Louis Young

Louis Young was born in 1849 in Arkansas, enslaved with his mother and eight others by a man named Hampton. He never knew his father. He started working at eight, from daylight to dark, Sundays included, and the weekly ration was seven pounds of meat, a peck of meal and a quart of molasses, with nothing more if it ran out.

In the fall of 1861, Hampton sold Louis and his mother to Tom Young, who felt his mother's muscles and checked her for whip scars before paying $900. Hampton argued for a higher price, saying Young was taking them to Texas, where they were sure to stay enslaved despite the war. The trip by wagon to Robinson County, Texas, took about a month. There they built the cabins and cleared the land. Louis said Young gave them enough food and reasonable work, and that Saturday-night music and dancing were things he had never known before.

After freedom his mother stayed on to cook, but Louis ran off to Calvert and worked for wages until he was grown. He married Addie Easter at twenty-five; she died ten years later. He married again in 1890 and rented farms, where, he said, good crops meant bad prices and good prices meant bad crops. He described the Klan whipping Black residents, some hanged by their thumbs, until people were afraid to sleep in their homes, and said order returned only when soldiers came. In 1925 he moved to Fort Worth.