The Auction Block and the Hit Song: Blues Is My Business

Written By: Amy Abugo Ongiri

Slavery continues to be an uncomfortable topic for most Americans. This is doubly so for Americans of African descent because of its association with our collective trauma, pain, and sorrow. In many ways, though, the story of our enslavement is one of radical hope. It is awe inspiring to consider the fact that even though all the technologies of European modernity and industrialization were allied in the attempt to control, oppress, and even eliminate us, and we are still here and very much free. What kept us here and moving towards freedom was our indigenous knowledge. Our agrarian roots didn’t start with our enslavement. Many enslaved people were expert planters and cultivators in Africa, and that knowledge was at least part of the reason that we were stolen away by Europeans in the first place, because they valued our ability to cultivate rice and other plants that would become mainstays in the US.

The seeds we planted under that bitter experience flourished despite the pain that we also experienced under enslavement. Music and sound became our means of resistance, and the seeds that we planted culturally flourished as well, despite the horrible conditions under which they came to expression.  It is commonly known that the roots of all US popular music originate in African American expressive culture. But do we always know how deep and widely those roots go?

One of the most impactful popular protest songs of all time has its roots in the 19th-century expression of slaves who sought freedom and liberation under what Amiri Baraka called “the worst kind of slavery.” Baraka wrote the book Blues People, a landmark study of the impact of enslavement on the development of African American culture. For him, the blues were the deepest experience of cultural expression created as people turned from Africans during enslavement into African Americans. Baraka would write: “Blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American captives.”  

Sometime in the late 1800s, possibly earlier, enslaved African Americans composed a song expressing their desire for liberation. The song was called “No More Auction Block for Me,” and it is a carefully detailed account of all of the things that enslaved people will joyfully leave behind when they achieve freedom. The song focuses on both the everyday aspects of slavery, such as the insufficient food rations, as the song exclaims, “no more pinch of salt for me, no more peck of corn for me.” While the rest of the song celebrates the end of the harsh realities of slavery, “no more hundred lash for me, no more mistress call for me.” An early publication of the song that appeared in 1867 said it was a song “to which the Rebellion had actually given rise.” Exactly which rebellion is somewhat in question, as very few people were concerned about recording the facts of Black resistance in the 1800s.

Image credit the Smithsonian

When it was written down in 1867, the author claims that “it was first sung” when enslaved people were sent to build fortifications for the confederate army on the Gullah Islands of Hilton Head and Bay Point. It is likely that enslaved people sang the song before this moment, but this was the first time that their enslavers heard it and recorded it. From a contemporary standpoint, it seems unlikely that enslaved people sang the song in support of the confederacy as its earliest recorders implied. Enslaved labor formed the cornerstone of the confederate rebellion, and the confederacy was fighting to maintain it. The alternate title for the song “Many Thousands Gone” suggests that the song was either a lament for the losses under slavery or a celebration of those who had managed to escape it by running away.

Canadians have long celebrated the song as part of the heritage of the “Black Loyalists” of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Black Loyalists were enslaved and free people of African descent who sided with the British during the Revolutionary War. In 1775, a British proclamation promised land, freedom, and protection to any person of African descent who fought for the British. When it was clear that the British would not win, thousands of these soldiers and their families fled across the border to Canada, forming some of the first free settlements there in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. These soldiers faced discrimination and denial of benefits that they were promised, though many persevered and were foundational to Canadian society. At least a thousand of these Black Loyalists elected to leave Canada and return to Africa in 1792. They settled in Sierra Leone and created the city of Freetown, which is now the capital and largest city in that country.

Whether the song is the product of the civil war or the revolutionary war, the song’s impact continues to be deeply felt, though, like the history of enslaved people, it’s not always acknowledged. The singer Odetta began performing the song in the 1950s and recorded it on her 1960 album Live at Carnegie Hall. Known as “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” Odetta explored the history of African American culture in song. When she began singing “No More Auction Block for Me” at folk music venues around New York City, she was heard by a young Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, himself, would begin performing the song, undoubtedly influenced by sharing the stage with Odetta in many of those same venues.

Dylan was already deeply influenced by Odetta’s music, and, in fact, he claimed it was Odetta who made him a folk singer in the first place. Dylan had become Dylan by practicing to an Odetta album when he was still a teenager in Minnesota. It was, according to him, the first folk album that he ever owned, and he learned every song on it. It was the music of Odetta that convinced Dylan to give up the electric guitar that he had been playing as a teenager and turn to folk music in the first place. He even bought the same model of acoustic guitar as Odetta, saying: “Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.” In 1965, Odetta would turn the tables on Dylan by recording Odetta Sings Dylan.

Odetta in 1961

Bob Dylan released the anti-war song “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1963, and it would go on to become one of the best-selling and most iconic protest songs in US history. Since its release, the song has been recorded hundreds of times by a wide variety of artists. When the folk group Peter, Paul, and Mary released their version of the song (also in 1963), it sold 300,000 copies in its first week and quickly exceeded a million sales. Since the song was copyrighted to Bob Dylan when he wrote the lyrics in the 1960s, he has continued to profit tremendously from its recording. In 2019, the song was even used in a Budweiser advertisement that aired during the Super Bowl.

It wasn’t until 1978 that Bob Dylan would acknowledge that “Blowin’ in the Wind” was a direct adaptation from “No More Auction Block for Me.”

The song literally made him millions, but he didn’t owe anything to the song’s original creators. Dylan has a long history of litigation around his “borrowing” of elements of songs from other musicians, but when “No More Auction Block for Me” was first written down in 1867 in Slave Songs of the United States, its creation was simply attributed to “Anonymous.” One could argue that it would have been impossible for Dylan to compensate African Americans for their creative work because of the conditions of the work’s creation that were beyond his control. But that wouldn’t explain why it took so long for him to acknowledge the song’s origins.

The creation of US popular music has always been a profoundly material as well as aesthetic process. In Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, Matthew D. Morrison marks the way that music as the space of Black creative possibility also became the space in which American commercial music was created as well. This space was not only one of creative productivity but also, as many scholars have noted, one that replicated the wider theft and exploitation occurring in mainstream US culture. Morrison notes: “Blacksound is the locus through which the original performances (sonic and corporeal aesthetics) of black musicians—who develop their practices both within their own segregated communities and in relation to European American and other ethnic styles over time—were then taken up as sources of property to be owned and copyrighted by mostly white musicians in the establishment of the popular music industry.”

It is hard to imagine what it must have been like for the originators of “No More Auction Block for Me” to sit and imagine freedom when it barely seemed like a possibility. It was a leap of radical hope and undoubtedly a very sacred moment. The journey of the song from a lament and call for liberation by enslaved African Americans to its hidden uses and commercial success for non-Black people is emblematic of the ways in which Black music exists within American culture in general. African Americans have always provided commercial music’s roots and also its branches but have rarely been fully acknowledged for that work. Our lyrical cries for freedom have nourished us when freedom didn’t even seem possible. We and all other Americans have always received the benefits of that imaginative leap even when it hasn’t been acknowledged or compensated. The musical continuity from slavery to the present moments assure that our sacred moments will never be lost to us.

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Copyrights 2025

Written By:
Allen Johnston
Music Specialist

Big Joe Turner

The idea that major record labels will be devastated by the wave of artists reclaiming their
copyrights is almost laughable, especially when considering what these labels currently own
and control.

Major record companies have long relied on their back catalog as a built-in revenue stream.
Sales of CDs, digital streams, vinyl, and live performance recordings continue to sustain them
while revenue from new artists remains unpredictable. Over the decades, these corporations
have strategically structured the industry in their favor.

During the 1980s, major labels executed a plan that dismantled independent Black and White
retailers while securing dominance over distribution. They introduced the SoundScan system,
offering free computers to independent store owners and coalitions. This initiative gave labels
direct access to sales data, allowing them to pinpoint which catalog titles were consistent
sellers. With this knowledge, they could optimize manufacturing costs while maximizing profits.

Since they owned the copyrights, they essentially paid themselves through mechanical,
synchronization, and performance publishing rights.Recording contracts from that era—and even before—ensured that major labels retained nearlyall revenue streams from copyrights. Artists were left with only a fraction of publishing revenue, limited performance royalties, and sometimes a cut of merchandising. PA (musical composition) and SR (sound recording) copyrights for nearly every hit song before 1984 remain under the ownership or control of a major label or one of its affiliates. For instance, Sony Music might control the SR copyright of a song, hold at least 50% of the PA copyright through contractual agreements, and place the composition within its wholly owned publishing division. This setup allowed money to circulate internally, with one corporate division paying another. Additionally, many artists had taken advances against royalties, leading to labels claiming ownership over original songwriter shares as well.

Artists affected by these agreements include, but are not limited to: Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Clyde McPhatter & The Drifters, Big Joe Turner, The Temptations, Little Richard, Wilson Pickett, Fats Domino, The Dominoes, Sly & The Family Stone, Lloyd Price, Martha & The Vandellas, Parliament-Funkadelic, The Four Tops, The Isley Brothers, Jackie Wilson, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Kool & The Gang, The Supremes, Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers, Earth, Wind & Fire, and many more.

Even in the worst-case scenario, where some artists reclaim their rights, major labels will simply renegotiate with savvy copyright owners who have financial leverage. For everyone else, it will remain business as usual—offering advances in exchange for new contracts.

These catalogs retain immense value in the digital age, particularly in streaming, film and commercial licensing, and corporate partnerships. With their industry connections, financial muscle, and technological infrastructure, major labels remain well-positioned to continue profiting from these assets.

Harvard Cancels Slavery Research program

Update on a troubling situation!

By: Kristina Mullenix, the Alabama Storykeeper 

Harvard recently fired researchers for their Slavery Remembrance program without notice and after researchers uncovered links to slavery in Antigua and Barbuda. In September, the vice provost had told them "don't find too many descendants." The project, according to news, has been handed over to American Ancestors in Boston. 

Link from Instagram about firing: 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFTAEpjJn9q/?igsh=MW5yanJ6cm1zajd5aw==

News articles about the situation: 

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/1/24/harvard-disbands-slavery-remembrance-program/ 

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/01/24/harvard-outsources-slavery-remembrance-program-lays-off-staff/ 

This is the website about the project (still on their webpage): 

https://legacyofslavery.harvard.edu/homepage 

the culture of black girl tokenism

BY: SAMARA PEARLEY

Growing up, seeing black girls on television made me appreciate my skin color and inspired me to be an actress. But I never really paid close attention to the role of black girls on syndicated cable shows. Lately I've noticed that a lot of black roles in programs I watch are grounded in tokenism. Tokenism was established in the 1950s and was termed in the 1970s. In the late 60s and early 70s another form of token was established, “the token black”. According to Ruth  Thibodeau in her piece From Racism to Tokenism: The Changing Face Of Blacks in New Yorker Cartoons, “cartoons were mostly racially themed, and depicted black people in token roles where they are only there to create a sense of inclusion”. Though Ruth was speaking specifically about cartoons, this idea can be applied to any medium featuring only one black character. Today in an era of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) we see the same things Thibodeau described in her writings. Tokenism strongly suggests the one black character among the many non black means a diverse voice or cast. To be fair, tokenism also includes members of the BIPOC and LGBTQIA community in predominantly white programs, but for the purpose of my scholarship, I'm focusing on black girls. Being a token means being different from the rest of the group in order to create some kind of diversity. Tokenism is a tactic, strategy used to get the optics of inclusion for marginalized people. Unwelcome Guest on the website Antimoon.com states: “An example of a token black would be a black person who is hired in a company, not because of his or her skills but because the company is by law to hire black people. It's not a derogatory term.”

 Monique Coleman would be a good example of tokenism. She is the only black-non mixed character in a predominantly white cast. Monique is well known for being on the hit Disney channel original movie (DCOM) High School Musical.  In an interview in December of 2022 with Christy Carlson Romano, Coleman states that “disney broke her heart”. Coleman went on to say how they left her out of the high school musical promo tour. She says their reasoning for leaving her and another cast member out was because “they didn't have enough room on the plane”. I find it suspicious how she was on the front cover of all the movies, one of the main characters, and her character Taylor was the smartest girl in school, but she wasn't on the tour? I'm sure Disney had enough resources to accommodate Monique. Coleman’s castmate is Corbin Bleu who is mixed. Do you find it suspicious that he got invited on the plane and Monique didn't? He gets to wear his natural hair but she doesn't? For example, in an article published by the Guardian, Coleman states that her hair stylist for high school musical did her hair very poorly in the front. And because of that she suggested wearing headbands so the stylists wouldn't have to cover her hair up with a hat everytime she was on screen.

Tokenism leads to stereotypes as well as mistreatment of black actors. It can also result in short lived programming of African American content. A result of mistreatment of blacks as a whole in this space is, black shows don't have the same life as non black shows, whether the show is good or bad. For example True Jackson v.p a show about a Black girl named True who was offered a job at mad style (a predominantly white fashion company) as the vice president of their teen apparel department. Keke Palmer is the main character of this show. This show got canceled after 2 seasons. Keke Palmer is in the process of trying to get theTtrue Jackson V.P. reboot done, while her counterparts iCarly and Zoey 101 have gotten, approved, and aired their reboots. Is this based on race? I can't say. However the track record of disparity between blacks and whites are very real. Recently Nickelodeon has been airing a show titled “That Girl Lay Lay” with not only 2 black girl leads but a predominantly black cast! There's no information on whether it's getting renewed or canceled, but I hope that this show can get a 3rd season. There's a lot of work to be done but this show signifies progress.

John H. Bracey, Jr., a pioneer of Black Studies

BY: DR ANDREW ROSA

In “the Grand Tradition”: A Reflection on the Passing of John H. Bracey, Jr., a pioneer of Black Studies Western Kentucky University 

“To teach is to mentor, and to mentor is to teach and lead students out,” John H. Bracey, Jr., 2019

Historians are, by and large, not noted for introspection. Our calling requires us to analyze past events, but rarely do we turn our interpretive talents upon ourselves. The occasion of John H. Bracey’s recent passing from the scene at the age of 81, however, has prompted me to reflect upon his significance to the field of Black studies and to my own evolution as a scholar of Black history. While beyond the scope of this reflection, I contend that any comprehensive examination of Bracey’s life history would illuminate an important genealogy of Black intellectualism essential to an understanding of the history of Black studies and a model for doing Black history at a moment when many states, especially across the U.S. South, seem to be engaged in a general assault on any type of knowledge that interrogates such critical issues as race, sex, gender, and class. 

My relationship to Bracey began when I arrived to the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1998, after receiving my masters from Temple University. In the broader history of Black studies, Temple is distinguished for establishing the first PhD-granting program in the field and for capturing, by the time I got there in 1995, significant media attention due, in no small part, to its Afrocentric orientation and to the charisma, entrepreneurialism, scholarly productivity, and rhetorical acumen of its chairperson, Molefi Kete Asante. Who could but forget the noisy academic battles that erupted during this period between Asante and the Wellesley classicist Mary Lefkowitz over how much, if anything, the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, and all Western thought for that matter, owed to the cultures of Africa, and particularly Egypt. This debate resulted in some notable books by Asante and Lefkowitz, as well as several acerbic essays in such popular outlets as The Washington Post, and Village Voice. In this way Afrocentricity was introduced to a wider public as a combination of racial romanticism, historical mythmaking, popular history, and the paradigmatic antithesis of Eurocentricity in that it purported to be a corrective to the wholesale exclusion of Africa and Africans from the unfolding of world history.  

To be clear, my choice of Temple for graduate school was not rooted in a desire to study under Asante, or by any unquestionable commitment to Afrocentrism. In fact, I knew very little about either at the time, and simply chose Temple because it was considered the premier graduate program in Black studies and I was offered a full ride in the form of a Future Faculty Fellowship, which aimed to increase the number of minority faculty in the professoriate. More than this, Temple offered me the opportunity to continue a course of study that began when I was an undergraduate student at Hampshire College where I felt as if I walked in the shadows of Great Barrington’s own W.E.B. Du Bois and the writer extraordinaire James Baldwin, who briefly taught in the Five College Consortium as a visiting faculty, before returning to the south of France where he died a few years before I started my undergraduate journey. At Hampshire, I had the good fortune of studying under the likes of Robert Coles, e. francis white, Michael Ford, Andrew Salkey, and David Blight, to name a few. Each of these individuals shaped how I first began to seriously analyze the history, culture, and contributions of people of African descent to U.S. society, which led me into the interdisciplinary field of Black studies. 

At Temple I came to appreciate how Afrocentrism represented a distinct school of thought within the larger universe of Black studies and, beyond this, an important variant in a long tradition of Black intellectualism that, since the early nineteenth century, defended Black capacity from attack by marking the achievements of African civilizations in the long centuries before European contact and the rise of racial slavery. For Asante, Afrocentricity’s centering of African knowledge systems made it the ideal foundational philosophy for the discipline; however, I came to reject efforts to impose a single methodology on doing Black studies, seeing it as stifling, unrealistic, and anti-intellectual. Moreover, as one who grew up in diverse working-class communities on both side of the Atlantic, Afrocentricity seemed to me to reinforce troubling discourses and hierarchies, and fell well short, as a research methodology, for engaging with the actual history and cultures of Africa. In addition to its inability to account for the hybrid identities and experiences across Africa and its diaspora, Afrocentricity’s emphasis on the dynastic universe of ancient Nile River Valley civilization made, in my view, little room for considering the contributions of Black people to the making of the New World and and an understanding of the myriad transformations wrought by the process of enslavement and colonialism. 

It was this type of interrogation that led me to join the doctoral program at UMass where I was one of five students admitted into the History track of the program’s second class. It was here where I developed a wider understanding of Black Studies’ history and learned how the UMass program was uniquely connected to Black movement history. In fact, it seemed as if the department’s founding faculty rode into academia on a wave of campus revolts, the freedom movement in the South, and several militant organizations that took hold in cities across the country in the era of Black Power. The department’s first acting head, Michael Thelwell, was a close confidant of Kwame Toure (Stockley Carmichael) and a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Howard University. As a student at Bennett College, where she now serves as provost, Esther Terry participated in the sit-in movement in Greensboro, North Carolina and was instrumental in the founding of SNCC. Ernest Allen, Jr. was active in the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and became a leading historian on Black nationalism; William Strickland was Malcom X’s biographer and a founding member, along with Vincent Harding, of the Atlanta-based Institute of the Black World (IBW)—a grassroots organization committed to bringing Black studies into Black communities. 

Of John Bracey, he arrived to UMass in 1972 by way of Howard University in Washington, D.C. and Chicago where he attended both Roosevelt University and Northwestern University. At Roosevelt, Bracey came under the influence of the linguist Lorenzo Turner, Charles Hamilton, coauthor of Black Power (1967), August Meier, an historian of Black intellectual history, and, most significantly, St. Clair Drake, a trailblazer in urban sociology and a pioneering figure in both African and African American studies. At Northwestern, Bracey became involved in the Black studies movement along with the likes of James Turner, Christopher Reed, and Darlene Clark Hine, all leading figures in the field of Black Studies today. 

As with most of the founding faculty of the Du Bois Department, Bracey was active in the civil rights, Black liberation, and peace movements, working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Chicago Friends of SNCC, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and RAM. Bracey often recalled how his arrival to UMass was the result of a request from Du Bois himself to hire the executor of his estate, the historian, Communist, and author of American Negro Slave Revolt (1943), Herbert Aptheker, as a condition of acquiring his personal papers. Meeting resistance from the Massachusetts legislature, Aptheker advised Thelwell to request five new faculty lines for the department in his place, one of which became Bracey’s position. More than underscoring the curious intersection of Cold War politics and Black studies, this story of Bracey’s joining UMass points to the insistence of the department’s founding faculty to protect their autonomy in building a program that would advance Black scholarship and mobilize knowledge for the liberation of Black peoples and all other exploited groups worldwide. 

In the long years after the battle over Black studies had been won and new questions arose as to theory, methodology, and the place of the discipline in relation to larger Black community, Bracey was instrumental in moving the Du Bois Department forward by bringing in a host of brilliant faculty who were at the forefront of charting new directions in the field of Black studies. Over the course of a career that spanned more than a half century, Bracey established himself as a giant in Black studies and a veritable institution within himself. A lifetime member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), National Council of Black Studies (NCBS), and the Organization of American Historians (OAH) Bracey’s significance and presence were felt across the profession. As a scholar with an enormous range of interests and competencies, he resists simple definition.  He wrote several award-winning works on Black life and history, and produced the kind of documentary and bibliographic research that gave textual substance to Black studies; all of this he made accessible to scholars, teachers, and students.  

Bracey was also a consummate collaborator, working with such prominent thinkers as Sharon Harley, August Meier, James Smethurst Manisha Sinha, Sonia Sanchez, and Elliott Rudwick, to name just a few. While much of his writing and research focused on Black social and cultural history, radical ideologies and movements, and the history of Black women, he also produced comparative and transnational histories, which explored, for example, relations between African Americans and Native Americans, Afro-Latinx, and Jewish Americans. This includes several co-edited volumes, such as Black Nationalism in America (1970); the award-winning African American Women and the Vote: 1837-1965 (1997); Strangers and Neighbors: Relations between Blacks and Jews in the United States (1999); and African American Mosaic: A Documentary History from the Slave Trade to the Twenty-First Century (2004). From an award-winning essay on the musician John Coltrane in the Massachusetts Review in 2016 to his contribution to the Furious Flower poetry anthology in 2019, even Bracey’s final works stand as testaments to his interdisciplinary imagination, creative spirit, and genuine love for Black people. 

As a model for Black studies, Bracey’s legacy suggests that the best of the discipline is in its interdisciplinary approach to knowledge production, its embrace of scholarly rigor and analysis, and in its mindfulness of the history, culture, and contributions made by people of African descent in the U.S., and throughout the African diaspora. Despite the many transformations that have accompanied the institutionalization and expansion of Black studies in American higher education, for Bracey, the discipline’s priority commitment to subjecting society to the most serious analysis to generate greater understanding of Black people’s experiences in the modern world was one that always remained steadfast and foundational to the Black studies enterprise. 

I cannot help but to think of how my own work documenting the life history of St. Clair Drake was perhaps inspired by the genuine affection Bracey carried for his Roosevelt mentor and their shared commitment to the field of Black studies. As he once informed me, “Drake was my teacher and guide in the struggle.” For this reason, the idea of building an interdisciplinary department of scholar-activists at UMass “was not that utopian. After all,” he concluded, “we had Professor Drake himself—co-author [with Horace Cayton] of Black Metropolis (1945), Pan Africanist and advisor to Kwame Nkrumah, participant in civil rights marches and sit-ins for over three decades, sociologist, anthropologist and political theorist—as a model.” In this way Bracey laid claim to an intellectual estate that can be traced, through Drake, to Black studies earlier peripheries, particularly to those sites where Black intellectuals were free to combine scholarship and militant activism in what Drake called “the grand tradition.” 

Buffalo Soldier Project, San Angelo Texas, and Black History

By Lamont Jack Pearley

In this episode of the African American Folklorist, I speak with Sherley Spears, NAACP Unit 6219 President, Vice President of the National Historic Landmark Fort Concho Museum Board, and founder of the Buffalo Soldier Project. The National Historic Landmark Fort Concho Museum preserves the structures and archeological site features for pride and educational purposes, serving the San Angelo, Texas community. 

Sherley Spears

NAACP Unit 6219 President, Vice President of the National Historic Landmark Fort Concho Museum Board, and founder of the Buffalo Soldier Project.

One significant story coming from Fort Concho and the San Angelo community is the contributions and community development of and by the Buffalo Soldiers. On July 28, 1866, Congress passed the Army Organization Act, allowing African American men including many former slaves to serve in the specially created all-black military units following the Civil War.  The original troops were 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st Infantry.  In 1869, the four infantry regiments were reorganized to form the 24th and 25th Infantry. Eventually, troops from each of these regiments served at Fort Concho. These black troops would be given the name ”Buffalo Soldiers," allegedly, by the Indian tribes because of their dark, thick, curly hair resembling buffalo hair. Fort Concho, originally established in 1867, was built for soldiers protecting frontier settlers traveling west against Indian tribes in the area.

Buffalo Soldiers

Buffalo Soldiers of the American 10th Cavalry Regiment

A notable member of the San Angelo community was Elijah Cox, a retired soldier from the 10th Cavalry. While never stationed with the Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Concho, Cox lived and worked many jobs there. He was a well-known musician and played for many of the socials and events held at Fort Concho. Elijah was a fiddler, he and his son, Ben played for all of the dances at the Fort. Elijah, born and remained a freeman, settled in San Angelo, Texas, and would learn the songs of the slave from ex-slaves now soldiers. Elijah would become the traditional bearer of these songs as he played fiddle, guitar, and sang. You can hear my podcast on his story here. 

FULL NEW EPISODE FEATURING SHERLEY SPEARS

These, and much more crucial historic narratives are being preserved by Ms. Sherley Spears and the organizations adamant of raising the awareness of African American contributions to the establishment and sustainability of Fort Concho & San Angelo, Texas.