Norris Wright Cuney

Cuney was the son of a white planter, Philip Cuney, and an enslaved woman, Adeline Stuart. In 1883, working as a contracting stevedore, he bought $2,500 worth of tools and organized Black dockworkers into an association that went into open competition on the Galveston wharves. In 1886 he became the Texas member of the Republican national committee, which the Handbook calls the most important political post given a Black man in the nineteenth-century South. One historian labels 1884 to 1896 the Cuney Era. His daughter Maud Cuney-Hare became a musician and writer.

What the plaque says

Norris Wright Cuney (1846-1898) Born a slave on the Waller County plantation of his father, Philip Cuney, Norris Wright Cuney was sent to Wyle Street School in Pennsylvania for an early education. At the age of seventeen he moved to St. Louis and found employment on Mississippi River steamboats. Following the Civil War Cuney moved to Galveston, where in 1867 he helped care for victims of the island's yellow fever epidemic. Interested in politics, he became a leader in the local Republican Party, eventually rising to high office in the state and national party organizations. He served as county agent in 1872, and in 1872 was appointed inspector of customs for the District of Texas, a position he held until he was elected Galveston's first black alderman in 1883. As a leader in the Republican Party, Cuney served as chairman of the state convention in 1882 and as a delegate to the national conventions in 1876, 1880, 1884, and 1888. He was appointed Collector of Customs by President Benjamin Harrison in 1889. Norris Wright Cuney was an important political and civic leader in Galveston. A park was dedicated in his memory in 1937. He is buried in Lake View Cemetery. (1989)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• 1859 Ashton Villa — 0.3 mi
  A brick Italianate house on Broadway, built with enslaved labor in 1859, whose lawn has held Galveston's Juneteenth commemoration of General Orders, No. 3 every year since 1979.
• The Strand — 0.3 mi
  Five blocks of iron-front brick buildings near the harbor that were once called the Wall Street of the Southwest, emptied after 1900 and brought back by preservationists from the 1960s.
• Moody Mansion — 0.5 mi
  A four-story, 28,000-square-foot house on Broadway, finished in 1895, that W. L. Moody Jr. bought just after the 1900 storm and his family kept until Hurricane Alicia in 1983.
• 1892 Bishop's Palace — 0.5 mi
  Nicholas Clayton's stone house on Broadway for the railroad lawyer Walter Gresham, later home to Galveston's Catholic bishops and one of the most admired Victorian houses in the country.

More markers nearby

• Rabbi Henry Cohen — steps away
• The Rt. Rev. Monsignor James Martin Kirwin — steps away
• Texas Bar Association — steps away
• Confederate Mariner: Leon Smith — steps away