A History of Fort Worth in Black & White: 165 Years of African-American Life
400
A History of Fort Worth in Black & White: 165 Years of African-American Life
400Hardcover
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Overview
This volume fills a long-empty niche on the Fort Worth bookshelf: a scholarly history of the city’s black community that starts at the beginning with Ripley Arnold and the early settlers, and comes down to today with our current battles over education, housing, and representation in city affairs. Profiles on some noted and some not-so-noted African Americans will appeal to both schools and general readers. Using a wealth of primary sources, Richard Selcer dispels several enduring myths, for instance the mistaken belief that Camp Bowie trained only white soldiers, and the spurious claim that Fort Worth managed to avoid the racial violence that plagued other American cities in the twentieth century. Selcer arrives at some surprisingly frank conclusions that will challenge current politically correct notions. “Selcer does a great job of exploring little-known history about the military, education, sports, and even some social life and organizations.”—Bob Ray Sanders, author of Calvin Littlejohn: Portrait of a Community in Black and White
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781574416169 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of North Texas Press |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2016 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 1,002,672 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d) |
About the Author
RICHARD SELCER is a native Fort Worther who has taught in his hometown for more than forty years. He holds a PhD from TCU, and has authored ten books on Western, military, and cultural history. He has taught at Tarrant County College, Dallas County College, and Weatherford College.
Read an Excerpt
A History of Fort Worth in Black & White
165 Years of African-American Life
By Richard F. Selcer
University of North Texas Press
Copyright © 2015 Richard F. SelcerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57441-630-5
CHAPTER 1
The Antebellum and Civil War Years
From the beginning, Fort Worth, Texas, has been a community where Southern values and attitudes intersected with Western values and attitudes; both are part of our genetic code today, but they had to come from somewhere. Fort Worth began life in the mid-nineteenth century as a frontier settlement built by migrants from the Deep South who combined the racial prejudices of that region with the greater tolerance and openness of the Wild West. This combination could not help but have an effect on blacks and whites alike.
Slavery arrived on the twin forks of the Trinity almost with the first white men. The earliest settler in the area was Tennessee-born Edward S. Terrell who arrived in 1843. He was a contract supplier for the U.S. Army who made a killing in 1856 by selling his entire herd to the Fort Richardson garrison. He then invested some of the proceeds in slaves to sell to the incoming homesteaders who like himself were mostly Southerners.
While Fort Worth was still a military outpost (1849–1853), there were also slave-owners among the officers. Major Ripley Arnold, the post's founder, owned a body servant, and so did his First Lieutenant, Washington P. Street. In that day and age, white men who grew up in the South, regardless of where they had been born, considered slavery part of the normal order of things. Men owned slaves, not necessarily a field full, but more than likely a personal or body servant if they could afford one. Lieutenant Washington Street grew up in the upper Midwest of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa — abolitionist country. But when military service took him to Texas he was accompanied by London Triplett, a black man who had worked for the family in some unspecified capacity for years. Family lore has it that Triplett was a free man, and having a last name suggests that, but it is also hard to imagine a black man in antebellum Texas being able to come and go as he pleased. It is equally hard to imagine a young Army lieutenant paying servant's wages out of his meager salary. Army life on the frontier was different from the world that gentlemen officers came from. Far beyond the pale of civilization, they might keep a black slave or live with an Indian squaw when they would never have done either back home.
Colonel Middleton Tate Johnson, one of the five men who helped Major Arnold select the site, later dubbed "the Father of Tarrant County," had at least thirty-nine slaves in 1850 on his plantation in nearby Navarro County. When he settled in Tarrant County that same year at a spot about fifteen miles east of Fort Worth, he brought his slaves with him. One of those slaves many years later told an interviewer that Johnson had "about" eighty-six slaves on his place in Tarrant County, which suggests that as his wealth and status rose he bought additional slaves.
Most of those early settlers came from the Deep South; they came west to farm a piece of land and realize the American Dream, a dream built on slavery. They were slave-owners who saw the rich, black soil as their ticket, in the process unwittingly extending the cotton empire onto the Great Plains. Fort Worth's location on the edge of the eastern prairie where it merged with the Cross Timbers offered the kind of hot, dry climate that was favorable for cotton cultivation although not as favorable as the deep delta lands of the Mississippi River valley. Statistically, Tarrant County did not even register when it came to calculating national cotton production; tables and charts showing the distribution of the twelve million acres under cultivation in 1859 do not even include Tarrant County. Since cotton was the single largest employer of slaves and Tarrant County was such an insignificant player in the cotton empire, it seems clear that slaves did not compose a large part of the local population.
There is no historical consensus about the number of slaves living in the county between 1850 and 1865, and even less agreement when it comes to Fort Worth. At best we have a snapshot of the population for certain years. Tax rolls show a steady increase in the number of slaves county-wide before the Civil War: from 32 in 1850 to 280 in 1855 to either 699 or 730 in 1860. The earliest number conflicts with some records that show 65 slaves total in Tarrant County including the little community calling itself "Fort Town." One of those who make the error of conflating the county and the town is B. B. Paddock, earliest chronicler of the city's history, who uses the number sixty-five as the number "in Fort Worth in 1850 out of a total population of 664." The fact is, it is virtually impossible to distinguish the number of slaves owned by residents of the town from those belonging to slave-owners in the rest of the county. Logically, we would expect the overwhelming majority of slaves to be engaged in agricultural work as opposed to the "house servants" and "body servants" that tended to be found in town. More confusion was created by later recollections. In 1893, which was still within living memory of the first generation of Fort Worthers, the Dallas Morning News states there were 115 slaves in Fort Worth in 1850 out of a total population of 500. Julia Kathryn Garrett, the respected modern-day historian of early Fort Worth, says there were 756 slaves in the county in 1861 but provides no source for that figure. At this late date we cannot make an accurate accounting of slave numbers in Tarrant County or Fort Worth because the primary sources are so unreliable. All we can say with confidence is that Fort Worth as a small frontier community contributed little to the total slave population of Texas in the antebellum period.
What we can do is put a face on the slave-owners if not the slaves themselves. Their ranks included the most distinguished citizens of the county: Ephraim Daggett, Lawrence Steele, Middleton Tate Johnson, Charles Turner, Dr. G.M. Standifer, Nathaniel Terry, and brothers Otis and Paul Isbell. All were planters who came to Fort Worth from elsewhere across the South, bringing their slaves with them to start over in the new land. Even Dr. Standifer only practiced medicine out of necessity while improving his spread. Among the others were occasional Indian fighters and slave traders, two well-known avocations on the Texas frontier.
The man called the "Father of Fort Worth," Captain Ephraim M. Daggett, was a big-time slave-owner. He and his family arrived in 1852 with what was described by contemporaries as "a large contingent" of slaves, meaning not just house servants but field hands as well. Lawrence Steele and his wife Elizabeth arrived that same year in two wagons with thirty-six slaves. Why Steele needed that many slaves is a mystery because he was in the merchandising business, unless they were an investment and he planned to sell them. Slave-trading was looked down on by Southern elites although not slave-owning. People were less squeamish on the frontier about such things. Supporting the slave-trading theory, the following year Steele was down to ten slaves, all registered in his wife's name although he paid the taxes on them. His business partner, Julian Feild [sic], was paying taxes on fourteen slaves before the Civil War.
The biggest slave-owner in Tarrant County on the eve of the Civil War was either Middleton Tate Johnson or Charles Turner. The two men had served together in the Mexican War and together guided Major Ripley Arnold to the bluffs of the Trinity in 1849. Turner owned 640 acres north of the river where Greenwood Cemetery is today and was active buying slaves on the local market. By 1861 he owned 150. Johnson owned a sprawling spread east of Fort Worth in present-day Arlington which served as a way station on the road to Dallas. He, too, owned more than 100 slaves. Turner saw no contradiction between being a Union man and owning slaves during the secession crisis of 1861. Both men cast their lot with the Confederacy after Texas seceded from the Union.
Another large slave-owner, also with a spread just north of town, was Nathaniel Terry, known locally as "Colonel Terry." He first came to Texas in 1854 from Alabama with his family and thirty-six slaves hoping to recreate the plantation life he had known back home. Within a few years, he had acquired more than eighty slaves. The area where both Turner and Terry settled was what later came to be known as "White Settlement." The origins of the name are still debated today, whether it refers to whites as opposed to Indians or whites as opposed to blacks.
All of these men are counted today among the founding fathers of Fort Worth, so the fact that they were not just slave-owners but big-time slave-owners is significant. It shows that slavery was considered respectable and was rooted in the community right from the beginning. It was the economic bedrock of the local economy. Approval even crossed whatever lines were drawn between secessionists and unionists in 1860–61.
What kind of masters were these men? They may have been pillars of the community in their day, but we judge our pillars differently today. Captain J. C. Terrell, who knew most of them, says in his Reminiscences of the Early Days of Fort Worth that Johnson and Daggett were "grand men ... morally" while admitting that neither was "exemplary or saintly." He calls them authentic "heroes" because "we loved them for the manifold good they did ... [and because] both were good Masons." Colonel Johnson may have put his guns away, but he never accepted the freedmen on equal terms. At the end of the war he opposed "granting the Negroes any political rights whatever" although he was not averse to treating them with "justice and kindness."
We know more about Charles Turner as a slave-owner than either of the other two. Reportedly he allowed his slaves an extended Christmas holiday every year that continued as long as a huge Yule log burned. He also went down to the "negro quarters" with Christmas gifts for all. It is suggested that such acts of kindness were far more than the average slave-owner did. When the Civil War came, Turner refused to convert his considerable gold stash into Confederate notes. Instead he buried it under a giant live oak "with the aid of a trusted slave," Uncle Jake. Since the location of the gold was never revealed to Union authorities even after the war, we can presume that it was a very strong relationship between Turner and Uncle Jake. Turner died in 1873. Reportedly, the "faithful" former slave was buried at Turner's side when he died. We do not have similar details on Nathaniel Terry, only that he was likewise a kindly master. However, we do have independent testimony that says lumped together as a group Texas slave-owners were less harsh than many of their brethren in the Deep South. Testimony to this effect comes from visitors to the state. There were no slave auctions, no underground railroad to serve as an escape valve for runaways, and the sketchy historical record does not contain any mention of any Simon Legree types. On a relative scale, therefore, slavery in Tarrant County (Fort Worth) was fairly benign, which should not be confused with being a good thing.
Compared to the big slave-owners, men like Ripley Arnold and Washington Street with their "body servants" were small cogs in the system. Their slaves were faithful retainers treated more like companions than chattel. Master and slave worked and ate together and sometimes slept under the same roof. Such owners were not economically dependent on slavery for their livelihood; having a "man servant" was a perk of being a gentleman in the Old South. It was the big plantation owners employing scores if not hundreds of slaves that drove the system. But most slave-owners, whether they owned one body servant or 100 field-hands, would have believed that they were doing the right thing for all concerned.
In the decade before the Civil War, black-white relations in the tiny community seem to have been not just peaceful but congenial. The local slave population was far from restive, and Fort Worth was safely removed from the strongholds of Northern abolitionism. Some prominent locals could even advocate for blacks without arousing the hostility of their white neighbors. The fact that such kindly souls were not willing to go all the way by arguing for emancipation does not mean they were hypocrites or completely heartless. One of the most solicitous was Florence Peak, the wife of Dr. Carroll Peak, who made herself a "friend to the helpless" among blacks and whites. Word got around in the slave community that a black man facing a whipping might even appeal to Mrs. Peak to intercede in his behalf. Her countless acts of kindness produced one unforeseen consequence; it was said that "numbers of [black] girl babies" were named "Florence" in her honor.
Acts of charity like Florence Peak performed, while admirable, did not change the law. Slaves were still property in the eyes of the law and could be treated as such, meaning they could be bought and sold at their owner's whim without any concern for what they might want. They had no legal protection; even the sanctity of the family unit that was a cornerstone of both English Common Law and Napoleonic law did not apply. Families could be broken up and sold off or gifted just like livestock. Slaves could also be seized by the sheriff in bankruptcy proceedings. When Colonel Terry suffered a financial setback, eighty of his slaves were sold at auction on the Tarrant County courthouse steps in a single sale. Neither the law nor the Colonel was entirely heartless; he got to keep his faithful "body servant," Uncle Daniel.
Uncle Daniel was one of the fortunate ones, but even he had no expectation of ever enjoying due process. The only protection he had came from his master, and that protection could be taken away arbitrarily for even the smallest misstep. It would have been big news if an accused black man did receive due process in any proceeding. The first known hanging in Tarrant County was of an unnamed black man, and reportedly it went by the book. According to a brief news items in 1859, the "Negro man of Col. Harton of Navarro County" was accused of robbing and murdering "Mr. English" of Fort Worth. He was tried — before an all-white court, of course — and convicted on the basis of some of the stolen money found in his wife's possession. The newspaper summarized the trial this way: The accused was "examined, found guilty, and hung by the citizens."
The hanging of Colonel Harton's man was noteworthy because it cannot be categorized as a lynching like the hanging of three black men in Dallas a year later in the super-heated atmosphere before the Civil War. The coming of the war shattered the established order between the two races, ultimately replacing it with something scarcely better, legalized segregation. The abolition of slavery was a noble goal, but lifelong docility and loyal service could not be swept away with the stroke of a presidential pen. Two and a half centuries of American slavery had created a comfortable if unequal relationship between slaves and masters. In the run-up to the Civil War the status quo was undermined by talk of war and rumors of abolitionist plots to incite a slave uprising. The closer the election of 1860 came with the possibility of an "abolitionist" President (Abraham Lincoln, sic), the more slave-owners became hypersensitive to anything resembling rebellion or even insubordination. Suspicions focused not on slaves alone but on white provocateurs (Northern abolitionists).
A series of events that summer dubbed the "Texas Troubles" in newspapers across the nation raised white fears of a vast plot to torch towns and murder citizens in their beds. It started with a wave of fires on July 8 that hit several north Texas towns, including Dallas (but not Fort Worth). In the public mind the fires were linked together and constituted the beginning of a slave revolt. The Dallas Herald stoked the worst white fears, which involved not just arson and murder but deep-seated fear of black men raping white women. Dallas citizens formed a vigilance committee to hunt down the conspirators, and Fort Worth was not far behind. In August, Col. Nathaniel Terry wrote to a friend in east Texas, "We are in an intense excitement, growing out of these organized burnings that have been going on." Another Fort Worth citizen, unnamed, declared that "universal sentiment" thereabouts was that it was better to hang ninety-nine (suspicious) men than "let one guilty man pass, for the guilty one endangers the peace of society." The lucky ones were hanged; there were reports that some men were burned alive.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A History of Fort Worth in Black & White by Richard F. Selcer. Copyright © 2015 Richard F. Selcer. Excerpted by permission of University of North Texas Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Photos ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The Antebellum and Civil War Years 17
Chapter 2 Reconstruction and the City's Beginnings (1865-1879) 41
Chapter 3 A Growing Sense of Identity (1880-1900) 71
Chapter 4 The World of Jim Crow 133
Chapter 5 World War I: Jim Crow Comes Marching Home 231
Chapter 6 Jim Crow Rules! 259
Chapter 7 The Depression 313
Chapter 8 World War II 363
Chapter 9 The Early Civil Rights Years or Jim Crow in Retreat 391
Chapter 10 Jim Crow RIP 467
Chapter 11 The Race Is Not Always to the Swift 497
Chapter 12 A Few Conclusions 529
Bibliography 543
Index 571
Interviews
Fort Worth, Texas