Texas Originals

Born in 1916, Henry B. González was the first Mexican American to represent Texas in Congress. An expert on the nation's banking system, he oversaw the 1989 savings and loan bailout, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He also led efforts to overhaul public housing and increase transparency at the Federal Reserve. González was reelected eighteen times and became the longest-serving Hispanic member of Congress.

Born in 1888, Walter Prescott Webb remains one of Texas's most significant and influential scholars. Webb taught at The University of Texas throughout his career. He served as director of the Texas State Historical Association and spearheaded the creation of The Handbook of Texas, the definitive encyclopedia of the state's history. In 1950, a survey of historians identified his 1931 study The Great Plains as the single most important work in U.S. history written since the turn of the century.

Civil rights leader James Farmer was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1920. Though he originally planned to become a Methodist minister, the influence of legendary teacher Melvin Tolson—and segregation within the church—led Farmer to activism. In 1942, Farmer organized the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Chicago. A decade before the civil rights movement made headlines, CORE followed Gandhian principles of nonviolent direct action to fight racial discrimination, pioneering the tactics that eventually dismantled segregation in the South.

Henry Allen Bullock devoted his life to advancing African American education in Texas—and made history in the process. His history of African American education in the South earned him the Bancroft Prize. He testified for the inclusion of African American history in Texas history textbooks and served on the Texas advisory committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In 1969, he became the first African American appointed to the faculty of arts and sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.

The scholar and writer Américo Paredes was born in Brownsville in 1915. Even as a youth, he saw that a distinct culture had emerged in the Rio Grande Valley—not just Mexican or American, but a blend of the two. Paredes made the border the focus of his career. He studied and celebrated the distinctive stories and humor of the lower Rio Grande, at the same time fighting to correct prejudice against Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

Tomás Rivera's career as a writer and educator was shaped by the struggles of his family, who spent much of their lives as farm laborers following the annual harvests from Texas to the Midwest. Rivera's landmark 1971 novel …y no se lo tragó la tierra—or, in English translation, And the Earth Did Not Devour Him—portrays the terrible conditions faced by Mexican American farm workers. Later in life, as a university administrator, Rivera committed himself to supporting first-generation college students such as himself.

Folklorist and oral history pioneer Mody Boatright was no stranger to the tall tale. Raised in a West Texas ranching family in the early twentieth century, he was descended from pioneers, cattlemen, and merchants. He grew up immersed in stories of the Texas frontier.

Born in 1844, Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis was one of the most important Texas writers of the nineteenth century. Her novel The Wire-Cutters is set during the Texas fence-cutting wars of the 1880s, when ranchers began restricting access to large sections of the previously open range. The Wire-Cutters is now recognized as one of the first "westerns" in American literary history.

Once described as the "Gertrude Stein of San Antonio," Marion Koogler McNay created the first museum of modern art in Texas. Over the course of her life, she collected European and American art, and especially loved the art of the American Southwest. McNay bequeathed her expansive residence, acreage, and more than 700 works of art to San Antonio in 1950. Today, the McNay Art Museum is one of the state's cultural treasures, boasting a remarkable collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of art, including works by Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Georgia O'Keefe, and other European and American masters.

Born to a sharecropping family in northeast Texas in 1892, Bessie Coleman became the world’s first female African American aviator. Her daredevil feats in air shows captivated crowds and earned her the nickname "Brave Bessie." An advocate for equal rights, Coleman encouraged young African Americans to fly, and she refused to participate in air shows that disallowed black attendance. In 1929, a flying school for African Americans was founded in her honor in Los Angeles, ensuring her legacy as a pioneer in aviation and civil rights.

Poet and educator Melvin B. Tolson began teaching at the historically black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, in 1924. A dedicated mentor, he coached Wiley's debate team through an impressive ten-year winning streak. The team is portrayed in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, with Tolson portrayed by Denzel Washington. Tolson was also a brilliant and inventive poet, drawing upon both the western tradition and the distinctive rhythm and vernacular of the blues. In 1947, the African nation of Liberia named him poet laureate.

In 1932, when John Nance Garner became the nation's thirty-second vice president, Texans were just beginning to exert influence and leadership at the national level. Garner, however, was hardly a newcomer. The Uvalde native had served fifteen consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was Speaker of the House when Franklin D. Roosevelt chose him as his running mate.

Among the most important Anglo settlements in Spanish Texas was DeWitt's Colony, founded in 1825 by Green DeWitt and James Kerr along the Guadalupe River. DeWitt and his wife Sarah moved their family to the colony in 1826. Several years later, Sarah became responsible for one of the enduring symbols of the Texas Revolution.

Mary Maverick's diaries paint a vivid picture of life on the Texas frontier. Living in San Antonio, she witnessed the bloody Council House Fight of 1840, a turning point in relations between Texians and the Comanche. She wrote about notable figures of Texas history, including Jack Hays, Juan Seguín, and Mirabeau Lamar. Mary also faced the challenges of raising a family alone while her husband was away. Three years before her death in 1898, she compiled and edited her memoirs with the aid of her son, leaving us with a remarkable account of life in early Texas.

Cynthia Ann Parker is the most famous Indian captive in American history. Captured when she was six years old, Parker spent twenty-four years with the Comanche, eventually marrying the warrior Peta Nocona, with whom she had two sons and a daughter. In 1860, Texas Rangers and federal soldiers abducted Parker in an attack on a Comanche encampment in north Texas. Sadly, she struggled to readjust. A number of times she tried to escape and return to the Comanche and her children, including her son Quanah—who became the most important Comanche leader of his day.

Known affectionately as "Mr. Sam," Sam Rayburn helped pass some of the twentieth century's most important legislation, working, as he put it, "with, not under," eight Presidents. Elected to Congress in 1912, he spent forty-nine years in the U.S. House of Representatives, including a record seventeen years as House Speaker.

Born in 1928, the artist Donald Judd was nurtured in the cultural hotbed of New York City. But the austere, high desert of West Texas became his artistic home.

Born in Laredo in 1885, journalist and activist Jovita Idár abandoned a teaching career to write for her father's weekly newspaper, La Crónica. Idár denounced the dismal social, educational, and economic conditions of Texas Mexicans. As an educated Tejana, she felt duty-bound to promote civil rights—including women's rights—and education. "Educate a woman," Idár often said, "and you educate a family."

In 1790, the woman now known as the first "cattle queen" of Texas—Rosa María Hinojosa de Ballí—inherited fifty-five thousand acres in what is now South Texas. Doña Rosa possessed a strong will, exceptional foresight, and shrewd business skills. When she died, in 1803, she had amassed more than a million acres of ranch land in the lower Rio Grande Valley.

One of the most acclaimed American photographers of the twentieth century, Russell Lee developed his distinctive style while documenting the effects of the Great Depression on rural communities for the Farm Security Administration. Lee's iconic images of ordinary Americans in extraordinary circumstances helped inspire the form now known as documentary photography.

Eugene C. Barker, in the words of his biographer, "did more than any other historian to show the influence that Texas exerted in shaping the destiny of the United States." As a scholar, Barker furthered the study of Texas and expanded the Texas State Historical Association. In 1925, he published the first biography of Stephen F. Austin. Through this and other works, Barker made narratives of the borderlands central to American history.

Known as "Miss Amarillo," Laura V. Hamner devoted much of her life to recording and sharing the history of the Texas Panhandle. She became known for "prowling" the region, interviewing ranchers, cowboys, and pioneers—and once boldly facing gunfire to meet with a former outlaw. Hamner’s books are now regarded as invaluable sources of Texas ranching history.

Writer and promoter Jane Cazneau helped shape Texas and American history in the mid-nineteenth century. Working as a journalist in the 1840s and 50s, she campaigned tirelessly for Texas independence. Her columns in periodicals such as the New York Sun helped sway public opinion in support of Texas statehood—and America's "manifest destiny" more generally.

Acclaimed singer and actress Etta Moten Barnett was born in Weimar, Texas, in 1901. By the age of ten, she was singing in the choir of her father’s church. Thirty-three years later, at the invitation of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, she became the first African American woman to sing at the White House. Barnett starred on Broadway, most notably as Bess in a revival of Porgy and Bess. She charmed audiences around the world singing in concerts with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. She was also deeply involved in civic affairs, women’s issues, and causes such as African independence.

Empresario Martín De León founded the city of Victoria and played a key role in settling the Texas Coastal Bend. De León oversaw the only empresario grant to attract large numbers of settlers from Mexico rather than the United States. As tensions rose between Anglo American colonists and the Mexican government, De León’s life illustrates how complicated loyalty was for Tejanos during the struggle for Texas independence.

Gail Borden Jr. was undaunted by failure. In the 1840s he built a wagon meant to travel on land and water but did neither successfully. His nutritional biscuits made from dehydrated meat and flour were unpalatable. Yet Borden kept at it. In the 1850s, he developed a way to condense milk—and this time, succeeded on a grand scale.

Texas became a two-party state in 1961, when conservative Republican John Tower was elected to the U.S. Senate. He was the first Republican senator from Texas since Reconstruction. During four senate terms, Tower was a master at moving legislation through Congress and a political mentor to many Texas Republicans, including future President George H. W. Bush.

In 1890, James Stephen Hogg became the state's first native-born governor. Six-foot-two and nearly three hundred pounds, "Big Jim," as he was known, vigorously fought for the interests of the common citizen. At the forefront of the Progressive reform movement in Texas, Hogg opposed abuses by insurance companies, railroad monopolies, and land corporations.

Born in Indiana in 1859, writer Andy Adams lived the cowboy life on the Texas plains. He later rendered those experiences in classic novels such as The Log of a Cowboy (1903) to set Americans straight about life in the West.

A self-described "student and jealous lover of Texas history," Adina De Zavala is best known for barricading herself for three days in the Alamo in 1908 to protest plans for its destruction.

Plácido Benavides is called the "Paul Revere of Texas" for his role in the Texas Revolution, as he was dispatched to Goliad to alert others of the Mexican army's approach. Although he had joined the Texians in opposing Mexican dictator Santa Anna, Benavides was fighting for Texas as part of a federalist Mexico, not for Texas independence.

Karle Wilson Baker was Texas's most celebrated poet in the first half of the twentieth century. Originally born in Arkansas, she fell under the spell of her adopted state, writing about the role of Texans in the American drama. Her collection of poems Dreamers on Horseback was nominated for the 1931 Pulitzer Prize.

After receiving a land grant from the Spanish government, Moses Austin planned to establish the first American colony in Spanish Texas. However, he died before his colonial dream became a reality. His son, Stephen F. Austin, succeeded him as leader of the Texas colony.

Texarkana's Scott Joplin is one the most popular songwriters in American history. At the turn of the twentieth century, he was known as the "King of Ragtime."

Lawyer and federal judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes is best known for administering the oath of office to Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One after John F. Kennedy's assassination. Over the course of her remarkable career, she championed equal rights and encouraged women to get involved in politics, illustrating her lifelong belief that "women can indeed be a force in history."

James Fannin led the Texas rebels massacred at Goliad in 1836. His defeat inspired the victory that secured Texas independence.

Librarian and historian Nettie Lee Benson rose from a bookish South Texas childhood to assemble one of the world’s leading archives for research on Latin America. Now, scholars from around the world visit the Austin library bearing her name.

Journalist, playwright, and raconteur Larry L. King spent most of his life in Washington, DC, but the vivid language and distinctive characters of his home state of Texas never ceased to inspire him. Texas, he once said, "provided me with the stuff of a career," and his work endures as a vibrant chronicle of the state's politics, culture, and personalities.

San Marcos native Cleto Rodríguez was born in 1923. By the age of nine, he had lost both his parents and was raised in San Antonio by relatives. Rodríguez began his military career in 1944 when he joined the Army. For his heroism in World War II, he received the nation's highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. Rodríguez was the fifth Mexican American ever to earn this honor—and one of fourteen Texans who earned it during World War II.

Cherokee leader Chief Bowl, also known as "Bowles" and "Duwali," was born in North Carolina around 1756 to a Scottish father and a Cherokee mother. In the early nineteenth century, Bowl led the first large Cherokee emigration west of the Mississippi River—to Missouri, then Arkansas, and finally to the Mexican province of Texas. There, in a settlement near Nacogdoches, Bowl headed an alliance of Cherokee villages and later perished in battle while fighting for Cherokee land rights..

In 1888, the historical novel Remember the Alamo was published to popular and critical acclaim. The novel's unlikely author was Amelia Barr, a British writer who lived in Texas in the mid-nineteenth century. To support herself after her husband and three of her children died of yellow fever in Galveston, she launched a remarkably successful writing career. In her memoir, completed at age eighty, she wrote that she hoped her life story might help "any sad or doubtful woman to outleap her own shadow, and to stand bravely out in the sunshine to meet her destiny."

Sarah Horton Cockrell played a pivotal role in Dallas's early economic development. In 1872, she raised funds to open the first iron bridge over the Trinity River, thereby connecting Dallas to major roads south and west. By the time of her death in 1892, she owned almost a fourth of the city's downtown. She is now remembered as "Dallas's first capitalist."

The singer who first performed the song "Ol' Man River" is an obscure figure today. Baritone Julius Bledsoe was among the first African Americans to appear on Broadway, but he made few recordings and his fame was soon eclipsed by the great Paul Robeson, who succeeded him in the role of Joe in the classic musical Show Boat. A critic from the New York Morning Telegraph described him as "a singer who can pick the heart right out of your body—if you don't look out."

Texan Margo Jones revolutionized American theatre. At a time when few professional drama companies existed outside New York, Jones fought for regional productions and new voices. Determined to create the best theatre in America, she said, "I saw no reason why I couldn't have it in Houston." In 1947, in Dallas, Jones founded America's first modern professional resident theatre, which in turn launched the regional theatre movement throughout the nation.

Poet, politician, and historian, Mirabeau B. Lamar is claimed by Texas, although he was a Georgia native and lived there for three decades. In 1838, Lamar became the second President of the Republic of Texas, inheriting a nation beset by problems that included a bankrupt treasury. Undaunted, Lamar promoted his vision of Texas as a prosperous, sprawling empire.

As a public official, suffragist, and educator, Annie Webb Blanton devoted her life to women’s rights. She said, "Everything that helps to wear away age-old prejudices contributes towards the advancement of women and of humanity." In 1918, Blanton was elected State Superintendent for Public Instruction, becoming the first woman in Texas to hold a statewide elected office.

A champion of historic preservation, prominent Texan architect O'Neil Ford decried architectural flamboyance and cliché. He was also a passionate advocate for education and the environment. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Ford to the National Council on the Arts. Ford died in 1982, but his ethic of simplicity, integrity, and restraint continues to inspire. "Architecture is scale and proportion," he often said. "The rest is décor."

His thousands of admirers called him a saint. His adversaries—and there were many—called him the Devil's apostle. But Waco publisher and journalist William Cowper Brann preferred to be known by the name of the weekly journal he published, the Iconoclast.

Born near Houston in 1918, Mary Kay watched her mother work long hours to support the family. At a time when few women worked outside the home, Mary Kay, too, pursued a career. She flourished as a saleswoman but quit when a man she had trained was promoted above her. In 1963, Mary Kay Ash launched her cosmetics business in Dallas with nine independent beauty consultants. Today, 2.5 million women sell her products in thirty-five countries.

Author of more than forty Westerns, the writer Elmer Kelton depicted the South Texas Plains with both romance and realism. These were qualities that Kelton knew well, having spent his entire life in the region. Kelton once explained, "I can't write about heroes seven feet tall and invincible. I write about people five feet eight and nervous."

Rabbi Henry Cohen once said, “Other men play golf for recreation. My hobby is helping people.” Cohen is perhaps best known for his role in the Galveston Movement, which brought Jewish immigrants into the Port of Galveston to settle throughout Texas and the Midwest. Cohen met immigrants at the dock and provided advice and assistance, sometimes purchasing clothing and supplies for them with his own money.