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Norris Wright Cuney, or simply Wright Cuney, (May 12, 1846March 3, 1898) was an American politician, businessman, union leader, and African-American activist in Texas in the United States. Following the American Civil War, he became active in Galveston politics, serving as an alderman and a national Republican delegate. Appointed as United States Collector of Customs in 1889 in Galveston, Cuney had the highest-ranking appointed position of any African American in the late 19th-century South.〔Hales (2003), p.16〕 He was a member of the Union League and helped attract black voters to the Republican Party; in the 1890s, more than 100,000 blacks were voting in Texas. Establishing his own business of stevedores, he helped to unionize black workers in Galveston, opening jobs for them on the docks. He substantially improved employment and educational opportunities for blacks in the city. He eventually rose to the chairmanship of the Texas Republican Party and became a national committeeman. Cuney is regarded by many as the most important black leader in Texas in the 19th century and one of the most important in the United States. Born into slavery, he was freed by his white planter father and sent to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for his education. The war interrupted his plans to attend Oberlin College, but he continued to learn all his life. He also became active in black fraternal organizations, and was elected by black Masons as the grand master of the Grand Lodge of Texas in 1875. ==Early life and education== Norris Wright Cuney was born on May 12, 1846 near Hempstead, Texas in the Brazos River valley.〔Hare (1913), p. 3〕 He was the fourth of eight children of Adeline Stuart, a mixed-race slave of African, European, and Native American ancestry. Among his siblings were his older brothers Joseph, who later became an attorney, and his younger brother Nelson, who became a building and painting contractor. Their father was Adeline's white master, Colonel Philip Cuney, a wealthy plantation owner of English ancestry. He also had a white family, and eventually married a total of three wives. He was a politician and state senator.〔Cartwright (1998), p. 131〕 By 1850 Philip Cuney was one of the largest landowners in the state, with 2,000 acres and 105 slaves, including Stuart. He was one of the 50 largest slaveowners in the state in 1860.〔Hales (2003), pp. 6〕 Cuney raised cotton but also had a dairy operation, with several hundred cows, plus beef cattle brought to the marriage by his second wife, Adeline Ware, with whom he had three children before her death before 1850.〔Hales (2003), pp. x, 6〕 He married for the third time in 1851. Cuney considered Houston his home, where he settled in 1853.〔Hare (1913), p. 8〕 By the principle of ''partus sequitur ventrem'', the mulatto Cuneys were all born into slavery, as their mother was a slave. Their father freed his mixed-race children and their mother, starting with Joseph in 1853, and sent his sons to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to the Wylie Street School for blacks for education.〔Hales (2003), p. 12〕 Norris was freed in 1859 and sent to Pittsburgh for schooling at that time. Jennie Cuney was freed and sent to Europe for her education; she later passed into white society.〔 The Civil War interrupted Norris' plans to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, which was open to students of all races and both genders.〔Gatewood (2000), p. 20〕 After the outset of the war, Norris Cuney gained work on a steamship that traveled between Cincinnati and New Orleans.〔 Spending a great deal of time in New Orleans, he became friends with influential figures such as P. B. S. Pinchback, who after the war succeeded to the position of Louisiana's first black governor.〔 At the end of the war, Cuney moved back to Texas and settled in Galveston. He entered postwar society as a literate, educated mulatto son of a wealthy white father, which gave him advantages. His mother and brothers joined him in Galveston, where they lived a few blocks apart.〔Hare (1913), p. 8〕〔Hales (2003), pp. xi, 17〕 Cuney began self-study in law and literature.〔 After the war, Cuney met George T. Ruby, a representative of the Freedmen's Bureau, the federal agency responsible for providing aid to former slaves. Its headquarters in Texas were in Galveston.〔 Ruby was secretly a director of the Union League, an organization dedicated to attracting freedmen to the Republican Party. (It was a relatively small organization in Texas at the time, as the Democratic Party had dominated southern white politics). Cuney became increasingly involved with the Union League and Ruby's ideology. In 1870 there were 3,000 blacks in the city,〔Hales (2003), pp. 15-16〕 nearly 25% of its 13,818 total in the US Census that year. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Norris Wright Cuney」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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