Yellow Rose of Texas: Myth-making and Race in the 19th Century

Women's History, Episode #4 of 4. Today we're exploring one of Texas's most enduring legends - the story of the "Yellow Rose of Texas" and her supposed role in the Battle of San Jacinto. We are going to unravel the myth of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” We will explore the woman at the heart of the tale, Emily D. West, who was a free woman of color working in Texas, and untangle her real life from the Texan myth. We will also unravel how Emily’s tale was erroneously tied to the song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

Select Bibliography

Jeffrey D. Dunn, “‘To the Devil with your Glorious History!’: Women and the Battle of San Jacinto” in Women and the Texas Revolution, edited by Mary L. Scheer. (UNT Press, 2012).

Obiagele Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Color Consciousness in African America (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003)

Randolph B. Campbell,  An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821—1865. (LSU Press, 1991). 

Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850. (UNC Press, 2018). 

Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, (UNC Press, 2013).

Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (UNC Press, 2018).

Frances Edward Abernethy, 2001: A Texas Odyssey (UNT Press, 2001).

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