‘Son of Texas’ kept on fighting
Arguably the most famous Galvestonian in history was Arthur John Johnson, a black man born on the island in 1878, the year after the Union army departed, leaving freed blacks at the mercy of embittered former Confederates. The irrepressible Jack Johnson, who would grow up to be the first black heavyweight champion of the world, credited his hometown for giving him a sense of possibility unavailable to black residents of most other southern cities. According to his biographer, one Galvestonian in particular was a role model for Johnson and others.
Geoffrey C. Ward, author of the 2004 Johnson biography “Unforgiveable Blackness,” notes that Galveston, the largest city in Texas at the time, took a more relaxed view of racial apartheid.
Even though whites were in firm control, blacks didn’t feel beaten down. He quotes a longtime resident: “You had all walks of life, races, creeds, colors. . . in here. We were segregated, but it wasn’t as bad as other places in the state of Texas . . . . Negroes and Caucasian people were poor and lived in the same neighborhood, ate the same food, suffered the same problems.”
No part of the city was more racially mixed than the 12th Ward, where the future champ grew up. Also living in the 12th, as the New York Times noted in an 1897 article, was “the most prominent Republican politician in the country.”
His name was Norris Wright Cuney, a black man who fought just as fiercely as Jack Johnson, although he didn’t use his fists. A deft political power broker, an impassioned, eloquent man whose reading leaned toward Shakespeare and Roman history, Cuney was, as Ward notes, “a constant reminder to neighbors like young Jack Johnson that a black man need not limit his horizons.”
Cuney. The name came up several times during last Monday’s funeral for George Floyd at Fountain of Praise Church, as friends and family members mentioned the public housing development in Third Ward where Floyd grew up. Houstonians are likely to know of Cuney Homes. I would guess that few in Houston or beyond are familiar with its remarkable namesake.
Known as Galveston’s “sable statesman,” Norris Wright Cuney was born in 1846. His white father was a plantation owner who worked more than a hundred slaves on his 2,000-acre spread near Hempstead, called Sunnyside. His mother was one of those slaves. She and her master had eight children.
Years later, the New York Evening Telegram would describe Cuney as “a finely built copper-hued man,” while the Houston Post called him a “darkskinned white man.” Cuney himself knew exactly who he was: a black man fighting with Johnsonian skill for the rights of his fellow African Americans.
Cuney’s father freed him at 13, and he was sent to a school for African-American children in Pittsburgh. When the outbreak of war prevented him from enrolling at Oberlin College, he came home to Galveston, where he studied law. During the tumultuous tenure of Radical Republican Gov. Edmund J. Davis, Cuney was named the first assistant to the sergeant-at-arms of the 12th Legislature and became a delegate to the 1872 Republican National Convention. He would be a delegate for the next 20 years. Also in 1872, he was appointed the United States Collector of Customs in Galveston.
Cuney ran for mayor in 1875, the Texas House in 1876 and the state Senate in 1882. He lost all three races, but in 1883, he was elected Galveston’s first AfricanAmerican
alderman.
He represented the overwhelmingly white 12th Ward. When he lost a bid for reelection to a third term, he had no doubt he’d been victimized by voter fraud. The chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, a resident of the district, swore that he had voted for Cuney and that his ballot had been changed; so did a number of other voters. The city called a new election. Cuney won.
A lifelong Republican in the tradition of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, Cuney fought a decades-long battle with the “Lily-Whites,” Texas Republicans obsessed with driving African Americans out of the party. He prevailed, cementing his reputation as “the greatest political organizer and manager the AfroAmerican race has produced.”
When he eventually left elective office, he established his own 500-man stevedore company. He also helped organize the Colored Screwman’s Benevolent Association, a labor union of black dockworkers.
In “Norris Wright Cuney: A Tribune of the Black People,” a dry, minutely detailed biography by a brilliant, dutiful daughter, Maud Cuney Hare describes her father’s lifelong efforts to protect the lives and hard-won rights of black Texans.
In December 1886, for instance, he’s in Brenham seeking justice for the families of three black men who have been taken from the jail and hanged by a mob of “from twenty to sixty men, quiet, sober and wellbehaved.” Two years earlier, he had been in nearby Chappell Hill, where armed men wearing masks walked into a polling place and shot three black men counting votes. When his family begged him not to set foot in either town, he laughed and assured them that masked men resorting to violence are invariably cowards.
One afternoon in 1888, he came home, sat down at the kitchen table and buried his face in his hands, “thoroughly disheartened and unnerved,” his daughter wrote. He had found out that Fort Bend County was in the hands of a rioting mob, and black residents had been driven from their homes, their property and valuables seized. Gov. Sul Ross had sent the state adjutant general to Richmond to investigate. According to Hare, the governor’s man met with the mob instead of the sheriff and vowed that when he visited Fort Bend again, “he would help kill every Negro in the county.”
In the words of Bill Minutaglio, author of a forthcoming history of Texas politics, Cuney was “an irritant doing dangerous outreach work.” He battled the Klan, pushed to end school segregation, pushed to include minorities on juries, fought the segregation of railway coaches. He lobbied for increased support for public education, including Prairie View A&M, and was instrumental in establishing three night schools for working-class Galvestonians, black and white.
Cuney, who died of tuberculosis in 1898 at age 52 — his wife had died of the same illness at 39 — spent his final years during the zenith of post-Reconstruction racial retrenchment. Despite the odds, he never stopped fighting.
“He might have drifted away from his people, as many have done,” a eulogizer noted, speaking to 3,000 people at his funeral, “but like Moses of old, he chose rather to suffer affliction with his own people than to enjoy honors and pleasures with another race.”
He always called himself “a son of Texas.”