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Week of June 12-18, 2002

L.C. ANGLIN

L.C. ANGLIN, a native of Limestone County and an avid student of history, recalls reading in a borrowed history book that the Comanche Indians that camped on the west bank of the Navasota River, were not only peaceful but had long been a refuge for escaped slaves. He later published his research. However, an aged Anglin visited Woodland High School in the early 1930s and sadly learned that his book was not in the Woodland High School Library. Anglin’s rich history of the birth of Comanche Crossing was lost forever.

The late Doris Hollis Pemberton, a native of Limestone County, who was married to Dr. Charles Pemberton a prominent Houston medical doctor, however, devoted many years of her life restoring Anglin’s lost history and published her findings in a book “Juneteenth At Comanche Crossing,” in 1983. Pemberton’s book was inspired by elders’ oral history that enthralled her when she spent eight days in a motor home on the site of Booker T. Washington Park, before and after the 19th of June, Bicentennial Celebration in 1977.

The first clue-- explaining the mysterious disappearance of Anglin’s historical account of Limestone County’s post slave history-- is the date of Comanche Crossing’s Juneteenth Bicentennial. For sure, slaves in Limestone County learned that they were free on June 19, 1865, but their celebration was premature, insofar as power is never conceded without a struggle. “Alleluia! Hallelujah! Our God ain’t no lying man. I told you so. Didn’t I tell you?” Freed women, men and children shouted as they shook their fingers in each other’s faces then shook hands. They were rejoicing in a taste of the sweetness of freedom.

However, the sweetness of freedom quickly became bitter. Oral historians, among the ex-slaves, often told as a fact that one slave of Governor Logan A. Stroud was afraid to test his freedom, delayed as it was on the 19th of June 1865. In the chapter in “Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing” entitled “Reconstruction: The Bitter And The Sweet,” it was cited: “For several months Gov. Stroud maintained his disposition to scare the living daylights out of his slaves and ex-slaves. He refused to recognize for his Negro ex-slave Giles Cotton the freedom upon the Emancipation Proclamation before the 13 Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on Dec. 6, 1865.”

History records that, throughout the slave states ill feeling between the races politically and socially ran high for a number of years following the Civil War. Ray A. Walter in “A History of Limestone County” wrote: “Little did the people realize that the Reconstruction Period would be worse than the War.” The wanton White Limestonians went throughout their county shooting and killing White Northerners-Easterners and Negroes without regard for their human rights. Negroes retaliated but the numbers of their victims were minimal in comparison.
Unfortunately for the law abiding Negroes, most of them adhered to The Freedmen’s Bureau’s Gen. Charles E. Culver’s order to surrendered their firearms.

Conversely, the angry White people not only remained armed, but also killed a federal agent and his orderly and put their bodies on display at the courthouse. The ex-slaves somehow armed themselves and took control of the courthouse for several days.
That was only one short-lived victory, in one small Texas hamlet. Bloody battles were constantly fought, because southerners refused to admit one of the outcomes of the recent Civil War (in which they had been militarily defeated) was the abolition of slavery.
In 1865, following Appomattox, “Black Codes”—laws—reestablishing slavery in all but name was enacted all over the south to regulate the lives of Black people. Then in the fall of 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was established. The KKK and other paramilitary organizations came into existence to insure Blacks stayed “in their place.”

There, virtually, was a reign of terror for Black folks throughout the south. To try to halt this reign, Blacks in Houston and elsewhere became actively involved in politics in 1886.
By 1868, Texas was one of the four former C.S.A. states that had not been “reconstructed.” Consequently, President Andrew Johnson appointed Edmund Jackson Davis provisional governor of Texas as 1865 ended and he was officially elected to govern the state from 1869-1874, a period during which ex-slaves were allowed to participate in elections. Ironically Black Union soldiers were brought in to observe the elections. The Texas Constitutional Convention (composed of about 10% Black delegates), began meeting in Austin on June 1, 1868 and as a result Texas was brought back into the Union.

However, Reconstruction, in Texas, was short lived. For in 1874, in Houston city government, Blacks were kicked out and White Democrats (the old guard) reinstalled.
The “lily-white” government in Houston became a dawning reality. This, in part, because true Conservatives were determined to “redeem” their southern governments at any costs.
It became acceptable to allow token Blacks to participate in government in Washington, D.C., or even in Austin. However, the conservatives, would simply insure Blacks were “bleached out” on the local scene.

Conservatives, seemingly, became convinced that the use of ballot box stuffing, bribery, lying, political fraud, and even violence (as far as killing) justified Conservatives again playing on the stage; and Blacks, outside and native White “radicals” being simply audience members. Consequently, as Texas Blacks prepare to celebrate Juneteenth 2002 we should be mindful that—over 137 years after being freed from slavery—not much has changed in the minds of White conservatives.

Historical data was excerpted from Doris Hollis Pemberton’s “Juneteenth at Comanche Crossing” and Dr. Howard Jones’ “Red Dairy.”

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