When Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph was published in 1995, it was acclaimed as the first comprehensive history of black women's struggles and achievements. This companion volume contains the original source materials that Ruthe Winegarten uncovered during her extensive research.

Like a time capsule of black women's history, A Sourcebook includes petitions from free women of color, lawsuits, slave testimonies, wills, plantation journals, club minutes, autobiographies, ads, congressional reports, contracts, prison records, college catalogues, newspaper clippings, protest letters, and much more.

In addition to the documents, a biographical section highlights the lives of women from various walks of life. The book concludes with a timeline that begins in 1777 and reaches to 1992. This wealth of original material will be a treasure trove for scholars and general readers interested in the emerging field of black women's history.

"No other works which combine so much material on Hispanic women have been published in the past, and I know of none in the offing. . . . This will be an excellent sourcebook for anyone interested in the many Tejanas who overcame adversity to succeed as businesswomen, professionals, educators, and politicians." -- Carolina Castillo Crimm, Associate Professor of History, Sam Houston State University

Since the early 1700s, women of Spanish/Mexican origin or descent have played a central, if often unacknowledged, role in Texas history. Tejanas have been community builders, political and religious leaders, founders of organizations, committed trade unionists, innovative educators, astute businesswomen, experienced professionals, and highly original artists. Giving their achievements the recognition they have long deserved, this groundbreaking book is at once a general history and a celebration of Tejanas' contributions to Texas over three centuries.

The authors have gathered and distilled a wide range of information to create this important resource. They offer one of the first detailed accounts of Tejanas' lives in the colonial period and from the Republic of Texas up to 1900. Drawing on the fuller documentation that exists for the twentieth century, they also examine many aspects of the modern Tejana experience, including Tejanas' contributions to education, business and the professions, faith and community, politics, and the arts. A large selection of photographs, a historical timeline, and profiles of fifty notable Tejanas complete the volume and assure its usefulness for a broad general audience, as well as for educators and historians.

As enigmatic and contradictory as far West Texas has always been, it is nevertheless surprising to learn that in 1925 its desert germinated a slender but vibrant shoot of the Harlem Renaissance. Isolated on the U.S.-Mexico border, far from any metropolitan African-American community or literary influences, Bernice Love Wiggins, a perceptive young poet, self-published her first, apparently only, book of poetry. One of only a handful of black writers in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, Wiggins was contemporary with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston and was among the first female African-American poets published in the United States. Just as the Harlem movement focused on experiences of black Americans who sought relief from racism and endeavored to build communities, Tuneful Tales gives voice to the many-sided black experience in remote El Paso. Whatever Wiggins may have known of her contemporaries more than half a continent away or of the movement itself may never be clear. Disappointingly, after her move to California in the early 1930s, the trail grows cold. Yet the composed young woman who gazes so wisely, if dreamily, from her high school photographs evoked her personae so compellingly in both timbre and substance that great folklorist and critic J. Mason Brewer proclaimed her the female Paul Laurence Dunbar. Ethiopia Speaks Lynched Somewhere in the South, the "Land of the Free," To a very strong branch of a dogwood tree. Lynched One of my sons, -- When the flag was in danger they answered the call I gave them black sons, ah yes, gave them all When you came to me. And Now Goodnight I have told you tuneful tales, Gathered from the hills and vales, Wheresoever mine own people chanced to dwell. If the tales have brought you mirth, Brought more laughter to the earth, It is well. Maceo Dailey is the director of the African American Studies Program of the University of Texas El Paso and a governor's appointee to the Texas Council For The Humanities and Juneteenth Commission.

Women of all colors have shaped families, communities, institutions, and societies throughout history, but only in recent decades have their contributions been widely recognized, described, and celebrated. This book presents the first comprehensive history of black Texas women, a previously neglected group whose 150 years of continued struggle and some successes against the oppression of racism and sexism deserve to be better known and understood.

Beginning with slave and free women of color during the Texas colonial period and concluding with contemporary women who serve in the Texas legislature and the United States Congress, Ruthe Winegarten organizes her history both chronologically and topically. Her narrative sparkles with the life stories of individual women and their contributions to the work force, education, religion, the club movement, community building, politics, civil rights, and culture. The product of extensive archival and oral research and illustrated with over 200 photographs, this groundbreaking work will be equally appealing to general readers and to scholars of women's history, black history, American studies, and Texas history.