Simp Campbell

Simpson "Simp" Campbell was born in January 1860 on Bill Sloan's place nine miles northwest of Marshall, Texas, and lived through the last five years of slavery. His father, Lewis Campbell, had been sold to Sloan by the Campbells of Florida and kept their name; his mother, Mariah, was brought from South Carolina. His siblings were Bint, Albert, Clinton, Dinah, Clandy, Mary, Lula, Liza, Hannah, Matilda and Millie. Sloan held more than a hundred people on a thousand acres, with a white overseer and a Black driver. Work ran from four until six, followed by a task. Sloan taught some of the men to read and write so they could keep cotton records in the field, and Simp's mother said the Black preachers had to preach what they were told: obey your master and mistress.

He saw Union soldiers and wagons returning from Mansfield. His family stayed with the Sloans until the old man died in 1906, but Simp left at 23, married, and spent his life as a day laborer in Marshall, raising two sons and two daughters. When he was eighteen, he said, the local Democrats told Black men that if they voted their ticket they would be recognized as white; nearly everyone on the Sloan place did, but he and one other man refused. When interviewed he lived in the Gregg Addition of Marshall, worked as a porter for a loan company, and said young Black people were progressing well but that "the color line holds them back."