Heroes of Camp Robinwood
In the 1940’s, segregation was a common practice in America. Most White and African American people lived in separate neighborhoods, attended different schools and were members of segregated churches.
When Camp Arnold was gifted to our Girl Scout council in 1945, it was designated for White girls only. However, at the same time, membership in Girl Scouts was growing and Houston had more than 650 African American girls active in troops. Unfortunately, the nearest camp they could attend was in Oklahoma.
To address this unfair situation, four local African American businessmen—Clarence A. Dupree, Hobart T. Taylor, Sr., Carter Walker Wesley and James Hudson Jemison—stepped forward to ensure that all girls could have the opportunity to go to camp. Together, they donated a substantial amount of the funds necessary to purchase 206.25 (per deed) acres of farmland in Willis for a new camp. Then, with Dupree as chair, they formed a fundraising committee of prominent African American citizens who undertook the task of raising the rest of the $8,240 needed to buy the property.
In June,1949, the president of Houston and Harris County Girl Scouts, Mrs. H.O. Johnson, received a deed for the new property, and camp development began. According to the Council Board Minutes, the first camping session was held in the summer of 1950. At that time, there was only one housing unit, a wash house, an infirmary, and a lodge. Girls were invited to enter a contest to name the new camp, and the winner was Evangeline McDonald (Singletary). She loved the wooded land and especially the flock of beautiful red-breasted birds that she observed there, hence the name “Robinwood.”
Thus, Camp Robinwood became the first camp in the state of Texas open to African American girls. It was truly a camp for ALL GIRLS. The names of the four men who made this possible are listed on a memorial at Camp Robinwood and pictures of them are on the wall of the theater inside the Goodykoontz Museum at the Program Place for Girls. But who were these heroes?
Clarence A. Dupree 
Clarence A. Dupree was born in 1893 in Palquemine, Louisiana, to a single mother who left him with relatives to raise him. At age seven, the young Dupree found himself orphaned. He was brought to Texas and moved to Beaumont with an uncle where he worked as a bellhop at the Crosby Hotel. He later moved to Galveston where he met his future wife, Anna Johnson. There, he continued to work as a bellhop at the Tremont Hotel until he was drafted into the Army in World War I.
In the Army, Dupree was a cook but his ability as a native of South Louisiana to speak and read French served him well. He often worked as an unofficial interpreter, and he earned extra money with his skills as a barber, which were often in great demand!
Dupree was quite an entrepreneur. He returned to Houston after the war with $1,000 in his pocket, according to his wife. He invested his money in a number of small ventures, but continued to work as a porter while his wife opened a beauty salon in their home. In 1939, they built the Eldorado business center across from Emancipation Park at Elgin and Dowling streets. For decades, the Eldorado Ballroom on Elgin Street hosted concerts, parties, dances, school fundraisers, and social events for the African American community.
In the 1940’s, the Duprees opened the Negro Child Center, a first-class orphanage for Black children, as well as the Eliza Johnson Home for Aged Negroes on Cullen Boulevard, named for Anna’s late mother.
Dupree died in Houston on October 22, 1959 at the age of 66.
Hobart T. Taylor, Sr. 
Hobart T. Taylor, Sr., was born in Wharton, Texas, in 1890. After finishing high school in Wharton in 1913, he attended Paul Quin College and Prairie View A&M, where he was captain of the Prairie View baseball team in 1917.
Upon graduation from college, he worked for Standard Life Insurance Company of Atlanta and was the first salesman to write one million dollars’ worth of policies in a single year. Sadly, the Great Depression drove the company out of business.
Following advice from his father, Taylor sought business opportunities in Houston where he obtained a taxicab franchise in 1932. Since segregation laws required White people and Black people to ride in separate cabs, Taylor’s taxi business was restricted to Black neighborhoods. Through his investments, an inheritance of land in Fort Bend and Wharton counties from his father and grandfather, and his own hard work, Taylor became a wealthy man.
In addition to his successful businesses, Taylor was active in political and civic affairs. He personally financed a United States Supreme Court case that affirmed the right of Black people to vote in Texas Democratic Party primaries.
He was also a delegate to the 1944 Democratic National Convention, the first Black delegate from a southern state since Reconstruction. Taylor was close friends with local and national political leaders, including several mayors of Houston and Lyndon Baines Johnson, who became a Texas Senator in 1948 and later, as Vice President, became President in 1963 after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Taylor’s son, Hobart T. Taylor, Jr., served as a legal aide to Johnson in the White House, as executive vice chairman to the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity under President Kennedy, and later as associate special counsel to President Johnson.
For more than 20 years, Taylor worked with the United Negro College Fund and was one of its largest contributors.
Taylor passed away in Houston on December 5, 1972.
Carter Walker Wesley 
Carter Walker Wesley was born in 1892 in Houston, in the city’s first and most successful Black neighborhood, Freedmen’s Town. Shortly after completing high school, Carter moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and graduated magna cum laude from Fisk University, a private, highly-ranked historically Black college.
During World War I, Wesley served as an officer in the Army. After attending the newly opened Black officers' training camp in Des Moines, Iowa, he was commissioned a first lieutenant. During his military service, he saw first-hand the discrimination against Black servicemen, which prompted him after his stint in the Army to enroll at Northwestern University’s law school in Illinois in 1919.
After a successful career as a civil rights attorney, Wesley took a job in 1929 with the Houston Informer and the Texas Freeman, a newspaper for African Americans, believing that he could do more to fight discrimination with the power of the press. He eventually became publisher of the newspaper.
In the 1940’s, Wesley was instrumental in helping desegregate The University of Texas Law School, personally and financially supporting Hermann Marion Sweatt who had been denied admission to the law school because he was Black. Wesley even employed Sweatt as circulation manager of the Houston Informer while the lawsuit Sweatt filed against the university worked its way through the courts.
Wesley died on November 10, 1969, at his home in Houston. His obituary in the Houston Chronicle also mentioned that he was “one of 11 Negro publishers sent to Germany by the U.S. Government in 1948 to investigate claims of discrimination against Black servicemen in that country."
James Hudson Jemison 
James Hudson Jemison was born in 1906 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He was one of seven children. After losing his father by age ten, his mother sent him to live with relatives in Chicago where he attended Wendell Phillips High School and met his future wife, Abbie Franklin, the daughter of Madame Nobia Franklin, who founded the Franklin Beauty School, Inc.
In Chicago, Jemison attended Crane Junior College, one of the largest community colleges at that time. He and Abbie married in 1928, and in 1934, Mrs. Franklin died, leaving the beauty school to her daughter and son-in-law. The couple decided to close the beauty school in Chicago and relocate to Houston in 1935. The Franklin School of Beauty was successful in Houston and trained many African American students in the cosmetology field.
Jemison was a tireless supporter of civil rights and initiated a lawsuit against the City of Houston for the practice of not allowing African Americans in city parks or golf courses. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor in 1954, resulting in the desegregation of city parks and golf courses.
Jemison died at the age of 76 on April 23, 1983, and is buried in Paradise North Cemetery in Houston.
All of us should remember these four special men, their extraordinary lives, their commitment to racial justice, and especially when visiting Camp Robinwood, how their generosity gave San Jacinto Girl Scouts of all races a beautiful place to explore, learn, and have fun together.