William Henry Ellis – Black Millionaire Posing as Mexican
By
John C Abercrombie
William Henry Ellis is an extremely interesting case in the history of race and race relations in America. Born June 15, 1864, in Victoria, Texas, located near Corpus Christi, Houston, San Antonio and Austin. His parents were Charles Ellis and Margaret Nelson Ellis who were former slaves. His parents had been bought by Joseph Weisiger from Kentucky and moved to Texas in 1853. Many slave owners moved to Texas to find more fertile soil and the focus of the slave trade. By 1870 Ellis’ parents had gained their freedom and moved to Victoria, Texas and built a home for themselves and their children.
Later in his life he would claim they were of Cuban or Mexican rather than African to fit with nis new identity which we will cover in detail shortly.
William Henry Ellis was fortunate to attend school in Victoria as was his sister Fannie. He had 2 other siblings, but they held full time jobs which was often necessary for Black families to do because of the low wages they were paid for the jobs they were able to get.
Being close to Mexico and having many people of Hispanic origin, he grew up bilingual, speaking English and Spanish which he used to his advantage later in life to his benefit. In his early life he held many different job including, working on a ranch, assisting leather dealers and later inspecting customs, trading cattle and growing cotton. This was knowledge that he would use later in life.
In his early 20’s he was employed by William McNamara and worked in the cotton and hides field as a dealer conducting business with Spanish businessmen. This allowed him to make a name for himself in the business. By 1887 he had moved to San Antonio. It was here that he began calling himself Guillermo Enrique Eliseo. It was here that he started spreading the story of his “Cuban and Mexican” ancestry. This allowed him to enjoy freedoms that were denied to African Americans.
It is interesting to note that Ellis did not “pass”. Passing is more related to a complete separation from your family and identity. Ellis was able to alternately pass as Mexican and American depending on which side of the border he was working at the time. It is also significant to note that he maintained a close connection to his Black family, not abandoning them as would have been necessary if he were “passing”.
To further explain passing, we consider the case of Plessey v Ferguson. Homer Plessey was 1/8 Black and 7/8 European. His appearance was that of a White person. In fact, it was necessary to set the setting for the case and a person was hired to ask Plessey if he were Black before arresting him for sitting unnoticed in the Whites only car on the train. The case was designed to show how absurd it was to have a streetcar conductor make judgement on the race of riders.
Ellis never turned his back on Blacks and in the early 1890’s he supported Norris Wright Cuney a Texas Republican. Cuney was the son of a White planter, Phillip Minor Cuney and a slave mother Adeline Stuart. As a result of Cuney’s win Ellis was nominated to represent the 83rd district in the Texas Legislature. He lost the election, but it further promoted his name.
Ellis began to develop a dream of a colony of Blacks in Mexico. He is quoted as saying “Mexico has no race prejudice from a social standpoint.” Twice during the 1890s, Ellis attempted to create a colony for blacks in Mexico from the southern United States.
One attempted exodus of nearly eight hundred people from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that failed when several cases of smallpox broke out after settlement in near Tlahualilo in northern Mexico, forcing almost all to return to the United States.
Some of the memorial events in the life of William Henry Ellis are listed below
- In 1903 he visited Empower Menelik in Ethiopia.
- 1904 he meets with United States President Teddy Roosevelt at the White House
- 1909 he signs agreement with the Mexican government for a concession to make rubber from Palo Amarillo and Amate plants. – this is important as they are essential to the emerging American automobile industry
- 1909 he is excluded from a Pullman train while traveling from Mexico City to New York. This is because in Mexico they did not practice the segregation of races as was the case when the train crossed the border into the United States.
- 1912 Victoria, Texas erects a Confederate memorial in the main square. Note: most of the confederate memorials were established well after the war with most after this time.
- 1918 he is involved in an oil deal in Costa Rica
- 1920 he is involved in a deal to create ports in Mexico for shipping
- 1923 he dies in Mexico City.
While in New York City he was president of a series of mining and rubber companies, all heavily invested in Mexico. He also bought a seat on Wall Street which he sold in 1910 before returning to Mexico.
Earlier we mentioned that Ellis did not pass as Mexican, forsaking his Black connections. When in the United States he was able to enjoy many privileges as a Mexican than he could as a Black American. When in Mexico, he was an American enjoying all of the privileges that all citizens enjoy.
He maintained and was close to his Black relatives. As you review the videos below, you will see that the author of a book on his life was able to get his Mexican and American relatives together. A wonderful story.
It is interesting to point out a misconception of the call to immigrants in the Emma Lazarus poem so often quoted on the Stature of Liberty.
We often quote proudly that that motto states:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
This leaves out the preceding line …
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips.
The generally accepted meaning of this can be seen below
This phrase is part of the poem “The New Colossus” which is engraved on the Statue of Liberty in New York. “Storied” means legendary, much-talked-about, and “pomp” is pageantry, especially the pageantry that goes along with authority. The whole line, which reads “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp” is an example of American rejection of European civilization while imitating it. Certainly, the poem is as pompous as anything Europe had to offer.
This shows the hierocracy of the American legend where we attempt to show the world that we are welcoming of people, yet we discriminate against even the best of Blacks born on our soil.
William Henry Ellis was able to demonstrate the ability of a great businessman, but only by taking on the personality of a Mexican rather than his true Blackness. In Mexico he was accepted on his prowess as a businessman, and it is a shame that such was and is often not possible in America.
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Continue scrolling down for more amazing information, videos, books and value items as we look deeper into the life and accomplishments of William Henry Ellis.
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The Strange Career of William Ellis
Andrew Norman Guest Lecture Series
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The Strange Career of William Ellis:
The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire Winner of the Ray Allen Billington Prize and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award “An American ‘Odyssey,’ the larger-than-life story of a man who travels far in the wake of war and gets by on his adaptability and gift for gab.” ―Wall Street Journal A black child born on the US-Mexico border in the twilight of slavery, William Ellis inhabited a world divided along ambiguous racial lines. Adopting the name Guillermo Eliseo, he passed as Mexican, transcending racial lines to become fabulously wealthy as a Wall Street banker, diplomat, and owner of scores of mines and haciendas south of the border. In The Strange Career of William Ellis, prize-winning historian Karl Jacoby weaves an astonishing tale of cunning and scandal, offering fresh insights on the history of the Reconstruction era, the US-Mexico border, and the abiding riddle of race in America. 8 pages of illustrations
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The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire:
The Strange Career of William Ellis Ellis was born on June 15, 1864,[1] in Victoria, Texas, to Charles Ellis and Margaret Nelson Ellis, former slaves. He later claimed that his parents were Cuban or Mexican, rather than African, and styled himself as “Guillermo Enrique Eliseo”. Ellis was fluent in Spanish. He first worked on a ranch, assisted in leather dealing, and later inspecting customs, trading cattle, and growing cotton.
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Passing
Nella Larsen’s powerful, thrilling, and tragic tale about the fluidity of racial identity that continues to resonate today. A New York Times Editors’ Choice. Now a major motion picture starring Tessa Thompson and Alexander Skarsgård Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to “pass” as a white woman. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene Redfield, just as light-skinned, has chosen to remain within the African American community, and is simultaneously allured and repelled by Clare’s risky decision to engage in racial masquerade for personal and societal gain. After frequenting African American-centric gatherings together in Harlem, Clare’s interest in Irene turns into a homoerotic longing for Irene’s black identity that she abandoned and can never embrace again, and she is forced to grapple with her decision to pass for white in a way that is both tragic and telling. This edition features a new introduction by Emily Bernard and notes by Thaddaeus M. Davis
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The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire:
The Strange Career of William Ellis Part 2
The first 16+ minutes are the continuation of the above video.
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Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Young Readers’ Edition: Everything American History Textbooks Get Wrong Full edition link follows this link – Look below this one. Now adapted for young readers ages 12 through 18, the national bestseller that makes real American history come alive in all of its conflict, drama, and complexity Lies My Teacher Told Me is one of the most important―and successful―history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship. Now Rebecca Stefoff, the acclaimed nonfiction children’s writer who adapted Howard Zinn’s bestseller A People’s History of the United States for young readers, makes Loewen’s beloved work available to younger students. Essential reading in our age of fake news and slippery, sloppy history, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition cuts through the mindless optimism and outright lies found in most textbooks that are often not even really written by their “authors.” Loewen is, as historian Carol Kammen has said, the history teacher we all should have had. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and then covering characters and events as diverse as the first Thanksgiving, Helen Keller, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen’s lively, provocative telling of American history is a “counter-textbook that retells the story of the American past” (The Nation). This streamlined young readers’ edition is rich in vivid details and quotations from primary sources that poke holes in the textbook versions of history and help students develop a deeper understanding of our world. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Young Readers’ Edition brings this classic text to a new generation of readers (and their parents and teachers) who will welcome and value its honesty, its humor, and its integrity.
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TEACHING US HISTORY AS IF BLACK LIVES MATTER
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Lies My Teacher Told Me, 2nd Edition
“Every teacher, every student of history, every citizen should read this book. It is both a refreshing antidote to what has passed for history in our educational system and a one-volume education in itself.” (Howard Zinn) A new edition of the national best seller and American Book Award winner, with a new preface by the author Since its first publication in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me has become one of the most important – and successful – history books of our time. Having sold nearly two million copies, the book also won an American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship and was heralded on the front page of the New York Times in the summer of 2006.
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TEACHING US HISTORY AS IF BLACK LIVES MATTER
When it comes to looking at the role of race in America, this video goes into the difference between what is taught and what really happened.
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Barracoon:
The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade―abducted from Africa on the last “Black Cargo” ship to arrive in the United States. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.
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Baylor Conversation Series:
Slavery in Texas and Baptist Life The second in a three-part “Perspectives on Our History” Conversation Series event convened by Baylor University, held March 9, 2021.
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We see the ability of a man that was not allowed in America because of a class distinction that deprived him and so many others of the opportunity. This in turn deprived many others of the fruits of their work. While we cry that all people have equal opportunity, this demonstrates the fallacy of that argument. While it is a bit better today, we have not achieved any semblance of the dream for ALL people. It is time for open and honest discussions that focus not only on the few who have been able to excel, but those who have been denied the opportunity.