Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West

by Herbert G. Ruffin II, Dwayne A. Mack, Quintard Taylor

Overview

Between 1940 and 2010, the black population of the American West grew from 710,400 to 7 million. With that explosive growth has come a burgeoning interest in the history of the African American West—an interest reflected in the remarkable range and depth of the works collected in Freedom’s Racial Frontier. Editors Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack have gathered established and emerging scholars in the field to create an anthology that links past, current, and future generations of African American West scholarship.

The volume’s sixteen chapters address the African American experience within the framework of the West as a multicultural frontier. The result is a fresh perspective on western-U.S. history, centered on the significance of African American life, culture, and social justice in almost every trans-Mississippi state. Examining and interpreting the twentieth century while mindful of events and developments since 2000, the contributors focus on community formation, cultural diversity, civil rights and black empowerment, and artistic creativity and identity. Reflecting the dynamic evolution of new approaches and new sites of knowledge in the field of western history, the authors consider its interconnections with fields such as cultural studies, literature, and sociology. Some essays deal with familiar places, while others look at understudied sites such as Albuquerque, Oahu, and Las Vegas, Nevada. By examining black suburbanization, the Information Age, and gentrification in the urban West, several authors conceive of a Third Great Migration of African Americans to and within the West.

The West revealed in Freedom’s Racial Frontier is a place where black Americans have fought—and continue to fight—to make their idea of freedom live up to their expectations of equality; a place where freedom is still a frontier for most persons of African heritage.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806159768
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	03/15/2018
Series:	Race and Culture in the American West Series , #13
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Herbert G. Ruffin II is Associate Professor of History and Chair of African American Studies at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, and author of Uninvited Neighbors: African Americans in Silicon Valley, 1769–1990.


Dwayne A. Mack is Carter G. Woodson Chair in African American History and Professor of History at Berea College, author of numerous articles on African American history, and co-editor of Beginning a Career in Academia: A Guide for Graduate Students of Color.

Quintard Taylor is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Community Formation in Houston, 1900–1941

"Beautiful People"

Bernadette Pruitt

Scholars trace African American community formation to the social construct accommodation. A compromise of practicality that originated in slavery, racial appeasement — the willingness of a subservient caste (slaves and freed blacks) to acquiesce to the philosophies and actions of a dominant group (slaveholding and nonslaveholding whites) — incongruously aided and hindered African-origin peoples. For example, public appeasement never translated into complete subjugation. Enslaved African-descent people learned that their ability to create two distinct identities — one exclusively for their own community and another in the presence of whites — provided them a crucial emotional, spiritual, and political outlet for contesting and surviving their ordeal. In addition, partly as a result of West African and West Central African syncretism and the formation of a single African American identity, the sustainable bonds that comprised the slave community and defined free blacks before slavery's demise inspired what historians refer to as community formation, the racialized self-help and autonomy that continues to this day.

On the other hand, appeasement among black people contributed to feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and self-hatred since enslaved Americans often embraced the negative concepts that defined them as a debased people. And along with community agency, making a double-edged sword, these negative effects of appeasement became one of the most lasting legacies of slavery, passed down from generation to generation. In the years that followed slavery, freedmen and freedwomen continued the practice of racial accommodation in an effort to withstand structural racism. When not acquiescing to whites directly, they relied on racial autonomy in their endeavor to create homes, institutions, and organizations, and to sustain hope, and so did their children and grandchildren, as the first generations of freeborn African Americans.

Community formation derives from self-help. Organizing institutions, formulating agendas, building coalitions, and cultivating shared cultural and political ideas — also known as community building — entails community agency, hope, self-respect, and self-reliance. Within the black community of Houston, Texas, this almost always translated also into a desired fight for social justice or human and civil rights, despite the notion of self-destruction that remained intact. This viewpoint derives from the scholarship of Robin D. G. Kelley, Jacqueline Rouse, Merline Pitre, Darlene Clark Hine, Amilcar Shabazz, Michael Botson, Tera Hunter, Allison Dorsey, Stephanie Shaw, Brian Behnken, and others who place the actions of black southerners within the context of racial independence, interdependence, and a Long Civil Rights Movement. The term "Long Civil Rights Movement," coined by historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall, is based on four theories: (1) the Modern Civil Rights Movement derived from individualized local modes of activism; (2) the nation, not simply the South, attempted to re-create racial slavery through exclusion and marginality; (3) the Modern Civil Rights Movement formed the traditional movement and the Black Power transformation that followed; and (4) the movement took place during a longer period than is typically thought, not simply in 1954–68 or 1954–75.

This chapter examines the tools black Houstonians used to accomplish the goal of community formation between the start of the twentieth century and the end of World War II, a period during which the African American population of the city grew eightfold, from 15,000 to 125,000, mainly due to the internal migrations of African American southerners mostly from eastern Texas and Louisiana, although several hundred blacks would immigrate to the city from the Caribbean. It takes a holistic look at the communities, organizations, institutions, and philosophies that emerged in the city for the purpose of securing racial autonomy and social justice. It also examines community formation through the lens of the Great Migrations. Houston served as an important destination for 50,000 African-descent people in the first half of the twentieth century. Investigating where people settled, the jobs they secured, the groups they joined, and the goals they initiated reveals something about community, compromise, conflict, blackness, and justice in the first half of the twentieth century. This essay focuses on the southwestern and southern city of Houston to explain why community formation remains the backbone of blackness in the United States.

If Americans regard St. Louis as the nation's gateway to the West, Houston is the southernmost urban center that bridges the historic Spanish and Mexican Southwest and West with the United States South. According to University of Houston architecture professors Rafael Longoria and Susan Rogers, Houston sits on the edges of two important United States regions: the once-Antebellum South, which went to war with its national government to maintain African American slavery and led the nation in isolating its African-descent citizenry through legal racial exclusion and social control through violence; and the Southwest and West, whose cultural designs, economy, people, and historical geography forever link the region with New Spain and a young, multicolored republic called Mexico. Houston, perhaps more than any other Texas city, straddles these two worlds with its historical legacy of subsistence agriculture, ranching, the legendary vaqueros, and spacious rural-like neighborhoods while engaging in innovative transportation, industrialization, commercial expansion, and urban-suburban development. Black Houstonians, with the help of community formation, without question, embraced both definitions of Houston.

First, I examine the roots of community formation in black Houston, the post–Civil War African American communities that gave the city its first institutions, and the rise of agency in the surrounding countryside and towns that provided the city its workforce, community activists, educators, and businesspeople. One of those adopted Houstonians, Joshua Houston Jr., along with his immediate family, represents the generational transformation from that of appeasement to the New Negro activists of the twentieth century. A direct link to the slavery past, Joshua Houston's generation ensured that the community would never lose sight of that slave past and the construct of prudent accommodation.

Roots of Twentieth-Century Community Formation in Black Houston

Joshua Houston Sr., the literate ex-slave of famed Texas politician and military leader Sam Houston, raised his seven children to thrive in the post–Civil War South and Southwest. Leading by example in slavery and freedom, the blacksmith, wheelwright, coachman, landholder, lay church leader, Reconstruction politician, and former overseer taught his offspring to be industrious, to value education, and to aid others in need. Houston himself sought the best for his entire community but especially its children. He served two terms as a Huntsville alderman and Walker County commissioner and used his influence in prominent white circles to raise funds for enterprises including Huntsville's Union Church andFreedmen's Bureau school, built in 1867, for which he served as a trustee, as well as established the short-lived Bishop Ward College, founded in 1883 for blacks. Community builder Joshua Houston Sr. and his spouses over the years — slave Anneliza Halyard of Alabama and Crockett, Texas, whom as a teenager and young adult in his twenties, conceived three children between 1836 and 1848; the enslaved Mary Green of Walker County, Texas, who gave him two children before her death in the early 1860s; and freedwoman Sylvester Baker Houston, a younger wife who also preceded him in death in the 1870s after the births of the couple's two children — adored their progeny and hoped that one day they would be free. As chattel and the offspring of chattel, the Houston children particularly understood appeasement. Before and after Emancipation, Joshua Houston and his wives instilled in their children the importance of respecting and fearing whites, believing that the ability to cultivate such nonthreatening, lasting relationships could benefit their family and community for years to come.

The children of Joshua Houston took all this to heart. They did well for several reasons but mainly because their financially shrewd father aptly invested in their pursuits, whether trade school, farming, light manufacturing, or liberal arts education. The Houston offspring triumphed as parents, professionals, and community builders, thriving under racial conciliation and segregation.

One of Joshua Houston's middle children, born into slavery at the start of the Civil War, Joshua Houston Jr., knew the "peculiar institution" and slave community firsthand. He therefore learned early in life the importance of using racial appeasement, particularly for self-interest. Following slavery, in 1867 he entered the Huntsville Freedmen's Bureau school — the Union School, excelling in reading and mathematics. Ultimately, he studied one of his father's trades, blacksmithing, at Prairie View State and Industrial College (today Prairie View A&M University) and in his father's blacksmith shop. Perhaps because his training and career took precedence over a social life, Joshua Houston Jr. did not marry until thirty-seven. On October 11, 1898, he wedded Georgia Orviss, a Mary Allen Seminary education major and the daughter of a prominent biracial Baptist pastor and local postmaster, George Orviss. The couple raised two daughters, Constance Houston (Thompson), born in 1899, and Hortense Houston (Young), born in 1902. The Joshua Houston Jr. family lived on Huntsville's Thirteenth Street and Avenue N near what became "The Drag," the African American commercial center, and on the edge of the Avenues district, an exclusive middle-class and upper-middle-class white subdivision. Initially Joshua and Georgia Houston felt good about raising their daughters in Huntsville. The two earned good livings: Joshua as the owner of a blacksmith shop and Georgia as a schoolteacher and beauty consultant for white women.

Joshua Houston family at the wedding of Joshua Houston Jr. and Georgia Carlina Orviss in October 1898. Back row,left–right: Lawrence Wilson, John Wilson, Israel Wilson, Wesley (C. W.) Wilson. Second row: Clarence Wilson, Joshua Houston Jr., Georgia Carolina Orviss, George Wilson, unidentified woman, Samuel Walker Houston. Third row (seated): Cornelia Orviss, Cadolie Wilson, Reverend Brooks, Joshua Houston Sr., Ellen Houston, Ida Wilson. Front row: Viola Wilson, Minnie Houston. Courtesy Sam Houston Memorial Museum, Sam Houston State University.

Family and the community doted on the Houston girls. According to Constance Houston Thompson in an interview with historian Naomi Ledé, "Our parents protected us as much as possible. My family life was one of contentment, free of most restraint and worries." One of the most enduring forces in their lives was their uncle Sam, educator Samuel Walker Houston, whose vocational high school they attended. Samuel, the youngest son of Joshua Houston Sr., had been a classmate of James Weldon Johnson while attending Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University) in the late 1880s and early 1890s and had founded Huntsville and Walker County's first high school for African Americans, the Houstonian Normal Institute (later the Samuel Houston Industrial and Training School) in the Galilee community of western Walker County in 1906, five miles west of Huntsville. The first high school for African Americans in Walker County, it would also serve coeds in surrounding counties for thirty years. Then the Huntsville Independent School District named Houston the first principal of its African American high school, established in 1930. The esteemed Samuel Walker Houston also served on the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation (TCIRC), the post–World War I civil rights organization headed by black and white civic leaders from across the state, including woman's rights and human rights activist Jessie H. Daniel Ames, Houston clubwoman Jennie Covington, Wiley College president Matthew W. Dogan, Prairie View College principal W. R. Banks, and Sam Houston State Teacher's College (now Sam Houston State University) History Department chair Joseph L. Clark. A lifelong defender of racial conciliation, Samuel Houston taught his nieces that a quality education and respectability could upstage racial animosity.

For other reasons racism seems never to have hampered the Houston girls. Elite whites are said to have often stepped in to protect the teens from insults or threats of violence: "That's Joshua's girl. Leave her [alone]." Constance and Hortense also learned to ignore insults and epithets when around whites, particularly students at Sam Houston State Normal Institute (later Sam Houston State Teacher's College) but also when downtown attending affairs and while running errands for their parents. According to Hortense Houston Young, "My parents would always explain racial etiquette to us before we attended [the Henry Opera House, for example]. They would tell us that we should look beyond the discrimination to the long-range benefits." Furthermore, they learned from their parents the many subtle ways to challenge institutional racism. For example, family and friends taught them to legitimize racial appeasement over demands for immediate integration, as the latter only antagonized whites. Public conciliation, on the other hand, could lead to real benefits — such as recommendations, internships, scholarships or fellowships, jobs, and financial perks — according to loved ones. The long-term benefits, according to the girls' parents, overshadowed short-term racial subjugation.

Their mother had other ideas in mind. Women's rights advocate Georgia Houston never used her full name when doing business and while working in the homes of white clients, who referred to her as G. A. Houston. This way neither she nor the girls had to hear whites call her Georgia — they called her Mrs. Houston. Self-respect and a quality education would win out over racial bigotry, according to mother Georgia Houston. Houston thus exposed her daughters to the best in American and world literature, classical music, operas, and off-Broadway musicals and plays. Truly the Houston daughters lived in a world apart from most of their peers — European American, Latin American, and African American. With the help of their community's protection, the parents worked hard to shield the girls from structural inequality.

The middle-class Houstons nonetheless felt stifled by Jim Crow segregation and structural injustice in the new century. Their elite status perhaps obscured the strain placed on the black middle class to both succeed and remain in their socially mandated place beneath whites. The family therefore could never completely safeguard the teens from racial bigotry, particularly during World War I, when interracial animosity intensified in the United States. Occasionally, even in Huntsville, racial violence surfaced and reminded all African Americans of whites' pejorative perception of them as inferior.

In June 1918, whites in the unincorporated community of Dodge in Walker County, ten miles east of Huntsville, massacred an entire black family, in an alleged shootout at the family home. This unfortunate event followed the arrest and beating of farmer George Cabiness, a member of the family, for protesting allegations that he had evaded the draft. A frightened Georgia Houston persuaded Joshua that the family needed to leave their hometown. According to Constance Houston Thompson years later, "We moved to Houston because our mother became concerned — very concerned — after they took a man from the prison in Huntsville and lynched him." Racial accommodation alone no longer served the family's needs. The family left for Houston not long afterward that year.

The family settled in Fifth Ward, primarily a working-class area north of downtown and near the city's industrial district and Port of Houston, living in a quaint one-story structure on 1303 Bayou Street. Joshua Houston Jr. had bought the property earlier in the decade, perhaps in preparation for an inevitable trek into the city and away from his hometown's lingering racial injustice. One hundred miles south of Huntsville, the city of Houston pleased the family, and unsurprisingly they prospered in their adopted hometown. Joshua opened a blacksmith shop on Lyons Avenue along Fifth Ward's African American business district. Georgia Houston, who held memberships in several fraternal orders, would teach at several Fifth Ward elementary schools for the next forty years.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

List of Tables xi

Foreword Quintard Taylor xiii

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: The African American West in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century History Herbert G. Ruffin II Dwayne A. Mack 3

Part 1 Place

1 "Beautiful People": Community Formation in Houston, 1900-1941 Bernadette Pruitt 45

2 The Las Vegas Press and the Westside: The Moulin Rouge Agreement Shared History Program, University of Nevada, Reno 87

3 The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: Structural Racism and African American Community Formation in the North Bay Area April L. Harris 99

As Seattle Gets Richer, the City's Black Households Get Poorer 108

Aurora's Growth Reflects That African-Americans Are Finding Base in Denver 'Burbs 110

Part 2 Racial Frontier

4 "Turn Our Faces to the West": Refugees, Pioneers, and the Roots of "All-Black" Oklahoma Kendra T. Field 115

5 Poetic Justice: Bay Area Afro-Asian Women's Activism through Verse Jeanelle Hope 128

6 Apartheid in Arizona? HB 2281 and Arizona's Denial of Human Rights to Peoples of Color Julian Kunnie 146

Black Population of Fargo-Moorhead Has Nearly Tripled in Past Decade 157

Part 3 Political Expression

7 Multiracial Garveyism in the Far West Holly Roose 163

8 Brothers Taking Action: African American Soldier Activism at Fort Hood, Texas, 1948-1972 Herbert G. Ruffin II 181

9 Black Women in Spokane: Emerging from the Shadows of Jim and Jane Crow Dwayne A. Mack 202

Albina Residents Picket the Portland Development Commission, 1973 229

Part 4 Entertainment and Representation

10 The New Negro Frontier: Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and African American Modernism in the West Emily Lutenski 233

11 Containing "Perversion": African Americans and Same-Sex Desire in Cold War Los Angeles Kevin Allen Leonard 252

12 "Something 2 Dance 2": Electro-hop in 1980s Los Angeles and Its Afrofuturist Link Gabriela Jiménez 278

Ku Klux Klan's 1925 Attack on Malcolm X's Family Home in Omaha Heralded the Fight to Come 293

The Black 14: Race, Politics, Religion, and Wyoming Football 296

Part 5 Reconsiderations

13 African Americans in Albuquerque, 1880-1930: A Demographic Analysis Randolph Stakeman 303

14 Obscured Collaboration: African American Presence in the Myth of the While West Tracey Owens Patton 320

15 Kama'ainas and African Americans in Hawaii: Making Sense of the Black Hawaiian Experience with Dr. Kathryn Waddell Takara Herbert G. Ruffin II Kathryn Takara 337

Blanche Louise Preston McSmith: An Alaska Civil Rights Icon 359

African American History Month Enacted in Alaska, 2015 361

Bibliographic Essay: The Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century West Herbert G. Ruffin II 363

Contributors 387

Index 393

Editorial Reviews

A cutting-edge collection from a new generation of scholars of black western history. Its greatest strength is its fresh take on the efforts of black men and women to achieve their goals within the unique and diverse setting of the American West, including Hawaii. From the impressive introduction to the comprehensive bibliographic essay, this is a refreshingly creative and groundbreaking work that should appeal to a wide audience.”—Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, author of Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails
 

“This collection of essays is an important source to anyone interested in the total story of the American West and American history.”—Panhandle-Plains Historical Review
 

“Ruffin and Mack have put together a commendable collection of essays. Freedom’s Racial Frontier makes a strong contribution to the scholarship on the modern American West and African American history. The book provides a much-needed regional look at the historical experiences of African Americans in the twentieth century. Its essays are thoroughly researched, well written, and, in many instances, highly relevant to contemporary issues. The essays are both scholarly and accessible to a wider audience. As with the essays, the two oral histories and more numerous brief topical articles are engaging and informative.”—Journal of African American History
 

From the Publisher