Despite being born into slavery in 1846, Norris Wright Cuney did not live an ordinary slave’s life. His education and other opportunities, led the way to his becoming one of Texas’ most powerful black political leaders of the nineteenth century. Cuney’s father, Colonel Philip Cuney, one of the
largest landholders in Texas, owned 105 slaves, and operated the 2,000-acre Sunnyside Plantation near Hempstead. Cuney’s mulatto mother Adeline Stuart was one of the colonel’s slaves, but she worked as the colonel’s chief housekeeper and bore eight of his children. Cuney’s mother made sure that he and his siblings never lived in the slave quarters or worked as plantation field hands. In fact, Cuney learned to play the bass violin and carried it with him when he traveled with his father on trading trips.
During the time Cuney was growing up, his father also had a white family. About the time his father married his second wife in 1843, he also embarked on a political career as a member of the House of Representative of the Republic of Texas, a delegate to the Convention of 1845 that voted for Texas annexation to the United States, and brigadier general in the Texas Militia. He also served in the Texas State Legislature and the State Senate. In 1853, not long after Colonel Cuney married his third wife, he left his plantation in the hands of an overseer and moved all his family, including Adeline Stuart and her children with him to Houston. That same year he began freeing his black children, starting with Cuney’s older brother Joseph who was sent to the Wylie Street School for blacks in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Over the years Colonel Cuney continued freeing his children and their mother Adeline Stuart.
In 1859 Cuney and his sister Jennie were freed with Cuney going to school in Pittsburgh and Jennie going to Europe for her education. Jennie later passed as a member of the white community.
The Civil War disrupted Cuney’s studies, and he spent the wars years working on steamboats between Cincinnati and New Orleans where he met and was influenced by black leaders such as P.B.S. Pinchback, who served for thirty-five days as Louisiana’s first black governor.
After the Civil War, Norris Wright Cuney settled in Galveston near the homes of his mother and brothers. He began studying law and took advantage of being a literate, educated mulatto son of a wealthy white man. He worked with the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Union League during the Reconstruction-era to push former slaves to the voting booth, which resulted in more than 100,000 blacks voting annually into the 1890s. When the Reconstruction Legislature established a public school system, Cuney worked to ensure that tax money also went to black students within the segregated system.
Cuney married Adelina Dowdie, a schoolteacher, who was the daughter of a mulatto slave mother and a white planter father. The Cuney’s had two children, and since both parents were musical—Cuney played the violin and Adelina was a singer—their home was filled with art and music and they emphasized education. Their son Lloyd Garrison Cuney, named for the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, became an official in the Congregational Church. Their daughter Maud Cuney Hare studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and became an
accomplished pianist, folklorist, writer, and community organizer in Boston. She wrote Norris Wright Cuney: A Tribune of the Black People (1913), a biography of her father.
Over years of Cuney negotiating with the white elite and despite serious strikes, unionized blacks finally gained access as workers on Galveston’s docks.
After being elected Texas national committeeman in the Republican Party in 1886, Cuney became Texas party chairman, which was the most powerful position of any African American in the South at that time. However his position did not sit well with some Republicans in Texas and throughout the country, which led to some in the party trying to have black leaders expelled. Cuney coined the term “Lily-White Movement” to describe the Republican effort.
In 1889 Cuney was appointed U.S. Collector of Custom in Galveston, the highest-ranking position of any black man in the South in the late nineteenth century, however, Cuney’s death that year coincided with efforts across the South to disfranchise black and poor white voters. Laws were passed to make voter registration difficult and Texas instituted poll taxes and white primaries that greatly reduced the number of black voters from the high of 100,000 in the 1890s to less than 5,000 in 1906. During the Great Depression racial strife in the unions dissolved much of the labor cooperation that had been established between blacks and whites.
Despite Cuney’s legacy, which inspired other black leaders, and the designation by some historians of the period between 1884 and 1896 as the “Cuney Era,” it would take the passage in the 1960s of the Civil Rights laws before the right to vote was restored to blacks across the South.
An account of Norris Wright Cuney’s life is portrayed in Douglas Hale’s A Southern Family in White & Black: The Cuneys of Texas.