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Politics alone did not drive Houston’s “New Negro” Movement. Migrants also relied on coded expressions of protest, such as the use of literature, political satire, music, dance, visual arts, as well as sports, in their efforts to break free of White supremacy and embrace Blackness. Houston especially created a culture of expression for musical entertainers. Saxophonist Tom Archia, born Ernest Alvin Archie Jr., in November 1919, in Groveton, Texas, in Trinity County, just northeast of Huntsville and 120 miles northeast of Houston, learned a good deal about Black consciousness from his parents and grandparents. Both sets of families and grandparents, the McDades and Nathan and Virginia Archie, farmed in Waller County at the turn of the century, with the Archies owning a lucrative watermelon farm. Both sets of families taught their descendants to appreciate their past as well as plan for the future. Also important to the former slaves and landholders was education. Their children especially learned early on the value of a college education, with Archie’s parents becoming professional educators in the era of the “New Negro.”1 The “New Negro” Movement influenced the Archies in a variety of ways. Ernest Archie Jr.’s parents, for example, attended college, taught school, with his father, Ernest Archie Sr., graduating from Prairie View College in the early twentieth century. For the young couple, Henrietta and Ernest Archie Sr., teaching afforded them the opportunity to influence young people as well as share with others a level of social consciousness. According to Tom Archia biographers Robert L. Campbell, Leonard J. Bukowski, and Armin Büttner, Ernest A. Archie Sr. even aspired to a level of social consciousness that set him apart from members of his extended family. For example, the schoolteacher changed his surname from Archie to Archia in the early twentieth century, perhaps during college, suggesting his father, five ~ In “The Garden of Eden” The Houston Renaissance, 1900–1941 Chapter Five 188 Nathan Archie, used an incorrect spelling. This action, however, possibly stems from a viewpoint that concluded African-descent Americans were better off rejecting immediate reminders of slavery and Jim Crow oppression , with names being a chief reminder. Other evidence supports the observation that Archie had cultivated other ways to reject Whiteness for Blackness. On his 1917 World War I draft registration card, thirty-year-old Ernest A. Archie defined his race as “African,” not “Colored” or “Negro,” terms more readily used by Americans at the time. The Archies [Archias], at the time of Ernest A. Archia Jr.’s Groveton, Trinity County, birth, in November 1919, aspired to the doctrine of the “New Negro” and found solace in the belief that better days were on the horizon for African peoples around the globe.2 In truth, Ernest and Henrietta’s new life in the country and in Houston had already begun symbolizing this dawning of the “New Negro” age, especially for their talented offspring. Ernest Archia met his wife Henrietta in the all-Black community of Sunny Side (or Sunnyside) in Waller County, a small town ten miles south of Hempstead, Waller County, where Henrietta was a student. Henrietta probably attended Prairie View, which was also in Waller, as she taught school for several decades, even earning a higher salary than her husband. Using stepwise migrations, the couple eventually taught school and farmed in Waller and Trinity Counties, in Milam County further west, and in Baytown, just east of Houston, where Ernest A. Archia Sr. served as a school principal. Rural schoolteachers of color generally traveled from place to place in search of steady work and farmland to occupy. Sometime around late 1919 or in the early 1920s, the couple and their newborn son, Ernest Jr., relocated to Houston from Rockdale in Milam County. The couple lived on 4519 Lyons Avenue and across the street from St. Elizabeth Hospital in Fifth Ward in Houston, although they later bought a home in the rural community of Pelly just east of Houston, where they taught at the “colored school.” Other members of the extended family lived in Fifth Ward also, even selling watermelons, no doubt from the family farm, at a stand on Lyons and Hill Street (now Jensen Avenue). Having an extended family in Fifth Ward aided the Archias, allowing their two children the opportunity to study music at Wheatley High School in Houston and not attend the segregated high school in Pelly or Baytown.3 The Houston area afforded Ernest A. Archia Jr. (Tom Archia) and his little sister...

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