The Ballad of Davy Crockett
Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee,
Greenest state in the land of the free
Raised in the woods so's he knew ev'ry tree,
killed him a b'ar when he was only three
Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier!
He give his word an' he give his hand,
that his Injun friends could keep their land
An' the rest of his life he took the stand,
that justice was due every redskin band
Davy, Davy Crockett, holdin' his promise dear!
He went off to Congress an' served a spell,
fixin' up the Govern'ments an' laws as well
Took over Washin'ton so we heered tell,
an' patched up the crack in the Liberty Bell
Davy, Davy Crockett, seein' his duty clear!
He heard of Houston an' Austin so,
to the Texas plains he jest had to go
Where freedom was fightin' another foe,
an' they needed him at the Alamo
Davy, Davy Crockett, the man who don't know fear!
I remember "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" from the 1954 ABC/Disney series starring Fess Parker and the Childhood of Famous Americans series biography of David Crockett: Young Rifleman (Bobbs-Merrill, 1949) was one of my favorites. For one birthday, I even got an imitation Davy Crockett coonskin hat like the one Vice-Presidential candidate Estes Kefauver wore during the 1956 campaign. In the 1960 movie The Alamo, Davy Crockett was played by John Wayne and he dies on the walls of the fortified mission while swatting dozens of Mexican soldiers with the butt of his rifle. This is the Tennessee Ernie Ford version of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.”
Left out of the dramatized versions of the life of Davy Crockett and unfortunately in Texas, Our Texas, the state’s response to the New York Times 1619 Project, is the reality of Texas and American history. Texas Republicans, who dominate both houses of the state legislature, passed the “1836 Project” bill to “promote patriotic education and increase awareness of the Texas values.” 1836 is the year Americans living in Texas declared independence from Mexico. Texas, Our Texas opens by asking the question “Why is Texas the way it is?” The 1836 team’s answer to students and teachers is that that while Texas history is “far from perfect,” they share a “common story” that is “full of optimism, energy, grit and gumption” and is a “bold example for the rest of the nation and the world.” It is not clear to me why the rest of the nation and the world would want to follow Texas’ example.
Governor Greg Abbott set up a blue-ribbon rightwing panel to draft a Texas version of Texas history. Kevin Roberts, who heads the panel, was on Donald Trump’s discredited 1776 Commission and described its distorted version of history as an “excellent piece of scholarship.” The American Historical Association called the 1776 Commission report of promoting “falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements.” Roberts is also the president of the rightwing Heritage Foundation. Don Frazier, chair of the team drafting the initial pamphlet, is an apologist for slavery. In the introduction to his book Blood on the Bayou, he dismissed stories about brutal enslavers as “gossip” and argued that some formerly enslaved Africans believed slavery “provided [them] a good life.”
According to an essay in Texas Monthly by Leah LaGrone an assistant professor of history at Weber State University in Utah and Michael Phillips, a research fellow at Texas’ Southern Methodist University, the draft of the Texas, Our Texas pamphlet is an “effort to sanitize the state’s long struggle with racial issues” that includes no details about the lives of enslaved Texans, never mentions anyone by name, or a description their fight for freedom. Unmentioned are the domestic slave trade that brought enslave Africans to Texas and Reconstruction-era white terrorist violence that stripped away the rights of African Americans that were promised in the 14th and 15th Amendments. “Of the document’s 4,517 words, 108 are spent on the 13,000-plus years of Indigenous history before the arrival of Spanish conquerors. The Texas Revolution receives 601 words. Only 133 words cover segregation, and 50 are spared for the African American mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement.”
I wonder which Texas values Governor Abbott the Republican legislatures want to promote. Americans demanded Texas independence from Mexico because slavery was illegal in Mexican territory. In 1826, enslaved Africans made up a quarter of the population of the American settlement in Texas and at the time of the war for Texas independence there were more than 5,000 enslaved people there. Slavery expanded rapidly and when the Civil War started the enslaved population of Texas was 182,566 people.
Racism did not stop after the Civil War. Between 1882 and 1945, over 700 African Americans were lynched in Texas. In 1922 had the most lynchings of any state, most in any state in the South. Meanwhile the fabled Texas Rangers, rather than being law enforcement, systematically slaughtered indigenous and Mexican communities, including in 1840 when a Comanche peace delegation was murdered in the Council House Massacre.
Racism in Texas continues with voter suppression deeply intertwined with white supremacy and armed vigilantism at the border with Mexico. Texas banned more books from school libraries during the 2021-2022 school year than any other state in the United States. Banned books include The Bluest Eye by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.
What an example to follow!
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