Texas Originals

Born in 1916, Henry B. González was the first Mexican American to represent Texas in Congress. An expert on the nation's... Read more

Born in 1888, Walter Prescott Webb remains one of Texas's most significant and influential scholars. Webb taught at The ... Read more

Civil rights leader James Farmer was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1920. Though he originally planned to become a Methodis... Read more

Henry Allen Bullock devoted his life to advancing African American education in Texas—and made history in the process. H... Read more

The scholar and writer Américo Paredes was born in Brownsville in 1915. Even as a youth, he saw that a distinct culture ... Read more

Tomás Rivera's career as a writer and educator was shaped by the struggles of his family, who spent much of their lives ... Read more

Folklorist and oral history pioneer Mody Boatright was no stranger to the tall tale. Raised in a West Texas ranching fam... Read more

Born in 1844, Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis was one of the most important Texas writers of the nineteenth century. Her novel... Read more

Once described as the "Gertrude Stein of San Antonio," Marion Koogler McNay created the first museum of modern art in Te... Read more

Born to a sharecropping family in northeast Texas in 1892, Bessie Coleman became the world’s first female African Americ... Read more