The legacy of slave and master lives on in relations of races. Caller-Times writer Ellen Bernstein knows what slavery has meant to the country and to Texas. She has seen it in the faces of South Texas families and has traced its blood lineage through the twisting branches of genealogy. In a recently concluded five-part series, Bernstein examined the sometimes open, sometimes ambivalent feelings as distant branches of families came to realize that they had their beginnings and linkage through the forced liaison of master and slave.
Slavery is very much a part of Texas' history.
In the years before the Civil War, slaves, that is to say, African-Americans, made up a quarter of the population in Texas. Texas was a part of the Old South, its white population seeing the world through eyes that accepted slavery as a way of life. But the lives of two peoples, one black and one white, one master and one slave, can hardly be lived side by side, as the stories of the McCampbell and Cox families suggest, without intermingling. The evidence of a relationship between male master and female slave is scant. In the case of the Cox family, its most recent branch additions discovered a link with an aging and dignified black former teacher.