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TEXASresolution ex-slave who died a millionaireBy Harvey RiceHouston ChronicleGALVESTON, TEXAS » Hecouldn’t read and he spent half his life in slavery.Once freed, though, Charlie Brown built a business domain in Brazoria County and eventually purchased the plantation where his wife once had worked as a slave. He did all this during a time when most black Texans faced almost impossible oddsin their efforts to achieve1 «goals that white Texans took for granted, dying a millionaire in 1920.Brown’s accomplishments went unheralded for nearly a century outside of his hometown of West Columbia, located about 50 miles southwest of Houston.Then last month, the Texas Legislature passed a resolution recognizing his contributions.The honor reflects growing interest in a little-known figure who remains a mystery in many ways but who managed to achieve extraordinary economic success for a freed slave living in the South.“Although he lived through slavery and its injustices, Charlie Brown became a prosperous landowner and a force for good in his community and his remarkable story serves as an enduring source of inspiration,” states the resolution by state Rep. Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton.While Brown’s rise is indisputable, the details of his success are hazy, said Larry Thomas, director of the Charlie Brown Initiative.“Nothing has been published about him,” Thomas told the Houston Chronicle. Even Brown’s birth date is uncertain, he said, though he is believed to have been born in the late 1820s.The Texas Historical Commission agreed in OcGARY CORONADO - HOUSTON CHRONICLEClark Woodson, 68, stands near a chimney on March 11 where his great-grandfather, Charlie Brown, built a home that Woodson has kept in the family on a piece of property where he lives in West Columbia, Texas. Brown built a business domain in Brazoria County and eventually purchased the plantation where his wife, Isabella, had once worked as a slave. He died a millionaire in 1920.tober to place a historical marker in West Columbia, a town of about 4,000 at the intersection of Texas highways 36 and 35 in Brazoria County, pending the compilation of a historical narrative, commission spokesman Chris Florence said. Brown once owned about two-thirds of the property in West Columbia, which named a streetafter him in 1955.The application for Brown’s marker qualified for the commission’s undertold marker program.“It’s a great story of Texas,” Florence said. Thomas agreed: “He may not be in the history books, but he needs to be in the minds of Brazoria County residents and Texas residents.”Although Thomas and the historical commission are separately trying to fill in the gaps in Brown’s biography, his great-grandson is curious about how his forebearer was able to amass such wealth in a period when blacks were increasingly the objects of hatred and discrimination by whites.“I don’t know who was watching over him,” said Clark Woodson. “Somebody had some power to say, ‘Leave that man alone.’?”Thomas acquired his holdings between 1889 and 1910, a turbulent time for blacks. The Civil War’s end had brought no end to segregation in Texas, writes historian Bruce A. Glasrud in “Jim Crow’s Emergence in Texas.” Segregation accelerated following the end of Reconstruction in 1874, a failed attempt to remove the pre-Civil War power structure and empower blacks, Glasrud wrote. Texas and other southern states were enacting the infamous Jim Crow laws that codified existing customs of segregation.Lynching was becoming more common, especially in a corridor along the Brazos River from Waco to the Gulf of Mexico that included BrazoriaCounty, according to the Texas State Historical Association. Lynching parties claimed 339 black victims between 1885 and 1942.Accounts differ as to when Brown arrived in Texas and whether he was free or a slave at the time. In Texas, he found himself among more than 180,000 other ex-slaves freed after the issuing of General Order No. 3 on June 19, 1865, by a union general in Galveston — a day that became known as Ju-neteenth.Local lore has it that Brown organized the firstJuneteenth celebration inWest Columbia.Jackie Jones, history department chair at the University of Texas at Austin, said it’s important to remember how difficult it would have been for a former slave like Brown to move up.“It’s incredibly unusual, and there couldn’t have been more than a handful of people that did that,” Jones said.
Newspaper Details
Alamogordo Daily News
Alamogordo, New Mexico, US
Sun, Mar 22, 2015
Page 16
Full Page
Clipped by
Houston P.
TX, USA 14 Sep 2019
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