Category: Texas

  • Biography: ‘The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire,’ by Karl Jacoby The Dallas Morning News 2016-06-24 Karen M. Thomas, Professor of Journalism Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas From all accounts, Guillermo Enrique Eliseo commanded attention. The elegantly dressed Mexican-born Wall Street baron in Gilded Age Manhattan was known…

  • Across the Border The Nation 2016-07-21 Michael A. Elliott, Professor of English Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia William Henry Ellis, (Photo courtesy of Fanny Johnson-Griffin) A new biography of William Henry Ellis reminds us how much we still don’t know about the elusive history of racial subterfuge in America. When, in 1912, James Weldon Johnson published…

  • A Tale of Racial Passing and the U.S.-Mexico Border The New Yorker 2016-07-20 Jonathan Blitzer The African-American businessman William Ellis, pictured here around the year 1900, frequently passed as Mexican. COURTESY FANNY JOHNSON-GRIFFIN Some people knew him as William Ellis, and others as Guillermo Eliseo. He could be Mexican, Cuban, or even Hawaiian, depending on…

  • How Reggie Yates went from kids’ TV to confronting neo-Nazis The Guardian 2016-06-28 Hannah J. Davies Louis Theroux 2.0: Reggie Yates in a cell at Bexar County Detention Center. He braves Russian far-right rallies and Texas prison cells for his job. Meet the man helping to reinvent the documentary for Generation Y While filming in…

  • Texas slave passes as Mexican millionaire San Antonio Express-News San Antonio, Texas 2016-06-11 Joe O’Connell Former slave passes as Mexican millionaire Historian Karl Jacoby was driving near the Texas-Mexico border when he was stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol, the agency charged with keeping Mexicans out of the United States. He explained, to their dismay,…

  • Mystery still surrounds ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’ The Houston Chronicle Houston, Texas 2016-04-01 Joe Holley, Native Texan A statue of “Emily Morgan” by Veryl Goodnight stands amidst a garden of yellow roses in an office complex across the street from Memorial City Mall in Houston. Photo: Joe Holley, Joe Holley/Houston Chronicle So, what was happening…

  • Fr. Virgilio Elizondo Takes His Own Life The Rivard Report: Urban. Independent. All About San Antonio. San Antonio, Texas 2016-03-14 Robert Rivard, Director Fr. Virgilio Elizondo, one of San Antonio’s most accomplished and beloved Catholic priests whose work brought him recognition in Latin America and Europe and an esteemed faculty position at the University of…

  • Unpublished Black Asian History Grits and Sushi: my musings on okinawa, race, militarization, and blackness 2016-03-08 Mitzi Uehara Carter This photo captures a quiet story of a multicultural South, black philanthropy, transpacific militarism and its hauntings, the organizing strength of of Black women, and the power of Black journalism and photography. How does this one…

  • When Louisiana Creoles Arrived in Texas, Were They Black or White? Zócalo Public Square 2015-12-15 Tyina Steptoe, Assistant Professor of History University of Arizona Tyina Steptoe’s book, Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City, was published by the University of California Press in 2015. Mixed-Race Migrants Came to Houston for Jobs and…

  • Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City University of California Press November 2015 320 pages Hardback ISBN: 9780520282575 Paperback ISBN: 9780520282582 Tyina Steptoe, Assistant Professor of History University of Arizona Beginning after World War I and continuing throughout the twentieth century, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of…