Behind the new look of Houston’s oldest park, a complex racial history

(Texas Observer) Emancipation Park was the first public park in Houston, and it has a complicated history. Its story is one of racism and segregation, resistance and revitalization. Now that the park has been transformed by a $33.6 million renovation led by Phil Freelon, one of the most celebrated black architects in the United States, it’s sure to become a point of pride for Houston. Still, thorny questions remain: Who is the park really for? And as gentrification reshapes the Third Ward, what will Emancipation Park’s next 145 years look like? (more)


Commentary

If you truly knew what the N-word meant to our ancestors, you’d NEVER use it

It was used and still can be used to make us hate ourselves

African American evicted sharecropper

African American Evicted sharecropper, New Madrid County, Missouri Buyenlarge/Getty Images

(The Undefeated) A few years ago, I read slave narratives to explore the lives of black agricultural workers after the end of the Civil War. The narratives came from the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration, a program that employed researchers from 1936 to 1938 to interview former enslaved people, producing more than 2,300 narratives that, thankfully, reside online and are fully searchable.

Those whom the law defined as property recounted various unique human experiences — their daily horrors and monotonies, how they freed themselves or learned of their emancipation, the surge of exhilaration upon securing freedom, and how they endured life on the edges of a white supremacist society in the decades thereafter.

As I pored over the narratives, I was struck less by their experiences, as heartrending as they were, than by how their experiences sculpted their self-perceptions. The best explanation of what I gleaned, what social scientists called internalized oppression, describes the psychological trauma that ensues when a person from a stigmatized group believes those negative stigmas.

White folk indoctrinated them into accepting their supposed inferiority. These narratives illustrate the success of this campaign of mental terrorism, and no word conveyed the depth of this internalized oppression more than “nigger.” Now, whenever I hear the epithet, a visual and emotional representation of the heinous process by which a people — my people — were induced to think they were less than trespasses into my thoughts. After years of habitual use of “nigger,” I banished it from my speech to honor the humanity that many never saw in themselves. (more)


How Wilson Pickett Found The Blues

Wilson Pickett with Jimi Hendrix

Pickett (left), with 24-year-old Jimi Hendrix at a 1966 Atlantic Records release party.

(Udiscovermusic) Wilson Pickett was born in Alabama but raised in Detroit, Michigan, before returning to the south to record a string of solo hits for Atlantic records. When he was living in Detroit Pickett joined the Violinaires, a gospel group.

“Well I was a bass singer, and then after that I was discovered by The Falcons, and went on the road with them, and I was with The Falcons a few years. In 1963 I went on my own, and signed with Atlantic Records. First I signed with Double L Records, which was owned by Lloyd Price and his manager, and I had a song called ‘If You Need Me, Call Me’.”

Pickett like so many gospel singers also had one foot in the blues. “Well after Sam Cooke left, and started singing the blues, then I left and then Aretha Franklin, and we all started singing the blues; Sam Cooke was the first one to leave Gospel and go out and start singing the Blues. I was told many times ‘Hey, you gonna leave God and start serving the Devil, right?’ I didn’t call it that, because in my opinion my songs today still sound a lot like Gospel. So I just made another move and made me a piece of money, that’s it.” (more)


This Anti-Slavery Jewelry Shows the Social Concerns (and the Technology) of Its Time

The ‘Wedgwood Slave Medallion’ was the first modern piece of protest jewelry

Anti-slavery jewelry (Smithsonian Magazine) A few years ago, it was those silicone slogan bracelets. Long before that, protest jewelry was a little more artistic–but just as high-tech for its time.

The “Wedgwood Slave Medallion” was created by a man named–you guessed it–Josiah Wedgwood. He’s remembered as giving a name to an easily recognizable style of pottery. As well as being a ceramics innovator, Wedgwood was an abolitionist who opposed slavery and used his business skills to create an icon of that movement.

“This medallion, first made in 1787, became a popular icon in the British movement for the abolition of the slave trade in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,” writes the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, which has one of the medallions in its collection. It shows a kneeling slave in chains above which the words “AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER” appear. (more)


TIPHC Bookshelf

civil rights in the texas borderlands (book)Published 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, “Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands, Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism,” by Will Guzman.

Physician Lawrence A. Nixon fled the racial violence of central Texas to settle in the border town of El Paso. There he became a community and civil rights leader, working on integration and antilynching cases and cofounding the local NAACP chapter. In 1923, Nixon challenged the law that banned African Americans from voting in the Democratic primary. His victory in two subsequent Supreme Court decisions paved the way for dismantling all-white primaries across the South.

Will Guzmán delves into Nixon’s lifelong, and mostly unknown, struggle against Jim Crow. Linking Nixon’s successful activism to his independence from the white economy, support from the NAACP, and indefatigable courage, Guzmán places Nixon within the context of the larger historical narratives of his era. At the same time, he sheds light on Nixon’s presence in both symbolic and literal borderlands–as an educated professional in a time when few went to college, as someone who made waves when most feared violent reprisal, and as an African American living on the mythical American frontier as well as an international boundary.

Enlightening and powerful, Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands adds to the growing literature on African Americans in the Southwest while exploring a seldom-studied corner of the Black past and the civil rights movement.


This Week in Texas Black History, July 16-22

 Wilhelmina Delco16 – On this date in 1929, Wilhelmina Delco was born in Chicago. Delco received a degree in sociology from Fisk University in Nashville in 1950 and seven years later relocated with her husband to Austin. Delco was elected to the Austin Independent School District Board of Trustees in 1968, making her the first African American elected to public office in Austin. In 1974, she won a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, making her the first African American official elected at-large in Travis County. Delco served 10 terms in the Legislature. In 1991, she was appointed Speaker Pro Tempore, becoming the first woman and the second African American to hold the second highest position in the Texas Houseof Representatives. She retired from the Legislature in 1995.

 

 Jack Johnson20 – On this day in 1910, Galveston native Jack Johnson was recognized as the heavyweight champion of the world. He had won the Negro heavyweight championship in 1903. The reigning white champion, Jim Jeffries, refused to cross the color line, so Johnson had to wait until Jeffries came out of retirement to fight him in 1910. Johnson left the United States in 1913 to avoid arrest on charges of violation of the Mann Act. When he returned on July 20, 1920, he was arrested and jailed at Leavenworth. After his release he returned to boxing, but without success. He died in an automobile crash at Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1946.

 

Robert Newhouse22 – On this day in 2014, Dallas Cowboys‘ great Robert Newhouse passed away from heart disease. Newhouse suffered a stroke in 2010 and had been under treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. where he passed away. Newhouse starred at Galilee High School in Hallsville, situated between Longview and Marshall. The University of Houston was the only major school recruiting offer he received and with the Cougars, from 1969-1971, Newhouse set several rushing records and left the school as its all-time single-season rushing leader with 1,757 yards as a senior. That total, at the time, was the second most rushing yards in a season in NCAA history and earned Newhouse second team All-American honors. He was a second round draft pick by the Cowboys in 1972 and played all of his 12 NFL seasons with Dallas. Newhouse led the team in rushing with 930 yards in 1975.

 

Lawrence Nixon22 – On this day in 1944, Dr. Lawrence Nixon, an El Paso physician, voted in the Democratic primary, the first black voter in the state to do so. The Texas legislature had passed a law in 1923 forbidding blacks from voting in the primary. However, Nixon, working with the NAACP, challenged the law and attempted to vote on July 26, 1924 and was refused a ballot. Twice the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor, however, the state Democratic Party found legal loopholes (including asserting the party was a private organization and could set restrictions on who could vote) to continue preventing blacks from voting in the primary. Finally, as a result of the Court’s ruling in Smith v. Allwright (where Lonnie Smith had brought a similar suit in Harris County), the all-white primary was ended on April 3, 1944 enabling blacks to vote in the primary. The Court ruled that a primary was an election and a political party was an agency of the state and thus could not discriminate by race. (See TIPHC Bookshelf: Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands, Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism.”)


Blog: Ron Goodwin, Ph.D., author, PVAMU history professor

goodwinRon Goodwin’s bi-weekly blog appears exclusively for TIPHC. Goodwin is a San Antonio native and Air Force veteran. Generally, his column addresses contemporary issues in the black community and how they relate to black history. He and the TIPHC staff welcome your comments.

Read his latest entry, “Big People, Big Moments,” here.

 

 


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 editors before beginning your research/writing.

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