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Slavery in Early Austin: The Stringer’s Hotel and Urban Slavery
- brudgers 7y agoit is not impossible to imagine enslaved people taking on leading roles in running the Stringer’s Hotel and other establishments in Austin. There’s much comforting in imagined logical possibility. Reading Fredrick Douglas’s autobiographies or Blight’s recent Pulitzer winner dissipates such illusion. If the knowledge of children for sale provided in the article somehow wasn’t enough to demonstrate how unincharge slaves were.
- csours 7y agoThat second map was made by a sociopath. North faces to the right? For those less familiar with Austin, Pecan St is also 6th Street. It's an interesting frame of mind to think about who would have been walking down the same streets I walk, over 100 years ago.
- thedance 7y agoHaving the East at the top of the map is very common. That’s why they call it “the orient”.
- seisvelas 7y ago>That’s why they call it “the orient”. Not challenging your claim that East-on-top is common (since I have no idea), but: it's called the orient because oriens is Latin for rising, and the sun rises in the east. Many other languages also have a word for east based on their word for rising. For a cursory reading, check out the Wiki article on the etymology Orient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient#Etymology
- samatman 7y agoThe grandparent comment makes a valid point, just backwards. The reason orientation and orienteering contain the string "orient" is because Europeans historically put the East at the top of maps, a practice which changed some time after the introduction of the compass. Which points North, unless it points South; Chinese maps traditionally put the South at the top. Here's an example of such a map, of the form known as "T and O": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps#/media/File:Diagrammatic_T-O_world_map_-_12th_c.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps#/media/File:D... It's interesting to me that, as moderns, we barely recognize such a stylized image as a map.
- csours 7y agoI learned more than I expected about maps. So so you think it was a style decision in the late 1800's to make a map with the top facing east? Or was it still common?
- samatman 7y agoNorth was pretty standard by the 1800s, or indeed by the 1600s. But there's a map in the public library of my hometown, showing it in 1890, in which the Old West Side is at the top of the map. So I'd guess that non-standard orientations were more common than they are now.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- anonsivalley652 7y agoConsider: - Lincoln was not an Abolitionist hero as popularly lionized, but a status quo "moderate,' reluctant to rock the boat. Even though he knew it to be wrong, he did nothing in the affirmative until Secession. That's not moral courage, that's political expedience. - 13th Amendment, Section 1 giant slavery loophole: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. - for-profit prisons - elected district attorneys eager to make large numbers of convictions for reelection stats - politicians at all levels (e.g., municipal, county, state and federal) $upported by the prison lobby - mandatory minimums - the highest incarceration rate (per-capita) on the planet except Seychelles - and corporations eager to exploit cheap labor (most belong to ALEC) and what do you get? Slavery never ended, it just hides in a slightly different form, out-of-sight in the prison-industrial complex that most people never think about. And that doesn't even include the matters of discrimination and segregation like Jim Crow laws like poll taxes, red lining, property requirements and voter ID laws. Here's just a few of the corporations that exploit prison (slave) labor: - Allstate Insurance - American Express - AT&T - Bank of America - BP America - ExxonMobil - Fruit of the Loom - GEICO - Johnson & Johnson - J.P. Morgan - Mary Kay Cosmetics - McDonalds - Microsoft - Procter & Gamble - Quaker Oats - Sara Lee - Sprint - Verizon - United Airlines - Wal-Mart - Wendy’s Source: http://affinitymagazine.us/2017/06/29/heres-a-list-of-corporations-that-use-prison-labor/ http://affinitymagazine.us/2017/06/29/heres-a-list-of-corpor...
- neo4sure 7y agoThank you for that list.
- UI_at_80x24 7y agoThis needs much more visibility and attention. Thank-you for posting this.
- thowfaraway 7y agoIt is a bullshit citationless list.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoDoes anyone know where this hotel existed? The article says it is where the "Piedmont" hotel currently stands, but there is no Piedmont hotel in Austin. As an aside, I'm getting to detest more and more how Google only seems to show current events. It's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to search for anything historical.
- cf512 7y agoSeems to be the space on the southeast corner of 8th & Congress, next door to the Stateside Theater. Pieced this together via: 1) "[...] named the Avenue Hotel but locally known as the Stringer’s Hotel" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swante_M._Swenson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swante_M._Swenson) and 2) "The Jan. 18 announcement indicates that The Avenue’s name is an homage to the original structure built on the site in 1880, the Avenue Hotel." (https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/01/18/31-story-boutique-hotel-would-be-something-new-for.html https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/01/18/31-story-...)
- KSS42 7y agoI came to the same conclusion by looking at the maps in the article and looking for the Avenue Hotel. You can it is at the corner of Congress and Hickory St. Hickory St (now 8th St) is 3 blocks south of the Capitol. I guess at some point the tree named streets were converted to numbered streets.
- KSS42 7y agoRe: tree named streets were converted to numbered streets https://www.statesman.com/news/20171101/austin-answered-why-did-tree-named-streets-switch-to-numbered-names https://www.statesman.com/news/20171101/austin-answered-why-...
- etrevino 7y ago> "On the eve of the Civil War, an advertisement appeared in the Texas Almanac ..." This was 1862. The war was well underway by then. I'm really not sure how that made it into the article. I'm very curious if an editor added it in, because I suspect that the author knows better.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoIf it was late Dec. 1862 it was just after The Battle of Fredericksburg, a bloodbath for the Union.
- alpineidyll3 7y agoI pass this site every morning, negotiating a throng of homeless people. Not everything about modern Austin is more humane.