In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, November 3rd, as many of us were settling into our beds preparing to bask in pleasant dreams about the outcome of the General Election, Joe Straus, the Speaker of the Texas House, announced:

“I will continue to lead the Texas House in a fair and respectful way as Speaker, and at this early hour, I’m grateful to have 122 colleagues support me for Speaker, including 76 Republicans and 46 Democrats, and I look forward to visiting with more members in the coming days.”

For many of us newly christened political junkies, this just didn’t go down well with our morning coffee. After all, the voice of the people had only been expressed hours before. You may have asked yourself, “In this climate, how dare a politician take our support, the public’s support, for granted?” And there’s the rub – Straus did not believe that he needed our support. No speaker during the last three decades had needed the support of Texas voters. The pre-election Good ‘Ole Boy network had been at work behind the scenes. And, Speaker Straus thought that 2010/2011 would be business as usual.

In 2008 Judge Sam Sparks overturned the “speaker’s statute”. Until then it was illegal for advocacy groups to spend “anything of value” to influence the election of the speaker.

Because of the “speaker’s statute” the Speaker’s race had never been at the forefront of the average voters’ minds. It is possible that no previous Speaker of the Texas House ever pondered if individual Texans would be supportive, if they were given the opportunity to vote for them. It is likely that past Speakers knew that most Texan’s didn’t know the difference between the Texas House of Representatives and the U.S. House of Representatives, and until now, no Speaker ever lost sleep over voter’s preferences.

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Saturday, August 28, 2010, my husband, two daughters, and I attended the Restoring Honor rally in Washington D.C. It was a wonderful experience for us all. The crowd was huge (500,000 + people), very peaceful, and individuals were kind and patient. You might think that the important part of the weekend was the three and a half hours (or more) that we spent together during the rally. When I was sitting under the bright, hot sun with my friends from Texas, I thought so too. But I was wrong…

During the first leg of our trip from D.C. to Chicago, our two daughters, ages 22 and 16, sat next to an African-American gentleman wearing an Obama inauguration t-shirt. After take-off, he mentioned to them that he had travelled to D.C. to attend Al Sharpton’s Reclaim the Dream rally. Our older daughter told him that they were in D.C. for the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally, and the conversation took off from there.

The gentlemen told my daughters that he went to the Restoring Honor rally with several friends because Al Sharpton told them that we were holding a negative protest that was against MLK’s message and against those who had gathered for Rev. Sharpton’s rally. He said that when he and his friends arrived that they didn’t see anything that they expected, so they stayed a bit to listen. They realized that Restoring Honor was not anything like what Rev. Sharpton told them to expect. They then returned to the Sharpton rally to try to tell several people that what Rev. Sharpton was saying about our rally was not true. He saw that our rally was not a political or hateful rally, and that it was not meant to divide Americans. He tried to get a message to Rev. Sharpton prior to his speech, but either he didn’t get the message or he ignored the message. Rev. Sharpton went forward with his original speech as planned.

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Today, we celebrate Juneteenth.  On this day in 1865, the slaves in Galveston, Texas learned from Union General Gordon Granger that they had been freed by the application of the Emancipation Proclamation with the end of the American Civil War.

The Central Texas 9-12 Project continues to focus on educating ourselves about American history.  We are inspired by “Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black and White” by David Barton (available at Amazon.com).  This book discusses the contributions that African Americans made to our American culture well before the modern civil rights movement.  As we did further research we found a list of African-American Republicans on Wikipedia.  There are only 98 listed here.

While we maintain a non-partisan position for our organization, we feel that this list of 98 Republicans  drastically underestimates the number of politically conservative African-Americans. We will add this gentleman to the list, E. Frederic Morrow.  (1906-1994) Morrow was the first African-American to hold an executive position at the White House.  He served under President Dwight D. Eisenhower as Administrative Officer for Special Projects from 1955 to 1961.

Wikipedia is edited by the users. There are no pre-requisites and no costs associated with contributing accurate, factual information to this resource. In the spirit of honoring the contributions of African-Americans from both sides of the aisle, and with a desire to reach further back in our country’s history than the last fifty years, we issue this call to action.

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