Island of Color

PREFACE

This book will endeavor to document or note the many ways in which African Americans entered the American scene via Galveston, and played roles on the stage of life that changed history. Leaving out these players in historical accounts is akin to trying to chew food without one’s back teeth – swallowing anything, and  wondering why the food won’t digest.

It should be known and appreciated that in Galveston, African Americans established their first schools, churches and businesses in this part of the country; played in their first organized sports clubs; attended the first medical school in the Southwest; produced leading post-Civil War politicians and the first African American world boxing champion; played orchestral instruments, and helped originate jazz music at the same time it was becoming known in New Orleans, maintaining this musical leadership in the Gulf Coast region through the blues explosion. Texas’ first daily newspaper, the Galveston Daily News, used information and data from an African-American institution of higher learning, now known as Prairie View University.

I take this opportunity to state that the capitalization of racial terminology is purposely inconsistent throughout the book. I have capitalized all proper names, with occasional exception of the word Negro in quotations, and capitalization of the words white and black varies, according to the context as well as time periods in which they are used.

This book is a communication – through me -- between you, the reader, and a segment of our world,  in its past, present and future. My best form of expression is music. That being the case, this book automatically took on musical designations. (As anyone close to me would expect.)

PRELUDE

Rev. Ralph Albert Scull’s Description of  19th -Century Galveston Island

“Gail Borden came to Galveston about 1850 and with him was a colored woman, Helen Rowe. She says they landed at Avenue H and 20th Street. At that time there seems to have been a channel across the Island at that point. In 1866, to my recollection there was a slew or waterway clear out 21st from Broadway to the South Beach; later sand piled up and closed the Gulf end, but the inner body of water still remained.

Up to 1873 there was a large pond of water at 21st and 22nd and M.  The Gulf of Randle, another cut, ran in at about twenty seventh Street. There seemed to be several places where the water partly cut across the island.

In the Storm of 1875, the Gulf and Bay waters met first on 25th Street. This storm also opened a channel on Sixth Street which led from the Gulf to the bay. It was called the Rosenberg Channel ... closed at Gulf by the wave motion and the sand. Crabs were caught on Broadway from the ditches from Seventeenth Street back to twenty first, and from there nearly to the Gulf on the South.

At the foot of Broadway were many small deep ponds, where fish of two or three pounds were found. Late in the Seventies [1870s], Mayor C. W. Hurley engineered the filling of Broadway from the high sand hills on the beach. Before that time the mule cars on Broadway ran on trussels [trestles] in some places three to four feet from the ground.

On the bay front water washed up to the Strand. The sail boats brought wood to town and came in three feet of water, then the[y] would drive out to the boats, load up and deliver it to the buyers. At this time no boats or ships drawing over twelve feet of water could come into Galveston over bar at the Gulf end of the channels.