Texas Originals

Lillian Horace

April 29, 1880–August 1, 1965

Fort Worth’s Lillian Horace was a prominent educator in her day. It is only now that we recognize her as Texas’s first Black woman novelist.

Born in 1880 in East Texas, Horace stated her ambitions at a young age: "to read—to unite—to teach—to possess no fear of death." Her pursuit of higher education was crucial to her journey, as she moved from Bishop College and Prairie View A&M in Texas to the University of Chicago and Columbia in New York.

But it was Fort Worth’s I. M. Terrell High, her alma mater and the city’s first Black school, that became her longest association. She taught there for many years, founding its library, drama department, and school newspaper.

Throughout her life, Horace also wrote. Her first novel, 1916’s Five Generations Hence, was a utopian account of Black Americans escaping the Jim Crow South through migration to Africa. The book was ahead of its time, predicting both Marcus Garvey’s popular emigration movement and the Afrofuturism of Black science fiction.

By the 1950s, Horace had completed two additional books, a biography of the Baptist leader Lacey Kirk Williams, praised at the time by Martin Luther King Jr., and the novel Angie Brown. Her works were not widely distributed in her lifetime, and it was decades before scholars uncovered the rich creative life of this revered public figure.

For More about Lillian Horace

The Genealogy, Local History, and Archives Unit of the Fort Worth Public Library contains photographs of Lillian Horace as well as original manuscripts of her work. The archive is open to the public by appointment, and some archival materials can also be accessed via the Fort Worth Public Library Digital Archives.

The Lenora Rolla Heritage Center Museum in Fort Worth, operated by the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, tells the stories of Black Fort Worth of which Lillian Horace was such a prominent part.

Selected Bibliography

Kossie-Chernyshev, Karen. Recovering Five Generations Hence: The Life and Writing of Lillian Jones Horace. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013.

Kossie-Chernyshev, Karen. "To Leave or Not to Leave? The 'Boomerang Migration' of Lillian Bertha Jones Horace (1880–1965), Texas’s Earliest Known Black Woman Novelist, Diarist, and Publisher." Black Women, Gender & Families 4, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 54–84.

Selcer, Richard F. A History of Fort Worth in Black & White: 165 Years of African-American Life. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2015.

Watson, Veronica. "Lillian B. Horace and the Literature of White Estrangement: Rediscovering an African American Intellectual of the Jim Crow Era." Mississippi Quarterly 64, no. 1–2 (Winter-Spring 2011): 3–24.

Winegarten, Ruthe. Black Texas Women: 150 Years of Trial and Triumph. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 

Listen to the audio

Portrait of Lillian B. Horace. Courtesy of the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society and the Genealogy, History and Archives Unit, Fort Worth Public Library.