The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery.

Photo: Children on a Louisiana sugar-cane plantation around 1885. (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library)

(The New York Times) Sugar has been linked in the United States to diabetes, obesity and cancer. If it is killing all of us, it is killing black people faster. Over the last 30 years, the rate of Americans who are obese or overweight grew 27 percent among all adults, to 71 percent from 56 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control, with African-Americans overrepresented in the national figures. During the same period, diabetes rates overall nearly tripled. Among black non-Hispanic women, they are nearly double those of white non-Hispanic women, and one and a half times higher for black men than white men.

None of this — the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic might and outsize impact on the American diet and health — was in any way foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work. (more)


Austin Failed At Desegregation Before. That History Influences Today’s School Closure Decisions.

Austin busing

Black students are bused to majority-white schools in 1971, after Austin ISD begins mandatory one-way busing to meet federal desegregation rules. (AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER, GENERAL COLLECTION PHOTOGRAPHS, PICA 10494)

(KUT) While many people in Austin are questioning why the Austin Independent School District is closing and consolidating schools, Roxanne Evans says she saw it coming.

Evans covered education for the Austin American-Statesman back in the 1980s, when students were bused in an attempt to integrate schools. She says what’s happening now is a continuation of something that was never finished.

“The aftermath [of busing] was what we see today: The neighborhoods that were segregated before went back to being segregated,” she said. “That didn’t change a lot.”

AISD announced in February that it needs to close and consolidate schools throughout the district. The decision came after years of declining enrollment, on top of budget issues. The superintendent and school board have said they’d rather invest money in teachers and academic programs than upkeep at under-enrolled schools. They’ve promised that if they close schools, they will use the savings to improve programs and facilities at the ones that stay open. (more)

Related: What Led to Desegregation Busing—And Did It Work?

After a 1954 ruling declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional, a decades-long effort to integrate them through busing was often met with violent protests.


In 1870, Henrietta Wood Sued for Reparations—and Won

The $2,500 verdict, the largest ever of its kind, offers evidence of the generational impact such awards can have

Henrietta Wood

No image of Henrietta Wood survives today, but her story is recorded in court filings, including the verdict slip above. (Illustration by Cliff Alejandro; Source material: W. Caleb McDaniel; NYPL (3))

(Smithsonian) On April 17, 1878, twelve white jurors entered a federal courtroom in Cincinnati, Ohio, to deliver the verdict in a now-forgotten lawsuit about American slavery. The plaintiff was Henrietta Wood, described by a reporter at the time as “a spectacled negro woman, apparently sixty years old.” The defendant was Zebulon Ward, a white man who had enslaved Wood 25 years before. She was suing him for $20,000 in reparations.

Two days earlier, the jury had watched as Wood took the stand; her son, Arthur, who lived in Chicago, was in the courtroom. Born into bondage in Kentucky, Wood testified, she had been granted her freedom in Cincinnati in 1848, but five years later she was kidnapped by Ward, who sold her, and she ended up enslaved on a Texas plantation until after the Civil War. She finally returned to Cincinnati in 1869, a free woman. She had not forgotten Ward and sued him the following year.

The trial began only after eight years of litigation, leaving Wood to wonder if she would ever get justice. Now, she watched nervously as the 12 jurors returned to their seats. Finally, they announced a verdict that few expected: “We, the Jury in the above entitled cause, do find for the plaintiff and assess her damages in the premises at Two thousand five hundred dollars.” (more)


TIPHC Bookshelf

A Night of ViolencePublished 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, “A Night of Violence,” by Robert V. Haynes.

Haynes analyzes the factors involved in the 1917 riot resulting from the armed march on Houston by black soldiers of the 24th Infantry in retaliation for a white policeman’s assault on one of their noncommissioned officers.

The Houston Riot of 1917, also known as the Camp Logan Mutiny, involved 156 soldiers of the all-black 3rd Battalion, 24th Infantry – a unit of the famed Buffalo Soldiers. The incident occurred on August 23, 1917, lasting roughly two hours on a hot, rainy night, and resulted in the deaths of four soldiers and 15 white civilians. The episode has the ignominious distinction of being the only race riot in U.S. history where more whites then blacks were killed, and it also resulted in both the largest murder trial and the largest court-martial in U.S. history.

Almost four months later, on December 11, 13 black soldiers were summarily hung at a hastily constructed gallows near a shallow creek on Camp Travis, a National Guard training facility next to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. The men were unceremoniously buried nearby in graves whose only identification was a number, 1 through 13. Sixty-three other soldiers were given life sentences, and in September 1918 six more soldiers were hung at the same Camp Travis site.


This Week in Texas Black History

Aug. 18

Rafer JohnsonIn 1935, Rafer Johnson was born in Hillsboro, Texas. Johnson was the gold medalist in the decathlon at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. That same year, he received the James E. Sullivan Memorial Award as the nation’s outstanding amateur athlete. In 1984 he lit the torch signaling the opening of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Aug. 19

Andrew JeffersonAndrew L. Jefferson, the first black state district judge in Harris County, was born on this day in 1934, in Dallas. Jefferson grew up in Houston, graduating from Jack Yates High School in 1936 and Texas Southern Universityin 1956. He graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1959 as the only African American to graduate in his class. As a statesman, Jefferson was active in numerous legal, civil and political organizations, holding the highest leadership offices for the American Bar Association, the State Bar of Texas, and the Houston Lawyers Association. He was admitted to practice law in all courts in the state of Texas as well as the United States district courts for the Southern and Western Districts of Texas, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth, Sixth, and Eleventh Circuit, and the United States Supreme Court. In 2001, the Andrew L. Jefferson Endowment for Trial Advocacy was established at Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law. (Listen to Judge Jefferson’s oral history interview for the Houston Public Library here.)

Aug. 23

Camp Logan headlinesMembers of the Third Battalion of the 24th Infantry (Buffalo Soldiers) were involved in the Houston Riots on this day in 1917. Also known as the “Camp Logan Mutiny,” men from the all-black unit violently marched on the city of Houston in response to racist treatment from the city’s white citizens, and especially the persistent verbal and physical abuse from Houston policemen. As a result of the two-hour incident, which became known as the only “race riot” in U.S. history in which more whites (15) than blacks (4) were killed, 19 black soldiers were court-martialed and hung. It was the largest court-martial in military history and the largest murder trial in U.S. history.

Aug. 24

Rufus HardinIn 1859, Rufus F. Hardin, educator, was born into slavery in Kaufman County, southeast of Dallas. However, he was driven to become educated and did so, attending several black colleges and earning a degree at Prairie View Normal College. He taught in Brownwood for 38 years, beginning in 1896 at the Brownwood Colored School, the county’s only school for black children. Hardin also became a community leader. In 1934, the school was renamed in his honor.


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

Ron Goodwin is an assistant professor of history at Prairie View A&M University. Even though he was a military “brat,” he still considers San Antonio home. Like his father and brother, Ron joined the U.S. Air Force and while enlisted received his undergraduate degree from Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, Texas. After his honorable discharge, he completed graduate degrees from Texas Southern University. Goodwin’s book, Blacks in Houston, is a pictorial history of Houston’s black community. His most recent book, Remembering the Days of Sorrow, examines the institution of slavery in Texas from the perspective of the New Deal’s Slave Narratives.

Recent Posts

The beginning of the end: D-Day

August 13th, 2019

In June 1944, Allied forces began their assault not only on the beaches of Normandy, but on Nazism itself. Dubbed Operation Overlord, the amphibious exercise is legendary as the extraction of France from German control and the beginning of the end of Adolph Hitler’s plans for a thousand year reign of his Aryan master race. The death tolls were staggering on the initial day of the operation. Thousands of Americans gave the greatest sacrifice in…(more)

Hidden In Plain Sight

July 30th, 2019

In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk in which he claimed: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” That was 1903. American society is in the last year of the second decade of the twenty-first century, and I wonder if that famous quote still applies. In 1903, Jim Crow dominated every aspect of American life and forced the black community into the shadows. Du Bois used”…(more)


 

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. Please contact Michael Hurd, Director of TIPHC, at mdhurd@pvamu.edu.