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Speaker reveals Black Indians
Story of black pioneers and homesteaders in Old West
by Tabitha Dial
The Metropolitan
 (by William Moore - The Metropolitan) Historian William Loren Katz delivers a lecture about Black Indians Feb. 26 in Room 320 of the Tivoli. Katz has written several books on African-Americans in the American West, including "Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage" and "Black Pioneers: The Untold Story."
It was author and historian William Loren Katz' first visit to Denver, he said, explaining the reason why he had a water bottle. He shook it and then took a drink.
Katz noticed that many of the people in his audience were ready to take notes on the speech for their classes. "Writing down everything I say is futile," said Katz, who has written over 40 books on the subject of his lecture, "Black Indians."
America's simply not America without the Wild West, jazz or corn on the cob. Jazz and corn on the cob? Well, yes, they were not created by pioneers of the old West, but we wouldn't have either without African-American and Native American cultures, and Katz would argue that the Wild West would not have been the same without what he termed "Black Indians."
African-American and Native American cultures met through the colonial practice of slavery, and later intermarried, Katz said.
One of the many experiences shared by Native and African-Americans was the Trail of Tears. "The Five Civilizations had a number of African members. Thousands of them, actually," said Katz as he reviewed a slide depicting the Trail of Tears, an event in which Native Americans were moved en masse to Oklahoma, Indian Territory, in 1838.
Fifty-two years later, according to one of Katz' books on Black Indians, the frontier had been settled. Katz wrote in The Black West that Texas and Oklahoma were home to half a million black men, women and children in 1890.
The old West didn't wear a white face. "Cowboys didn't all look like John Wayne," Katz said. In the average post-Civil War trail crew, two or three of the eleven men were African-American, according to Katz. Not everyone shot like John Wayne, either. Katz joked about the poor shooting skills of cowboys during his lecture in the Tivoli on Thursday, Feb. 26.
The first man shot in Dodge City was a black cowboy named Tex, Katz said. He fell victim to the terrible aim of men involved in a gunfight at high noon.
No known fatal shootings ever occurred on the sets of western movies. Gunfights were staged and rehearsed for the likes of actors Gene Autry and Gary Cooper.
Katz began his lecture with pictures of western movie stars from the 1930s. Katz recalled how he often enjoyed three movies for 11 cents while growing up in New York City.
"Inevitably, one of those movies, if not two of the three, were cowboy movies. It didn't matter what color we were, what neighborhood we came from. That's what we learned the West was like, and our textbooks were no different," Katz said.
In 1950 in New York, Katz began teaching U.S. History in American public schools, and the books and course material "pictured blacks as happy under slavery and kind of bewildered when freedom came," Katz said. Katz has, what he calls the good fortune, to have been left in charge of a great amount of extensive research done in his area of expertise in American history.
When asked how he became such an expert on the Black West during his lecture, he mentioned how he acquired the research of Kenneth William Porter, a white professor in Oregon.
Porter had done decades of research into the connection between African-Americans and Native Americans, Katz recounts. Katz showed slides of black pioneer families, cowboys, homesteaders, and fur trappers. Katz said that miners in the mid 1800s who came from minority groups were required to pay a foreign miner's tax of $4 a month in California.
He shared stories of colorful figures from the Black West, such as Lucy Parson, who was married to a white man. Together they began the "Waco Spectator," a Texas paper that took on the KKK.
Parson was, as Katz observed, ahead of her time. "She was the first woman of color to become a socialist revolutionary," Katz said. She encouraged fellow members of the Industrial Workers of the World to stay in on strike to tie up the factories. Staying in to keep out scabs was not done until decades later in the 1930s.
Though Parson gave two speeches to the Industrial Workers of the World, it was Ben Hodges who Katz recognizes as the fastest tongue in the West. "He talked the head of the bank into lending him money, he talked the head of the railroad into giving him a free ticket, and even though he was a cattle rustler, he almost talked the governor into making him chief livestock inspector," Katz said. Katz has written nearly 40 books on African-American history, and has found much evidence illustrating how African-Americans and Natives created alliances in the Americas.
"From Martin Luther King to Frederick Douglas to L.L. Cool J to Leena Horn to Alex Haley, to bell hooks, to whoever that you might think of, practically, in the African-American leadership community, there's an Indian branch in their family tree," Katz said.
In Katz' family tree is a father who loves jazz. This musical adoration brought his son to African-American history, and Katz muses that he is perhaps "the only white kid in the world to grow up with books on black history."
And no American can help but grow up with a sense of Americana.
Cowboys are as much a part of Americana as the freedom fighters our culture celebrates and admires today.
Having studied history, Katz has determined the first true American freedom fighters were African-Americans. Almost one hundred years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Maroon colonies in Brazil fought for their liberty from Portuguese and Dutch expeditions until they were overcome in 1696.
More than 300 years later, Katz fights for the liberation of old ideas from history textbooks. He has found much missing from history lessons taught today, and he strives to correct that in his classes in New York City.
The real West, Katz showed in a slide, was a place where some could afford rifles, while others couldn't. Not everyone had a horse either. Today, without horse or rifle, author and historian William Loren Katz is a pioneer of knowledge, exploring the old West.
And, just as in the many western movies Katz watched as a kid growing up in New York City, the cowboy rode off into the sunset. |
