re: Ongoing Baylor controversy/discussion thread

quote:

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Baylor and the Brazilian Girl

The same year that Brann settled in the town, a missionary named Zachariah Taylor brought an eleven-year-old girl named Antonia Teixeira to Waco from her native Brazil. Ostensibly, the plan was to foster Teixeira in the Baptist faith then return her at sixteen years old to her homeland, where she could share her beliefs with the Papists. Teixeira was given room and board at the home of Baylor president Dr. Rufus Burleson and his wife, Georgia, in return for domestic service.

When Teixeira was thirteen or fourteen, it became apparent that she was pregnant. Her condition was concealed from the public for several months, but on June 16, 1895, the Waco Morning News dropped a bombshell story. Teixeira claimed that she had been drugged and raped on multiple occasions by H. Steen Morris, brother of Burleson’s son-in-law who took his meals with the Burlesons.

The girl claimed that she had told Georgia Burleson about the attacks, but that “nothing was done about it,” and so they continued. At some point, the pregnant Teixeira was handed over to a Catholic woman. The Burleson-Morris clan had hoped that the girl would deliver her baby under her roof and return with it to Brazil, and the whole thing would blow over.

Meanwhile, Morris’s friends floated the story that she had taken a black lover, but that tale came to naught when Teixeira gave birth to a white baby, prematurely, two days after the Morning News story broke. In Brann’s words, the sickly child lived “just long enough to develop a striking resemblance to H. Steen Morris.”

In an attempt to quell the swelling controversy, Burleson dashed off a four-page pamphlet entitled “Baylor and the Brazilian Girl.” The girl had never said anything to Georgia about Morris, he claimed. The accusations were “black and damnable lies” concocted by a troubled young girl.

“With exceeding great reluctance,” Burleson claimed that the girl was “utterly untrustworthy,” and “in addition to her other faults, crazy about the boys.” All of this in spite of the fact that he had treated her just like his granddaughter, Burleson wrote.

Furthermore, Burleson went on to reassure readers that Baylor was a perfectly safe place for young women to receive their Christian educations, before reminding the good people of Waco all that Baylor had done for their city. “Rise up and vindicate Baylor University,” Burleson urged. As for Brann and his lot, they needed to “repent and confess openly their sins and receive forgiveness, before they are everlastingly lost.”

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