John Crawford

John Crawford was born on Judge Thompson Rector's plantation at what later became Manor, Texas. His mother, Viney Rector, had been brought from Alabama and milked all the cows twice a day, and John turned out the calves. His father, whose name, Crawford, he took when grown, was sold away before John was born. His stepfather, Tom Townes, could make nearly anything: plows, horseshoe nails and furniture. Native people often came to the Rector place asking for food, and the judge always gave them something. John never learned to read or write.

One morning the judge sent word that no one was to go to the fields. Everyone gathered at the big house, but he was too choked up to speak, so his son-in-law announced they were free and could stay and pick cotton for fifty cents a hundred pounds. Only two families stayed. John's family rented land on halves. He said they had been told they would get forty acres and a mule but never did, and that night riders in the county were always chasing and beating Black men.

In 1877 he married Jannie Black at the little town of Sprinkle, and they were married 52 years and had seven children, all living. He spent his whole life in Travis County as a sharecropper, and when interviewed at 81 he lived in Austin with his daughter Susie on a $9-a-month pension.