African American History Loses Three Past Masters
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| In Memoriam
August Meier |
Barry A. Crouch Barry Alan Crouch died suddenly of cancer on 13 March 2002 at his home in Riverdale, Maryland. He was sixty-one. Born in Glendale, California, on 26 February 1941 with his twin brother Robert, most of his childhood was spent in Syracuse, Kansas, and later in Norwood, Colorado, where he became a football and basketball star and still holds the school record for most points scored in one game. Barry went to Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colorado, and graduated with a B.A. from Western State College of Colorado in Gunnison. He quickly earned an M.A. degree at the University of Wyoming and his Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico in 1970. Upon graduation, Barry embarked upon a decade of various academic teaching jobs and fellowships. From 1967 to 1970 he taught at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, where he inspired one of his students--the well-known scholar Arnoldo De Leon--to become a historian. From 1970 to 1971 he received an NEH Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Black American Historical Studies at Howard University. He spent 1972 and 1973 at the University of Maryland working as an assistant editor on the Booker T. Washington papers. From 1974 to 1979, he taught at Bowie State College in Bowie, Maryland. Finally, in 1980, he became an assistant professor of history at Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C., where he spent the next twenty-one years as a teacher and scholar. Along the way, Barry received a half-dozen research and study grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barry was an incredible researcher. During his career, he produced three dozen journal articles, almost as many book reviews, and three monographs (two coauthored). Three more books, including a collection of his articles, will be published posthumously. His career spanned a variety of interests always resulting in a publication. His earliest article on New Mexico Senator Dennis Chavez and FDR's Court Packing Bill came from his Master's thesis. Two journal articles on the conservative reformer Amos A. Lawrence were drawn from his Ph.D. dissertation. Two articles on comparisons of the American slave south and ancient Rome and comparisons of different slave societies in Latin America were based upon research in NEH seminars. During his career at Gallaudet, he wrote several articles on deaf history and co-authored, with John Vickery Van Cleve, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America (Gallaudet University Press, 1989). Barry's major contributions to American history, however, lay in two fields: Reconstruction Texas and the bandits of the "wild" West. Because of his first teaching assignment at San Angelo State, Barry developed a life-long interest in Texas history. A prodigious researcher in primary sources, Barry along with Randolph Campbell, James Smallwood, a handful of other scholars began in the 1970s to undo the old racist Dunning School interpretation of Reconstruction Texas which has prevailed since Charles Ramsdell's 1910 monograph. Having mined the Freedman's Bureau Records on Texas for a dozen journal articles over a twenty-year period, Texas University Press published his monograph, The Freedman's Bureau and Black Texans (University of Texas Press, 1992). For years, scholars such as Herbert Gutman and Eric Foner relied on conversations with Barry and dozens of his journal articles for their own research about Texas in their major books about the slave family and Reconstruction. It was well known that Barry was one of the earliest practitioners of social history written from the bottom-up with generalizations based upon careful and time-consuming research in the Texas Freedman's Bureau records. In 1992, David Donald wrote a full page review of The Freedman's Bureau and Black Texans in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, an honor rarely accorded to historical monographs. Besides breaking new ground in Reconstruction history, Professor Donald remarked that the "episodes in Texas Reconstruction history that Mr. Crouch relates, perhaps do more than broad generalizations to explain the Freedman's Bureau failed, and how we lost the peace after the Civil War." In his last years, Barry became interested in the bandits that roamed the South during and after the Reconstruction Era. His biography of Cullen Montgomery Baker: Reconstruction Desperado (Louisiana State University Press, 1997), coauthored with Donaly E. Brice, is a case study and revisionist treatment of an outlaw that removes the romantic image of these bandits which continually emerges in popular literature, television shows, and even documentaries about this era. Two books coauthored by Barry will soon be published: The Governor's Hounds: The Texas State Police, 1870-1873 with Donaly E. Brice; and a book on the Lee-Peacock feud with James Smallwood. Before he died, Barry was engaged in two projects: (1) a full scale modern treatment of Reconstruction in Texas and (2) a revisionist biography of John Wesley Hardin. We will miss you, my friend. Larry Madaras |
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