Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Norris Wright Cuney: A Texas Black History Prototype

... Who became a tragic stereotype.

You've never heard of him. Not unless you are seriously into Texas history. And Black history at that. He was of the first generation of Black freedmen in our country. He had an education and the gift of public speaking and was among of the first African Americans to rise within the Republican Party and be elected to public office, and then the White junta stone-walled his momentum and his legacy like an embarrassing criminal record. Norris Wright Cuney was one of the first of many largely forgotten Black forefathers; men and women who suffered all kinds of oppression, yet achieved the highest stations in what I call “Black Exceptionalism.”

And don't laugh at that term. I can show you plenty of places, cities right here in Texas where the most extraordinary people in the community were Black. In fact I am about to. And history and popular culture today supports that fact. But due to the racism in the past we have never heard of many of these individuals. Sadly it seems, our lack of knowledge about Black Exceptionalism is a persistent hold-over from our past, and one we cannot shake, whether we are Black or White or like Norris Cuney, somewhere in between.

The mulatto son of Texas Senator Phillip Cuney and his negro slave, Miss Adeline Stuart, Norris Wright Cuney was born into a mixed-race plantation family 1846 in Hempstead, Texas. He was freed in 1859 when still a teenager, and sent by his wealthy father to Pittsburgh to be educated. Afterwards he relocated to the coast where he started and managed his own stevedore business. Eventually Cuney would be appointed to the highest ranking position of any African American in the South during the late 19th century.

During the war, Norris had worked on steamships which serviced up and down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, giving him invaluable experience. Right after the Civil War, he went to Galveston where he got involved in the Union League, a somewhat clandestine government-funded organization designed to establish Civil Rights for the newly freed slaves. Cuney was soon considered one of the most important Black leaders in Texas, and his activities were closely reported by the New York Times, giving him national prominance. In 1870, Cuney served as the first sergeant of arms of the Reconstruction Legislature in Texas, where he became friends with Governor Edmund Davis. A fierce post-Civil War politician, he was elected to Galveston alderman and Republican Party Chairman, was a Mason and labor union leader, and in 1872 was appointed as a Federal Customs Collections agent, while his excellent education landed him as a member of the Galveston County School Board, which was beginning the first racially integrated schools in Texas, some one hundred years before this became the law of the land.

Norris Cuney's Republican leadership in Texas lasted almost twenty years, and is known by historians as the “Cuney Era.” Still, after a number of attempts, he was never able to get elected to either the Texas State Legislature or the Texas Senate. Then in 1882 as federal troops vacated the state at the end of “Reconstruction,” Cuney's days of influence were numbered. He was elected to Galveston alderman in 1883, but he and his fellow Black politicians were finally brought down by the manipulations of White Democrats, a conspiracy he dubbed the “Lilly White” movement, which joined forces with President Grover Cleveland and finally removed him and other Blacks from statewide involvement or influence in the Republican Party. This was the beginning of the “Jim Crow” era, or the regression of Negro Civil Rights enforced by Democratic leaders all over the United States. Never the less, in 1889 he was appointed to be U. S. Collector of Customs, the highest ranking appointment for any person of color before the turn of the century.

Nobody can blame Norris Wright Cuney for trying to hide or disappear. But his importance to Texas history was so obliterated that his and his wife's 16 inch by 20 inch portraits could hang in an antique shop in Belton, Texas for years without ever being recognized. That's where I entered the picture, pardon the pun.

Norris Wright Cuney

Loving history, and being an avid collector of antique images, I have been on this crazy doppelganger kick now for almost a decade, and had become my own worst doubter. Never the less I kept finding images at every turn of famous persons from the Victorian era. I had seen these portraits of the Cuneys a few years ago and said to my self, “Surely not.” What would a portrait of a prominent Black leader from Hempstead be doing in Belton, Texas? I told myself I had become delusional. It just wasn't that easy to locate rare old photographs of important people from history. But Saturday I was sauntering through the same antique shop... and saw them again... and by this time I had learned to trust my instincts.

I took a photo with my cell phone and looked him up. Bingo. Another important find. I often never tell the folks who sell old images to me that I recognize the people in them, or whom I think they are. It would be disheartening to them, and usually I have a long row to hoe to prove it anyway. But this time I broke from that habit, and asked the nice lady in the antique shop if she cared to know. And she did. All she knew for sure about them was that she had owned the portraits “a long time.”

Adelina Dowdy Cuney

When I told her, suddenly bells rang in her mind, and almost instantly she produced an article out of a 2013 Austin newspaper. My full disclosure had paid off. And here is where a coincidence became a Divine Appointment. Her memory jogged, she knew exactly where the portraits had come from. The portraits had come from a prominent home in Bell County... the subject of the Austin article, in fact the home of the most prominent Black man in Bell County during the 1930's and 40's. A man who knew many important Black leaders around the state. When he died, his house was a treasure trove of Texas Black history. When his home was sold around 2013, this Belton antique dealer was invited to come peruse and obtain what she could use, and she recovered a number of things, including the tattered portraits featured here, of this handsome, heretofore unknown couple. Also a letter made out on KKK stationery, wrapped around a projectile and thrown through the window of a prominent Black family, boldly threatening them. This may well have been the same cousin of the homeowner who reportedly ran for Congress and had received death threats. Blacks were not just hated and frustrated back then, they were killed for trying to be Americans. Yet this Black man had persevered and prevailed, and I was anxious to know more about him.

The newspaper editorial, written by Brad Stutzman, was entitled “A house of history, a man of mystery.” Stutzman's article highlighted the black hole in most Texas communities where Black history should be residing. The Belton citizen who lived at 702 S. Pearl, a large, red brick home known to him and his family as “Villa LuNecia,” was an associate of nationally prominent Blacks, and it was said that Duke Ellington once tickled the ivories there. Marcus Garvey, the controversial Black publisher and “Back to Africa” demagogue had once visited there. Local legends place many famous Black entertainers and sports icons having stayed in the Kinchion home, considered a hostel to African Americans on the road, when many hotels were not available to Blacks. So today this house is fittingly listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The owner, this Belton legend, named L. B. Kinchion Sr., had made his fortune selling Blacks cosmetics and beauty products, and then built the nicest house in the nicest Black neighborhood. L. B. Kinchion eventually had far-reaching contacts with Black educators, politicians, entertainers, and military men. A former neighbor remembered in the 2013 article that Kinchion was a sort "Great Gatsby" kind of character, referring to the movie starring Robert Redford, and added that he had a cook, a butler, a valet and a chauffeur. Kinchion lived better than 99% of his White neighbors. So who WAS this guy?

L. B. Kinchion

Stutzman's mystery man was not so much a mystery, a Black version of the Great Gatsby as the writer observed, as much as he was a vastly diversified individual with his fingers in many pots, which may have slightly watered down his impact in any of them. Kinchion's first fingers stirred the pot in Texas education, perhaps his greatest interest. He was there when Blacks organized and levered the state for better Black colleges, which ultimately led to the state's support of Prairie View University. An obvious savante, Kinchion was serving as a school principal when only 27 years old. Later he served as the principal of the West Belton Colored High School. And after twenty years in Texas education, he was serving as president of the State Colored Teachers Association. That's one pot.

The talented educator apparently took a break from his school duties around 1905 when he joined the Texas National Guard. Records show that he was captain of Company C, Hawley Guards, 1st Colored Battalion-Infantry which was based in Galveston. He must have stayed with it, because he was commissioned as a major in the Texas National Guard in 1934. That's a second pot. Kinchion had a penchant for service to the community. He also helped establish the Moorland YMCA in Dallas. Due to aparthied, he was very active in the Black branch of the Knights of Pythias, a national service organization, as was one of his sons. He invested a great deal of his life and fortune in his membership and was eventually made Grand Chancellor. We'll call that a third pot. And it was believed that he spoke seven different languages. This would have been handy as his home was a frequent gathering place and sometime way-station for travelers, in a circle euphemistically known as "the Blue Moon Chasers Social Club." That would be the fourth pot. Yet neither L. B. Kinchion's service, his glamourous high life nor his accomplishments or any of his “pots” are known to any published account of Bell County history. Nobody with his lifestyle could have maintained that much “mystery” to those who truly knew him, but what is amazing was how fast his society forgot him.

By 2013, approximately 50 years after his passing, those who remembered him observed to Stutzman that although Villa LuNecia had been a popular scene of social activity, where the “Who's Who” of African America once partied and toasted one another, very few folks showed up at Kinchion's funeral. Maybe his contemporaries preceded him in death, and sadly several of his children did not live long, and so there were few surviving to mourn his death or to leave his belongings, or his legacy to. And a talented, industrious, father of the Belton Black community vanished, almost without a trace.

Luckily, the Austin journalist had discovered his story, and interviewed a few old-time Beltonians who filled in a few blanks... so there was at least a trace of his existence in that black hole. Where Black history should reside.

We cannot blame the local historians, who missed his contributions later, if those achievements were not recognized initially by his contemporaries. And this vacuum is where Stutzman and many others might have perceived a shroud of mystery surrounding L. B. Kinchion and his life. To some degree, it seems even Kinchion did not give a nubbin about what people thought, or what legacy he might have owned, or what might have been written in the history books. It is obvious that he fought all of his life for his causes, and he left it all on the field of battle and the aftermath made little difference to him. But he might have been wrong about his indifference. Stories like his needed to be recorded and preserved, and the present accusations of racism in our country are why.

I get mad at all the claims that there is still so much racism in this country. Then I run into the remnants of it; precious icons of Black history like the portraits of the Cuneys hanging in the shadows, proving that nobody, not even Blacks know or care very much about their history... or these two important portraits of the Cuneys, once cherished by Kinchion and his family, would never have ended up as anonymous faces in an antique shop, the last vestiges of a forgotten Black achiever whose contributions may have perished faster than his body returned to the dust from which it came.

I have to say with all humility, that history is important, for many reasons, but it is up to every group to preserve their own heritage, and when they do not, their children will not learn the valuable, fortifying, inspiring lessons of history. And subsequently, as the Bible says, “my children perish from lack of knowledge.”

It is no wonder that today's African Americans still claim and blame the invisible arms of racism, so long after their emancipation, when they have not treasured and preserved their victors and their victories, and taught the outstanding examples of Black achievement, such as the Kinchions and Cuneys, which might have provided hope and inspiration to generations. So today our children have no clue about Black Exceptionalism. But if I know it and believe it, then certainly every Black child could and should. Teaching children of all races the value of achievement, especially that which faced adversity, and ackowledgement of individuals who have paved the way, would free them from crippling fears and suspicions, and launch them into reaching their own potential. That was what history used to do before it was redesigned to heap guilt and shame upon our most impressionable fledgling citzens.

NOTE!: IF YOU ARE A FIRST-TIME VISITOR TO THIS BLOG, My book about Texas Blues can be found near the very bottom of this front page. Scroll down and look for "The Light of Day" I recommend starting with the Introduction!

Thanks for stopping by!

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