Black History Month Part III
During the years that Texas was part of Mexico, the government offered free blacks the same rights of citizenship and opportunities for land ownership as were provided to white settlers. And just like the white colonists, the free settlers of color worked to establish successful lives in the new country. William Goyens (sometimes spelled Goings) […]
Black History Month Part II
Many slave families were sold and ripped apart by white slave owners as easily as if they were selling purebred puppies. When Matilda Boozie Randon was a child in South Carolina, her mother and siblings were sold and she never saw them again. Matilda was sold to a family that brought her to Texas, settling […]
Black History Month–Part I
In celebration of Black History Month, I plan to write a series highlighting the often-brief stories of black men and women that made their mark on Texas history. Estevanico (often called Esteban and Esteban the Moor) was captured in 1513 in Morocco when he was about thirteen years old and sold to a Spanish nobleman. […]
Buffalo Soldiers in Texas
During the Civil War more than 180,000 black soldiers served in segregated Union Army regiments. Realizing that many of the black units had achieved outstanding combat records, the U.S. Congress reorganized the peacetime army to include black enlisted men in the Ninth and the Tenth United States Cavalry and by 1869 the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth […]
Stein House is Published
For several weeks I have been blogging about the central coast of Texas where the first huge wave of German settlers landed in December 1844 on a bare shell beach that developed into the thriving seaport of Indianola. The blog posts have been an introduction to the exciting history of the place where Stein House, […]
War Clouds Gather Over Indianola
Indianola was a southern town with a seaport’s connection to the broader cosmopolitan world of commerce, business cooperation, and a diverse blend of residents newly arrived from all over Europe. The soil—gritty shell beaches cut by a crisscross of shallow bayous and lakes—did not lend itself to cotton growing. The vast slave plantations thrived much […]
Women Pilots of WWII Trained in Texas
When the United States entered World War II, the top brass, including General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF), had doubts about women’s ability to pilot large aircraft. In the summer of 1941 even before the United States entered the war, two famous women aviators Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran and […]
Scott Joplin, King of Ragtime
By the time he was seven, Scott Joplin was proficient on the banjo and had started experimenting with the piano at the house where his mother worked as a cleaner. Born about 1867 into a musical family—Joplin’s father, a former slave, played the violin for plantation parties and his mother, a freeborn African-American, sang and […]