Black History in El Paso: A retrospective | Lifestyle

Black history in El Paso is a story of African American, Anglo American and Mexican interactions that illuminate the borderland as either a tolerant multicultural community or a region mired in the nation’s historical oppression of people of color.

“The border region makes clear that the African American past has a multitude of historical traditions,” said Will Guzmán, professor of history at Prairie View A&M University and a former instructor at the University of Texas at El Paso. “The question to ask is, ‘Does this border region have the potential to become an egalitarian society, particularly for African Americans?’  And the answer is no.”

That’s because the Black borderland experience remains outside political, social and economic power, said Guzmán, who authored a book on one of El Paso’s Black historical icons –  Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon.

El Paso’s NAACP first in Texas

A physician who lived in this city from 1910 to his death in 1966, Nixon was instrumental in the founding of the NAACP’s El Paso branch – the first in Texas – and led successful campaigns to build an all-Black pool in the then whites-only Washington Park, and to open an all-Black hospital in El Paso.

Nixon filed court cases that “would establish the legal precedence that ultimately would dismantle all-white primaries throughout the entire South in the famous Smith v. Allwright Supreme Court decision in 1944,” according to Scholarworks of UTEP, the university’s institutional repository of research.

He is among a long list of Blacks who throughout El Paso’s history have helped the region develop into the modern metroplex it is today. The city has struggled historically with its race relations – as a previous Southern Confederate state with segregationist policies – and for some, the residue of that remains.

“The reality is there is still a lot of discrimination against Black people in El Paso, and it’s not just from white people,” said El Paso attorney Ouisa Davis, a longtime advocate for equal rights.

Blacks comprise about 4% of El Paso’s population – about 20,000 people, according to the U.S. Census – making it difficult to address their concerns politically, some academics and historians said.

‘Blaxicans’ in the borderland

Howard Campbell, a professor of cultural anthropology at UTEP, said there was “a terrible side of history” for Blacks in the region, but added that there were also meaningful interactions across cultures.

“The history of Black Americans is almost always told in terms of segregation, of suffering, racism, slavery and antagonism of the whites. But they also had other types of relationships with indigenous people, and with Mexicans and it wasn’t always bad,” he said.

“Many people are part of multiple cultures, not just part of one. And that’s a part of Black history that is not often told.”

Campbell and Michael Williams, head of UTEP’s African American Studies, in 2018 published an academic article titled “Black Barrio on the Border: ‘Blaxicans’ of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.”

The article studied the history of Blacks who visited and lived in Juárez as a way of enjoying freedoms not available to them in the United States.

“That’s why my research on Blacks and Juárez is valuable because it shows that Blacks and Mexicans often have been allies, not enemies, inter-marrying and sharing culture,” Campbell said.

“Many Black people lived in Segundo Barrio as well and grew up as a minority among Mexicans. Many learned Spanish and were very comfortable in the Mexican culture. I think that is a beautiful thing about El Paso,” Campbell said.

Sports, music & art

Jesus “Cimi” Alvarado, a muralist based in Segundo Barrio, said that the Black and Chicano experiences merged in this historic part of the city’s central area.

“Nowadays we don’t recognize, or we don’t think of our community as being so diverse, but we were,” he said. “I think both cultures benefited. As the cultures go back and forth, both of our cultures got stronger together because we mixed them, we played off each other, with sports, with music, with everything else.”

Alvarado points to Segundo Barrio-born Nolan Richardson – a Bowie High School basketball coach who rose through the college coaching ranks and was elected to the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008.

One of Alvarado’s favorites, and a subject of a Downtown El Paso mural, is Sonny Powell, a Black rock-n-roll soul musician who grew up in Segundo Barrio and gained regional popularity in the 1950s and 1960s.

“He influenced rock-n-roll with his sound, and the Chicanos picked it up, especially here in Segundo,” Alvarado said.

Military, railroad spur assimilation

The military and the railroad brought Blacks to the region during the 1800s.

Along with Fort Bliss, also established in 1848, came the troop movements and assimilation into the El Paso area. Black soldiers arrived in 1866 with Company L – the Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry – as an Apache-fighting regiment.

In the late 1880s, Black Americans began to populate the region in increasing numbers when the railroad needed workers, and cotton fields needed picking.

“So Black people came in and started to work here in various capacities – railroads, agriculture industry, and the population started to grow. And then with Fort Bliss, came more African Americans,” Campbell said.

Education for Black children began in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio in the late 1880s, about the same time as it did for Mexican residents in the area. Douglas Elementary School – named after Frederick Douglas, an escaped slave who fought for Black rights – opened in 1886. Aoy Elementary School, named after Jesuit priest O.V. Aoy, opened in 1887 to teach Mexican children.

An important aspect of Black presence in El Paso is that “African-American persons were also doctors, engineers, and they had many roles, they were not only workers on the railroads or soldiers,” said Selfa Chew, associate professor of African-American studies at UTEP’s Department of History.

Henry Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point Academy, was one such person, Chew said.

Flipper arrived to El Paso during the Mexican Revolution and “functioned as a very reliable informant for the government of the United States in relation to the movements of the revolutionaries in El Paso.”

From the archives: Black leaders in El Paso 

Desegregation & integration

El Paso, in 1955, was the first city in Texas to integrate its public schools. Then, in 1962, El Paso became the first former Jim Crow city to pass an ordinance desegregating public accommodations.

But the history of Blacks in El Paso is complicated. It can be lauded for being the first Texas city to incorporate a NAACP branch, but, Guzmán said, it is open to a different perception, perhaps better grounded in the reality facing Black El Pasoans at the time.

“I would argue that things were so horrible that it demanded action, and part of that action required the NAACP to be established,” he said.

The pursuit of racial equality in El Paso was shared by Blacks and Chicanos, both of whom were on the perimeter of the city’s institutional power, said Miguel Juarez, a lecturer in the UTEP Department of History.

“African Americans have been there alongside Mexican-Americans, struggling for the right to vote, for having decent housing, for having everything that people need – health care, all of those struggles,” Juarez said. 

Raymond Cartwright, a retired U.S. Army soldier at Fort Bliss and a Park University instructor, has spent the past 40 years in El Paso. As a member of the El Paso NAACP, the McCall Black Cultural Center and the fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha, he said there was “a lot of camaraderie between African-Americans and Hispanics.” But, he said, some people in El Paso’s history believed in an unspoken race hierarchy. 

“They felt that there were three levels: Whites on top, Mexicans in the middle, and Blacks on the bottom,” he said.

Cartwright said he credits the military with helping many Black service members advance over the years.

“It gave me an opportunity to reach for higher things, and it helped my aspirations.”