Book dossier

Norris Wright Cuney

by Maud Cuney-Hare

Although a largely laudatory and uncritical study of a complex man, writer and musicologist Maud Cuney-Hare's 1913 biography of her father is still the most comprehensive account of the life of this prominent politician, businessman, and labor organizer. Born the son of a slave woman and a wealthy white planter, Norris Wright Cuney rose to become the most influential leader in the Republican Party in Texas in the late nineteenth century. Throughout his career he remained a viable force in electoral politics at a time when the political fortunes of African Americans were sharply declining. Elected as alderman in Galveston in a predominantly white ward, he developed a political base chiefly composed of black male workers, specifically the longshoremen he helped to organize. Cuney held key positions within the state and national Republican organization and in 1889 was appointed by President Benjamin Harrison as the Collector of Customs at Galveston, the most important federal position held by a black Southerner. Norris Wright Cuney: A Tribune of the Black People is a valuable record in the study of African-American political, social, and labor history.