William Thomas

William M. Thomas was born on May 17, 1850, on Dr. Frank Thomas's plantation near Meridian, Mississippi, a place of about 700 acres with forty-four enslaved families. His father was sold to Texas when William was a baby, and he never knew him. His mother was the plantation cook. As a boy, William ran errands and gathered eggs.

He remembered punishments used to frighten the enslaved, including one for a boy who took a seed pumpkin. During the war he saw the tents of a Union field hospital, and what he saw there turned him against war for the rest of his life. Freedom was not announced on the plantation until long after it came. He said Union officials then made the enslaver pay fifty cents a day for work, and that the families were allowed to farm the land rent-free for seven years.

He stayed with his family until he was twenty-four. He then worked twelve years as a stevedore on the Galveston docks, where he voted, and farmed until 1910. After that he worked as a mortar man at Purina Mills in Fort Worth until 1931. In the late 1930s he lived on Hays Street in Fort Worth with his wife, on a thirteen-dollar monthly pension.