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By Root 625 0

for itself (replete with rodeos and cowboy culture), it was very much a Southern city during the first half of the twentieth century, with everything that entailed, even as the burgeoning oil industry supplanted the cotton economy that had helped Houston flourish. The sharecropping system of the surrounding rural areas was collapsing as African Americans moved to the city looking for jobs and a better way of life. Houston’s black community was spread across principally the Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards. While the ward system of government was dissolved by the City of Houston in the early 1900s, the names remained, and as the city evolved over the years, so did the geographical boundaries of the neighborhoods they defined.

Racism was rampant in Houston. The separate-but-equal principle, upheld by the United States Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), legalized racial discrimination, and Houston, like other cities throughout Texas, passed Jim Crow laws that restricted African American access to public facilities and permeated every social, political, and economic institution in the city, including housing, education, and employment.

On August 23, 1917, years of racial tension erupted in a deadly riot that was triggered by the arrest of a black soldier stationed at Camp Logan on the outskirts of the city, for interfering with the arrest of a black woman in the Fourth Ward. Though the soldier was released, rumors spread to Camp Logan that he had been executed, and more than one hundred black soldiers marched on the city in protest, killing sixteen whites, including five policemen. The consequences of the riot were severe; nineteen black soldiers were hanged and sixty-three received life sentences in federal prison, and the separation of blacks and whites across the city was strictly enforced and more carefully monitored.1

Lower-, middle-, and upper-class African Americans lived and worked in close proximity to one another, but the level of education and income of the residents in the wards varied greatly. Articles in the Houston Informer, founded as the Texas Freeman in 1893 and still publishing today, attest to the diversity of life in the segregated wards, and point out the complexities of social, economic, political, and cultural growth among all sectors of the black population in which Sam Hopkins lived and worked.2

The Fourth Ward, established as a freedman’s town after the Civil War, was the site of the first black church, high school, and medical facility in the city. As it grew, so did the degree of stratification within the community there. It developed its own musical identity early on. It was home to what was known as the Santa Fe Group, a loosely knit assemblage of blues pianists in the 1920s and ‘30s which included Robert Shaw, Black Boy Shine, Pinetop Burks, and Rob Cooper. Together and individually, these pianists frequented the roadhouses along the Santa Fe railroad that sold “chock” (bootleg liquor) and prostitution, playing a distinctive style of piano that combined elements of blues with the syncopation of ragtime.

According to Shaw, there were so many blues pianists in Houston during this period that each neighborhood had its own particular style. In the Fifth Ward, the most well-known pianists and vocalists were members of the George W. Thomas family. The eldest child George Thomas Jr. was born about 1885, followed by his sister Beulah, better known as Sippie Wallace, and brother, Hersal. Their style of piano playing involved more fully developed bass patterns than those of the Santa Fe Group.3

The Fifth Ward of Houston also had an area known as Frenchtown, where about five hundred blacks of French and Spanish descent migrated from Louisiana in 1922. As the population grew, the music performed there reflected both Creole and African American influences, not only in blues but in the emerging zydeco style. African American businesses, from restaurants, pharmacies, and doctors’ offices to undertakers, beauty parlors, and barbershops, flourished on Lyons Avenue and served the people who lived in