Mixed Race Studies

Mystery still surrounds ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’

The Houston Chronicle
Houston, Texas
2016-04-01

Joe Holley, Native Texan

A statue of “Emily Morgan” by Veryl Goodnight stands amidst a garden of yellow roses in an office complex across the street from Memorial City Mall in Houston. Photo: Joe Holley, Joe Holley/Houston Chronicle

So, what was happening in that red-and-white striped tent at about 4:30 on the afternoon of April 21, 1836? Santa Anna’s field tent at San Jacinto, that is.

Was the exhausted Mexican general in a deep daytime slumber, even as Gen. Sam Houston and his Texian army were massing for an attack just three-quarters of a mile away? That’s what Santa Anna said he was doing in a long report he presented to the Mexican government about that fateful spring day. (Actually, he said he was sleeping under a shade tree.)

Or, as Texas myth and the movies have it, was he entwined in the arms of a beautiful, young “mulatto” woman named Emily Morgan, the fabled “Yellow Rose of Texas,” and thus oblivious to the looming danger?

Of course, the latter is the spicy tale most of us would like to believe, although the intricate swirl of legend, lore and shrouded history makes it very difficult to tease out the truth. As Dallas attorney Jeff Dunn reminded me earlier this week, the Emily tale isn’t totally implausible, but with the evidence that’s been uncovered to date, there’s no way to prove it one way or the other. (Neither party took a selfie.)

Dunn, an amateur historian long interested in the Battle of San Jacinto, has researched the Emily story for 25 years. He’s as interested in how the story evolved and how it got entangled more than a century later with a popular minstrel song as he is in establishing the truth of the matter. He’ll be exploring both those issues at the annual San Jacinto Symposium next weekend here in Houston. The symposium topic is “African-Americans in Texas History from Spanish-Colonial Times to Annexation.”…

Read the entire article here.

Texas bucks U.S. trend on standardized scoring

Houston Chronicle
2011-07-25

Jennifer Radcliffe
 
It will tally multiracial students but not report their scores separately

Multiracial students are being tallied for the first time in Texas history, but their standardized test scores won’t appear as a separate group when accountability ratings are released Friday.

As it grapples with increasing diversity, Texas has opted not to measure the scores of the state’s 78,419 multiracial, non-Hispanic students as an ethnic subgroup whose performance matters in determining whether a school made “adequate yearly progress.”
 
Instead, they’ll join the ranks of the 180,000 Asian students lumped in with their schools’ entire student body for accountability purposes…

…Some scores moved
 
As Texas transitions to the new categories this year, state officials have opted to return some multiracial students’ scores to their previous category, if records indicate that the student was originally listed as white or African American. Their scores will only count in that previous category if they improve the school’s rating…

Read the entire article here.