Jack Daniel’s Embraces a Hidden Ingredient: Help From a Slave

(Pictured above: In a photo in Jack Daniel’s old office, Daniel, with mustache and white hat, is shown at his distillery in Tennessee in the late 1800s. The man to his right could be a son of Nearis Green, a slave who helped teach Daniel how to make whiskey.)

Every year, about 275,000 people tour the Jack Daniel’s distillery here, and as they stroll through its brick buildings nestled in a tree-shaded hollow, they hear a story like this: Sometime in the 1850s, when Daniel was a boy, he went to work for a preacher, grocer and distiller named Dan Call. The preacher was a busy man, and when he saw promise in young Jack, he taught him how to run his whiskey still — and the rest is history.

This year is the 150th anniversary of Jack Daniel’s, and the distillery, home to one of the world’s best-selling whiskeys, is using the occasion to tell a different, more complicated tale. Daniel, the company now says, didn’t learn distilling from Dan Call, but from a man named Nearis Green — one of Call’s slaves.

This version of the story was never a secret, but it is one that the distillery has only recently begun to embrace, tentatively, in some of its tours, and in a social media and marketing campaign this summer.

“It’s taken something like the anniversary for us to start to talk about ourselves,” said Nelson Eddy, Jack Daniel’s in-house historian.

Left out of the account were men like Nearis Green. Slavery and whiskey, far from being two separate strands of Southern history, were inextricably entwined. Enslaved men not only made up the bulk of the distilling labor force, but they often played crucial skilled roles in the whiskey-making process. In the same way that white cookbook authors often appropriated recipes from their black cooks, white distillery owners took credit for the whiskey.

Read more here.


U.S. Congressional Black Caucus steps into fray over Austin’s Municipal Golf Course history

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A “Save Muny” sign at the driving range at Lions Municipal Golf Course. Activists seeking to prevent the University of Texas System from turning Lions Municipal Golf Course into a mixed-use development have nominated it for listing on the National Register for Historic Places. Leaders of Save Muny say the 141-acre tract in West Austin warrants protection for its place in sports history but especially as the first public golf course in the South to desegregate.

Three members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including its chairman, have called on the National Park Service to add Lions Municipal Golf Course in West Austin to the nation’s list of historic places.

Democratic U.S. Reps. G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, James Clyburn of South Carolina and Eddie Bernice Johnson of Dallas said in letters this month to Stephanie Toothman, the Park Service’s keeper of the National Register of Historic Places, that the golf course merits listing because of its role in civil rights history.

Lions Municipal, also known as Muny, became quietly and peacefully integrated in the early 1950s, well before violent confrontations that characterized desegregation of public accommodations elsewhere in the South. It is considered one of the earliest, if not the first, municipal golf courses in the former Confederate states to be desegregated.

Save Muny, a group whose name sums up its mission, nominated the course for the National Register. The Texas Historical Commission agreed and forwarded the nomination to the park service, which is reviewing the matter.

The University of Texas System, which owns the city-operated course, opposes the nomination, preferring instead that any listing on the National Register be confined to a small portion of Muny. The system’s Board of Regents has long contemplated leasing the property for residential and commercial development.

Read more here.


Black Iris Project: Telling African-American Stories Through Ballet

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Choreographer Jeremy McQueen in the Black Iris Project. Photo: Jubal Battisti

From The Root: “Diversity doesn’t stop with people onstage,” says Jeremy McQueen, a dancer, choreographer and educator. “We need black stories in classical ballet. “Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty are great, but we need stories that will resonate in my spirit and reflect my cultural background.”

McQueen has taken a big step toward that goal by launching the Black Iris Project, a dance collective that draws performers from several leading companies and aims to present works that create an African-American narrative in classical ballet. “Where is the ballet about the lives of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X?” he asks.

In many ways, Black Iris may represent the next chapter in the diversification of classical ballet. McQueen, who is 30, grew up in San Diego. He was inspired to pursue a career in dance after his mother took him to see the touring performance of Phantom of the Opera. He attended the San Diego High School for the Performing Arts and trained at the California Ballet School, the San Francisco Ballet, ABT and Alonzo King’s Lines Ballet. He has danced in many productions, most notably in the touring production of the Broadway hit Wicked.

“Ballet is so visceral,” McQueen says. “It has to tell stories that are rooted in the African-American experience.” He pauses and considers his goal. “I want to create work that is authentic to who I am.”

Read the rest of the story and view a video of McQueen and his performers here.


African-American History Through the Eyes of Children

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Two paper boys sitting on a bench, 1947.

Time Magazine: The images of African-American children that are featured in the upcoming Smithsonian photo book Picturing Children especially resonate with any family’s wish that their child be reminded of their “dignity and sacred worth

[that] no outside force can touch,” as Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, says in one of the book’s introductory essays.

Picturing Children is host to scenes ranging from playful moments during summer camp, school recess and high school proms, to historic images of enslaved families and young marchers in the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. Some photographs feature instantly recognizable faces — Jackie Robinson and Dr. Martin Luther King with their children, President Barack Obama with a child in the Oval Office — while others capture quiet moments between the photographer and his or her unnamed subject, such as a photograph from Jamel Shabazz that features a boy in his community doing a flip on a beat-up mattress. Though the collection features both portraits and candid shots, taken together they offer a window into both individual lives and the arc of American history.

Picturing Children is the fourth installment in the Double Exposure series, released by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, on the heels of Through the African American Lens, Civil Rights and the Promise of Equality and African American Women.


 Solving a Neighborhood Mystery Reveals Forgotten African-American History in San Antonio

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San Antonio map, circa 1840

From Smithsonian.com: A vacant, abandoned lot in the middle of a residential area normally inspires ghost stories among neighborhood children. But for one San Antonio, Texas, man, it sparked curiosity, and a quest, which recently led him to uncover a nearly forgotten history of a African American settlements started by emancipated former slaves in the mid-to-late-1800s, reports Vincent T. Davis for the San Antonio Express-News (via Star-Telegram).

Retired Air Force Maj. J. Michael Wright’s plot of interest was next to an elementary school. The lot, Wright noticed, overgrown with trees and thorny brush, was the only space that had been left undeveloped in his subdivision. Wright set out to learn why, and with the help of Bexar County archivist David Carlson, deeds, census records and other documents, Wright stumbled on the story of a community of African Americans who settled in Wright’s area a century and half before.

The settlement, he learned, was one of several in the area started by former slaves, who were finally emancipated on June 19, 1865.

Read the story here.


TIPHC Bookshelf

Flipper_EppingaPublished scholarship on black history in Texas is growing and we’d like to share with you some suggested readings, both current and past, from some of the preeminent history scholars in Texas and beyond. We invite you to take a look at our bookshelf page — including a featured selection — and check back as the list grows. A different selection will be featured each week. We welcome suggestions and reviews. This week, we offer, “Henry Ossian Flipper, West Point’s First Black Graduate,” by Jane Eppinga. 

In 1878 Henry Ossian Flipper seemed destined for a long military career. Four years later, he was on trial at Fort Davis, Texas, for embezzlement of government funds and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

The remarkable story of a young man born to slavery on the eve of the Civil War, and his struggle for recognition has left its mark on our nation’s history. Through extensive research of military documents, court records, appeals, and from Flipper’s personal journals and published papers, “Henry Ossian Flipper: West Point’s First Black Graduate” captures the sum and substance of a nation torn apart by political ambitions and extreme prejudices and reveals the uncertainty of acceptance and intolerance of blacks in America following Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation.


This Week In Texas Black History, June 26-July 2kirk_ron

27Ronald “Ron” Kirk, the first black mayor of Dallas, was born on this day in 1954 in Austin. Kirk is the son of Willie Mae Kirk, a school teacher and civil rights activist, and Lee Andrew Kirk Sr., the first black postal clerk in Austin. Ron Kirk served two terms as Dallas mayor, 1995-2001. Prior to becoming mayor, he served as Texas Secretary of State (1994) under Gov. Ann Richards. Kirk graduated from Austin College in Sherman, and earned his law degree from the University of Texas. He served as U.S. Trade Representative from March 2009 until February 2013, and was the first African American to hold that Cabinet position as the president’s principal trade advisor, negotiator, and spokesperson on trade issues.

Flipper30 Lt. Henry O. Flipper, first black graduate of West Point, was court martialed and dismissed from the Army on this day in 1882 for “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” Flipper was an officer in the Tenth Cavalry serving at Fort Davis (Texas) when he was accused of embezzlement as commissary officer. Flipper maintained his innocence until his death (May 3, 1940) and waged a lifelong battle for reinstatement in the Army. In December 1976, when a bust of him was unveiled at West Point, the Department of the Army granted Flipper an honorable discharge, dated June 30, 1882. An annual West Point award in honor of Flipper is presented to the graduate who best exemplifies “the highest qualities of leadership, self-discipline, and perseverance in the face of unusual difficulties while a cadet.”

 

lewis_carl1 – University of Houston and Olympic sprint and long jump star Carl Lewis was born on this date in 1961 in Birmingham, Alabama. Lewis graduated from Willingboro (N.J.) High School in 1979 and entered UH as the top-ranked high school track athlete in the country. He kept his top national ranking in the long jump and the 100-meter dash at the 1981 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) indoor championships and was the first athlete to win two events at an NCAA championship. As an Olympian, Lewis became the first African-American athlete since Jesse Owens in 1936 to win four gold medals in Olympic competition. Lewis won nine gold medals combined in the 100 and 200 meter sprints, the 4×100 meter relay, and the long jump, in four consecutive Olympics – 1984 Los Angeles, 1988 Seoul, 1992 Barcelona, and 1996 Atlanta. He won gold eight times in World Championships competitions. In December 2001, Lewis was elected to the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, was voted “Sportsman of the Century” by the International Olympic Committee, and “Olympian of the Century” by Sports Illustrated magazine.

acres home marker1 – The Acres Homes Transit Company became the first African-American-owned bus franchise in the South on this day in 1959 when it received state certification. The predominantly black Acres Homes residents lived outside Houston’s city limits and nine miles northwest of downtown and had petitioned city hall for a permit to operate the franchise. The Yale Street Bus Line had ceased commuter service to the area the previous year. Four AHTC buses made 43 round trips a day between downtown Houston and Acres Homes, which was annexed to Houston in 1967.

 

 


Blog: Ron Goodwin, author, PVAMU history professor

Ron Good goodwinwin’s bi-weekly blog appears exclusively for TIPHC/TBHPP. Goodwin is a San Antonio native and Air Force veteran. Generally, his column will address contemporary issues in the black community and how they relate to black history. He and the TIPHC/TBHPP staff welcome your comments. His latest blog is, “The “Roots” of the problem.” Read it

 

 


Submissions Wanted

Historians, scholars, students, lend us your…writings. Help us produce the most comprehensive documentation ever undertaken for the African American experience in Texas. We encourage you to contribute items about people, places, events, issues, politics/legislation, sports, entertainment, religion, etc., as general entries or essays. Our documentation is wide-ranging and diverse, and you may research and write about the subject of your interest or, to start, please consult our list of suggested biographical entries and see submission guidelines. However, all topics must be approved by TIPHC/TBHPP editors before beginning your research/writing.

We welcome your questions or comments via email or telephone – mdhurd@pvamu.edu.