The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 75, July 1971 - April, 1972 Page: 262

Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Association in 1891. It is an ironic commentary on late nineteenth-
century race relations, however, that white chaplains and other of-
ficers who often compared the black soldiers favorably with any
troops in the army could never escape a sense of paternalism toward
them.
Though less detailed than William H. Leckie's account of the
Negro cavalry in the West, this volume is similarly based on thorough
research primarily in the official army manuscript records. Arlen L.
Fowler thus joins Leckie, John D. Weaver, Philip Durham and Ev-
erett L. Jones, W. Sherman Savage, and Kenneth W. Porter in re-
viving and analyzing the role of black people in the western United
States. Chaplain Mullins foreshadowed the importance of such studies
when he noted the black troops "are possessed of the notion that
the colored people of the whole country are more or less affected
by their conduct in the army." Rayford Logan later confirmed this
view, for "Negroes had little at the turn of the century to help
sustain our faith in ourselves except the pride that we took in the
Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth In-
fantry. . . . They were our Ralph Bunche, Marion Anderson, Joe
Louis, and Jackie Robinson."
Texas Tech University ALWYN BARR
The Negro in Texas, 874-1900oo. By Lawrence D. Rice. (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Pp. ix+3o9.
Footnotes, bibliography, index. $ o.oo.)
The study of Black Texans is an often neglected aspect of Texas
history, notwithstanding the myriad volumes devoted to Texans.
Lawrence D. Rice closes one gap in that story with his informative,
interestingly written, and well-researched investigation of black Tex-
ans from 1874 to 1900oo. His book, a significant addition to the knowl-
edge of black-white relations in the United States as well as in
Texas, is similar in nature and scope to the studies of Vernon L.
Wharton and George B. Tindall. Texas Negroes endured an exist-
ence much like that of blacks in other southern states, but with some
noticeable peculiarities due to the more recent arrival of blacks in
Texas, the frontier atmosphere of the state, and the presence of other
ethnic groups.
The most important contribution that Rice makes in this book
is his comprehensive examination of blacks and politics; although

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