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Hello, Dr. Waligora-Davis, how are you? Good, thank you, Dr. McDaniel, it's such a pleasure to join you in this conversation. I think it's been almost a year since I had a chance to talk to you on doc talks about

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some of the amazing and always interesting finds in the Rice archive, so thank you for letting me come back again and join you in conversation. Well, hey, any time you wanna come to doc talks, you are always welcome to join. I guess last year was probably the same thing was pulling Dr.

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Byrd away, maybe, so... Perhaps, perhaps. It's the season of much busyness on, on university campuses everywhere. Of course, spring break always comes just at the right time.

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But Dr. Byrd is not able to join us today, so our audience, who's filing in, will be pleased to know that, that you're here, Dr. Waligora-Davis, a member of the steering committee and also professor in the English department, we're so glad that you're here to talk about documents with us.

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Thank you. And before I get too much farther, I want to make sure to let people know this is a big day for the task force, not only because you're here, but also because this evening we have a task force webinar at 6:30 PM.

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I'm gonna put the link here in the chat so that people can bookmark that and make their plans. But if you haven't seen it already, I wanna encourage our audience to go to that website and make your plans this evening. It's supposed to be cold outside, there's a front coming in, into Houston, I hear talk of

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cyclone, cyclones in the northeast, so you might as well stay in and tune in to this Zoom webinar with Dr. Bernadette Pruitt, who's going to be talking about black migration to Houston in the early 20th century. And so if you, if you're interested in understanding more about the

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context in the city of Houston around the time that the Rice Institute began, this is the event for you, and I hope that you'll make plans to attend, especially because the document that I wanted to start us off talking about today dates from that period. And it's a continuation, in fact, of a document that Dr.

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Byrd and I were talking about last Friday. Would that be okay with you if I just launch in? Oh, this would be fantastic. I'm eager, I'm eager to hear about this, and I'm grateful for Dr.

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Pruitt's talk today. I'm a big fan of her scholarship in that book. It is an amazing study of our local community. Absolutely, yeah, you don't, you don't wanna miss it.

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So let me pull up, let me see if I can find my share screen here. And I'll, I'll sort of briefly remind our audience of where we were last Friday. We were looking at this map, which is a Sanborn Fire Insurance map from 1907, I believe, I'm gonna have to check my memory, yes, 1907.

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And as you can see, if I blow this up and hopefully you'll be able to see it, is it a little bit bigger? Beautiful. Okay, great. So you can see on this map that there is a tract that's labeled "To Be Rice

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Institute." And that's because this is a piece of property, about six acres, in what is now downtown Houston on Louisiana Street between Bell Avenue and Peace and Jefferson Street down here at the bottom. And this six acres was gifted by William Marsh Rice to the Rice Institute in 1892, and

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for a long time it was intended by the original trustees of the institute to be the campus grounds for the Rice Institute. It was only after William Marsh Rice died that they realized the endowment would be enough to support a much bigger institution, a university of higher learning, than they

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had initially been planning for, and in the end they decided to build the grounds where we are currently located. Although it's interesting to me that the shape of this tract, if you kind of look at it, is a similar sort of triangular shape to our own campus.

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But our campus is on a much larger piece of property today, you know, over 300 acres, I believe. And this is just a small piece of property in downtown Houston. Now, what we were talking about last Friday though is that this is a significant piece of property in the early years of the Rice Institute because there were plans to put the

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grounds here, and there was a lot of interest in development around this tract. And what we saw last Friday was that there was a lawsuit that was filed against the Rice Institute by some neighbors of this property and specifically by African Americans living in the neighborhood who were concerned about access to a street called Smith Alley that

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you can see here on this fire insurance map. And they were suing the institute to keep that street open, presumably so they would have access to the property that they owned in this area. And the institute was was fighting that in court.

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So there's a little bit of a cliffhanger because I haven't yet been able to find more about the, about this suit. But it's interesting that this was happening, partly because in this kind of blank space on the map here is actually the original site of the Gregory Institute, the

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Gregory School, which later located to the east of this property. And so we were talking last Friday a little bit about what this tells us about the institute's relation to its neighbors and its neighborhood in this particular property. Let me see if I can get back out of this full screen.

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So as I said, I don't yet know kind of the conclusion to that story that, that we started last week, but what I did wanna talk about today was some of the prehistory of this, this event that that we were discussing, this lawsuit, because it turns out that if we go back in time from that lawsuit, we can find lots of sources that

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refer to and describe and characterize the neighborhood around this Rice Institute tract, which is known in the archives as Louisiana Street Property. And by the way, I have to, I forgot I was gonna share, one reason that this suit happened was because the city was wanting to build a playground on the Rice Institute

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tract. And just today, literally an hour ago, I was in the Woodson Research Center, and with the help of our archivists there, we located a sketch of the proposed playground that would have been on this, this Louisiana street property. And you can see here that it was planned to have sort of one main access point here at

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Louisiana Street and Leland Avenue. And the document we looked at last week was the institute telling the city that if they agreed to this plan, they would require the city to build a fence all the way around all the other sides of the property.

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And that's what was leading to the dispute over Smith Alley, which is not shown here on this sketch, but is on the south side of the property. So, so this is a story that's still developing. But again, what I wanted to share with you was some of the early references to this

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property in other sources going all the way back to 1899. So this would have been before William Marsh Rice had died. And the source that we're looking at right now is a very lengthy affidavit from a lawsuit that was being contested over William Marsh Rice's widow's estate.

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Are you following me so far? There's a lot, there's a lot of complicating details here. But this is a suit that generated tons of paperwork that still exists in the Woodson Research archive because it, it, it was important to the Rice Institute to make sure

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that, that the widow's estate did not siphon off a lot of the, the funds that William Marsh Rice was intending to give to the institute. And James Baker, who was serving as the lawyer for William Marsh Rice in that suit, called many, many affidavits from people who knew Rice to detail his intentions for the

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Rice Institute, what his plans were, and where he was living at the time. And then there's cross-examination. You know how lawsuits can be, they generate, you've read Bleak House, right, I'm sure, so there's lots of, lots of paperwork generated by this, this lawsuit.

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But this one is interesting because it's an interview with an early secretary of the institute, Emmanuel Raphael, who was also a trustee, an early trustee, of the William Marsh Rice Institute. And in this particular cross-examination, the lawyer for Mrs.

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Rice's estate is asking Raphael, here's the question, "What is the value of the Louisiana Street property in Houston, Texas, that Mr. Rice conveyed to the institute?" So that's the property that we were looking at a moment ago. And he says, "I suppose that would be worth somewheres along $15,000 or $20,000."

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And then there's another question on the very next page. The lawyer says, "What sort of a neighborhood is there around it?" And Raphael answers, "Not very good." And then the lawyer asks, "Isn't it most all colored population?" And then I'm quoting here the answer, "On two sides it is colored, but one

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side is white people." Okay, now they go on to talk a little bit about the property. The place fronts Louisiana Street. It's fenced already in 1899. It's been cleared off except for a small house that's been built on the property where

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the groundskeeper of that tract lives and keeps all of his tools and supplies. But what interested me, given our conversation last week, was this description of the population around the tract. And it's clear that this is a property that, today we might describe it as being kind of

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in transition. There's, on two sides of the property, black neighbors, or what, in the terminology of that time, the lawyer would have described as the, quote, "colored population." And then on one side is white people.

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Okay. Now, this isn't the last time in the archive that this neighborhood around the, the property is described. So now I want to, I promise I'm gonna get to the main document that I wanted to show you, but I think all of this is really important to be able to understand it.

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And I'm gonna pull up a different file now, which we were looking at last week, these are papers from the Rice Institute business manager, and it's in this box in collection number 353 that we found the document from last week discussing the lawsuit over Smith Alley. But earlier in that box, earlier in that folder, there's quite a few letters or

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documents that, again, refer to the racial composition of the neighborhood around the campus grounds. And here's one example from June 9th, 1911, and it's written from the Rice Institute to someone in the city, and they're including their enclosing here, quote, "a notice from the City Health Officer, from which you will note his

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recommendations on the back of said notice." And we don't have that notice from the city health officer, but it's clear that there's some building on the property, from the rest of the letter, that has kind of become derelict and needs to be dealt with. It's sort of an eyesore on the property, the city is complaining about it to the

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institute. And you can see here that the institute is writing to this Mr. C.E. Elliott, and they say, quote, "We would thank you to have a cheap Negro pull down said building, as we understand it is not needed. If you can have this done without cost to the institute, we would be obliged;

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otherwise, we will pay for same." So they're, they're hoping to use the labor, it sounds, of somebody who's in the neighborhood to do this work. They'd prefer for free, but if not, they would be happy to pay for it. And something similar happens a little bit later in the file in 1912, when again, the

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City Health Department sends the institute a notice that they haven't been taking very good care of this vacant property. And here we do have the Department of Health's notice sent to the institute, and you can see that the city health officer has told the institute in this handwritten memo

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on the top of this printed, preprinted form, "Please have the lot cleaned up of old trash, such as tin cans and other stuff." There's a lot of litter, apparently, on this vacant lot. And what's the institute's solution? Well, again, if we look up here to this letter written to Mister D.D.

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McClung at 1602 Louisiana Street, he's actually, we know from other sources, the groundskeeper who was living in that house that was on the campus grounds, the institute writes to him and says, "The City Health Department have made a request on the institute to have all tin cans and trash removed from the institute grounds, and to

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this end we would ask you to send us a man who runs a wagon with whom we can make a contract for clearing up all cans and trash and removing same from the grounds." And then here's the key line, the last sentence of the letter, quote, "We think there are some Negroes in your neighborhood who do hauling of this kind and if you will give this matter

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your early attention, we will be obliged." So there's two things that jump out at me about these two letters. I mean, one is that they're clearly aware of who's living around the campus grounds, just as we saw in 1899.

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And the institute is happy to rely on the labor of some of those neighbors to help it keep up the grounds. The second thing that jumps out to me is that these grounds needed a lot of care, apparently.

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There was a lot of trash, the buildings were not well cared for and one reason for that, I was surprised to learn is that the institute in these early years apparently rented out the Louisiana Street property for circuses on a regular basis. In fact, earlier in this box, there's a letter from, or to the Barnum & Bailey Circus

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where the institute informs them that they can use the grounds, but they can't allow any of their wagons to drive into the enclosure at the corner of Bell Avenue and Louisiana Streets, they wanted all the wagons to come in through the rear of the institute property. And this is only one of many letters in this box of the institute

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corresponding with circus companies to use Louisiana Street properties. In fact, the same year that the Institute was opening its doors, the fall of 1912, they were leasing the property out to the Buffalo Bill shows, if you're familiar with the Buffalo Bill shows, these sort of Western shows, historians have written about them,

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there's a lot of interest in them for the ways that these performances kind of enacted a narrative about civilization and whiteness in the conquest of the frontier. And that property there on Louisiana Street was the stage for one of these Buffalo Bill shows around the same time that the institute was opening its doors.

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So maybe it makes a little sense why there are so many tin cans, why there's so much litter. If there's literally circus wagons coming and going across the grounds, you can see why the institute would need some help cleaning them up. And that's gonna lead me to the main document I wanted to show you, but before I

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show it to you, Dr. Waligora-Davis, did anything jump out at you with that whirlwind tour of some of these earlier sources? I mean, this is incredibly fascinating, A, to get a sense of the reach of Rice Institute throughout the city, right, that there are multiple parcels that are at stake and make

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up part of the composition of the, of the land ownership that the city, that the institute had acquired. But I'm also deeply struck by the disruptive presence of these circuses, right, because they are absolutely, from the map you showed us initially, abutting these black

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neighborhoods. And what might it be like, so you could complain about the detritus in the area and that it's a health, a public health concern, but what it must have felt like for the communities of individuals who've lived there to have this sort of chaotic, cacophonous sounds and brouhaha of a circus all the time, right, perpetually coming in

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and out and in and out and in and out. I can't even imagine. What was the experience? Yeah. And I had that question too, and that's one of the things that interested me

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in this document that, that I wanted to show you, because it gets to that question of how did the neighborhood respond to the use of the property. And this is a letter from October 1911, so it's a year before that Buffalo Bill show that we were just looking at, and it's a letter that's addressed from the Rice

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Institute to the Honorable H.B. Rice, the mayor of the city of Houston. And that's H. Baldwin Rice, by the way, who was a nephew of William Marsh Rice. He was the son of Frederick Allan Rice, the brother of William Marsh Rice.

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And that means that he was also the brother of some institute trustees at the time who were also the sons of Frederick A. Rice, but he was the mayor. So there's a, he's a Rice and he is connected to the Rices we're interested in,

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but in this, in this particular letter, the institute is not writing to him as a member of the Rice family, necessarily, but in his official capacity as the mayor of the city of Houston. And I wanna read a good bit of this letter and then ask for your, your thoughts about it, 'cause it raises a lot of important questions for me.

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So they say to the mayor, "Dear sir, With reference to our complaint of all manner of unsightly and objectionable vendors who have their stands for the sale of lunches and refreshments placed all around the corner of Bell Avenue and Louisiana Street, just outside the institute property, on the days when shows are exhibited on said institute

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grounds, would ask that you please give instructions to your Chief of Police to place officers at said corner early tomorrow morning, October 10th, to prevent said practice. The agents of the circus companies complain bitterly of this nuisance, which takes away a certain amount of revenue from their refreshment stands on the grounds for

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which they pay rental." Okay, so we're getting a little bit of a picture of what happens, that chaos that you were describing on a circus day, that there's lots of vendors who are crowding around the Bell and Louisiana Street entrance to the property, and they're trying to sell, just like you would today if you were headed down to the

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ballpark or the circus, you'd probably pass a number of vendors selling sodas and water bottles and refreshments. And the institute wants the mayor in his official capacity to instruct the chief of police to put a stop to this.

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And we learn on the second page a little bit more about what they're requesting. They say, and I'm continuing to read here directly from the letter, "Please, therefore lend your assistance in this matter by giving instructions to your Chief of Police to allow no stands or vendors on the city property just outside of said grounds.

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Similar nuisance is also committed on Fredericks Street at the entrance to said ground by many Negroes, which should also be stopped. Thanking you for your relief in this matter, Yours very truly," and then it's signed by A .B. Cohn, the secretary of the Rice Institute at this time.

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So I wonder if that letter helps paint a picture for you about what was happening on these circus days and anything, any questions that the document raises for you about this relationship between the neighborhood and the institute. I mean, certainly what it suggested to me immediately, the first thing that came to my

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mind is, what was the commercial potential for the African American residents who are living there, who have to adjust their days, their daily habits, their lives, to account for this disruption that happens on a weekly basis by these major exhibitions, which you have to imagine drew large audiences and were incredibly disruptive to their

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neighborhoods. And so, you know, I applaud it, and I was hoping you would, you would find exactly what you found, that you would see the presence, the entrepreneurial spirit of African American residents trying to find a way to, to leverage what is already for them a very bad situation, and turning it into a commercial opportunity.

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And I think it's also notable that the policing that they want to see happen is incurring, occurring and incurring within these black neighborhoods, right. it's not a concern about what's happening on the actual grounds of the Rice Institute, those vendors are permitted, right.

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But it's the space outside of those grounds that's getting police and surveilled. And we already know from what you illustrated to us that two of those sides are black neighborhoods, right. And only one is white.

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Right. So I think that's really telling. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the, that's what jumped out to me as well, is the, the institute using this

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power that you referred to earlier, within the city, this property owner with connections to the mayor's office, familial connections... Unbelievable. Calling on the, the chief of police to send police into the neighborhood on the day of

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the circus and put a stop to some of this commercial activity that's occurring. And I'll show the map again, because I think it's interesting that they were referring to the vendors at the entrance of Bell Avenue and Louisiana Street, which is right here at this corner, and then they also said that the, the commercial activity of the black

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vendors was happening at the Fredericks Street entrance. And so maybe reading between the lines there, we're getting a little bit of a, a glimpse of some segregation that is, that is developing even in where these vendors were setting up their, their locations, that they weren't all in one place, but that they were

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at these two different entrances. But the key is that the police were being called in and stationed here, and just in the same way that we were imagining what that circus day would be like, I think this source kind of calls on us to imagine, to the extent we can, even though the archive

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doesn't disclose it to us, you know, what would have happened in these locations if there was a confrontation between a police officer and a black Houstonian at Fredericks Street who had been accustomed to, to setting up a stand or a vendor here, and then found out on that particular day that things would be different and that the force of the

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chief of police would be brought to bear on, on this community. And we know, of course, from other histories of this period what that could look like. And in fact, in 1917, just a few years after this, when, what's sometimes referred to as the Camp Logan mutiny or, or the 1917 Camp Logan riots in downtown Houston, really

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originated because African American soldiers who were stationed at Camp Logan in Houston heard about the overpolicing and harassment of black neighborhoods in the Fourth Ward by white police officers from the city of Houston. That's just a few years after this, and it's very close in location.

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In fact, some of the accounts of the, the march the soldiers took from Camp Logan to downtown have them running right past the ball grounds that were connected to this Louisiana Street property. And so I think we can, we can sort of, between the lines and what we know about the

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context, imagine that, that even though we're talking about circuses here and we're talking about commercial activity, there, there is a story of violence, I think, that probably exists just off the page here. And to me, it's the tension between the commercial activity that you're referring to

00:26:18.610 - 00:26:38.140

and the fact that the institute was relying, in many cases, on the labor of black neighbors, standing in tension with this surveillance and control that we can see in the fencing of the property and also in the appeal to the mayor to get the chief of police involved.

00:26:39.450 - 00:26:58.500

Well, it's an extraordinary moment, and I'm looking forward to the update on the lawsuit that these neighbors filed against Rice Institute. I really would love to hear the brief that they wrote against the institute, I'm sure in defense of, of keeping their, their neighborhood safe, protected, and used for

00:26:58.500 - 00:27:13.170

other purposes than perhaps exhibiting circuses. Yeah, well, I'm, I'm seeing in the Q&A as well, which we wanna encourage our audience to use if you have questions, it'd be interesting to know too if they were allowed to attend the circus at all.

00:27:13.410 - 00:27:31.830

Was the circus itself a segregated event? So there's lots of questions, I think, that again relate directly to the lecture that hopefully y'all have a chance to, to attend tonight. They get out the relationships between black Houstonians and the Rice Institute and white

00:27:31.830 - 00:27:46.080

institutions in the city of Houston as segregation is taking shape in early 20th century Houston. So thanks, that's the document that I wanted to share, but I'm really curious to hear what document you've brought to share with us, or documents.

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As you can see, we, we don't always stick to our one document rule anymore here on doc talks, but what, what were you hoping to share with us today? So mine dovetails nicely, I think, with the conversation you've watched us on in terms of thinking about questions about racial violence.

00:28:04.260 - 00:28:24.780

And so I wanna share my screen for a moment and turn our attention to some exciting things that have happened and what has been already, as we well know, a very difficult week as we turn to world events and consider all that's happening in the Ukraine. And so as we think about this, I wanna think about some, some significant things that have

00:28:24.780 - 00:28:39.250

happened in terms of our own national history. And so to put that in perspective--I'm not sure if you're seeing the same thing that I am. That looks right.

00:28:39.730 - 00:28:46.500

That looks right? Yeah, we see the slides. Can you see your slides? Yeah, that's always the question, right?

00:28:46.540 - 00:29:00.490

So sort of. Sort of. Sort of. So I wanted to talk about some belated things that have happened recently over the last couple of months, some interesting, I think, legislative developments at the state

00:29:00.490 - 00:29:20.650

and federal level relating to our national history of race relations. So and among them, I wanted to start sort of, to sort of jog our recent memory about the state of Louisiana's posthumous pardon of Homer Plessy. And you know this very well, Professor McDaniel, that this is the African American

00:29:20.650 - 00:29:38.350

man who purchased that first-class train car ticket and was arrested in 1892 because he refused to leave what was, in fact, a whites-only, first-class train car. And that his arrest, of course, prompts subsequent trials and leads us with the landmark U.S.

00:29:38.350 - 00:29:57.070

Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, that, of course, legally sanctions Jim Crow. And so this week we saw a similar belated action and this time on the part of Congress. So after more than, and it's really hard to sort of get your, your mind around the

00:29:57.070 - 00:30:22.870

stretch of time here, but we're talking about after more than 100 years and more than 200 anti-lynching bills being proposed to Congress, we finally had the passage of a federal anti-lynching bill, and that's the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act that is gonna allow prosecutors to pursue lynching charges against assailants for cases involving

00:30:22.870 - 00:30:46.240

victims who were injured or killed as part of a hate crime. And so as I thought about this, I couldn't help but think about, a little bit about a conversation that Eleanor Roosevelt was having with Walter White in 1936. And at that point, she's talking about the Van Nuys Lynching Bill that was one of many,

00:30:46.240 - 00:31:04.300

as you know, as I said, there were more than 200 attempts, 200 bills proposed attempting to try to pass an anti-lynching bill. And this is a letter that Roosevelt is writing to Walter White and is saying to him, "Before I received your letter today, I had been to the president," of course her

00:31:04.300 - 00:31:18.610

husband, right, "talking to him about your letter, enclosing that of the attorney general. I told him that it seemed rather terrible that one could get nothing done and that I did not blame you in the least for feeling there was no interest in this very serious question.

00:31:18.820 - 00:31:37.180

I asked him if there were any possibility of getting even one step taken, and he said the difficulty is that it's unconstitutional apparently for the federal government," sorry for my, my typo here, "to step in to the lynching situation." So this is 1936, and this debate about lynching is raging.

00:31:37.180 - 00:31:50.950

The first attempt to pass an anti-lynching bill in Congress is done by, I believe it's Henry White, the North Carolina congressional rep, African American, and the only one at that time. And so he fails.

00:31:50.950 - 00:32:11.560

We've got the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill from the '20s that fail, this other one that Walter White is pressing upon the conscience of Eleanor Roosevelt, who is also expressing dismay about the lynching situation. And so it brought me to this occasion in our own Rice Thresher about an article.

00:32:11.560 - 00:32:28.780

Well, it's not even an article, it's, it's the debut of a new feature series that was launched, oh, and I put the wrong date, it should say 1938. It's a new feature series from 1938 that was launched in the Thresher and launched actually by the young man whose article is here.

00:32:29.350 - 00:32:50.770

And it's called, he wrote a short story called The Namesake. And Henry Dunlap positions himself, he's part of the the Rice Thresher staff, he positioned himself as the one who, from this point forward, would review all subsequent submissions to participate in circulating and publishing the creative works of of Rice

00:32:50.770 - 00:33:04.960

students in this new features column, which could be poetry or short stories, they were looking for nothing longer than about a thousand words. And he said he would act in consultation with members of the English department to review selected texts that had been submitted.

00:33:05.830 - 00:33:28.060

So he kicks us off with a story that he calls The Namesake. And again, it's from 1938, and I apologize for, for mistyping the date here, but I think it's an important one for us to look at because it's a grisly story of lynching. And it's a curious thing that in 1936 he would call our attention to and write about

00:33:28.060 - 00:33:44.950

lynching, and I, and I say that not because lynching is no longer happening. The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is a reminder that lynching stays with us well, true, and one could argue even into, of course, the 21st century, as the timeliness of this new bill passed on Monday suggests.

00:33:45.100 - 00:34:09.520

But because, by 1938, when this article is published, I would argue that the practice of lynching had been supplanted by another kind of practice, and that's the work of the kangaroo justice produced by our court system that was supplanting the work of the lynch mob by promising a swift and speedy trial, of the absence of due process for

00:34:09.520 - 00:34:33.310

African American defendants, and a legally sanctioned execution. And so I thought this this story was really telling, because it's in a moment when lynching is, is, is diminishing in terms of its numbers, and certainly still remains present in the consciousness of Americans during the time period.

00:34:33.370 - 00:34:53.140

This is an article that's also coming right before, or close, or in close proximity to it, I have to look up the dates here, the, the film adaptation of Gone with the Wind. So there's this nostalgia for the antebellum South, and I think this article plays a little bit with it.

00:34:53.140 - 00:35:17.140

And so I wanna just tell you a little bit about this story to sort of set up the scene for us. So the story is set on this hot Texas morning and Brazos bottom. And you have an older gentleman named Jake Belton who is riding his wagon led by mules down the road. And he encounters the badly disfigured, maimed, and murdered body of what

00:35:17.140 - 00:35:37.270

at that point is an unidentified African American who's been tied to a barbed-wire fence on this large property. And he's trying to figure out what to do with the with with the body when he immediately recognizes the individual as an African American who's been seen in this

00:35:37.270 - 00:35:55.840

community attempting to engage in labor organizing. So this is an African American who's been attempting to encourage the unionization of other black sharecroppers in the Brazos area. And, of course, as you can imagine, and as the murdered body of this gentleman already

00:35:55.840 - 00:36:21.100

articulates for us, this was not a welcome practice in this area. And so we hear our narrator in this story sort of happily reveling on the fact that this is the outcome that befell this African American who had the audacity to try to pursue the right to equal pay for black sharecroppers, who was invested in securing

00:36:21.100 - 00:36:46.180

access to schooling for African Americans in the community, who had the audacity to believe that blacks should have access to adequate and sufficient housing. All of these things, in the words of this narrator, is seen as the practice of Russian Bolsheviks. And this is also really, to my mind, crucial, not just that the narrator is

00:36:46.270 - 00:37:04.780

reveling in the death of this, of this union organizer, but that he attaches the practice of black labor protest to communism. And this is really important, if you know anything about the history of labor organizing in African American communities, which I know you know incredibly well,

00:37:04.780 - 00:37:30.460

Professor McDaniel, and the important role that the Communist Party in the United States played in those efforts to unionize, to gain adequate access to fair labor condition, equal, equal employment opportunities, and so forth. I also found this story incredibly compelling, and I'm gonna show another slide,

00:37:31.660 - 00:37:47.380

for the conversation that ensues among the characters. So we've got this guy, Jake Belton, who's confronted by this mutilated body of this African American man. And his first question is, once he's identified this individual as a labor

00:37:47.380 - 00:38:03.700

organizer, what am I going to do with this body, right? And so as he's traveling into town, he carries the body in his wagon, he encounters some other townspeople, and they pursue a conversation, what to do with this body. And so they decide that they're just gonna bury the body.

00:38:04.540 - 00:38:18.400

And this is the conversation that they have. "I reckon we better make it out all legal, with a death certificate and everything, and then bury him. Ain't no sense waiting for the sheriff to come back." "But ain't we gonna try to find out who done it?

00:38:18.520 - 00:38:32.880

Seems sort of coldblooded, seeing the man's been beat to death." "What's the use? He was up to no good. A troublemaker. If Colonel Andrews is in back of this, which is more an likely, the less done about it,

00:38:32.880 - 00:38:45.990

the better for all of." So there's an acknowledgement that they already suspect the individual, the property owner, on which this body was found as the responsible party for this murder. But they don't want to bring any trouble to this gentleman.

00:38:45.990 - 00:39:03.370

"And anyway, what difference does it make? He was just an N." "You're talking sense now." The other individuals, townsfolk, who are gathered around this body, say, "I say he's right, men. Let's bury him." Oh, sorry, lost the page.

00:39:04.150 - 00:39:17.890

"Let's bury him and get it over with. He stinks worse than a skunk." "Hold on there, hold on there, not so fast. This has got to be done legal. We've got to make out a death certificate first." And as they're flying through the

00:39:17.890 - 00:39:35.080

body, trying to figure out what the proper name of the individual that's murdered, they find an envelope, and the envelope is addressed to Abraham Lincoln Jones. So they decide that this assailed body is the body of Abraham Lincoln Jones. And so for me, this was a really telling conversation on multiple levels.

00:39:35.110 - 00:39:59.650

Among them, the, the decision not to try to pursue any kind of criminal investigation and the kind of recognition that they are likely very aware of who is the responsible party and they don't wanna do anything about it to, that this person's life and lifestyle was more important than the life than of this disposed of, literally disposed of, African

00:39:59.650 - 00:40:13.870

American murdered man. I also thought it was telling for the ways in which it sanctioned the immunization of, of violent acts against black people. And I thought this was really potent.

00:40:13.870 - 00:40:37.000

And to turn it back to the initial conversation that I started this with, the tension of this text around Bolshevism and communism, I mean, I think for some of us, we kind of forget the, the persuasive force that the Communist Party had for African Americans. There was a member of the Communist Party, Howard Johnson, who in the

00:40:37.000 - 00:40:56.830

second half of the 1930s would argue that 75% of black cultural figures had party membership or maintained regular, meaningful contact with the party. So here we're talking about Richard Wright, Langston Hughes. I mean, you could do a sort of list of who's who's of famous or notable African Americans

00:40:56.830 - 00:41:15.920

during this time period, and you would see that they had some kind of affiliation, formal or informal, with the Communist Party, because the Communist Party understood the importance of a kind of working class consciousness and interracialism in the project of racial equality, social justice, and democracy, right.

00:41:15.940 - 00:41:32.290

It would be the Communist Party that would talk about the interconnection between racism and capitalism and the status that culture would play in any kind of reformation of black civil rights. And so, yes, it would be the Communist Party that would help to to realize some of the

00:41:32.290 - 00:41:50.290

first unions that we would see among African Americans, right. So during this 1930s sweep, we would see the National Miners Union, the Auto Workers Union, the Croppers and Farm Workers Union. I also found this tale particularly telling because in my mind it immediately conjured

00:41:50.290 - 00:42:10.450

the Scottsboro Boys, and I felt that there would be no way for you to be reading this article in the Thresher in 1938 and for your mind to not immediately jump to that notable precedent setting case of the Scottsboro Boys, right. And to sort of refresh the memories of our audience members, who'll remember that the

00:42:10.450 - 00:42:34.450

Scottsboro Boys involved the case where a set of African American men, ages 13 to 20, were arrested for allegedly raping two white women on a freight car headed toward Memphis, Tennessee. And this would result in multiple lawsuits. And if you remember anything about this history, you'll note that it was the the

00:42:34.450 - 00:42:52.720

Communist Party's legal defense arm that was actually came to the aid and helped to defend these young men. And in the end, eight of the nine men who were arrested and convicted were executed. And so it's an important confluence here, this, this idea of this alliance between

00:42:52.720 - 00:43:16.930

African Americans and communism, that this writer, Henry Dunlap, a student at Rice, is taking issue with, it's an important that he's noting the ways in which racial violence against blacks is sanctioned, and it's important to note the way in which this moment, in its reference to this assailed black body as Abraham Lincoln Jones, to me,

00:43:16.930 - 00:43:42.320

conjured this kind of deep tension, and also desire for a yearned-for antebellum period and the ongoing anger and frustration with a figure like Lincoln who's responsible for the Emancipation Proclamation. So I couldn't, I couldn't stop thinking about this article.

00:43:42.350 - 00:44:06.110

I mean, for me it was just such an incredible moment to see that the first short story published in this new series for the Thresher would be one that would feature lynching, right, at a moment when it is waning and being supplanted by the work of the criminal, criminal justice system, that has taken over in the activity of quickly and

00:44:06.110 - 00:44:24.650

swiftly executing African Americans. So that was the first thing that I wanted to show you, and I don't know if you have thoughts on this as you're, as you're looking. That's, that's all really important context, and connecting it to, I had kind of, I think,

00:44:24.650 - 00:44:47.420

when I first read the, the slide that you put up, run past the reference to Russia. But you're absolutely right that that's part of the context. I mean, I wonder what else we can learn about Henry Dunlap, you know, and his, we know a little bit about his, his literary sensibilities from reading this, this story,

00:44:47.420 - 00:45:07.850

but do we know anything about his political sensibilities or his his background? Is he from Texas? Is he, is he, is he evoking scenes that he may well have heard of in his own community? Or is he maybe aware of some of the literature that's being published around this

00:45:07.850 - 00:45:28.250

time probing some of these same themes? I was just checking to see Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, which was published in 1938, the same year, and, if I recall, features a story partly about a black preacher in a southern town coming across a Communist Party meeting and demonstration,

00:45:28.250 - 00:45:52.580

and also has scenes of, of lynching and racial violence in the book. So is, is he, is the student here at Rice, really, I would imagine probably without much encouragement from the faculty, although that's a question that we could, could raise or ask, what his, what his familiarity with that kind of literature might have been in

00:45:52.580 - 00:46:06.440

the 1930s, but what is he, what is he attempting to do in the short story? You know, is he modeling it on other fiction? And I don't know if you have thoughts about that. It's hard to tell from the story...

00:46:06.440 - 00:46:21.500

It is hard to tell, yeah, it is. I was, you know, for me, you know, the choice of the title "Namesake" was an interesting one, and it conjured for me another lynching story that is written by Richard Wright called The Birthright that comes out in the 1940s.

00:46:22.010 - 00:46:35.480

And so, yeah, it is, it is a notable thing that he, that he has, that he has written this particular story. And as you said, you know, Uncle Tom's Children, really the seminal text that launches Richard Wright's career, published the same year.

00:46:35.480 - 00:46:54.290

And yes, that, that story that you're recalling within that collection very much is also about labor unionizing, right, and a concern about labor unionizing. And so you see that, we know that in the cultural productions that are happening in this moment, this is a source of and site of concern.

00:46:55.580 - 00:47:17.330

And it's definitely in the, the protest literature that marks the 1930s writings of African Americans, for sure, unequivocally. I wanna turn to something that seems like a like an odd non-sequitur, but that's to this other article that came out seven years later, and I hope you don't mind me for

00:47:17.330 - 00:47:27.730

making, this is like an abrupt shift. So I wanted... Doc talks is all about, all about non-sequiturs, that's, that's what we do here, because it's just whatever, whatever we're looking at at the time, and we try to,

00:47:27.740 - 00:47:49.510

to fit it all together. So to sort of shift away from the 1938 and, and, and this, this lynching tale to a different kind of, of, of creative work, and this is actually to a ball, a planned ball, that was being sponsored by the Architectural Society, the Guaya-Guayere.

00:47:49.870 - 00:48:11.820

And so this is a ball that was being planned for May that was going to be featured, or celebrated rather, in the Junior League's location. And they're talking in this about the theme, and the theme is going to be after this Trinidadian town called Guayaguayere.

00:48:11.830 - 00:48:31.840

And I want you to hear just a little bit in this article as they're announcing this upcoming ball to try to encourage interest on the part of students to participate in the ball and to get a sense of what this year's theme is going to be and how they need to sort of adorn themselves, because it is a costume party, and you're expected to fall in

00:48:31.840 - 00:48:43.870

line with this year's theme. So I wanted you to hear some of the language here, and I wanna attach it to some larger geopolitical events that are happening as well. So here's how one of the moments in the early paragraphs of the essay.

00:48:43.870 - 00:49:03.460

So the Junior League, they promised, would be transformed, right, into this "lazy West Indian town with the pulsing, half-civilized atmosphere of the tropics. Donations and costumes will help to capture the air of beauty and ugliness, naivete and mystery, magnificence and squalor, which is Guayaguayere.

00:49:05.230 - 00:49:21.010

To give people an idea of what they will be expected to wear, here's a brief description of the kinds of people to be found here. On market days, laborers from sugar mills and rum distilleries mix in the streets with creoles of English, Spanish, and French origin.

00:49:22.000 - 00:49:44.650

East Indians peddle their wares, and calypso singers for a nominal fee will compose and sing their songs on the spot for the sightseeing tourist. Negroes form a major part of the population, remnants of the days when this city was a center for the slave trade." Well, this story just sort of struck me on so many

00:49:44.650 - 00:49:54.430

levels. I couldn't get away from the date. And I'll tell you why. Because of this. So I don't know if you know, Dr.

00:49:54.430 - 00:50:14.620

McDaniel, anything about the calypso craze in the United States. In some document, the calypso craze in the United States is starting in the 1950s, but I would actually argue that it began in the 1930s. And this song, "Rum and Coca-Cola", is to me a sort of telling example of this earlier

00:50:14.620 - 00:50:34.030

prior history of the calypso craze that, as I said, we frequently document as beginning in the 1950s. This article in the Thresher for me was a strong reminder of the significant history of U.S.-Caribbean relations from World War II through the Civil Rights Movement, right, so

00:50:34.030 - 00:50:51.080

I wanna sort of earmark this. So the same year that this Architectural Society is sponsoring this ball, the Andrews Sisters, pictured here on the right, dominated the U.S. Billboard charts. They were holding captive the top four slots on the U.S.

00:50:51.080 - 00:51:11.260

Billboard chart. But the most famous of the songs that hit the top of the charts for them was this song, "Rum and Coca-Cola." "Rum and Coca-Cola" transfixed U.S. audiences for weeks and weeks. The Andrews Sisters regularly played this calypso tune during an eight-week USO tour

00:51:11.260 - 00:51:23.310

that they did for U.S., U.S. soldiers stationed abroad. They would describe, the Andrews Sisters described "Rum and Coca-Cola" as both the national anthem for U.S.

00:51:23.310 - 00:51:40.240

GI camps. I want to put as a caveat here, importantly, this song actually was originally written by a Trinidadian calypso singer, stage name Lord Invader. But the reason why I brought up this particular article and this particular song

00:51:40.270 - 00:51:59.620

is not simply because of the racist practice of cultural appropriation that this article highlighted regarding this ball, but also for the way in which it reminds us of a longstanding U.S. military presence in the West Indies, right, and of the signal importance that the West

00:51:59.620 - 00:52:19.510

Indies would play in our own national defense. I think we often forget that we had bases, U.S. military bases, in the West Indies, in places like Trinidad, and I think we also forget that the presence of these soldiers on these bases really correlated with an increased

00:52:19.510 - 00:52:40.870

cultural preoccupation with these island spaces. And that preoccupation translated, right, into the production of numerous Hollywood and naval films, television shows, travel guides, adventure and mystery stories, island ethnography, and this, quote unquote, "calypso craze" of which "Rum and Coca-Cola"

00:52:40.870 - 00:52:59.830

is one example. But the other thing that's important about this article and about all of these sort of cultural objects and the sort of fetishes and obsessions with the, quote unquote, "islands," is the way it reveals a kind of cultivated political and cultural attitude

00:52:59.830 - 00:53:22.360

toward the West Indies, an attitude that I would argue really undercut black anti-racist and anti-colonial politics in the United States and the Caribbean. And you can sense that in the kind of deprecating language, the mocking language of, this is how you should be dressed, this is what you should be wearing, this is what

00:53:22.360 - 00:53:47.110

this market scene looks and feels like, right, this is, this is not an article that takes seriously the importance of the island and the West Indies to U.S. economic and political security, and certainly is not one that is invested in the anti-colonial movements that are taking hold and had been taking hold from the 1930s and

00:53:47.110 - 00:54:04.450

really gain strength and strive post World War II. I don't know if you had any thoughts when you saw this, this ball that was being assembled. That is, I mean, that is, that is so helpful, and not a context that I would have, that I

00:54:04.450 - 00:54:27.190

would have known about or thought to, to connect to this. I think what you're showing is we could read that ball just very superficially or quickly as one of a long series of examples of Rice students donning blackface and engaging in acts of racist performance, but what you've just done is connected it to a much larger

00:54:27.820 - 00:54:41.290

political imaginary that, that these Rice Institute students are aware of, and, and showing that their, their ideas about race are shaped both by that geopolitical context, but also by popular culture. Absolutely.

00:54:41.290 - 00:55:04.720

I mean, I think one of the things we've, we've seen throughout the work of the task force is that even in the period when Rice Institute was presumably a whites-only institution, that nonetheless, Rice Institute students and faculty and staff were imagining people of color, and, and those imaginings, whether it's in the short story

00:55:04.720 - 00:55:30.910

or in the ball, are shaping the way that the Rice Institute as an institution is, at any moment, either preparing or not preparing or not getting ready for the, the arrival of of black students and faculty and staff at the university when, when it desegregates. And then, of course, if we go back to the first document, all of this is happening in a

00:55:30.910 - 00:55:53.080

context where black Houstonians are very much present and interacting with the Rice Institute as laborers, as neighbors. And so I think what we can see from, from all of these documents is how important it is to think about this early period of the Rice Institute, not just as kind of the prehistory

00:55:53.080 - 00:56:13.720

of, of the charter trial or the shifts in the 1960s, but as a, as a crucial context for understanding the history of segregation and racial injustice in not just Rice, but Houston and the United States and the Western Hemisphere and, and the world. Absolutely. Absolutely.

00:56:13.720 - 00:56:39.790

No, you are, you are, you're so right, Professor McDaniel, you're so right, I think we would be mistaken and naive to, to, to refuse to read these larger and influential contexts in which these students at Rice are situated, right, and in which these histories that you're disclosing to us and that we're thinking about week by week are embedded, for

00:56:39.790 - 00:56:52.840

sure. I'm so grateful to you for being here and, and really opening up some of those conversations for us and our research. I'll be thinking about it in the weeks to come, and I hope our audience will as well.

00:56:53.290 - 00:57:02.500

I wanna let you know that our doc talk will be suspended next Friday for spring break. I hope you have a great spring break, Dr. Waligora-Davis, and have some plans... Thanks to you as well.

00:57:02.590 - 00:57:25.240

...to get away. But we will be back the Friday after spring break, and I want to once again encourage you to attend tonight's webinar, which I'll drop in the chat one more time, where we can continue this conversation hopefully with Dr. Bernadette Pruitt, who will be talking to us about black Houston in the early 20th century

00:57:25.240 - 00:57:40.970

and giving us another one of these vantage points on the Rice Institute from the outside, looking in, from the inside looking out, to help us better understand the history of slavery, segregation, and racial injustice. Thanks so much again, Dr.

00:57:41.170 - 00:57:47.410

Waligora-Davis. Thank you, thank you for having me. I look forward to tonight's presentation. Take care, Dr. McDaniel, and thanks all of you.

00:57:47.800 - 00:57:49.900

Have a great weekend. You as well.