Free Blacks in Antebellum Texas ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud, Milton S. Jordan (original) (raw)
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Slavery and Freedom in Texas: Stories from the Courtroom, 1821–1871 by Jason A. Gillmer
Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 2019
natural law, on the one hand, and on the other, as a tool by which those settlers can co-opt those virtues and eliminate the Natives themselves. In this case, Richards sees the rhetoric of white purity, including Natty Bumppo's, undermined by repeated suggestions of questionable ancestry and possible miscegenation. A similar kind of reversal takes place in the reading of Uncle Tom's Cabin, where Richards sees Stowe's well-known use of blackface tropes accompanied by instances of whiteface imitation such as Tom's portrait of a blackface George Washington: "Ironically, whereas whites imitated blacks by wearing blackface, Tom is imitating white culture by blackening George Washington" (p. 121). This kind of black resistance to the literal and figurative violence of minstrelsy, in turn, becomes central to the book's final chapter, which takes up a series of nineteenth-century novels by black Americans that counter the exaggerations of blackface caricature "with their own avenging distortions," including Martin Delany's Blake, which answers Uncle Tom's Cabin by relocating black nationalism from Liberia to the United States (p. 164). Richards's method sometimes relies on an expansive sense of "performance." He writes, for example, that "by writing the black body [Washington] Irving engages in a blackface performance, replete with the desires, fears, disguises, and racial burlesque that crystallize in minstrelsy" (p. 73). To point out the similarities between blackface performance and such modes of writing is powerful and persuasive; to say that this kind of writing is blackface performance (to move from analogy to identity) is to unnecessarily minimize or even erase the significance of embodiment and audience. At other times, Richards attends to the importance of medium more precisely, as when he contends that for Cooper's character Natty Bumppo "[m]etaphoric redface and blackface allow the hunter to turn Native, turn black, and then back again to white, registering the racial privilege of these performance modes, which served as mediums for white personal and national self-discovery" (p. 105). To an important degree, the metaphor is the message. And the message of Imitation Nation is compelling. Writing at the meeting point of historicist study of cross-racial performance and postcolonial theory, Richards finds ways to use the recent intensity and depth of argumentation about the signification of blackface minstrelsy to his advantage. Synthesizing the existing scholarship in clear and engaging prose, Richards takes up the contradictory impulses of blackface, redface, and whiteface. In Imitation Nation, the seeming contradictions resolve into paradoxical but forceful statements of cultural logic. In both historical and literary studies, this book deserves a wide and attentive academic audience.
Boyd, Douglas K., Aaron R. Norment, Terri Myers, Maria Franklin, Nedra Lee, Leslie L. Bush, and Brian S. Shaffer 2015 The Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead: Post-Emancipation Transitions of an African American Family in Central Texas, volumes 1 and 2. Reports of Investigations No. 173. Prewitt and Associates, Inc., Austin, Texas. Archeological Studies Program Report No. 139, Environmental Affairs Division, Texas Department of Transportation, Austin, Texas. Volume 1 can be downloaded at Prewitt and Associates website: http://www.paiarch.com/Williams%20Farmstead%20Report%20Info.htm
The Origins of the African-Born Population of Antebellum Texas: A Research Note
Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 2016
A portrait of Washington ("Wash") Edwards, ca. 1889. On the reverse side is the following: "Was born in Africa & belong[?] to the state. Was one of the captives sold or traded to old Mr. Monroe Edwards & was brought to Texas before the Mexican War several years & was at the battle of San Jacinto & at that time bels to Col. Hill. He left a wife & children in Africa. Still speaks his native language when he meets one who can talk with him of whom one or two remain out of the many that were landed here at Time Uncle Wash came-Wash says they his companions that still live were little boys when they were brought to Texas-A native African brought to this co. by Monroe Edward in the early Thirties-and landed on the Bernard River a few miles West of Columbia." Courtesy of Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
Sacred Forest, Piney Veil: Black Landscapes of Deep East Texas By Andrea R. Roberts
A whole lot of nothing is everything. Texas is a vast place, chock full of nothingness, unless you learn to see beyond the open expanses of unpopulated water, cotton rows, or rolling hills, and let the landscape tell you its secrets or better yet find the keeper of the landscape’s secrets. I have been seeking the keepers of the secrets of Texas’ forgotten, Black landscapes, our self-defined geographies. For the past few months, I’ve spent time “behind the Pine Curtain” of Deep East Texas which includes Jasper, Texas. It is likely that for many a mention of Jasper or Deep East Texas woods that surround the town conjure up images associated with hate crimes and white supremacy. The facial expressions I’m met with when I announce my regular trips to Deep East Texas seem to ask, ‘How can a place associated with hate crimes and white supremacists have anything to do with landscapes and landmarks of Black self-governance and sovereignty?’ And as a Black woman from Texas, I understand. These forests have found their way into a few childhood nightmares. They’re the forests of whispers among “grown folks” heard between hand over mouth hushes at family gatherings. Someone disappeared. Someone was lynched. Remember James Byrd. Driving to Deep East Texas awakened my intergenerational muscle memory of racialized terror. The region is unsettling, as it is one of the most distinctly southern areas of Texas, but idyllic. The landscape borders the edge of Louisiana’s outdoorsman paradise where one might find more catfish farms and restaurants than gas stations. Driving through Polk and Tyler County is to pass though the lungs of the southeast, the sacred grove of Texas, the Big Thicket whose 106,305 acres span more than five counties and two states. Once you reach the Alabama Coushatta reservation, where Polk borders Tyler County, you cannot help but feel as if you the trees are in charge. Not white supremacy, the trees. They cover you the way church elders cover you in prayer. Jasper County and the surrounding forests, places associated with the absence of black agency, actually contain some of the last remnants of what the Black Liberation Movement’s first wave looked like during Reconstruction in Texas. Since I’ve begun making this drive to the region, I’ve passed through these forests, and met the Black Texans that lay claim to these woods. These pines are more of a veil through which it is possible to glimpse early African American civilizations than a curtain. From 1870 to 1890, former slaves founded more than 500 “Freedom Colonies”, Freedmen’s Towns, or settlements across Texas. Since then, a variety of factors facilitated Freedom Colony descendants’ dispersal. They’ve often left behind intangible geographies where structures and populations associated with early African American placemaking and self-determination have disappeared. However, more than 20 of them are clustered throughout Jasper, Tyler, and Newton Counties in Deep East Texas. Jasper, and Newton to its East, and Tyler County to the west, are filled with people and a spirit of self-possession not widely celebrated in the popular imagination, and surely not thought to reflect dominant mainstream representations of Blackness. Such communities are said to typify a nostalgic Blackness, but surely not a Blackness of the present or action. Popular Blackness is urban, struggle, class stratification, shared oppression, but not self-determination and agency. These are huge generalizations, terrible tropes, but they are persistent enough in the American imagination to have become the bedrock of dominate current dialogues around Black identity, agendas, and unity. However Deep East Texas is home to a diaspora of Freedom Colonies, settlements founded by ex-slaves. These Freedom Colonies belie these dominant narratives of what it is to be a Black Texan. Behind the Pine Curtain, formerly enslaved Africans made places, small towns, some of which still have a sizeable population nestled in the marshy bottomland, the edge of forests, and small clearings and white wooden churches at the end of long winding farm roads. Some vibrant and alive, others latent rhizomes, sprouting only during reunions and homecomings. Where many see a whole lot of nothing, I have begun seeing more of Texas’ beautiful, Black everything.
Freedmen's Town Versus Frenchtown: A History of Two Black Settlements in Houston, Texas
Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 2020
With names signifying “freedom from slavery” in one case and referencing Creole ethnicity in the other, the founding characteristics of two black settlements in Houston, Texas, foreshadowed the different prospects their residents would face over the next century and a half. Both Freedmen’s Town and Frenchtown have been studied individually and with regard to patterns of spatial oppression. This article, however, attempts to show how different orientations toward race adopted by the two communities qualified the operation of spatial oppression in them since the late-nineteenth century. In doing so, it will reflect on the hidden workings of discrimination and economic injustice through four critical planning periods: post-Civil War Reconstruction, the Great Depression, the era of “white” flight, and the era of gentrification. The article will conclude by discussing the continued operation of these forces under hypergentrification.