Phillip Thomas Tucker, PhD, is an award-winning author of more than 40 books on various aspects of American history. He has conducted extensive research into the remarkable lives of historical men and women, black and white. Phillip Thomas Tucker, PhD, stands out as the ground-breaking author of the 2014 publication, Emily D. West and the “Yellow Rose of Texas” Myth.
Like many popular legends, the story of the Yellow Rose of Texas has changed significantly from its source material. However, Dr. Tucker has placed her fascinating story in a proper historical perspective for the first time. The original, or real, Yellow Rose was Emily D. West, a black woman who was born free in New Haven, Connecticut. She signed a contract to work as a housekeeper for James Morgan, who would pay her $100 a year and transport her to Galveston Bay, Texas.
Some time after West arrived by ship on the coast of east Texas, Mexican troops seized her and a number of other black servants and white workers, when the small port of New Washington was captured in mid-April 1836. Legend says that West was in General Santa Anna's tent on the hot afternoon April 21, 1836, when Texan forces launched a surprise attack that captured the military camp.
The story attributes the Texans victory to Ms. West’s seduction of the Mexican general, but historical facts place this firmly in the realm of impossibility. She could not have known the recently-formulated Texans' plans to attack, and no reports at the time mention a woman's presence or the general's alleged predicament of an intimate nature.
When Ms. West later reported the loss of her freedom papers in the attack, she was granted a passport out of Texas, where the institution of slavery thrived, and she left the area. She remains ensconced in legend, still credited by many for the winning of the most decisive and important Texan victory of the Texas Revolution. For the first time, Dr. Tucker has set the historical record straight, while illuminating the life of a remarkable free black woman from the North.
