Volunteers Ensure History Of Black Houston Lives On At Historic Olivewood Cemetery – Houston Chronicle

They include the founding pastor of Mount Zion church, Pastor Henry Stewart and one of the founders of Trinity United Methodist Church, Reverend Elijah Dibble.

Perhaps none of these early African American leaders, however, achieved the same level of prominence during their lifetimes — garnering acclaim even from the white press — as did Brown, who in 1914 was credited as being the first individual in the area to submit his income to the government under the recently approved constitutional amendment establishing the federal income tax.

A contemporary and friend of early civil rights leader Booker T. Washington, Bell was instrumental in bringing the first library dedicated to Black citizens to Houston. He also floated a loan to the organizers of Emancipation Park, saving the park from being sold off to pay a debt.

At his death, the Houston Chronicle praised J.B. Bell as “a leader whose place will be hard indeed to fill.”

From slave to business leader

Born on Christmas Day, 1858, in Macon, Ga., his parents named him John Brown, after the abolitionist who incited an unsuccessful slave rebellion before the Civil War. At the age of 6 months, Bell’s family was torn apart, when his mother and her children were taken to Galveston where they were sold to a new owner in Polk County.

In 1865, when he was 7 years old, Bell and other members of his family were emancipated. Bell’s mother then moved her young family to Houston, where she died three years later.

Bell attended school for about 3 ½ years, before he was forced to interrupt his education to earn a living, according to The Red Book, a Who’s Who of African Americans in Houston in the early 20th century. He would later continue his formal education, briefly attending Tillotson College, now Huston-Tillotson College, in Austin. He was largely self-taught, learning business and business strategy on the job.

“He received his business training with the firm of Bell & Thornton, which firm conducted a grocery store in the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas. This firm dissolved partnership in 1875 and the ambitious young boy was thrown out of employment,” The Red Book said. “Ambitious to support himself, he secured a position to attend to the horse and buggy of Dr. G. A. McDonell, of Houston, Texas, which position he held for three years, 1875 to 1878, at a wage of $5.00 per month.”

In 1878, Bell left Houston and moved to Calvert, where he worked for his half-brother, L. W. Woods, in the grocery and restaurant business. He left this position to briefly teach school in Robertson County. He returned to Houston on New Year’s Day 1882 and went to work for grocer Reuben Thornton, for $30 a month, plus board. He worked for Thornton for a year and one day, until Thornton’s death on January 2, 1883. Less than two weeks later, Bell bought the business from Thornton’s widow for $315.

He began acquiring rental properties, and in 1896, he sold the grocery store and went into the real estate business full-time, according to a brief biography of Bell by Patricia Smith Prather.

Bell was known to have said, ‘Seize opportunity and buy lands,” Prather wrote. He purchased 50 rental houses and accumulated more than $100,000 worth of property — about $2.4 million in today’s dollars — over his career.

Michael Wyke / Contributor

Community leader

But Paul Jennings, a volunteer and the unofficial historian of Descendants of Olivewood, said that more significant than Bell’s business successes were his contributions to the African American community. Bell served as a member of the executive committee of the National Negro Business League, where he became friendly with Booker T. Washington, the league’s president. Bell and Washington were instrumental in securing funding for the old Colored Carnegie Library.

The history of that library reflects the struggles that Black leaders had to overcome in the Jim Crow South. The city had received $50,000 from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie to build what is now the Houston public library, which opened in 1904 on the corner of McKinney and Travis streets in downtown Houston.

In 1907 the library staff denied service to a group of Black teachers. Seeking to extend educational opportunities to members of their race, Bell and Washington traveled in a private rail car to New York to ask Carnegie for funds to build a separate library for the city’s African American residents.

Jennings said the use of the private rail car reflected both the status of the two community leaders, as well as the segregated society that prohibited Blacks from traveling in the same rail cars as whites.

“These were people who were comfortable with talking to one of the richest men in America,” Jennings said. “But they may have had to travel up in a private car because they couldn’t travel in a first-class car on the railroads.”

Carnegie agreed to donate funding for the construction of the library, providing that the city guarantee an annual allocation of $1,500 for the upkeep of the segregated facility. Houston Mayor H.B. Rice made the guarantee, provided a committee of African American leaders, led by Bell, purchased the land.

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The committee selected a site, at the corner of Frederick and Robin Streets in the Fourth Ward, but had only raised $500 for a lot costing of $1,500. Bell loaned the committee the remaining $1,000, allowing the library to be built and ensuring annual funding from the city for its upkeep.

Bell also was responsible for saving Emancipation Park amid the park’s early financial difficulties. In 1914, the park board owed a $1,000 payment on the park land and didn’t have the money to pay the debt.

On the day before the note came due, the board approached Bell for help. He loaned the association the $1,000 — about $28,000 in today’s money — against the advice of his lawyer, who warned that he might never get the money back.

“I would rather lose $1,000 than see my people lose their park,” Bell replied, according to The Red Book.

An almost erased past

Bell’s life story is emblematic of the stories that can be learned by researching the lives of those who rest in Olivewood, said Cook. The cemetery was incorporated in 1875, a mere decade after June 19, 1865, when Texas slaves learned they had been emancipated.

The fortunes of the eight-acre cemetery began to decline in the 1940s as development cut off access routes to Olivewood, Cook said. The last burials at the cemetery occurred in 1960s.

Over the next several decades, the historic cemetery became overgrown and fell into disrepair. Today, even the ownership of the land is uncertain. Unlike many historic graveyards, Olivewood was never affiliated with a church. The site had been purchased by a group of trustees who administered the cemetery. All the original trustees have long since passed away, Cook said.

In the early 2000s, a group of volunteers, many of whose ancestors are buried in Olivewood, began to rehabilitate the grounds. In 2004, the Descendants of Olivewood was incorporated and in 2008, a state court granted the nonprofit official guardianship to act as caretakers of the historic cemetery.

Guided by a 20-person advisory board, members of the Descendants of Olivewood engage in clean-up activities several times a month, mowing, raking and cutting back on overgrown vegetation. As more acreage of the cemetery comes under control with regular maintenance and care, the group plans to launch a plot and walkway beautification program.

Olivewood served as the burial site of many of the city’s early African American leaders who rose to prominence in the years between the end of the Civil War and the first half of the last century, fighting off the legacy of slavery and the legal discrimination of Jim Crow to advance themselves, Black residents and Houston.

“You can see the progress, just 10 years out of slavery,” Cook said. “They built schools, fraternal groups, sororities, and they established a lot of self-help organizations in the community.”