Norris Wright Cuney, or simply Wright Cuney, (May 12, 1846 – March 3, 1898) was an American politician, businessman, union leader, and advocate for the rights of African-Americans in Texas. Following the American Civil War, he became active in Galveston politics, serving as an alderman and a national Republican delegate. He was 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.[1] 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 stevedores business, 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.
Norris Wright Cuney was born on May 12, 1846, near Hempstead, Texas, in the Brazos River valley.[2] He was the fourth of eight children of Adeline Stuart, a mixed-race slave of African, European, and Native American ancestry. Among his mixed-race siblings, all of whom were white-passing, were his older brother Joseph, who later became an attorney, and his younger brother Nelson, who became a building and painting contractor.[3] Their father was Adeline's white master, colonel Philip Cuney, a wealthy planter of English ancestry. He had a white "first" family and eventually married a total of three white wives after the earliest ones died in childbirth or from disease. All his mixed-race children were enslaved at birth. Philip Cuney was a politician and was elected as a state senator.[4]
By 1850 Philip Cuney was one of the largest landowners in the state, with 2,000 acres and 105 slaves, including Stuart and her children. In 1860 he was one of the 50 largest slaveowners in the state.[5] 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.[6] He married for the third time in 1851. Cuney considered Houston his home, where he settled in 1853.[7]
By the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, adopted from the model of Virginia colonial slave law, the mixed-race, majority-white Stuart children were all enslaved at birth, as their mother was enslaved. Their father freed his mixed-race children and their mother sometime before the Civil War, starting with the oldest son Joseph in 1853. He sent his sons to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to the Wylie Street School for Blacks for education.[8] When Norris was freed in 1859, he took his father's surname of Cuney. His father also sent him to Pittsburgh for schooling at that time. Jennie Cuney was freed and sent to Europe for her education; she later passed into white society, consistent with her majority-white ancestry.[8] The Civil War interrupted Norris' plans to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, which was open to students of all races and both genders.[9]
After the outset of the war, Norris Cuney gained work on a steamship that traveled on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers between Cincinnati and New Orleans.[9] Spending a great deal of time in New Orleans, he became friends with influential figures such as P. B. S. Pinchback, a mixed-race man educated in the North who returned to the South after the war. He was elected as a Republican lieutenant governor of Louisiana and succeeded to the position of the state's first Black governor.[7]
At the end of the war, Cuney moved back to Texas and settled in Galveston. He entered postwar society as a literate, educated son of a wealthy and powerful white politician father, which gave him social advantages. His mother and brothers joined him in Galveston, where they lived within a few blocks of each other.[7][10] Cuney began self-study in law and literature.[7]
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 and helping them negotiate a free-labor society. Its headquarters in Texas were in Galveston.[4] Ruby was secretly a director of the Union League, an organization dedicated to attracting freedmen to the Republican Party.[11] (It was a relatively small organization in Texas at the time, as the Democratic Party had dominated southern white politics and Texas was a white-majority state).[12] Cuney became increasingly involved with the Union League and Ruby's ideology. In 1870 there were 3,000 blacks in Galveston,[13] nearly one-quarter of its 13,818 total population recorded in the US Census that year.