Mixed Race Studies

The Cuneys: A Southern Family in White and Black

Texas Tech University
August 2000
289 pages

Douglas Hales, Professor of History
Temple College, Temple, Texas

A Dissertation in History Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial FulfiUment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

[Note from Steven F. Riley: See the book based on the dissertation titled, A Southern Family in White and Black: The Cuneys of Texas.]

The study begins with Philip Cuney. He had much in common with other paternalistic slaveholders of the South. He believed in the institution of slavery and had grown accustomed to the lifestyle that the peculiar institution afforded him. By Texas standards, his large tracts of land and his large number of slaves made him a wealthy man. He became a respected and prominent leader in Austin County. Cuney also went into Texas politics and gained some success both before and after Texas became a state. Cuney, like many Southern planters, used his powerful position as a slaveholder to begin a sexual relationship with one of his female slaves. His relationship with his slave Adeline Stuart produced eight slave children. Along with his white wife and children, Cuney in effect had two families, one white and one black.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER
• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. PHILIP CUNEY: POLITICIAN AND SLAVEHOLDER
• III. NORRIS WRIGHT CUNEY: LABOR AND CIVIC LEADER
• IV. POLITICAL EDUCATION, 1869-1883
• V. NEW LEADER OF THE PARTY
• VI. PARTY AND PATRONAGE
• VII. MAUD CUNEY: EDUCATION AND MARRIAGE
• VIII. MAUD CUNEY-HARE: MUSICIAN, DIRECTOR, WRITER
• IX. CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

…[Norris Wright] Cuney, as an urban black, seemed far removed from the mass of nineteenth-century black Texans who lived in rural areas pursuing agricultural endeavors in impoverished conditions. In many ways, Cuney represented a new urban black middle class. As a mulatto he represented a minority within a minority. Cuney strongly identified himself as a “Negro.” Many men of mixed heritage within the first generation of black leadership following the Civil War became a black elite both culturally and politically. As the son of an upper-class white man and a mulatto slave, Cuney represented an even more select group of blacks who received an education and freedom from their white fathers. According to Joel Williamson, “It was almost as if mixing of this special sort in late slavery had produced a new breed, preset to move into the vanguard of their people when freedom came.”

White southerners, steeped in the ideology of slavery and black inferiority, and feelings of guilt over miscegenation, refused to see a difference between mulattoes and darker skinned blacks. Most Southern states codified this view into law. Some Antebellum mulattoes, especially house servants and others in close contact with their white fathers, often viewed themselves as distinct from other blacks; but following the Civil War, their interests fused with those of the black community. When freedmen entered the political arena they shared common enemies and objectives that made this fusion permanent. Dark-skinned blacks viewed this relationship as positive. According to Williamson, “they needed verbal and mathematical literacy, economic, political, and social education, and people to teach their teachers.” The mulatto elite along with Northern missionaries provided that help.”…

Read the entire dissertation here.

A Southern Family in White and Black: The Cuneys of Texas

Texas A&M University Press
2002-12-06
192 pages
6.125 x 9.25
4 b&w photos.
ISBN 13: 978-1-58544-200-3

Douglas Hales, Professor of History
Temple College, Temple, Texas

The complex issues of race and politics in nineteenth-century Texas may be nowhere more dramatically embodied than in three generations of the family of Norris Wright Cuney, mulatto labor and political leader. Douglas Hales explores the birthright Cuney received from his white plantation-owner father, Philip Cuney, and the way his heritage played out in the life of his daughter Maud Cuney-Hare. This intergenerational study casts light on the experience of race in the South before Emancipation, after Reconstruction, and in the diaspora that eventually led cultural leaders of African American heritage into the cities of the North.

Most Texas history books name Norris Wright Cuney as one of the most influential African American politicians in nineteenth-century Texas, but they tell little about him beyond his elected positions. In The Cuneys, Douglas Hales not only fills in the details of Cuney’s life and contributions but places him in the context of his family’s generations.

A politically active plantation owner and slaveholder in Austin County, Philip Cuney participated in the annexation of Texas to the United States and supported the role of slavery and cotton in the developing economy of the new state. Wealthy and powerful, he fathered eight slave children whom he later freed and saw educated. Hales explores how and why Cuney differed from other planters of his time and place.

He then turns to the better-known Norris Wright Cuney to study how the black elite worked for political and economic opportunity in the reactionary period that followed Reconstruction in the South. Cuney led the Texas Republican Party in those turbulent years and, through his position as collection of customs at Galveston, distributed federal patronage to both white and black Texans. As the most powerful African American in Texas, and arguably in the entire South, Cuney became the focal point of white hostility, from both Democrats and members of the “Lily White” faction of his own party. His effective leadership won not only continued office for him but also a position of power within the Republican Party for Texas blacks at a time when the party of Lincoln repudiated African Americans in many other Southern states. From his position on the Galveston City Council, Cuney worked tirelessly for African American education and challenged the domination of white labor within the growing unions.

Norris Wright Cuney’s daughter, Maud, who was graced with a prestigious education, pursued a successful career in the arts as a concert pianist, musicologist, and playwright. A friend of W. E. B. Du Bois, she became actively involved in the racial uplift movement of the early twentieth century. Hales illuminates her role in the intellectual and political “awakening” of black America that culminated in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He adroitly explores her decision against “passing” as white and her commitment to uplift.

Through these three members of a single mixed-race family, Douglas Hales gives insight into the issues, challenges, and strengths of individuals. His work adds an important chapter to the history of Texas and of African Americans more broadly.