Navasota Echo (Black Newspaper)
In 1891, an albino slave child started up the Navasota Echo as publisher/editor of a black newspaper in Navasota. His name was Charles Love. His mother was born a mulatto slave in 1842 in what became Grimes County. She carried the name of Sarah Jane Holland.
“In the dead middle of the Civil War, Sarah Jane gave birth to a boy she named Charles,” quoted from the (Oxford American, a Southern Magazine of Good Writing, Spring 2015; feature by ‘Though the Heaven Fall, Part 1’, by John Jeremiah Sullivan and Joel Finsel, February 26, 2015).
“The boy was just two or three when the war ended… in later life he would possess, at most, a few fuzzy snapshot- memories of slavery days…but he’d been born a slave like his mother, and as such with no legal surname. Sarah Jane kept the name Holland as she carried her two sons to Houston immediately after the War, settling in the northern part of the Third Ward, just off Clay Street.”
In the 1870 census he is still Charles Holland, but in the 1880 census he is 17-year-old Charles Love still in his mother’s home, listed as a laborer. His brother, Richard, had taken the name of Percy. Early on Charles was marked down as a mulatto like his mother, but in 1900 he is listed as black. With census takers later instructed to use only “negroes, blacks, and coloreds” for race identification, Charles as a mulatto was light skin colored enough to be called “white” and the Oxford American’s writers are now referring to him as an albino.
Charles is also referred to as a “salamander” with very poor eyesight having to hold a document within six inches of his eyes to read at all and could see better at night than in sunlight. As a school boy, Charles became a good public speaker, and grew up in the city’s black cultural life to become a master of ceremonies. He also had a good singing voice.
As his mother aged, Charles, with difficulty, did what he could to support her. He found he could successfully peddle advertising space and subscriptions to several prominent newspapers.
Seeing the money he was earning for some African- American newspapers, it triggered his idea to start the black Navasota Echo as publisher/editor in a return, after nearly thirty years, to his home birth county. He advertised it as “the cheapest and best colored paper published west of the Mississippi… devoted to the interests of the people in general and the negro in particular.” Charles stood for the “uneducated and oppressed…against ignorance and superstition.”
Not a single copy of the Echo is known to survive. However, scattered articles that were quoted in other newspapers exist, particularly in the Galveston Daily News. Within a couple years the Echo folded. Charles had expected the end to happen stating that “the object in launching the Echo was to make money, this we must do, if not I’m ready to resign posthumous fame to our successor, whoever he may be.” No successor is known.
Charles returned to Houston to become an active, and endeared, Republican figure in Texas. His skin complexion seemed to turn “lilywhite” as he aged. In the 1900 Harris County Republican convention there was a squabble with Acting County Republican Secretary Ed Williams. Williams drew a knife. Seeing the knife, Love pulled a pistol. During a wild rush to the stage, a Mr. Tracey grabbed Love’s pistol to avert the challenge. In 1944, Charles, now “white, blind, bald, an old lion” was guided by an escort to the voting booth. Two years later, in 1946, Charles died to be buried in Paradise Cemetery located in Acres Homes.
(Written by Betty Dunn, Two Rivers Heritage Foundation. See www.tworiversheritagefoundation. org for more information and membership.)