IMPORTANT: Some materials in the collections and resources provided contain offensive and racist language and/or imagery, especially in depictions of enslaved people, African Americans, Black Americans, and other people of color. These harmful and racist perspectives are not representative of the beliefs of the University, library, or staff. It is our hope that our research guide provides historical context rather than perpetuates negative positions, language, values, and stereotypes.
Historically, the Black and African American communities in Rio Grande Valley have been small and tightly-knit (see McAllen Monitor, 1999). The first people of indigenous African descent arrived in the Rio Grande Valley region as enslaved people. During the period prior to and directly following the U.S. Civil War, they began to arrive as freed men and women and established themselves as farmers and ranchers, including the Jackson, Webber, and Biddy families. Later Black Americans would arrive as members of the U.S. military, teachers, farmworkers, rail road workers, and other trades people--all seeking new opportunities in the Rio Grande Valley.
Throughout these historic periods of migration to the Valley, Black and African American people were subject to racial hierarchy as codified law and practice. As in the rest of the American South, Jim Crow and sustained racial discrimination, segregation, humiliation, hostility, and violence toward African and Black Americans has been documented in the RGV from first hand accounts, newspapers, historic research, court records, and more.
The purpose of this guide is to focus on resistance, resilience, and perseverance among our Black and African American communities in the RGV, which began as early settlers, like Silvia Hector Webber, resisted slavery, secured her own freedom, and aided other enslaved people seeking southern passage to Mexico. The conflicts at Fort Ringgold and Fort Brown further demonstrate of the resistance of decorated soldiers to racial degradation and discrimination. Local Juneteenth Celebrations held publicly since 1996 also highlight the imperative of not only commemorating the end of slavery but also honoring and memorializing the achievements of Black people in the Valley to ensure their heritage remains our history.
This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new windowThe first Black people arrived as enslaved Africans to the area that would become Texas, Mexico, and the United States.
Enslaved and free Black people came with Spanish exploring expeditions first as soldiers and later as settlers. They would become African Tejanos accounting for 15% of the non-native population of Spanish Texas by the end of the 18th century. Soon after Mexico won its independence from Spain (1823) and abolished slavery (1829), starting a wave of Black Americans migrating south and seeking freedom. However, Mexican Texas was granted exception and slavery continued well after Texas became its own Republic. Texas not only prohibited free Black people from coming to the republic, limited the emancipation of enslaved people, and restricted the rights of freedmen. (Barr, p. 7-11)
While the vast majority of Black and African American people arriving in Texas between the 1830s and the U.S. Civil War were also enslaved there is some emerging evidence that some families in the Rio Grande Valley helped people escape enslavement through the Underground Railroad in South Texas to Mexico. And, while President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (1863) abolished slavery in the United States, Confederate States, including Texas, continued the institution until the end of the war. News of their freedom did not reach Black Texans until June 19, 1865, or Juneteenth, when federal troops arrived in Galveston to take control of the state.
However, the end of slavery did not result in the end of racial discrimination for African or Black Americans. The period following Reconstruction gave rise to increasing hostility as Jim Crow laws became institutionalized across the country including the military (e.g., conflicts at Fort Ringgold and Fort Brown). Black Texans were victimized by discrimination and segregation in all aspects of their public and private lives, and co-mingling with white people was generally forbidden and could result in brutal and even fatal punishment against black people. It was not until 100 years after emancipation that Black Americans were officially afforded the same legal rights as other Americans.
Juneteenth, or June 19th, is a federally recognized holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. Although President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to abolish slavery, Texas was the last Confederate state to emancipate enslaved people. In fact, freedom did not arrive for nearly two years on June 19, 1865 when federal troops assumed control of the state in Galveston and issued General Order No. 3 proclaiming independence for Black Texans. Opal Lee, a retired school teacher from Texas, campaigned for decades for the national recognition of Juneteenth. Her efforts were rewarded on June 17, 2021 when President Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law. Juneteenth has been celebrated locally since 1996.
Juneteenth: Freedom Day Library Resources: https://utrgv.libguides.com/blackhistorymonth/juneteenth
Collections include videos, photographs, programs, and other documentation relating to local Juneteenth Celebrations in the RGV.
Rev. John B. Norman (1896–1967) was born in Glen Flora, Texas. Soon after relocating to Edinburg, he founded one of its earliest African American churches, Lily of the Valley Baptist Church at the corner of 19th Ave. and Van Week just across the street from his house on Schunior Road. Rev. Segregation prohibited African American children from attending white schools. Therefore, Rev. Norman began teaching school inside the church and then in a one-room schoolhouse he built behind the church a few years later. The E.W. Norman School, named for the Edwards, West, and Norman families of Edinburg, served around 25 black school children during the 1930s. It provided curriculum for kindergarten through 8th grade, and early teachers at the Norman school included Rev. Norman, Verna Veil Butler, Ruby Leona Parker, and Melissa Dotson Betts. The E.W. Norman school closed in 1938 when Edinburg Consolidated School District open George Washington Carver Elementary School (on E. Lovett St.).
Melissa Dotson Betts (1902–1988) attended Wiley College (Marshall, TX) and earned her BA from Texas Southern University (Houston). Mrs. Betts began her teaching career in San Benito (1929–1934), but in 1935, she began teaching in Edinburg first at E. W. Norman School and later at George Washington Carver Elementary School (1014 E. Lovett). Mrs. Betts split her time between teaching during the week in Edinburg and spending time with her family in San Benito on the weekends. Like most teachers at so called, "colored schools", Mrs. Betts was the only teacher at Carver for multiple grades and was expect to fulfill the roles of principal, counselor, cook, custodian, and even groundskeeper. She spent her final four years teaching at Austin Elementary before retiring in 1969. Thirty years later Edinburg CISD honored her decades of service and education with the opening of Melissa Dotson Betts Elementary School (1999).
Parnethia Archer (1920–2003) was born in Cuero, Texas and was a lifelong educator and resident of South Texas. She taught elementary school and special education for nearly 40 years and was herself a lifelong learner. She attended Booker T. Washington School (Harlingen) until 8th grade and returned to Cuero for high school. After attending Junior College, Miss Archer continued her education, earning BA in education from Huston-Tillotson (Austin) and her first MEd from Texas Southern University (Houston) followed by her second from Texas A & I University (Kingsville). She taught for four years in Mission before moving to Weslaco in 1947. Miss Archer became the school teacher at Beatrice Allen Elementary School, located on Pino Street, and at the time, it was simply referred to as the "Colored School" before she campaigned to officially name it. After integration, Miss Archer taught classes at Roosevelt, Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin before retiring in 1982 from Weslaco ISD and later All Faith Christian Academy in Harlingen.
Mittie Anita (Williams) Pullam (1913–2009) was most known for her historic achievement as the only African-American School Principal and the first African-American Teacher for the Brownsville ISD. Mrs. Pullam earned a Bachelor's Degree in Literary Arts from Samuel Houston College in Austin and a Master's Degree in Education from Texas Southern University. In 1947, she began teaching at the segregated school for African Americans in Brownsville, Frederick Douglass Elementary School (located on E. Fronton St.). Later in the 1960s, owing to Mrs. Pullam's high standards for curriculum, the school was incorporated into Skinner Elementary, where she continued teaching until her retirement in 1975—the same year she was recognized as the Elementary Teacher of the Year. Mrs. Pullam's devotion to students touched countless generations and inspired a grassroots campaign to name a school in her honor. Mittie Pullam Elementary School in Brownsville honors her three decades of service to her community.
Jean Marie “Joe” Callandret (1883–1931) and his wife, Fannie Sanco, moved from Louisiana to San Benito, Texas in 1908. Joe was a farmer and respected businessman, who was fluent in English and French. He and Fannie raised six children and were among twenty-four African American families living in San Benito in the 1920s. In 1921, San Benito became the first Texas school district to establish a one-room school for black children. However, the school fell into disrepair, was relocated several times, and was once destroyed by a hurricane. Seeking a more permanent structure for her community, Fannie donated land to the San Benito School District (1948). The new two-room cinderblock school house opened in 1952, and the Joe Callandret School served African American children from San Benito and Harlingen until integration in 1960. Today the former school serves as the Callendret Black History Museum.
The Rio Grande Valley Oral History Collection consists of over 500 digitized oral histories recorded and collected by faculty, staff, students, and community members and donated to the University Library. Oral histories provide unique, and in many instances, otherwise unavailable written information, and as such provide valuable insight into life in the region, including immigration, military service, ranching, education, agriculture, border violence, sports, and much more.
The African Texans by
Immigrants of African descent came to Texas first as free blacks seeking opportunity under the Spanish and Mexican governments, then as enslaved people from the deep South; then after the Civil War, a new wave of immigration began. Here, Alwyn Barr considers each era, giving readers a clear sense of the challenges that faced African Texans and the social and cultural contributions they have made to the Lone Star State.
Before the Mayflower : a history of the Negro in America, 1619-1964 by
Traces black history from its origins in western Africa, through the transatlantic journey and slavery, the Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights movement.
Black Texans by
African American have lived in Texas for more than four hundred years?longer than in any other region of the United States. Beginning with the arrival of the first African American in 1528, Alwyn Barr, in Black Texans, examines the African American experience in Texas during the periods of exploration and colonization, slavery, Reconstruction, the struggle to retain the freedoms gained, the twentieth-century urban experience, and the modern civil rights movement. Barr discusses each period of African-American history in terms of politics, violence, and legal status; labor and economic status; education; and social life. Black Texans includes the history of the buffalo soldiers and the cowboys on Texas cattle drives, along with the achievements of notable African-American individuals in Texas history, from the Estevan the explorer through legislator Norris Wright Cuney and boxer Jack Johnson to state senator Barbara Jordan. Barr carries the story up to the present day in this second edition, which includes a new preface a new chapter on the years 1970-95, and a revised index.
Blue and Gray on the Border by
Runner-up, 2019 Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Book Award, sponsored by the Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Association (TOMFRA) Most general histories of the Civil War pay scant attention to the many important military events that took place in the Lower Rio Grande Valley along the Texas-Mexico border. It was here, for example, that many of the South's cotton exports, all-important to its funding for the war effort, were shuttled across the Rio Grande into Mexico for shipment to markets across the Atlantic. It was here that the Union blockade was felt perhaps most keenly. And it was here where longstanding cross-border rivalries and shifting political fortunes on both sides of the river made for a constant undercurrent of intrigue. And yet, most accounts of this long and bloody conflict give short shrift to the complexities of the ethnic tensions, political maneuvering, and international diplomacy that vividly colored the Civil War in this region. Now, Christopher L. Miller, Russell K. Skowronek, and Roseann Bacha-Garza have woven together the history and archaeology of the Lower Rio Grande Valley into a densely illustrated travel guide featuring important historical and military sites of the Civil War period. Blue and Gray on the Border integrates the sites, colorful personalities, cross-border conflicts, and intriguing historical vignettes that outline the story of the Civil War along the Texas-Mexico border. This resource-packed book will aid heritage travelers, students, and history buffs in their discovery of the rich history of the Civil War in the Rio Grande Valley.
Bricks Without Straw by 
The Brownsville Raid by
Around midnight on August 13, 1906, shots rang out on the road between Brownsville, Texas, and Fort Brown, the old army garrison. Ten minutes later a young civilian lay dead, and angry residents swarmed the streets, convinced their homes had been terrorized by newly arrived soldiers. Inside Fort Brown, the alarm was sounded. Soldiers leaped from their bunks and grabbed their rifles, thinking they were under attack by hostile townspeople. The soldiers were black; the civilians were white. Still proclaiming their innocence, 167 black infantrymen of the segregated Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment were summarily dismissed without honor (or a trial) by President Theodore Roosevelt. "The ""Brownsville"" Raid, " first published in 1970, is John D. Weaver's searching study of the flimsy evidence presented in a 1909-1910 court of inquiry. That court had upheld the president's action and closed the case against the soldiers, not one of whom had ever been found guilty of wrongdoing. The case remained closed until 1971 when, after reading "The Brownsville Raid, " Congressman Augustus F. Hawkins of Los Angeles introduced a bill to have the Defense Department rectify the injustice. Amid a flurry of national publicity, honorable discharges were finally granted in 1972. All were posthumous except for that of Private Dorsie Willis, who received his in a moving ceremony on his eighty-seventh birthday.
The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846-1876 by
2020, Texas Historical Commission's Governor's Award for Historic Preservation was awarded to the Community Historical Archaeology Project with Schools (CHAPS) at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. This book grew out of the CHAPS program. Runner-up, 2019 Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Book Award, sponsored by the Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Association (TOMFRA) Long known as a place of cross-border intrigue, the Rio Grande's unique role in the history of the American Civil War has been largely forgotten or overlooked. Few know of the dramatic events that took place here or the complex history of ethnic tensions and international intrigue and the clash of colorful characters that marked the unfolding and aftermath of the Civil War in the Lone Star State. To understand the American Civil War in Texas also requires an understanding of the history of Mexico. The Civil War on the Rio Grande focuses on the region's forced annexation from Mexico in 1848 through the Civil War and Reconstruction. In a very real sense, the Lower Rio Grande Valley was a microcosm not only of the United States but also of increasing globalization as revealed by the intersections of races, cultures, economic forces, historical dynamics, and individual destinies. As a companion to Blue and Gray on the Border: The Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail, this volume provides the scholarly backbone to a larger public history project exploring three decades of ethnic conflict, shifting international alliances, and competing economic proxies at the border. The Civil War on the Rio Grande, 1846-1876 makes a groundbreaking contribution not only to the history of a Texas region in transition but also to the larger history of a nation at war with itself.
Hopping on the border; the life story of a bellboy. by 
Racial Borders by
When the Civil War ended, hundreds of African Americans enlisted in the U.S. Army to gain social mobility and regular paychecks. Stationed in the West prior to 1898, these black soldiers protected white communities, forced Native Americans onto government reservations, patrolled the Mexican border, and broke up labor disputes in mining areas. African American men, themselves no strangers to persecution, aided the subjugation of Indian and Hispanic peoples throughout the West. It can hardly be surprising, then, that the relations among these groups became complex and often hostile-hardly surprising, but rarely examined. Despised by the white settlers they protected, many black soldiers were sent to posts along the Texas-Mexico border-- perceived to be a "safe place to put them." The interactions there among blacks, whites, and Hispanics during the period leading up to the Punitive Expedition and World War I offer the opportunity to study the complicated, even paradoxical nature of American race relations. James N. Leiker has applied the sophisticated perspectives of new social history to the experience of the buffalo soldiers and their legacy in southern and western Texas in an effort to gain new insight about race in the West. Racial Borders establishes the army's fundamental role in transforming the Rio Grande from a "frontier" into a "border" and shows how that transformation itself brought a tightening of racial and national categories. But more importantly, it warns about the dangers of simplifying history into groupings of "white and non-white," "oppressors and oppressed." Leiker draws on Mexican and U.S. military records and Texas state and black national newspapers to do more than provide an account of the shifting loyalties of race and nationalism along the Rio Grande over a fifty-year span; he reminds scholars and reformers about the tangled history of race relations in America.
The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son by
A mysterious midnight shooting spree that began on a dirt road in Texas between Brownsville and Fort Brown on August 13, 1906, killed one civilian and shattered the lives of 167 black infantrymen who had been summarily discharged without honor by a stroke of President Theodore Roosevelt's pen. In The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son, John D. Weaver completes the task he began with his 1970 book The Brownsville Raid, which, two years later, led to the soldiers' exoneration. Weaver now traces the intertwined lives of Ohio's Senator Joseph B. Foraker, who risked his political career in an eloquent defense of the soldiers, who "asked no favors because they are Negroes but only for justice because they are men"; of Dorsie Willis, the Mississippi sharecropper's son who emerged from obscurity as the black battalion's last survivor; and of the New York aristocrat who linked the fates of those two men--the flamboyant and popular Theodore Roosevelt. Weaver's narrative explores these tangled lives against the background of "the color line," which W. E. B. Du Bois defined in 1903 as "the problem of the twentieth century." The Senator and the Sharecropper's Son gives a powerful human dimension to the facts of history. The senator committed political suicide by championing the men caught up in this "Black Dreyfus Affair" and Dorsie Willis, who spent fifty-nine years shining shoes in a downtown Minneapolis barbershop, told a reporter, "That dishonorable discharge kept me from improving my station. Only God knows what it done to the others."
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt by
In August 1906, black soldiers stationed in Brownsville, Texas, were accused of going on a lawless rampage in which shots were fired, one man was killed, and another wounded. Because the perpetrators could never be positively identified, President Theodore Roosevelt took the highly unusual step of discharging without honor all one hundred sixty-seven members of the black battalion on duty the night of the shooting. This book investigates the controversial action of an otherwise much-lauded president, the challenge to his decision from a senator of his own party, and the way in which Roosevelt's uncompromising stance affected African American support of the party of Lincoln. Using primary sources to reconstruct the events, attorney Harry Lembeck begins at the end when Senator Joseph Foraker is honored by the black community in Washington, DC, for his efforts to reverse Roosevelt's decision. Lembeck highlights Foraker's courageous resistance to his own president. In addition, he examines the larger context of racism in the era of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, pointing out that Roosevelt treated discrimination against the Japanese in the West much differently. He also notes often-ignored evidence concerning the role of Roosevelt's illegitimate cousin in the president's decision, the possibility that Foraker and Roosevelt had discussed a compromise, and other hitherto overlooked facts about the case. Sixty-seven years after the event, President Richard Nixon finally undid Roosevelt's action by honorably discharging the men of the Brownsville Battalion. But, as this thoroughly researched and engrossing narrative shows, the damage done to both Roosevelt's reputation and black support for the Republican Party lingers to this day.
The Weed Was a Flower by
Black schools helped the black man to find himself. He found his identity through the school. This identity was and is the most essential thing for man, race, or nation. With the discovery of identity one can draw analogies about his place or position in the world. Identity was not the objectives of these schools, and one should note that this identity was the result of many years of struggle. It was not an overnight occurrence. This is not to say that all blacks have self-identity, for they don't. Black inferior schools were wonderful if you compared them with other black schools.
Who's shooting firecrackers? : the "riot" at Fort Ringgold, Texas by
The book discusses an incident that occurred when Troop D, Ninth U. S. Cavalry Regiment (Colored) stationed at Fort Ringgold and townspeople in Rio Grande City exchanged shots on the night of November 20, 1899.
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