This Day In Texas History - July 22

[joe817]

1760 – A fiesta was held in La Junta to celebrate the completion of a new Spanish presidio and mission, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Mission, constructed to support missionary activities and peaceful settlement in Apache lands. It was was part of the missionary complex that grew up at a Polacme Indian village near the confluence of the Rio Grande and Río Conchos. A number of Apache and other Indians camped nearby, purportedly to join in the celebration. They attacked the presidio at sunrise but were beaten back. After the battle Lt. Narciso Tapia was sent across the river to fetch a priest and saw the missionaries come out of the chapel there. This chapel is identified as that of the Mission of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.

1861 - On this date in 1861, West Point graduate, and veteran of the Mexican War, Confederate Brigadier General Bernard Elliott Bee Jr, died from wounds received the previous day at the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). Gen Bee served as Secretary of State and Secretary of War under Presidents Burnet, and Lamar, during the Texas Republic. During the battle, General Bee called out to his men "Rally behind the Virginians! There stands Jackson like a stonewall!". Some contend that Bee was unhappy with Jackson's position, and actually said "Look at Jackson standing there like a damned stone wall!" We'll never know what Bee intended because shortly after his rallying cry, he was shot, dieing the next day. Whatever his dieing words, General Bee was credited for giving rise to General Thomas J Jackson being forever after referred to as "Stonewall Jackson."

1887 - At Panhandle, Texas, Henry Harold Brookes published the Panhandle Herald, now the oldest continuously published newspaper in the Texas Panhandle. The paper has been a weekly except in 1922 and from 1926 to 1928, when it was issued semiweekly. It had numerous owners through the years until it became part of the Panhandle Publishing Company in 1932. The Herald printed a special Fiftieth Anniversary Edition on July 22, 1937.

1933 - A record-breaking rainstorm hits Freeport.

1944 - Lawrence Aaron Nixon walked into the same El Paso polling place that had denied him his ballot twenty years before and voted in a Democratic primary. The black physician and voting rights advocate was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1884. The lynching of a black man in Cameron in 1909 influenced Nixon to become a civil-rights advocate. In December of that year he moved to El Paso, where he established a successful medical practice, helped organize a Methodist congregation, voted in Democratic primary and general elections, and in 1910 helped to organize the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1923 the Texas legislature passed a law prohibiting blacks from voting in Democratic primaries. On July 26, 1924, with the sponsorship of the NAACP, Nixon took his poll-tax receipt to a Democratic primary polling place and was refused a ballot. Thus began a twenty-year struggle in which Nixon and his El Paso attorney, Fred C. Knollenberg, twice carried their case to the United States Supreme Court. It was not until the decision in Smith v. Allwright ended the white primary that the way was cleared, allowing Dr. Nixon to finally caste his primary ballot in El Paso.