Sam Houston’s Quest: The Cherokee & African-American Virtue Agenda

Sam Houston's Quest: The Cherokee and African-American Virtue Agenda is an historical analysis fertile with relationship to current issues of cultural polarization. Against the backdrop of Sam Houston's legacy, it addresses problems of social mix between the larger US scene and the Cherokees and African-Americans. Overlapping the interactive social milieu is a treatment of issues endemic to political unity within and between all the racial and cultural segments. Pertaining to the Cherokees, addressed are the varied opinions and assessments of the threat of Civil War overshadowing the era of the forced migrations called The Trail of Tears. Within the context of shifting locations from Tennessee and Georgia to Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas from the late eighteenth century to current times, the evolution of social structure and politics of the Cherokee receives analysis as relates to factors both within and exterior to their own domain. As with the Cherokee, explored is the larger African-American psyche as it engages a socio-political environment in constant flux from the 17th century to the present era. Highlights include the impact of Sam Houston's legacy upon his fabulous slave and compadre, Joshua Houston, and the latter's famous son, Samuel Walker Houston. Along the way, explored are the workings of several religious-based African American colleges started in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Central to these explorations are the interrelated concepts of intelligence capped by Biblically-based virtue as keys to education and assimilation to US Culture. The book ends with a call to honor the dual legacies of Sam Houston and Martin Luther King Jr. as models around which to forge a common and integrated culture true to the essence of both pluralism and virtue-based traditionalism.