Exhibit — “Purchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 to 1865”
Touring a Bullock Texas State History Museum exhibit with experts helps explain the stories behind the stories.
(Photo: Oil painting of a slave auction scene from between 1830 and 1850. Contributed by Matilda Gray Stream Collection, Everygreen Plantation)
(Austin American-Statesman) If your African-American ancestors go back more than a few generations in Texas, some of them almost assuredly passed through New Orleans.
“New Orleans was the richest and busiest slave port in America,” says LaToya Devezin, community archivist at the Austin History Center and a native New Orleanian. “And it operated the biggest slave market.”
In fact, that city on the Mississippi River supported multiple marketplaces hosting regular slave auctions. Especially in the period after 1808, when federal law banned the Atlantic slave trade in the United States.
From that point on, almost all American sales and purchases of humans as property were made on the domestic market, and New Orleans was the hub.
That is why so much of “Purchased Lives: The American Slave Trade from 1808 to 1865” — on view in the upstairs rotunda galleries at the Bullock Texas State History Museum through July 9 — examines the New Orleans scene. Look closer at the enlarged maps, pictures of buildings, ships and railroads, broadsides about sales and manifests, and the New Orleans connections are easy to see. (read more)
Locker room talk: HBCU players once were common in the pro football draft
Cleveland Browns quarterback Mike Phipps (15) is caught from behind by Chiefs Hall of Fame linebacker Willie Lanier (63) during the Browns 31-7 loss to the Kansas City Chiefs on October 8, 1972 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, Ohio. Tim Culek/Getty Images
Only four HBCU players were taken in last week’s National Football League draft, and all are “rare breeds,” as William Rhoden writes in The Undefeated:
“This was not always so. From 1967 to 1972, 365 players from HBCUs were drafted.
“By 1967, black colleges had established themselves as the secret weapon in the American Football League’s bold and ultimately successful challenge to the National Football League. The NFL had drafted players from small schools, but the league would not begin to embrace the HBCU football community until 1949, when the Los Angeles Rams signed Grambling’s Tank Younger as a free agent.
“The AFL feasted on the rich talent pool of HBCU players. When the new league opened for business in 1960, HBCUs were willing partners, eager to satisfy the AFL’s demand for top-notch players. In 1963, Grambling’s Buck Buchanan was the first-round draft pick of the Kansas City Chiefs.
“Thank God for the AFL,” Willie Lanier (Morgan State) said. “If it wasn’t for the AFL, we wouldn’t be talking about anything. You have to have somewhere to work. Without the AFL, you would never have heard from a lot of us.” (read more)
Related: The 50 most important college players in Texas in 2017 — No. 42: Prairie View’s Joshua Simmons
Joshua Simmons made a name for himself in his first season with the Panthers, taking advantage of his time in a variety of roles to account for more than 700 all-purpose yards and three total touchdowns. His ability to rack up yardage in a hurry helped Prairie View A&M to a 7-2 conference record, and the junior was named the Newcomer of the Year in the Southwestern Athletic Conference. (read more)
Never Mind Her Stellar Jazz Career, Young Ella Fitzgerald Just Wanted to Dance
April 25, 2017, marked the centennial birthday of Ella Fitzgerald (above, in a triple-exposure undated photograph). (NMAH, Archives Center)
(Smithsonian) In her songs, no one could tell a story better than Ella Fitzgerald. Her phrasing made us believe in Cole Porter’s words: “Night and day, you are the one/Only you beneath the moon or under the sun,” or personally experience Ira Gershwin’s plea: “There’s a somebody I’m longing to see/I hope that he turns out to be/Someone who’ll watch over me.”
But she actually did not begin her career as a singer. In 1934, at the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night contest, her name was pulled in a weekly drawing to compete. The 17-year-old Fitzgerald was going to audition as a dancer, but a remarkable dance act just ahead of her was such a success that she changed her mind and decided to sing “Judy” by composer Hoagy Carmichael.
The song was one of her mother’s favorites; so she knew it well from a recording by Connee Boswell, and her sisters Martha and Helvetia. When the audience demanded an encore, Ella sang the flip side of the Boswell Sisters’ record, “The Object of My Affection.” These were the only two songs she knew, but she won the contest. Jazz bandleader Chick Webb soon asked the young singer to join his orchestra. (read more)
“Ella Fitzgerald: The First Lady of Song at 100” will be on view at the National Museum of American History through April 2, 2018.
Saved from demolition, Rosa Parks’s house gets a second life…in Germany
Ryan Mendoza, an American artist, with his son and his wife, Fabia, in front of Rosa Parks’s house in Berlin. The neighbors have embraced the little house from Detroit. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times
(New York Times) BERLIN — As twilight fell over Wedding, a working-class Berlin neighborhood, the curtained window panes of a small, dilapidated-looking backyard house began to glow. Yellow light spilled through the cracks in the wooden facade. Children playing next door looked up as the house started to vibrate with musical notes and otherworldly feedback.
Then came the strong, clear voice of the American civil rights icon Rosa Parks. She was talking about Montgomery, Ala., and her refusal to give up her seat in the front of a bus.
The house, where Ms. Parks lived, once sat in Detroit, and belonged to Ms. Parks’s brother. But after it was threatened with demolition, the house was moved to Berlin, where it was opened to the public in early April.
Inside, Ryan Mendoza, a Berlin-based American artist, has been putting on half-hour-long sound performances, including excerpts from a 1957 radio interview with Ms. Parks conducted in this very building. “It’s my job to keep the house alive,” Mr. Mendoza explained.
Related: Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Ala.
Black history briefs
May 3, 1898: Septima Poinsette Clark (pictured left), whom Martin Luther King Jr. called “the mother of the movement,” was born in Charleston, S.C. As an educator, she studied summers with W.E.B. Du Bois at Atlanta University and later worked with Thurgood Marshall on successful litigation that equalized salaries for black and white teachers. In 1956, after the South Carolina Legislature passed a law that banned state employees from belonging to the NAACP, the school board fired Clark, who lost all her pension, despite 40 years of work. She began conducting workshops at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and helped establish “Citizenship Schools,” which spread through the Deep South. In 1979, President Carter awarded her a Living Legacy Award, and three years later, South Carolina honored her with its highest civilian honor. She died in 1987 on the same Johns Island where she originally taught.
May 3, 1933: R&B singer and funk pioneer James Brown was born in Augusta, Georgia. He became the “Godfather of Soul” and saw 17 singles go to number one. Rolling Stone ranked him as one of the greatest music artists of all time, and he became an inaugural member of the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame. He died in 2006.
May 3, 1963: In Birmingham, Alabama, Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor used fire hoses and police dogs on children near the 16th Street Baptist Church to keep them from marching out of the “Negro section” of town. The use of the dogs and hoses became iconic footage in the civil rights movement. Police put the children in vans until there were 959 filling the city jails.
May 4, 1891: Provident Hospital and Training School, America’s first minority-controlled hospital, opened in Chicago. At this time there were few physicians, and even fewer were allowed hospital privileges. Respected surgeon Dr. Daniel Hale Williams worked with other African-American physicians, ministers and businessmen to establish the institution.
May 4, 1961: The first group of Freedom Riders, with the intent of integrating interstate buses, left Washington, D.C. by Greyhound bus. The group, organized by the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), left shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in interstate transportation terminals.
May 6, 1960: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which provided penalties against those who attempted to obstruct someone from voting. The legislation signaled the federal government reversing its long-standing “hands off” policy towards civil rights.
May 7, 1955: The Rev. George Lee was shot to death in Belzoni, Mississippi, after using his pulpit and his printing press to urge other American Afric
ans to vote. His work had led to the registration of 93 African Americans, angering some whites. Two shotgun blasts hit Lee in the face as he was driving home, and his Buick smashed into a house. Authorities claimed the lead pellets found in his shattered jaw were fillings from his teeth, but FBI tests revealed the pellets were buckshot. No one was ever prosecuted. Lee is usually considered the first martyr of the modern civil rights movement, and he is among 40 martyrs listed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
May 8, 1915: John Hope Franklin (pictured right) was born. He became one of the most respected historians in the country. His book, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, sold 3 million copies. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
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, “The Strange Career of William Ellis — The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire,” by Karl Jacoby.
A prize-winning historian tells a new story of the black experience in America through the life of a mysterious entrepreneur.
To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican, the proud owner of a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, a busy Wall Street office, and scores of mines and haciendas in Mexico. But for all his obvious riches and his elegant appearance, Eliseo was also the possessor of a devastating secret: he was not, in fact, from Mexico at all. Rather, he had begun life as a slave named William Ellis, born on a cotton plantation in southern Texas during the waning years of King Cotton.
After emancipation, Ellis, capitalizing on the Spanish he learned during his childhood along the Mexican border and his ambivalent appearance, engaged in a virtuoso act of reinvention. He crafted an alter ego, the Mexican Guillermo Eliseo, who was able to access many of the privileges denied to African Americans at the time: traveling in first-class train berths, staying in upscale hotels, and eating in the finest restaurants.
Eliseo’s success in crossing the color line, however, brought heightened scrutiny in its wake as he became the intimate of political and business leaders on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Ellis, unlike many passers, maintained a connection to his family and to black politics that also raised awkward questions about his racial status. Yet such was Ellis’s skill in manipulating his era’s racial codes, most of the whites he encountered continued to insist that he must be Hispanic even as Ellis became embroiled in scandals that hinted the man known as Guillermo Eliseo was not quite who he claimed to be.
The Strange Career of William Ellis reads like a novel but offers fresh insights on the history of the Reconstruction era, the US-Mexico border, and the abiding riddle of race. At a moment when the United States is deepening its connections with Latin America and recognizing that race is more than simply black or white, Ellis’s story could not be more timely or important.
This Week in Texas Black History, Apr. 30-May 6
1 – On this day in 1991, Marcelite Harris became the U.S. Air Force’s first African-American female general. Harris is a Houston native who graduated from Kashmere Gardens High School in 1960. Among her many other “firsts,” she was also the first woman aircraft maintenance officer, one of the first two women air officers commanding at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the first woman deputy commander for maintenance. She was the highest ranking woman in the U.S. Air Force and the highest ranking black woman in the entire Department of Defense when she retired in 1997.
1 – Olympic sprinter and National Football League running back Ollie Matson was born on this day in 1930 in Trinity, Texas. His family moved to Houston, where Matson briefly attended and played football at Jack Yates High School, however he finished at Washington High School in San Francisco. In 1952, Matson earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of San Francisco. In 1951, he led the nation with 1,566 yards rushing and 21 touchdowns and was named an All-American as a defensive back. The next year, he won a bronze medal in the 400-meter dash and a silver medal as part of the 4×400-meter relay team at the Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland and was the No. 3 overall pick in the NFL Draft by the Chicago Cardinals. In his 14-year career, Matson set a league record with nine career touchdown returns and retired with 12,884 combined net yards (rushing, receiving, and returns), an NFL record at the time. He also played with the Los Angeles Rams, the Detroit Lions and the Philadelphia Eagles. The Rams traded eight players and a draft choice to the Cardinals to get Matson in 1959, in one of the biggest deals in league history. Matson was a six-time All-Pro and shared Rookie of the Year honors in 1952 with San Francisco 49ers running back Hugh McIlhenny. In 1972, the first year he was eligible, Matson was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and in 1976 was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. (See: Sports Illustrated story on Matson, “Run for the Money.”)
2 – On this day in 2009, the Texas Medical Association (TMA) elected Houston neurologist William H. Fleming III as its 144th president and the first African American to lead the group. A native of Memphis, Fleming was named a Texas Super Doctor by Texas Monthly magazine In 2005 and 2006, and Top Doctor by Houston magazine in 2007.
Blog: Ron Goodwin, Ph.D., author, PVAMU history professor
Ron 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, “100 days,” 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.