A Southern Family in White and Black: the Cuneys of Texas.

A Southern Family in White and Black: The Cuneys of Texas. By Douglas Hales. Texas A&M Southwestern Studies. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 178. $29.95, ISBN 1-58544-200-3.)

Douglas Hales's biography traces three generations of the Cuney family from 1897 to 1936. After a brief sketch of white planter Philip Minor Cuney, the author devotes the better part of the book to Norris Wright Cuney--the fourth of eight mulatto children of the planter father and a slave mother. Wright Cuney received an education and eventually his freedom before the Civil War. He returned to Texas after the war and rose to prominence in local and state politics as leader of the state's Republican Party. Although the bulk of the work focuses on Wright Cuney, the best chapters examine his daughter, Maud Cuney-Hare, who left Texas and lived most of her life in the North. Cuney-Hare wrote one of the first scholarly studies of the music of black people in America and preserved folk songs, sacred music, and other works that would otherwise have perished. She befriended W. E. B. Du Bois, "passed" as white while married to a light-skinned African American doctor in Chicago, went through a sensational divorce, and became a renowned concert pianist and teacher.

Although Hales's work succeeds in rescuing a fascinating family from obscurity, its limited scope leads occasionally to oversimplification. For example, Hales details Norris Wright Cuney's single-handed campaign against corruption while serving as a Galveston alderman in 1884. Hales claims that Cuney's righteousness provoked the majority on the council to institute a system under which aldermen were elected by the city as a whole rather than by wards. This at-large system disfranchised African Americans and contributed to Cuney's defeat. However, the Galveston Daily News articles cited by Hales present a more complicated story. Cuney, for example, was only one of several councilmen to charge corruption. Cuney himself proposed the charter reform committee and offered a plan mixing single-member wards and at-large seats. His plan was not rejected by the committee, as Hales states, but was one of several plans to be sent to the legislature. However, at the meeting cited by Hales, the proposals for at-large municipal voting were tabled, not approved as Hales claims, when the men Cuney had accused of corruption refused to eliminate representation by ward. Cuney, therefore, was not the victim of a vindictive, anti-democratic majority but was in fact an advocate of limiting democratic participation in the name of efficient government. His defeat in the next council election stemmed from voting fraud and violence rather than the at-large system that Hales emphasizes.

Cuney and his time thus appear far more complex than Hales portrays them. Unfortunately, while errors are inevitable, oversimplifications such as this undermine an otherwise valuable introduction to a remarkable family.

ROBERT S. SHELTON

Cleveland State University