African Americans in Houston: Past and Present

Beginning with the first documented African in Texas, Estevanico (c. 1500–1539) of Azemmour, Morocco—the enslaved survivor of the Pánfilo Narváez expedition, who landed west of Galveston Island near the future site of Houston in 1528 to become an explorer, a translator, a scout, and a spiritual healer—African-origin peoples have for a half millennium contributed immeasurably to the wealth, well-being, and heritage of Texas. So too have African-descent peoples facilitated in the building of Houston, the world’s leading energy and medical science center and nation’s fourth largest and most diverse city. Two sociocultural, demographic legacies laid the foundation for Black Houston: (1) West and West Central Africans of the Middle Passage and their creole and multiracial descendants of European, Indigenous, and Mexican origins in New Spain/Mexican Texas, along with runaways from Louisiana and the United States, all of whom successfully secured greater societal freedoms at the time of Mexican Independence in 1821; and (2) paradoxically, beginning that same year, enslaved African descendants of the First and Second Middle Passages who forcibly entered the emerging settlements of Anglo-American Texas. In slavery and segregated freedom, African American Houstonians helped transform the 19th-century small city of Houston into a global industrial center by World War II. Houston Blacks, despite the racism they encountered daily, dominated the unskilled workforce, certainly through the late twentieth century, while promoting the advancement of a growing, thriving middle class. African-descent Houstonians since Reconstruction also engaged in community building and social justice. The scathing backlash to superb African American workmanship, autonomy, and agency, however, regrettably occurred often, although in the instance of the Houston Mutiny of 1917, propelled the reinvention of long civil rights, sparking, for example, the establishment of the Houston NAACP branch the next year. In the succeeding decades, Black Houstonians through their protests and lawsuits dismantled barriers of exclusion: the white primary, higher education apartheid, union marginalization, unequal pay among educators, citywide segregation, and the daily threat of racial violence. All this gave rise to new leadership by the civil-rights years, including Hattie Mae White, Barbara Jordan, Curtis Graves, and Judson Robinson Jr., and helped produce the city’s first Black police chief and mayor, Lee Brown. Despite African American Houstonians’ role in the creation of modern Houston and the long fight for social and racial justice, the historiography of Black Houston has only piqued in recent decades. This annotated bibliography therefore introduces researchers to the rich body of works that highlights historical and contemporary studies. This bibliographic reader also directs students and academics to primary-source research.