Join us for a captivating journey into the heart of Texas history with none other than Ken Kesselus, local historian, former mayor, and minister. With his wealth of knowledge, he takes us back in time, revealing the intriguing origins of Bastrop. Ken's engaging storytelling keeps us hooked as we traverse the intriguing paths of the past.
We'll focus on the 75th anniversary of the Delgado vs. Bastrop case. Ken discusses the importance of recognizing and celebrating this local landmark case. This episode isn't just about revisiting the past, it's about understanding our roots and celebrating our shared history. So, join us, and let's keep the stories of our past alive together.
See Ken's books on Amazon:
John E. Hines: Granite on Fire https://a.co/d/2zghZcC
Alvin Wirtz: The Senator, LBJ, and LCRA https://a.co/d/8UjhJ6u
Join us for a captivating journey into the heart of Texas history with none other than Ken Kesselus, local historian, former mayor, and minister. With his wealth of knowledge, he takes us back in time, revealing the intriguing origins of Bastrop. Ken's engaging storytelling keeps us hooked as we traverse the intriguing paths of the past.
We'll focus on the 75th anniversary of the Delgado vs. Bastrop case. Ken discusses the importance of recognizing and celebrating this local landmark case. This episode isn't just about revisiting the past, it's about understanding our roots and celebrating our shared history. So, join us, and let's keep the stories of our past alive together.
See Ken's books on Amazon:
John E. Hines: Granite on Fire https://a.co/d/2zghZcC
Alvin Wirtz: The Senator, LBJ, and LCRA https://a.co/d/8UjhJ6u
This podcast is not sponsored by. It does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the family.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it and, of course, all of us who live it and love it. Welcome to Talking Texas History. I'm Gene Proce, I'm Scott Soseby. Today, scott, we have another person that I've been an admirer of for quite some time, and that's Ken Kessilis from Bastrop, texas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ken, welcome to. We're glad you're here with us. Yeah, I'm a holop in Bastrop. That's almost like being in heaven, isn't it to do that right? To some extent, I understand.
Speaker 3:As it goes.
Speaker 1:I look over your resume and everything and it's quite impressive. You worn a lot of different hats. You've been a fiscal minister, you're mayor of Bastrop. You are basically the official historian of Bastrop, as you've written quite a bit on that. I don't know how you have time to do anything else, so tell us about your various interests and how you got started in writing the history of Bastrop and things like that.
Speaker 3:Move to Bastrop in 1981 to do that. I was in Paralyne Texas and I came back to my home church really odd thing to serve and it was in pretty bad shape and I needed something to do to fill in my time Turns out I didn't have to sell used cars, so I decided to just start looking into Bastrop County history and found out that there had been some stuff written that was pretty nice. Then I decided that I would write an article for what I hope would go into the Texas, to the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, and it was all about Bastrop almost becoming the capital of Texas. And I worked and, worked and worked out and wrote what wound up being a chapter, sent it to my cousin, john Jenkins, a very flamboyant, wonderful, interesting person who was the youngest fellow for the Texas State Historical Association ever and a fine amateur historian, and he said look, why don't you just go ahead and write the history of Bastrop? And I thought, well, I think that's been done. He's not a good one.
Speaker 3:So I thought, well, maybe I can find something. And so 250 pages later I had a book. And of course then, in the course of the survey of the material for the book, it was a Bastrop County before statehood. I discovered that Ernest Winkler had written the story about the seat of government and had details in a more general fashion and had already been published in the Quarterly in 1904. So much for that dream, anyway. So that got me hooked. John was very encouraging. He used his publishing company to publish the book and that led to the next book and the next book. John and I did actually award-winning biography of Edward Burleson together and that led to a couple other biographies that I did for hire, and meanwhile I've just continued to write about Bastrop in lots of different venues.
Speaker 2:So with Jenkins, that's another layer of Texana and Texas history that you have connections to.
Speaker 1:So if we played seven degrees of Kent Kessler so we don't get like two degrees in, is that what it is?
Speaker 2:Kent, you've written a number of books on Bastrop. As you were saying, tell us what is your favorite story that you've run across.
Speaker 3:Supposedly in 1841, this is from the newspaper account Sam Houston was going through Bastrop on his way to Austin. He was governor, I mean president at that point and he tipped over in his buggy crossing the river, supposedly drunk, almost drowned. A slave named Sam Banks rescuing him. They took him to the hotel of a guy named Nestle who nursing back to health, sending him on his way, and in exchange for the favor, houston gave him title to a piece of land that supposedly turned out to be completely worthless. That's kind of one of those unknown Sam Houston stories. It fits the big drug stuff. Everybody in the western part of Texas disliked Houston and loved Edward Burwellson.
Speaker 2:You know, I think, if people aren't familiar, and it occurs to me that somebody may not know where Bastrop is and its significance, bastrop started off under a different name, didn't it?
Speaker 3:No, I will correct something I've been working on for 40 years. It was named Bastrop, june 1832 by Miguel Arsienaga, the land commissioner. I'm absolutely certain, although I can't prove it, that the request of Stephen F Austin to name the town after his confidant and land commissioner and primary resource in Texas until he died in 1827. Anyway, so it's a longer story than you probably want to hear now, but it was named Bastrop, and two years later the Mexican government upgraded it to a municipality and so they, in the course of doing that, they renamed it Mina. I believe the locals may have requested something like that in order to show their loyalty to the Mexican government, or it might have just been. They wanted to name it after a Mexican hero and so in, but everybody kept calling it Bastrop.
Speaker 3:Oh, here's my other favorite story. There's a while it was called Mina. For four years an old boy from somewhere in the east came and wrote in his diary I'm in this town and the I think the official name is Mina, but everybody calls it Bear Strap, which makes me know that how Bastrop was always pronounced. Anyway, so they they've got lots and lots of documentation that continued to use it as the name Bastrop as soon as the Republic got organized and the Congress got organized and they started establishing the old municipalities as counties, they changed the name Mina back to Bastrop. So when I talk to kids I make them say Bastrop, mina, bastrop, bastrop, mina, bastrop, because there's lots of literature out there that's got it wrong and it drives me crazy.
Speaker 1:If you'd asked me, I'd have told you. Well, the city was originally named Mina and they changed it to Bastrop when the Republic was born, because that's the story and how I'd always seen it.
Speaker 2:That's how I always heard it too, yeah.
Speaker 1:That means, ken, you got to get it out there, we got to get that out there in the historical, historiographical sphere. So that does not slip away.
Speaker 3:Been trying for 40 years.
Speaker 1:Maybe people will listen to this podcast and say, hey, it's time to correct something and all Well. Bastrop has a wonderful history of many different things, but maybe the thing that people identify with Bastrop more than anything else is the court case. They'll got to be Bastrop in the 1940s, such an important case in all of Latino civil rights. You, being the historian of Bastrop, can you let our audience know, and former or bound, how that case affected the Bastrop community and what was the result of that and how it progressed?
Speaker 3:To be honest with you, it didn't affect us any more than the other areas in Texas that had separate Mexican American and Anglo-American schools. It is, in fact. It took me a long time to discover that it was a reality. It affected us because we were all Mexican Americans and the little German boys like me went to school together after 1948. So the significance for us is that it carries the name Bastrop in Delgado. Two stories about how it got its name. One is Bastrop's, the first in the alphabet of the plaintiffs, the defendants, and Delgado is the first name under the Bastrop. But there's also I've seen it written that the story about Minerva Delgado was so compelling that they decided to use it as their primary drawing card for the case and so they named it after her. And the reason for that is in the testimony.
Speaker 3:It came out that her grandmother, who was rearing her because her parents were dead, sent Medirba's uncle to the school.
Speaker 3:Superintendent said my grandmother wants Medirba to go to school in a closer school.
Speaker 3:Instead of walking a mile, she could walk half a mile and go to school with me and go to the, I guess, so-called white school. And the professor said the superintendent said does she speak English and the answer was no, it's just sorry she has to go to mean award school, the Mexican school. And so her husband was one of the real kind of leaders of the Latino community in Bastrop, sam Garcia, and he was strong enough to agree to file suit with Dr Sanchez, and Bob Eckhart and others came trying to round up people to file suit for those school districts in the Austin area. So it's a great sense of pride to us. Recently since we discovered it and we've gone to the trouble to put a marker up where the old school was, centro Gonzalo Barrientos has been instrumental in helping us in a number of ways and it's a part of our history largely. I think that rings a bell for us because it's got the Bastrop Indian Pound School District attached to it and a native daughter.
Speaker 1:All of us know when we're trying to get behind something, to get a marker up, sometimes it's a big campaign, it's a difficult campaign. You were involved, so tell us a little bit. How did the community get behind that and how would it become such a success for getting that marker put up?
Speaker 3:Well, it was all that hard. We had the city council, had a council member that was interested and she was the kind of Hispanic representative and so we worked out. I had explained to her about the school the mean award school we had also become. I had become aware of it because we did a video interview with some of the former students in 2009. And so I had a lot of knowledge from that. And then I had written articles and people were aware of it from the articles that I wrote, and so we decided to do something to honor Hispanics.
Speaker 3:We found the city manager, found a three acre piece of ground that was unclamed and we made a park out of it, named it after Minerva Delgado and worked with the state and Gonzalo and others to make sure that, and the Bastrop County Historical Commission to get the site marker put up. But it was really not that much of a difficulty. After we got the marker, the city council put together a really good program with a meal at the convention center. They published my articles about mean award school and the case and gave everybody copy that and had some of the former students show up, and so that was a really good event in 2017. So I think that that raised a fair amount of awareness where I think people kind of recognize it locally and kind of have some idea of what it is, although I'm not sure the students do.
Speaker 3:I was at the school the other day and a couple of girls walked by speaking Spanish and I asked the principal if I could talk to them and said sure. I said girls, would you be surprised to know that 75 years ago you'd gotten spanked for just for what you just said because it was in Spanish, just shook their heads what? And walked off talking about it. So that really kind of convinced me that doing this 75th anniversary commemoration of the ruling, which is we're working on right now, was timely and really important and I think, much more than local interest. We hope it will draw interest statewide, become part of the important lore that needs to be told. The story needs to be told and it needs to be told because we can't let it happen again.
Speaker 2:It's interesting that you say that because when I first started and I've written a little bit on, I mean awarded to come up in some of my research and I had, of course, read about it in books by Guadalupe, san Miguel and other Mexican-American historians in Texas about Delgado versus Bastrop, and so I started looking into it after I graduated and found out that a lot of the information that people had about it was incorrect. And it's interesting because it made its way into the teaks, the Texas essential skills and knowledge, that our public school teachers have this as one of the subjects that they teach about Delgado versus Bastrop. And I would go out and talk to future teachers or acting teachers. I said, well, can you tell me about the case they go? We really don't know much about it.
Speaker 2:The history was very small, and so I think that it's interesting that Bastrop has actually embraced this. And I think that's very important, ken, because you know, in a lot of communities and not just in Texas where they've had a case or an event that didn't necessarily put them in good light at the time, a lot of communities might shun that information. But what's amazed me about the city of Bastrop is Bastrop has kind of embraced this decision and you know Bastrop has changed a lot from the way it used to be and, like you were talking to those kids in school is that you know 75 years ago was much different and you know they can't believe it today, but it was. And I think that the community of Bastrop really should be a model of how you can look at something in the past that maybe wasn't complimentary but you changed it and now you celebrate it and look at the difference of the community.
Speaker 1:We don't hear about Delgado as much those of us that study Mexican-American desegregation and civil rights. The Mendes case out in California was getting all the publicity and that was regarded as this first one, although Delgado probably had more effect than that. Why do you think it got buried so much?
Speaker 3:Old history. I mean, we're moving on and I don't think that I know that whatever lingering discrimination that continued after that Delgado ruling, in Bastrop at least, was not severe, but it was at least a kind of a kind of we all went to the picnic together but sat at different tables, sort of. I mean, that's not, that's the, the Hispanics and the Anglos, those are the right terms. But I also think that the racial integration was so much more powerful, so much more. The discrimination, the segregation was so much more harmful and in a lot of ways. So I think that I'm guessing that that episode, the civil rights episode, kind of just simply takes precedent in terms of thinking through those kinds of things for us.
Speaker 3:And also it's like you know, my father grew up being discriminated against to some extent as a German. The Germans were separate in Bastrop until World War I and suddenly they became Americans, but until that point they were distinct and they didn't intermarry in that sort of thing. So I think about the third and fourth and fifth generation Latinos in Bastrop that I know, that I grew up with and there's no difference, I mean, why would you call me a little German boy and call them Mexican Americans? I think we're way past that. What's that generation Now, the newer immigrants? It's a different story, but I think there's a almost complete integration of Latinos and non-Latinos, in Bastrop at least, I think, mostly across the state. I mean, we're way past that. So I think it's a non-issue, and it's been a non-issue for quite a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a very good point you bring out, and I think it's often overlooked in the history of ethnic minorities in Texas is that, you know, I grew up in New Bromphils so I'm very familiar with a lot of the German history. But German history Germans were at one point the largest immigrant group in Texas and in fact the United States, and that kind of has become buried. I mean, you know you don't hear much about German history, like in New Bromphils. That you know went up to about 1900, then it kind of disappears. And I think that you're right is there was a lot of discrimination around the World War I area against Germans.
Speaker 2:But one of the things that I found very interesting when I was looking at Delgado versus Bastrop and of course those court cases also included Elgin and Taylor and some other communities there in west of Austin, del Valley is that one of the things that one of the superintendents said is that, look, there is a lot of mixed families, and by mixed he met a lot of German families that had married into Mexican families and so a lot of the students were kind of caught between two worlds, because in some places you did have separate schools and other places you didn't.
Speaker 2:My mother, for example, spoke English and Spanish and this was in Caldwell County, and when she lived in one town she went to the white school with the other, with the other children, and as they moved into a smaller town she was forced to go to a segregated school. So the segregation for in that time period for Mexican Americans was different. It was uneven. It was enforced in some areas, not in others. And the whole thing about the Germans being also a minority, that in many times, or an ethnic group in many times that were discriminated against, those are issues that are sometimes get forgotten and get buried too.
Speaker 3:It's also the American story. You move on and you're not immigrants anymore and you blend in Somewhat different with the current situation, with Spanish-speaking people. But I mean, it's one of the first times we've had this struggle that doesn't seem to end. My last latest book on Bastrop is 1874 to 1900. And there's a lot of interplay in that, following up after Reconstruction, where there and I think Bastrop in many ways is a microcosm of Texas and we had a sizable number of freed slaves, african Americans, a sizable number of Germans and the rest were called Americans, and so there was a lot of interplay where the Germans and the African Americans and the liberal whites were able to control the politics for a while, but it didn't last all that long. Eventually the Germans just kind of sided with the Americans in most things.
Speaker 3:But there's a number of events that I think are pretty significant.
Speaker 3:One of them in particular is the in sort of a three-part populace and the predominant group, the American.
Speaker 3:So whites decided it was time to build a public school and so they had to have a bond of election to build the schools, and they couldn't pass it with the number they needed without the African-American vote.
Speaker 3:So they worked to deal. The Germans were going to shut down their school and they were going to join in with the white school, and so they they made a deal where they would build equal schools if for the blacks one hand, whites on the other, and there were no Mexican-Americans around at that time, and so they were able, the the blacks were able to parlay that into two seats on the school board, which also included two Germans and two Americans, and they were able to elect some city council members. But that was really the high point of their ability. That the interplay is just really fascinating to me. The Germans were very liberal in terms of African-American rights and so forth, but they increasingly joined the Americans and being a kind of a white person's party, and integrated with them against the African-American, so that Jim Crow kind of activities set in the late 1890s and that was all she wrote until civil rights.
Speaker 2:You know I think it's so important and you know, you know, scott and I teach at a university and we have to teach big Texas history, right, you know, students will come to our class for one semester, four months, and we're teaching Texas history from Native American settlements all the way to, you know, 21st century. So we can't cover it all, and so it's so important that that historians like yourself are digging deep locally. What is the the best way for somebody interested in looking at community history, like you did, to get started?
Speaker 3:Read, read and read, talk. You know, talk to people that have done it before. There's, there's amazing resources out there. If you're, if you're lucky, the, if you're lucky to have a newspaper in the area that's a gold mine. The courthouse records are gold mines. Anybody, anybody that's got a museum or archives or a county, is well, everybody has a county historical good commission. You can talk to those people and just don't, don't be afraid to ride into and to search. I didn't know what I was doing when I started. I had enough brain to start finding things and I found out different resources, started looking, I looked at, I looked for Bastrop and every index of the book I could find, and I could read microfilm and see the name Bastrop on the page in three seconds back when you had to read microfilm. So, yeah, you just go do it. I don't know how else to say it.
Speaker 2:You mentioned earlier that you've got the 75th anniversary of the Delgado decision coming up and I know that you've got a lot planned, and it's actually planned for the end of September, right September the 30th. So tell us a little bit about what you guys have planned.
Speaker 3:We've got a four-hour program that's pretty comprehensive. It's it's kind of timeline, historically based. We're going to start with the esteemed professor Gene Price to kick us off with what life was like before the Delgado, early in 48. We have a video of students who went to school at the mean award school talking about their experiences there. We have a play that I wrote that the students at one of the high schools will enact this, depicting the trial.
Speaker 3:We have a video of some local Latinos who will be talking about, you know, life after the ruling, life in success. We have a Manorberdel-Gato talking about her life after the ruling and then we'll cap it off with Senator Gonzalo Bariantes talking about what's next and what the legacy means going forward in the future, and we'll provide a free lunch for anybody who shows up. By the way, it's at the Performing Arts Center in Bastrop September 30, 10th to 2nd, and we'd love to have anybody in the world show up and participate. I also hope that we can video the whole thing, maybe with some of the students with different angles, kind of a documentary type thing and possibly make it available statewide. If we're lucky, we'll get that done and maybe somebody will pick it up.
Speaker 2:Saturday, september the 30th, starting at 10 o'clock. It's really an honor for me to be helping with this, because I think it's so important and I love Bastrop. I've spent many a summer as a child in the park, in the forest of the trees, hunting snipe and just doing other things, so it's a lot of fun. You were telling us a story right before we began because I wanted to make sure I got your last name right. I always refer to you as Ken, but your last name is.
Speaker 3:It's Kessel with a US Kessel Us.
Speaker 2:Kessel Us. How did you get that name Kessel?
Speaker 3:Us. It should be pronounced Kesselus if it's in English, but it was Kessel. My great-grandfather added US on the end for his new country and to differentiate himself from his family that he was mad at. It's Kessel Us and it's pronounced that way because of that addition and not the way you would pronounce it.
Speaker 2:That's a neat little story. I mean, there's a lot of history wrapped up into that, right that he comes to the new country and he takes on that new country as part of his name, ken. We always ask our guests one last question, so tell us now, what do you know?
Speaker 3:I know some stuff about a lot of things in the world. I know less about myself than I probably need to. I know that I get up every day loving and chance to live another day of life, and I know that all I care about the rest of my life is trying to help people one way or another Family first, church second, history third, everybody else fourth.
Speaker 2:That's beautiful and I think that's good advice for all of us to adopt and live by.
Speaker 1:Yes, thank you, Ken. It's great. I mean people like Gene and I. We can't do our job if there's not people like you. They're doing that local history and doing the stuff. So we value you and we're so glad you're here. Thanks for coming.
Speaker 3:It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you.