Norris Wright Cuney (May 12, 1846 – March 3, 1898) was an American politician, businessman, union leader, and advocate for the rights of African-Americans in Texas.

[3] Their father was Adeline's white master, colonel Philip Cuney, a wealthy planter of English ancestry.

[5] Cuney raised cotton but also had a dairy operation, with several hundred cows, plus beef cattle brought to the marriage by his second wife, Adeline Ware, with whom he had three children before her death before 1850.

Jennie Cuney was freed and sent to Europe for her education; she later passed into white society, consistent with her majority-white ancestry.

[8] The Civil War interrupted Norris' plans to attend Oberlin College in Ohio, which was open to students of all races and both genders.

[9] After the outset of the war, Norris Cuney gained work on a steamship that traveled on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers between Cincinnati and New Orleans.

[9] Spending a great deal of time in New Orleans, he became friends with influential figures such as P. B. S. Pinchback, a mixed-race man educated in the North who returned to the South after the war.

He entered postwar society as a literate, educated son of a wealthy and powerful white politician father, which gave him social advantages.

[7] After the war, Cuney met George T. Ruby, a representative of the Freedmen's Bureau, the federal agency responsible for providing aid to former slaves and helping them negotiate a free-labor society.

As reform efforts in the city were pushed forward by the community's business leaders, including the Galveston Cotton Exchange garnering support for harbor improvements, Cuney was asked to participate.

In 1889 Cuney was appointed as the US Collector of Customs for the port, the highest-ranking federal appointee position of a black in the late 19th-century South.

[14] Cuney's popularity enabled him to shape the Republican Party in Texas; his opponents, white and black, were initially unable to challenge his authority in most matters.

At the 1888 Republican National Convention, a group of conservative whites attempted to have a number of important black leaders expelled, leading Cuney to coin the term Lily-White Movement to describe the trend.

[26] Beautiful with grey eyes, she was also mixed race, the daughter of a mulatto enslaved mother and a white planter father.

They filled their house with music and art, emphasized education for their children, had them learn Shakespeare, and worked to shelter them from the racism of Galveston society.

[28] With two of Cuney's brothers and their families nearby, the children and their cousins regularly enjoyed frequent gatherings and events together.

She settled there, writing a biography of her father, published in 1913, and becoming an accomplished pianist, musicologist, author, and community organizer in the city.

[34] By the time of Cuney's death, white conservative Democratic-dominated southern state legislatures were passing new constitutions and laws to disenfranchise blacks and poor white voters to expel them from politics and secure their dominance after having lost some offices in the biracial coalitions of Populists-Republicans at the end of the century.

For instance, Texas instituted required payment of poll taxes and restricting voting in the Democratic nominating process to white primaries.

[31] By the 1930s, and the Great Depression, racial strife in the unions, in part encouraged by the employers as well as segregationists, had broken much of the former labor cooperation between blacks and whites.

Following his being removed from the Texas Republican chairmanship, William Madison McDonald, a black Fort Worth banker, formed an alliance with multimillionaire Edward H. R. Green to lead the party.