TIPHC Newsletter, June 17-23, 2018

The Unheralded Pioneers of 19th-Century America Were Free African-American Families

In her new book, ‘The Bone and Sinew of the Land’, historian Anna-Lisa Cox explores the mostly ignored story of the free black people who first moved West

Photo: The first map of the United States, published in 1784 by Abel Buell, shows the recent addition of the Northwest Territories—a region that would soon include the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, home to thousands of African-American pioneers. (Library of Congress)

(Smithsonian) Before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, before settlers in wagons organized to travel west along the Oregon Trail in the 1830s, the great American frontier was the prized stretch of land, comprising the states we know today as Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. The colonial rebels claimed control of the region, known as the “Northwest Territory,” upon the end of the American Revolution in 1783. In fact, that territory was one of the reasons for going to war in the first place; British colonists wanted to settle there and turn it to farmland, while George III hoped to leave it for Native Americans and fur trading companies.

When the newly formed United States government opened the territory up for purchase by citizens, ignoring indigenous populations’ right to the land, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 also stipulated that the region would be free of slavery and that any man who owned at least 50 acres of land, regardless of skin color, could vote. By 1860, the federal census found more than 63,000 African-Americans living in the five states that were founded out of that territory; 73 percent of them lived in rural areas. Those people are the focus in The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality by Harvard historian Anna-Lisa Cox.

“When I started this project, the assumption was that there were three, maybe five settlements where landowning African-American farmers lived in the Midwestern states,” Cox says. “What I began to realize as I studied these settlements and found more and more of them is that it’s these pioneers who had such courage and such imagination about what the nation should be and could be. And it was probably historians, myself included, who were lacking in imagination about this region.” (more)

Historian and UTSA archaeologists discover remains at forgotten African American burial site

(San Antonio Express-News) Beads of sweat dotted Daniel Winters’ clean-shaven head as he walked across the land that once held the remains of his ancestors in an overgrown corner of Northeast San Antonio.

He squinted in the glare of the morning sun as his niece Melanie Winters Brooks and landscape architect Everett Fly followed him, seeking to determine the location of long-gone markers.

“My uncle and grandfather were in this area,” the 85-year-old retired electrical technician said, pointing beneath a grove of trees. “Cousin Bessie was over there.”

Wading through knee-high grass and thorn brush, he gestured toward a wooden stake tied with a strip of pink cloth marking what he said was the burial place of his great grandfather, Amos Jackson, a former Buffalo Soldier. Winters hopes to mark other former grave sites in the coming months.

It’s a labor of love mixed with anger and despair.

The marked graves that were once here were summarily moved in 1986, without any notice to family members, and put into a single mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery, about one mile away. No knows exactly why the remains were removed, but presumably to make way for development that never occurred. (more)

Dallas Will Get First Look At Sally Hemings’ Life At Monticello In Exhibit’s National Tour

Thomas Jefferson’s home “Monticello” in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Carol Highsmith/Library of Congress)

(KERA News) A landmark exhibition that addresses former President Thomas Jefferson’s long-debated relationship with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves who bore six of his children, will begin its national tour in Dallas this fall.

The exhibition, “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello,” was originally organized in 2012 by Jefferson’s estate in partnership with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Its subject was the wider issue of the daily lives of slaves at the Founding Father’s Virginia plantation.

Thanks to a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, Monticello has expanded that show to include new material about Hemings. During an archaeological excavation of Monticello’s south wing in 2017, thousands of artifacts were uncovered, as well as a kitchen and a bedroom adjacent to Jefferson’s bedroom. That room has since been restored and recently opened as an exhibition dedicated to what little is known of Hemings’ life. (There is, for instance, no known image of her.)

The updated touring version of “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello” will feature some 340 items, several of them never seen before. The exhibition will begin its tour at the African American Museum in Fair Park and run from Sept. 22 through Dec. 31. (more)

TIPHC Bookshelf

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, “Juneteenth Texas: Essays in African-American Folklore,” edited by Francis Edward Abernethy, Alan B. Govenar, and Patrick B. Mullen.

“Juneteenth Texas” explores African-American folkways and traditions from both African-American and white perspectives. Included are descriptions and classifications of different aspects of African-American folk culture in Texas; explorations of songs and stories and specific performers such as Lightnin’ Hopkins, Manse Lipscomb, and Bongo Joe; and a section giving resources for the further study of African-Americans in Texas.

This collection, with contributions by Glen Alyn, T. Lindsey Baker, Lorenzo Thomas, Dave Oliphant, Alvia Wardlaw, Patricia Smith Prather and others, contains essays based on personal experiences and reminiscences about the past as well as the present, and studies of particular folklorists who were important in the collecting of African-American folklore in Texas, such as J. Mason Brewer.