I Want to Take You Higher_ The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone - Jeff Kaliss [4]
The history of Denton, Texas, Sylvester Stewart's birthplace, encapsulates an important portion of the history of African descendants in the United States, and the influences under which Sly and his family would be raised. Denton County's 1850 census listed five slave owners and ten slaves. These persons likely originated in Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas, and whites and blacks worked the fields side by side to subsist on the clay-based soil of the newly created state of Texas, which joined the Confederacy in 1861, four years after the founding of the city of Denton. Following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, many of the former slaves evolved from servants to tenant farmers, and the development of cotton, wheat, and other cash crops expanded the influx of both races. The Chisholm Trail, regaled in a jaunty cowboy ballad, brought cattle from the South through Denton, and two major rail lines followed suit.
The settlement of Freedmen Town, in the area where Sly would be born seventy years later, was populated in 1875 by twenty-seven black families from Dallas. What would become an even larger and more active black community, Quakertown (possibly named for Quaker abolitionists) took form a few years later, closer to the city center. Outside of farming and service jobs within Quakertown, the North Texas Normal College and the Girls Industrial College both became significant employers of blacks after opening in Denton (to white students only) around the turn of the century. Other Quakertown folk worked as daytime domestic servants of wealthy whites along Oak Street several blocks to the west. Pride of place in a growing Quakertown community ultimately fell victim to resentful white racists, who appropriated the area to establish a downtown park and fairground, forcing the black residents out of the downtown and into an area of failed former pastureland to the southeast. Many blacks opted to leave Texas, but those who remained strived to restore Quakertown's hard-won level of selfsufficiency.
In the meantime, blacks returned to being dependent on white services downtown. "We knew where we were supposed to go and we went where we were supposed to go, and we didn't go where we weren't supposed to go," recalls Betty Kimble of her life as a black teenager attending school with Sly's older cousins (including future college halfback and pro football Hall of Famer Abner Haynes) in 1940s Denton. "We'd sit in the back of buses, and go to colored water fountains, and at the restaurants we went through the back door."
As southeast Denton laid in retail outlets and services along Prairie Street, one of its two blacktop thoroughfares, the churches did their best to sustain hope and community spirit. The newcomer St. Andrew Church of God in Christ and its pastor, F. L. Haynes, must have seemed like novelties alongside the established Methodist and Baptist sects, which dated back to Quakertown. Haynes's congregation was "more free with their rejoicing and all," says Ruby Cole, who went to church and school with several of the pastor's offspring, Sly's cousins. Others remember that before St. Andrew was constructed, worship occurred outdoors under a tent, and intimidated passersby would throw things at the "hollering" parishioners. Eventually St. Andrew earned more respect for its music. The pastor's younger sisters, Alpha (Sly's mother) and Omega, led hymns with pretty, powerful voices. Alpha's husband, K. C. Stewart, who'd relocated to Denton from Fort Worth, fashioned a percussion