Image: Mr. Carter Walker Wesley (April 29, 1892 – November 10, 1969) born in Houston, Texas to Mable (Green) and Harry Wesley and he grew up in Freedmen’s Town, the city’s earliest and most successful Black neighborhood. He was an American lawyer, newspaperman and political activist.

Photographs left to right: Military career, 1917-1818; Carter Wesley & his wife Doris Wesley circa 1952; Carter Wesley- center, being congratulated by St. Elmo Brady- left, and Charles S. Johnson- right, for his donation of the Fisk Bell Tower, May 1, 1948; Newspaper publisher and Attorney Carter W. Wesley. (1950) At the time one of the only Black owned printing press in the Southwest.
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Mr. Carter Walker Wesley

He was born in Houston, Texas on April 29, 1892, to Mable (Green) and Harry Wesley and he grew up in Freedmen’s Town, the city’s earliest and most successful Black neighborhood.

After finishing high school, Wesley moved to Nashville, Tennessee where he worked his way through Fisk University, graduating magna cum laude in 1917.

Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois and other Black leaders and writers, Wesley joined the NAACP and contemplated a career in law. World War I soon interrupted his plans. Following graduation from Fisk, Wesley attended the newly opened Black officers' training camp in Des Moines, Iowa.

He graduated on October 15, 1917, and was commissioned a first lieutenant. Like other well educated Black men, Wesley was later passed over for the higher ranks in favor of less educated White men, a disparity between Black and White officers that was one of many Wesley observed during his experiences in the military, leaving a deep and lasting impression that informed his later career as a newspaper editor.

At the same time, Wesley became deeply concerned over the racial violence against the Black population that had swept through his hometown of Houston and led to the court martial and hanging of Black soldiers from Camp Logan. His concerns over the miscarriage of justice reinforced his interest in law.

The U.S. Army soon sent Wesley and his unit to Europe where he was first assigned to the Ninety-second Division at Camp Funston, Kansas, Wesley and other newly commissioned Black officers were saluted by only a tenth of the White soldiers stationed there, a show of military demeanor that Black soldiers at Camp Funston made a successful organized effort to rectify.

In 1918 he was assigned to the 372nd Infantry Regiment in France, where the regiment underwent further training with French officers and, as part of the French Army, saw action in June in the Argonne, moving into the Verdun region by August.

He was transferred the following month to the 370th, Wesley participated in the battle of Oise-Aisne on September 27, 1918. At the time of the armistice, Wesley was in command of his company after the captain had been severely wounded a few days before. Returning with the Ninety-third Division in February 1919, Wesley was released from service on April 5, 1919.

That fall, he enrolled in the Northwestern University Law School in Illinois, where he received a J.D. degree in 1922.

Following his graduation from law school, Wesley joined Jasper “Jack” Atkins, a friend from Fisk and a graduate of Yale’s law school, in establishing a practice in Muskogee, Oklahoma, near Tulsa. In 1921, Tulsa was the site of one of the worst race riots against the Black population in the nation’s history.

Wesley set up a law practice in Muskogee, Oklahoma, from 1922 to 1927. Wesley devoted most of his time to defending Blacks who were freed enslaved people of American Indians in Oklahoma and who, therefore, were entitled at birth to 160 acres, land that was increasingly coming under control of White men that the local courts assigned as guardians after White lawyers had the Blacks declared incompetent. Eleven of the thirteen cases Wesley took to the Oklahoma Supreme Court were successful.

Although he prospered in Oklahoma, Wesley made plans to return to Houston in 1927 and convinced Dr. G.P.A. Forde, a physician in Muskogee, to also move to Houston because of the opportunities afforded by the Houston Negro Hospital. Wesley also invested in construction businesses, real estate, and the local African American newspaper, The Informer

In 1931, Wesley and Atkins invited another Northwestern law school graduate, James Madison Nabrit, Jr., to join their practice. In 1930, they were only 21 Black lawyers practicing in the state of Texas. Finding his legal practice in Texas limited because of his race, he became a businessman and bought into a newly formed publishing company which owned the Houston Informer.

For several years, he served as auditor, vice president, treasurer and general manager of the Informer. By 1934, he became publisher of the newspaper. The Houston Informer at one time had a state-wide circulation of over 45,000. He soon took controlling interest in the newspaper and by 1945, The Informer was the largest Black-owned business in Houston in terms of the number of people employed and its gross income.

Carter used the Houston Informer as a podium from which to battle racism and to speak on behalf of African Americans. He used the paper, for example, to publicize the battle against the White Democratic primaries that effectively denied Blacks the right to vote. That battle was won in 1944 when the United States Supreme Court in Smith v. Allwright granted Texas blacks the right to participate in those primaries. Thereafter Wesley urged Black men and women to pay their poll taxes, vote, and fight for equal rights.

He and Atkins became associated with the Houston Informer , a newspaper for African Americans, whose publisher and owner, C. F. Richardson, publicized the manner in which Blacks' rights were being subverted and the notion that Blacks could do something to effect change.

If they paid their poll taxes, Blacks could vote in the general election, but the Democratic party, whose candidate was certain to win, did not allow Blacks to vote in primaries, rendering the Black vote ineffective. After Wesley, Atkins, Richardson, and others formed a corporation to help finance the newspaper, Wesley joined the State Bar and was allowed to practice law in Texas.

As he became increasingly aware of the power of owning a publication that served the community, he limited his law practice and focused more and more on his new investment. He was auditor of the paper in 1929, vice president in 1930, and treasurer and general manager by the end of 1932; he later became publisher of the newspaper.
He also owned the Dallas Express, one of a group of papers published by Freedmen's Publishing Company. The Houston Informer was a crusading voice for equal rights for Blacks before the integration of hotels, restaurants, and theaters in Texas in the early 1960s.

It was in Wesley's office that his friend and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People attorney Thurgood Marshall dictated a brief that resulted in granting African Americans the right to vote in the primary elections in Texas.

Wesley was also personally and financially supportive of Heman Marion Sweatt when he appointed Sweatt circulation manager for the Houston Informer, and when he later helped plan Sweatt's case in the landmark suit against the University of Texas. Wesley was a founder of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. In 1948 he was sent to Germany along with ten other Black publishers to investigate claims of discrimination against Black servicemen in that country.

As an attorney, Wesley remained active in civil rights issues. He forced the NAACP to stop relying on white attorneys to pursue cases in Texas. In the 1940s, over the objections of other activists in Houston, Wesley successfully argued for a two-prong approach to civil rights.

On one hand, he pushed for the integration of White educational institutions throughout Texas. When Herman Sweatt applied for admission to the University of Texas law school, he was denied admission because he was Black. Supporting Sweatt’s cause, Wesley employed him at The Informer while the lawsuit worked its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In an effort to forestall Sweatt’s efforts, the Texas legislature launched Texas State University (now known as Texas Southern University) and established a law school there to show that African Americans had their own separate and supposedly equal facility. Nonetheless, in 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Sweatt’s favor, holding that there were quantitative differences in the facilities and intangible inequities in the development of professional networks. The decision in Sweatt v. Painter (339 U.S. 629 (1950)) represented a successful challenge to the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Despite court victories such as this, Wesley anticipated that the integration of educational facilities in Texas and throughout the South would be a slow process. Thus, as the second part of his strategy, he continued to demand immediate improvements to and increased resources for the schools the state restricted to Black students only. Other activists believed that “segregated Black schools were no more than monuments of Jim Crow racism.” 1 When in-fighting erupted in the local NAACP office, Wesley, a man of no small ego, succeeded in pushing through his two-pronged approach.

The State of Texas did not mandate the elimination of race as an admissions requirement at all state institutions of higher education until 1965, some eleven years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and fifteen years after the decision in Sweatt v. Painter.

Wesley spent the remainder of his life engaged in a public campaign on against racial discrimination behalf of African Americans in Houston and across Texas.

His weapons ranged from boycotting to fundraising, but they all sought the same goal.

In 1923 Wesley married Gladys Dunbar, (his first wife) a woman from Ohio he had met while a student at Fisk. She died in 1925.

He married Doris Wooten in 1933 they were the parents of three children, Horace Wesley, Katherine Wesley Ennix,, and Dolores Wesley.

Houston lost one of its great civic leaders when Carter Wesley died on November 10, 1969, in Houston, and is buried in Paradise Cemetery North.

“Ultimately, the civil rights movement Wesley sounded into action modernized the southern system of racial hierarchy, helping save it from itself. The movement pushed a racial state to demonstrate obedience to the rule of law, to become less opaque, more rational and insidious…. His solution centered on black people sustaining a collective ethos of independence and self-reliance.”
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Sources for information about Mr. Carter Walker Wesley:

https://houstonhistorymagazine.org/.../carter-wesley-HH-1...

https://www.tshaonline.org/.../houston-informer-and-texas...

https://www.blackpast.org/afri.../wesley-carter-w-1892-1969/

https://www.tshaonline.org/.../entries/wesley-carter-walker

https://military-history.fandom.com/.../Carter_Walker_Wesley

https://www.digitaljournal.com/.../the-newly-formed...

https://tile.loc.gov/.../usre.../usrep273195/usrep273195.pdf

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