Saddle up, RodeoHouston is back in town

Yee-haw! It’s that time of year again!

The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is back in town. I loves me some rodeo and this is one of the best in the world!

Last year I managed to get myself kicked out – I mean escorted from the premises – over a simple misunderstanding. I honestly thought I was doing my job, the same way I had for years. Apparently, I failed to follow the rodeo’s rules regarding photography (which, in my defense, were not printed anywhere). This year the rules are made abundantly clear, so hopefully I can bring you some awesome rodeo action in the weeks to come.

There’s a lot to see and do at the HLSR and I encourage you to make a trek there this season, which runs through March 17. I know for many people the nightly concerts are the big attraction. For them, the rodeo is usually a warm-up act. It’s the opposite for me. I get caught up in the rodeo action and the concerts are usually a cool-down period.

When it comes to the concerts, I really don’t care much about the modern acts that most people get excited about. I like the classic acts that I grew up with. I’m thrilled to see that two retired performers are appearing this year – George Strait and Brooks and Dunn. I’m also excited for Tim McGraw and Brad Paisley. I didn’t grow up listening to any of them other than King George, but the rest made a mark on my early adult years.

I also enjoy the vendors and the foods. Once again I’ve been invited to be a Gold Buckle Foodie Award judge. I really enjoy doing that. You never know what you’re going to be served or how your fellow judges will respond. In past events I’ve shared a table with KSBJ’s morning crew, among other local media personalities. I will never forget a couple years ago when Maggie Flecknoe of KIAH-TV (CW39) shrieked when presented with a slice of pizza topped with scorpions, mealworms, and crickets. To her credit, she did try it.

Another big attraction is the carnival. Hundreds of thousands of people will enjoy the rides this year. I’ll probably not be one of them. It generally doesn’t fit my budget. That, and it’s hard for me to get much of a thrill out of carnival rides when I’ve done things like tandem skydiving and taken numerous media flights in aircraft ranging from hot air balloons and ultralights to micro-jets, bi-planes, aerobatic stunt planes, and vintage fighters. But that’s just me. If carnival rides are your thing, go for it!

I know a lot of locals show livestock at RodeoHouston, and for them it’s a big deal. These kids put a lot of time and effort into their animals and this is where all that hard work pays off. Good luck to all those who are showing this year!

I also wish luck to all of the student artists who have their works displayed and up for judging at the show. That competition can sometimes be a life changer for a budding artist. I also enjoy seeing artwork of my friends on display. A lot of students will draw and paint pictures of J.R. Thomas and others from George Ranch Historical Park and also re-enactors from the Texas Army. A lot of the student artwork is mind-blowing good.

I have numerous friends who are involved in the annual barbecue cookoff. That’s got to be one of the toughest barbecue competitions in the world. I know the participants have a great time. I wish my friends the best of luck this year, even though the contest will be over by the time this goes to print.

For me personally, the Houston rodeo marks the beginning of a very busy season which generally lasts the rest of the calendar year. March and April mark the heart of the re-enactment season for the Texas Army as we do the battle demonstrations and re-enactments from the Alamo and Washington-on-the-Brazos to San Jacinto. That takes up a lot of weekends.

This year we also have the Houston SaberCats rugby team back in town at Constellation Field. That also fills the calendar on the weekends and it is a lot of fun to watch.

All of that leads right into one of my favorite times of year – baseball season. I cannot wait for the Sugar Land Skeeters to start up again in April. From there it’s a marathon right into football season. That usually runs straight into Christmas and beyond. After that we get about a month of downtime before the rodeo returns and the whole thing starts over again.

I’m certainly not complaining. I love what I do and this is a great place to do it. Life is what you make of it and this little part of Texas is full of a lot of life and opportunity. So, let’s get out there and make the most of it. Cowboy up, my friends! This is gonna be a wild ride.

DNA test is very revealing about who you really are

I suppose it’s only fitting that I received my DNA test results during Black History Month.

I used 23 and Me to do my DNA test and they give you plenty of warning that your results might turn up some surprises. Mine sure did! It turns out I’m .4 percent black. That means a fifth-great-grandparent was of sub-Saharan African origin, probably Congolese.

Having done some ancestral research on my family, my mind immediately went down my paternal lineage to my fifth-great-grandmother. She had two out-of-wedlock sons, one of whom is my fourth-great-grandfather. There is no record anywhere of his father. There are, however, photographs of the two boys as adults and they are as lily white as they come. There are no visible signs of African heritage in them. (Seeing how they lived in the early 1800s in Virginia, I doubt either of them self-identified as black either.)

So the mystery is afoot. Where does my black ancestry come into play? That’s going to take some serious investigation. I can trace my paternal line to England. The first Southern to arrive in the New World came from England as part of the Second Virginia Charter in 1609. His son followed 11 years later on a ship called the George. If my black ancestor is paternal, it will likely be on my grandmother’s side and I haven’t been able to trace that line very far.

It’s doubtful my black ancestor is from my maternal side. Both sets of my mother’s grandparents came from Scandinavia and what little I have learned indicates those roots run deep in that part of northern Europe. Still, anything is possible and I’m not ruling it out. 

I do find it exciting to know that I’m much more diverse than I grew up believing. Knowing that my family line runs the gamut of American history, I have a lot to learn. I wonder if this is how Alex Haley felt when he was researching his book “Roots.” I loved the TV miniseries made from the book and I’m inspired to watch it again.

Although much of my DNA didn’t reveal anything I didn’t already know, there were a few areas and percentages that now have me questioning everything I’ve learned about my heritage. My mother always said she was part Spanish, and sure enough there is 1 percent Spanish DNA in me. Unfortunately, she and her parents have passed away so I’ll probably never have the opportunity to investigate that side of my family very well.

As I sit here writing this I realize that life is a great mystery. One of the oddities about 23 and Me is that they test for Neanderthal variants. I have 288, which is pretty high for their current customer base, but it is less than 4 percent of my overall DNA. They test for 2,872 Neanderthal variants. How they can do that is beyond me because there haven’t been any Neanderthals around for several millennia. 

I have to assume that the largest known assemblage of direct Neanderthal descendants can be found in Washington, D.C., and Hollywood because they seem to be bent on taking us back to the stone ages, at least in terms of behavior. But I digress. 

One of the main things I’ve been learning about DNA and ancestry isn’t how much we are different but how much we are alike. What sets us apart isn’t our physical features or what part of the world our ancestors are from. What sets us apart is our attitude about it. Genetically, I’m a European mutt – a regular Heinz 57 blend. Ultimately, we are all human. All of us are made in the image of God. To disrespect that is to disrespect the creator and, by extension, ourselves.

I doubt we will see in our lifetimes a true colorblind society that is welcoming and accepting of all humans. There is far too much hate and prejudice to overcome. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. As the human race expands and intermingles, we are growing closer to a global citizenship. America is at the crux of that movement. 

This really is a melting pot of races and ethnicities from around the world and it grows more diverse every day. Here in the Greater Houston Area and specifically Fort Bend County, we are on the cultural frontier. There is still a long way to go for there to be perfect harmony but I think we are on the right path and making excellent progress.

I recall reading an article several years ago about how some experts predict that many centuries from now humans will have interbred to the point that the extreme lights and darks will vanish and we will all become shades of brown. It makes sense. We’re seeing plenty of evidence in that direction with so much interracial mixing in our culture.

If, as science and religion both tell us, that all humans descend from a single ancestor or group of ancestors, how did we become so diverse in race, color, and ethnicity? If we could grow so far apart in those regards, it’s only logical that we could return to our roots. After all, it’s in our DNA.

I can’t say that I even begin to understand the complexity of DNA and genetics, but I can appreciate that magnitude of information we are learning about ourselves. The things we are learning can help us cure diseases, birth defects and such. I just wish it could help us cure prejudice and hate. Who knows, maybe with a better understanding of what makes us what we are on the outside will lead to a better appreciation of what we are on the inside.

Last week I learned that a very small fraction of me is black. That made my world a whole lot bigger. Suddenly I have something in common with a whole race of people that I didn’t think I had much connection with. The thing is, I like that very much. I’m proud of my newfound black heritage. It may not show on the outside, but I’m feeling it on the inside.

I’ve changed my mind, the Sugar Land 95 should stay

Last Wednesday the Fort Bend County Historical Commission voted unanimously to oppose the Fort Bend Independent School District’s request to remove the cemetery designation for the 95 graves discovered at a school construction site that have become known as the Sugar Land 95.

I was one of the commissioners who voted. I’m newly appointed to the commission and the special meeting on Wednesday was my first as a member of the board. My vote was also in stark contrast to a column I wrote last December in support of the school district’s desire to move the remains to a prison cemetery a half-mile away.

So what changed my mind? Perspective. Reason trumped logic. At the meeting and as a member of the commission I had a lot more information at my disposal than when I wrote my column with little more than my ivory tower perspective. 

The logical and easy thing to do is to move the graves to the Imperial Prison Farm Cemetery and allow the Fort Bend ISD to continue construction of the James Reese Career and Technical Center. It would save millions of dollars and a lot of time. It would give the Sugar Land 95 the dignity of a uniform and well-maintained historical cemetery as their final, final resting place.

I’ve also been thinking about perspective. If you have a crime victim whose body is buried in an unmarked grave and it is discovered several years later, would you leave them in that burial spot or would you exhume the remains and re-bury them in a cemetery? That is essentially what we have here.

Moving the Sugar Land 95 to the Imperial Prison Farm Cemetery is the logical thing to do and it’s also the wrong thing to do.

First, a little background. The Sugar Land 95 are victims of the state-sanctioned convict labor leasing program that ran from 1878 to 1910. The program was essentially a new form of slavery. Black people were imprisoned for minor offenses or on trumped-up charges. The prisons would then lease them out as laborers, in this case to work the sugarcane fields for Imperial Sugar. Those who died while in custody were buried in unmarked graves in an unregistered cemetery. The cemetery was discovered a year ago as construction was starting on the career and technical center.

To the Fort Bend ISD’s credit, it did everything it was supposed to up to the point of discovery of the cemetery. It commissioned a cultural resources investigation and went through the Texas Historical Commission’s process prior to purchasing the property. It also did a detailed title search. No evidence of a cemetery ever appeared. As the district was making plans to start construction, Reginald Moore, a local resident and historian with an interest in the prison system, warned the district there was a distinct possibility there may be graves in the area. 

The district hired archaeologists from Goshawk Environmental Consulting, Inc., to conduct research. They found nothing, but just before they submitted a final report to the state, crews installing utilities discovered human bones. Construction was temporarily halted and Goshawk was called back out. This time the investigation uncovered 95 graves on the site right next to where the building was going up.

The district had Goshawk exhume the 95 bodies. In hindsight, that probably never should have happened, but it did. They now sit in an environmentally controlled trailer on the site awaiting disposition. The district, which has a responsibility to the voters who approved the bonds for construction of the school, is moving ahead with as much of the construction as it can do with one wing of the building in limbo until the issue with the cemetery is resolved.

The district held community meetings along with the City of Sugar Land to try and figure out how best to handle the situation. FBISD and the city entered into an agreement to allow the bodies to be reinterred at the city-owned Imperial Prison Farm Cemetery a half-mile away.

Moving forward, the school district went to district court to ask that the cemetery designation on the site be removed and that the remains be re-buried at the Imperial Prison Farm Cemetery. District Court Judge James Shoemake was wise enough to see that there was no one representing the cemetery or voices in opposition to the school district appearing in his court. Shoemake postponed making a ruling and named attorney Michael W. Elliott as master in chancery, a special investigative advocate, to research the issue for the court. The district appealed that decision and the matter is pending in appellate court.

In the meantime, the Fort Bend County Commissioners Court has asked the historical commission to advise it on how best to proceed regarding the cemetery issue. From what I understand, the commission is one of the few entities with a legal right to intervene in the case. That’s exactly what we asked the commissioners court to let us do.

Although there is plenty of legal precedent for moving graves and relocating whole cemeteries, I now feel that moving this one would be a big mistake. This is a find of tremendous historical significance. The convict leasing program is a very ugly and deplorable chapter in our history. Very little has been made known about it. For the most part it has been swept under the rug of time, much like the Sugar Land 95.

Although we don’t know enough to determine who each of the Sugar Land 95 are or how they came to be in the convict leasing program, we do know from forensic evidence that they lived horrific lives of hard labor. They presumably died while in custody of the state and were buried in unmarked graves in an unregistered cemetery. I would imagine all that their relatives were told is that they died in prison. If anyone came looking for them, the bodies were nowhere to be found.

We found them. 

Now that we know they are there, we have just this one chance to do the right thing for them. Each one should be returned to his or her eternal resting place. (Yes, there was one and possibly more women buried in the cemetery.) A discovery like this is rare and should be preserved for the sake of history and the dignity of the individuals. These are people who were wronged their entire lives. It would be a travesty for us to do them wrong in death.

I realize that keeping the cemetery designation creates an enormous hardship for the school district and the taxpayers therein. As the district is fond of pointing out, it is charged with educating students. What better opportunity could there be than to teach this and future generations the value of doing the right thing no matter the cost? 

About 27 percent of the district is black. Are we to tell them their ancestry and heritage are not important enough to preserve and memorialize? I don’t think so. If the remains had been those of Republic of Texas soldiers or other people of historic significance, there would be no question about leaving them there. So why should this be any different?

Although this is my own personal column and I do not speak on behalf of the Fort Bend County Historical Commission, I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find a member who would disagree with me on this subject. It took a willing ear and an open mind for me to change my position on this. I can only hope the school district will do the same or at least be open to reasonable compromises.

We must stop fighting and learn to respect diversity

As I’m sure you’re aware, February is Black History Month. 

The first time I heard of the designation was about 28 or 29 years ago when I was a cub reporter working for The Daily Advance in Elizabeth City, N.C. I thought it was absurd that there would be an entire month dedicated to learning about black history. I also felt it was extremely racist. After all, there was no White History Month, Hispanic History Month, Native American History Month, and so on.

Elizabeth City, however, had about a 50 percent black population and is home to Elizabeth City State University, a historically black college. Our newspaper staff was about 99 percent white, and we struggled each year to write stories pertaining to local black history. We did the best we could, but in hindsight I’m sure our stories would now seem condescending and comical in their sincerity. 

I don’t remember what the story was, but I recall vividly the day I received several phone calls about one of the stories I had written. I had one black lady just blast me for being overtly racist. A white man also cursed me out as an N-word lover. I felt that by taking heat from both sides over the same story that I must have done something right.

After seven years and a day in Elizabeth City, I returned to my home in Colorado, where the black population was well below 10 percent. Working at the Longmont Daily Times-Call, we really didn’t do much to acknowledge Black History Month. Every once and a while we would find someone who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. or we would cover a black history program being held in the area.

The big racial issue in Colorado at the time was between whites and Hispanics. There is a long history of racial strife in Longmont. Back in the ’70s or ’80s the police started holding basketball tournaments with local Hispanics to try and improve relations. I kid you not, but they actually called the tournaments Pork-N-Beans.

While I was at the Times-Call we usually made a big deal about Cinco de Mayo as our annual tip-of-the-hat (sombrero?) to Hispanic culture. About 20 percent of the population was Hispanic. I never really felt comfortable writing about Hispanic culture because I’m not Hispanic and I don’t understand the culture. Still, I must have learned something from trying to write about black history because I usually received compliments for my work, often from Hispanics.

I have now lived on Fort Bend County for 10 years. I didn’t know it until long after I had moved here, but Fort Bend County is widely considered to be the most racially diverse county in the state and probably the nation. I’ve never seen any data to support that, but I’d find it hard to dispute.

Some of the first people I met here and some of my dearest friends are black and Hispanic. I’ve become so accustomed to seeing people of different colors and races that I hardly notice it anymore. My sons attend Terry High School in Rosenberg. We’ve had children there for most of the last nine years. It wasn’t until just a couple years ago that I learned they are minorities at the school. It’s almost 74 percent Hispanic and 13 percent black. Whites only make up about 11 percent. We don’t have a problem with that.

What I do have a problem with are people who insist on making race an issue. I may be guilty of naively holding onto old racist attitudes, but I do make a very conscious effort to avoid any appearances of bias or racism. Unfortunately, I come across too many people of all races and ethnicities who harbor and nurture their racial hatred. We see a lot of it in the national media. It seems you can’t even mention President Donald Trump without someone getting their dander up and screaming racism. 

Even now we have people equating his red Make America Great Again (MAGA) baseball hats to Nazi swastikas. That’s totally ridiculous. It’s a political slogan, not a racial epithet. People need to learn to de-escalate the race wars that are brewing in this country. We need to stop looking for excuses to hate each other and start finding reasons to like one another. 

That is going to become crucial as we head into the elections this fall and the census in 2020. Race and ethnicity are going to become front-burner issues. If we can’t talk about them with civility, we’re going to erupt in major racial and ethnic violence. This will naturally spill over into politics, as the census is the tool we use to determine representation in Congress and to draw congressional districts.

If we can’t cool down the rhetoric now and learn to get along, we will be setting ourselves up for a very rough and uncomfortable time in the next two or so years. I see this as a great opportunity to get to know my fellow man a little better and to understand the journeys of people who walked a different path than I. If that means embracing Black History Month and Cinco de Mayo, then so be it. We lose nothing by learning about others and gain much in the way of trust and respect.