She Changed the Nation, page 51
79. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 4, 12–20. Ed Patten was buried in College Memorial Park Cemetery in Houston, Harris County. Birth April 14, 1916, died May 12, 1919, according to “Find a Grave” memorial page for Ed Patten.
80. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/restaurants-bars/bbq/article/A-brief-history-of-Houston-barbecue-8126319.php#photo-10325380, accessed November 22, 2023.
81. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 9.
82. Drummond’s meditation on “Paul’s Message on Love” (chapter 1 Corinthians, verse 13), The Greatest Thing in the World (1888) sold widely in the early twentieth century and had a profound effect on readers in North America and the UK. Harold L. Bowman, review of James W. Kennedy, Henry Drummond: An Anthology (New York: Harper and Bros., 1953), in The Journal of Religion 34, no. 2 (April 1954): 148. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1200667.
83. Henry Drummond, The Greatest Thing in the World (Kessinger Publications, 1888, reprint 2000).
84. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908). In chapter 5, “The Flag of the World,” Chesterton considers the position of the optimist and the pessimist and tries to reconcile the existence of evil and disappointment with love, optimism, and faith.
85. https://archive.org/details/cavnaughsselecti00slsn, accessed November 22, 2023. Taken from an (1800) Methodist hymnal/prayer book, Cavnaugh’s Selections (1932), hymn 14: “I take the narrow way, / I take the narrow way, / With the Resolute few who dare go through, / I take the narrow way.”
86. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 10.
87. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 10; James E. Wood Jr., “A Theology of Power,” Journal of Church and State 14, no. 1 (Winter 1972): 107–124.
88. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 5.
89. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 11.
90. Shelby Hearon Papers, Box 3, Folder 11, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX.
91. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 27.
92. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 38.
93. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 39.
94. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 40.
95. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 31.
96. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 32.
97. The beloved and joyful gospel song was featured in The Blues Brothers (1980) starring John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd and performed by James Brown, playing the role of Rev. Cleophus James, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEkpkcQZ_P8 accessed November 22, 2023, and has been sung by countless gospel and pop singers. Here is Aretha Franklin’s version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4babYkY8Xs, accessed November 22, 2023.
98. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 40.
99. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 42.
100. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 43.
101. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self -Portrait, 42. James Weldon Johnson, “The Creation,” in God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (New York: Viking Press, 1927).
102. The “colored poet,” Johnson wrote, “needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor. . . . The form of ‘The Creation,’ the first poem of this group, was a first experiment by me in this direction.” James Weldon Johnson, introduction, God’s Trombones. See also Benjamin E. Mays, The Negro’s God as Reflected in His Literature (New York: Atheneum, 1938, 1968), 20–23, 65–68, which compares God’s Trombones and slave spirituals.
103. All quotes from Johnson, “The Creation,” in God’s Trombones.
104. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 42.
Chapter 2
1. Houston: A History and Guide, compiled by workers of the Writer’s Program of the Work Projects Administration (WPA) in the State of Texas, American Guide Series (Houston: Anson Jones Press, 1942) estimated that Houston had approximately 268 Black churches in 1941, 172–173, 189.
2. Beeth and Wintz, eds., Black Dixie, 21. Before World War II, Houston employed “over 3,000 Black longshoremen, 4,000 black workers in the crude oil industry, and 3,000 employed in tool works, such as Hughes Tools, and other manufacturing. Over 9,000 black women were employed as domestics.” See Ralph Matthews, “How Houston Earns Living,” in Baltimore Afro-American, May 7, 1938, 13. Bernadette Pruitt, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2013).
3. Pruitt, The Other Great Migration, 282–283.
4. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 63.
5. Playland Park, located south of downtown Houston, operated from 1940 until 1967. The park featured a racetrack and rides; the Skyrocket rollercoaster boasted to be the largest in the country.
6. Letter from Charles White to Barbara Jordan, July 16, 1976, Personal Letters, Classmates, Barbara Jordan Archives, Texas Southern University (hereafter BJ Archive, TSU).
7. Letter from Charles White to Barbara Jordan, July 16, 1976, BJ Archive, TSU.
8. Jordan and Hearon, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait, 63.
9. The 1923 Texas state law stated: “In no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic party primary election held in the state of Texas.” The Supreme Court decreed in 1935 that a political party could legally exclude Black citizens from membership and from voting in a primary. Charles L. Zelden, “In No Event Shall a Negro Be Eligible: The Texas NAACP Takes on the All-White Primary, 1923–1944,” in Long Is the Way and Hard: One Hundred Years of the NAACP, ed. Kevern Verney and Lee Sartain (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009,) 135–153; Steven F. Lawson, Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941, 3rd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell,, 2009), 18–20.
10. Address of Rev. A. A. Lucas to the Texas Conference of Branches, NAACP, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1940. Quoted in Melvin James Banks, “The Pursuit of Equality: The Movement for First Class Citizenship among Negroes in Texas, 1920-1950” (DSS diss., Syracuse University, 1962), 190.
11. Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–1263; Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (December 1988): 786–811; John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The South Before the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
12. Missouri ex el Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938) held that states had to provide comparable in-state graduate education for Black students or pay for their education in another state. Darlene Clark Hine, 1973 interview with Judge William Hastie, in Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003, repr.), 66–67, and quoted in Zelden, “In No Event Shall a Negro Be Eligible,” 278, n. 10.
13. “You talk about a hornet’s nest! Ye Gods, this is the worst I have ever seen.” James SoRelle, “The Darker Side of ‘Heaven’: The Black Community in Houston, Texas, 1917–1945” (PhD diss., Kent State University, 1980). p. 378, quoting letter from Daisy Lampkin to Richetta Randolph, Oct. 31, 1939, NAACP Archives, Box C-69.
14. See Rebecca Montes, “Working for American Rights: Black, White, and Mexican American Dockworkers during the Great Depression” (PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2005), 139, 164, for poll-tax drives and the requirement of ILA, and 165–173 for efforts among ILA men and women to pay poll taxes. For Everett background, see Montes, “Working for American Rights,” 1–3, 123–124, 131. Everett’s work with the ILA began in the 1910s, when he was hired as the organization’s minister. He and his family migrated to Houston from Mississippi, and he initially worked in the oil industry. He lived on Dowling Street in the Third Ward.
15. Beth Tompkins Bates, “A New Crowd Challenges the Agenda of the Old Guard in the NAACP, 1933–1941,” American Historical Review 102, no. 2 (April 1997): 340–377, identifies a shift in the NAACP to include collective, secular, labor interests largely in northern cities such as Chicago.
16. Local 872 formed in tandem with a white local 1273, and the two groups “signed a ninety nine year contract for an even division of work.” For a time, the two unions worked in “mixed gangs” without any problems between the races, but an intervention by the KKK forced the unions to segregate. For the most complete history of the ILA in Houston, see Rebecca Montes, “Working for American Rights: Black, White, and Mexican-American Dockworkers in Texas during the Great Depression,” in Sunbelt Revolutions: The Historical Progression of the Civil Rights Struggles in the Gulf South, 1866–2000, ed. Samuel C. Hyde (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 102–132; See also Lester Rubin, William S. Swift, and Herbert R. Northurp, Negro Employment in Maritime Industries: A Study of Racial Policies in the Shipbuilding, Longshore, and Offshore Maritime Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974), 123, quoting Herbert R. Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944) 151; and Maude Russell, Men Along the Shore: The ILA and Its History (New York: Brussel and Brussel, Inc. 1966).
17. “I would like for somebody to send me the name of a group of Negro teachers, doctors, lawyers, editors or any other group of so-called educated Negroes which has been able to do half as much.” Houston Informer and Texas Freedman, May 25, 1935, 12, quoted in Montes, “Working for American Rights” (2005), 132.
18. For the migration of Black women out of Houston and other parts of Texas for California, see Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Paul Alejandro Levengood, “For the Duration and Beyond: World War II and the Creation of Modern Houston, Texas” (PhD diss., Rice University, 1999), 384, 392, and 371–399. See also David R. Goldfield, Promised Land: The South since 1945 (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Daidson, 1987), for an overview of continued racial discrimination against southern Black workers, which spurred their migration. Overall, Texas lost 75,000 Black residents in the 1940s. Jack Temple Kirby, “The Southern Exodus, 1910–1960: A Primer for Historians,” Journal of Southern History 49 (November 1983).
19. James M. SoRelle, “‘An de Po Cullud Man Is in de Wuss Fix uv Awl’: Black Occupational Status in Houston, Texas, 1920–1940,” Houston Review 1 (Spring 1979): 14–26; and for descriptions of decrepit housing, see Levengood, “For the Duration and Beyond,” 372, 372–383, who cites journalist Tom Lester, Houston Chronicle, November 18, 1945.
20. Maud Cuney-Hare, Norris Wright Cuney: Tribune of the Black People, intro. Tera Hunter (New York: G.K Hall, 1995); Merline Pitre, Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares: The Black Leadership of Texas, 1868–1900 (Austin: Eakin, 1985); John Mason Brewer, Negro Legislators of Texas and Their Descendants: A History of the Negro in Texas Politics from Reconstruction to Disfranchisement (Dallas: Mathis Publishing, 1935), .99; Lawrence Goodwyn, “Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study,” American Historical Review 76, no. 5 (December 1971): 1435–1456, 1446; and Rogers, Barbara Jordan: American Hero, 7–10.
21. Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 128.
22. James SoRelle, “The Darker Side of ‘Heaven’: The Black Community in Houston, Texas, 1917–1945” (PhD diss., Kent State University, 1980). See chap. 7, “No Such Thing as Unity: Politics in the Black Community,” 283–308, 289–290.
23. Zelden, “In No Event Shall a Negro Be Eligible,” 135–153.
24. SoRelle, “The Darker Side of ‘Heaven,’” 284, quoting Houston Informer, April 7, 1923.
25. “Wanted to Mutilate Texas Editor: KKK Planned to Cut Negro Journalist to Pieces,” New York Amsterdam News, April 8, 1925.
26. Zelden, “In No Event Shall a Negro Be Eligible,” 143; and Robert Haynes, “Black Houstonians and the White Democratic Primary, 1920–1945,” in Beeth and Wintz, eds., Black Dixie, 192–211, p. 201–202. Pitre, Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares, 23–24, cites the organizations that raised money for the suit and supported it, including the Eastern Star and the Metropolitan Council of Negro Women.
27. Michael Gillette, “The Rise of the NAACP in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 81, no. 4 (April 1978): 393–416, 400–401; Hine, Black Victory, chaps. 2–4 and 6–10.
28. SoRelle, “The Darker Side of ‘Heaven.’” See chap. 7, “No Such Thing as Unity: Politics in the Black Community,” 283–308.
29. Zelden, “In No Event Shall a Negro Be Eligible,” 143; and Haynes, “Black Houstonians and the White Democratic Primary,” 201–202.
30. Lulu White joined forces with A. Maceo Smith of Dallas, and the two are generally held up by scholars as responsible for renewing popular faith in the NAACP in Texas. In Houston the energy and enthusiasm of Lucas and White renewed the national office’s confidence in the branch. For background on this era of the NAACP in Texas, see SoRelle, “The Darker Side of ‘Heaven’”; Merline Pitre, In Struggle against Jim Crow: Lulu White and the NAACP, 1900–1957 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1999), 31–36; Gillette, “The Rise of the NAACP in Texas,”: 393–395; Michael Gillette, “The NAACP in Texas, 1937–1957” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1984); Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Free Press, 2009), 282–283; John Ralph Wilson, “Origins: The Houston NAACP, 1915–1918 (Master’s thesis, Department of History, University of Houston, December 2005).
31. Hine, Dark Victory, 221–222.
32. Address of Rev. A. A. Lucas to the Texas Conference of Branches, NAACP, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1940. Quoted in Melvin James Banks, “The Pursuit of Equality: The Movement for First Class Citizenship among Negroes in Texas, 1920–1950” (DSS diss., Syracuse University, 1962), 190.
33. Banks, “The Pursuit of Equality,” 191–192, quoting from the conference speech of Rev. Lucas and the minutes of the statewide NAACP Meeting in Corpus.
34. Address of Rev. Albert A. Lucas, Houston, Texas to the NAACP “Committee on Time and Place,” 31st Annual Conference, Philadelphia, June 22, 1940. Papers of the NAACP, Part 01: Meetings of the Board of Directors, Records of Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and Special Reports, Series: Annual Conference Proceedings, 1910–1950, Folder Title: 1940 Annual Conference.
35. Address of C. V. Rice, Houston, Texas, to the NAACP “Committee on Time and Place,” 31st Annual Conference, Philadelphia, June 22, 1940. Papers of the NAACP, Part 01: Meetings of the Board of Directors, Records of Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and Special Reports Series: Annual Conference Proceedings, 1910–1950, Folder Title: 1940 Annual Conference. Gillette, “The NAACP in Texas, 1937–1957,” 17, also refers to Lucas organizing the March 1940 meeting of Houstonians aiming for a new lawsuit against the white primary.
36. Letter from Roy Wilkins to Branch Officers, April 28, 1941. “This is the first time in the history of the N.A.A.C.P. that the annual conference has been held so far in the ‘Deep South.’ In 1920 we were in Atlanta; in 1934 in Oklahoma City; in 1939 in Richmond.” Papers of the NAACP, Part 01: Meetings of the Board of Directors, Records of Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and Special Reports, Series: Annual Conference Proceedings, 1910–1950, Folder Title: 1941 Annual Conference.
37. “Houston Negroes headed by Rev. A.A. Lucas, pastor Good Hope Baptist Church, who also heads both the local and state NAACP organizations, have already over-subscribed their quota.” “Indications are that the entire $8,000 will be raised in time to file a case following the July primary elections.” W. H. Bonds, “From a Layman’s Viewpoint: Texas Points the Way,” Atlanta Daily World, June 1, 1940.
38. Gary M. Lavergne, Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 58–59.
39. Hine, Dark Victory, 223, and Haynes, “Black Houstonians and the White Democratic Primary,” 205.
40. Haynes, “Black Houstonians and the White Democratic Primary,” 205; Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 23–54; Hine, Black Victory; Valelly, The Two Reconstructions.
41. Baltimore Afro-American, June 28, 1941.
42. NAACP Papers, Program, Annual Convention—1941, General Office File—II: A22, folder 11.
43. 1941 Annual Convention, NAACP Papers, ll: A 23, Folder 4.
44. See his obituary in the New York Times, December 18, 1996.
45. Manfred Berg argues that the anticommunism of the NAACP in this period has been exaggerated. Although local Texans were vocally anticommunist, Wright’s award and warm reception indicates an acceptance of those with radical views. Manfred Berg, “Black Civil Rights and Liberal Anti-Communism: The NAACP in the Early Cold War,” Journal of American History 94, no. 1 (June 2007): 75–96. See Baltimore Afro-American, July 12, 1941, for an account of Wright’s speech.
46. The murderous deed was carried out in full view of the judge, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, but Cochran went free. See also Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2021), 34–37, on the local impact of the White case in Conroe, Texas.
