No city is all of a piece, and Houston’s oneness is relieved by the variant peoples merging with it since the beginning.
A Greek kaffeneion, a large room, nearly bare, with a ceiling of ornately stamped tin, is a walk-up reached through the unmarked door of an old downtown building. There the city’s Greeks, and only Greeks, drink the coffee of their homeland—a strong brew, neither sweet nor bitter, of a strange, nearly syrupy consistency.
The oriental mysteries of the shrine room of the On Leong tong—the word tong is shunned now, and they call it a Chinese Merchants Association—is on the second floor of the tong’s modern building on the northeastern fringe of the skyscrapers. The first Chinese, three hundred of them, came in 1870. Two thousand now live in Houston—two thousand of the city’s most exemplary citizens.
The Houston Turn-Verein, founded in 1854, is one of the oldest organizations in the city. The Germans, immigrating to Texas in great numbers in the nineteenth century, came early to Houston and were a dominant element in the city from the 1850s until well after Reconstruction. Edward King, a Yankee journalist who visited the city in 1873, wrote that “the Germans, who are very numerous and well to do in the city, have their Volks-fests and beer-absorbings, when the city takes on an absolutely Teutonic air.” Gradually the Germans have merged with all Houston, one loss of which was the virtual extinction of their magnificent singing societies.
Frosttown, Chaneyville, Freedmantown, Chapmanville, and Jourdeville, local names for parts of an older city, have vanished, but a newcomer called Frenchtown still lives. Its street names are lyrics—Deschaumes, Delia, Roland, Adelia, Lelia—and the tiny Creole oasis is seasoned with music and dance rituals unknown in the rest of Houston. Frenchtown’s people, coming from Louisiana during hard times in the early 1920s, settled in a few blocks off Liberty Road, and there they have remained as one family, little altered in forty years by the changing city surrounding them.
Houston’s Mexican group lacks the color and ritual of San Antonio’s, but it is the second largest national group in the city. Western Slavs, mainly Czechs and Poles, have lived in Houston for many decades, especially the Czechs. A few Japanese, most of whom excel as truck farmers and rice growers, live outside the city. Many foreign traders, scientists, and executives have been drawn to Houston by cotton and oil and chemicals.
The state’s largest concentration of Negroes lives in Houston, which ranks ninth in the nation in the proportion of Negroes to the total population. Nearly a quarter of a million Negroes live in the metropolitan area, or roughly one in five persons. In an article about Negro millionaires in Texas, Ebony Magazine said in 1952, “Houston is sometimes called the ‘Bagdad of Negro America.’” It is said also that Houston Negroes have a higher per capita wealth than those of any other American city.
What a change in one century! Frederick Law Olmsted, one of the most important historical figures to have written about Houston, came to the city in 1854. Writing in The Cotton Kingdom, he said of Houston: “There is a prominent slavemart in town, which holds a large lot of likely looking negroes, waiting purchasers. In the windows of shops, and on the doors and columns of the hotel, are many written advertisements, headed ‘A likely negro girl for sale.’ 'Two negroes for sale.’ ‘Twenty negro boys for sale,’ etc.”
In his book The Great South, Edward King said Negroes “have had something to do with the city government [of Houston] during the reconstruction era, and the supervisor of streets, and some members of the city council, at the time of my sojourn there [in 1873], were negroes.”
Houston has proportionately few native Houstonians. The board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce, where natives might be thought to dominate, reflects the newness of the population. Of the board’s twenty-nine members in 1956, eleven moved to the city after 1945, seven in 1951 or later. Only one of the twenty-nine was born in Houston, only eleven more were born elsewhere in Texas.