Walter Moses Burton was 21 years old and living in slavery when he arrived to Texas in 1850. The wealthy white planter who enslaved Burton also taught him to read and write; after emancipation, he sold Burton several large plots of land in southeast Texas for a small sum, making him one of the wealthiest and most influential freedmen in Fort Bend County. In 1869, Burton successfully ran to be the state’s first Black sheriff and tax collector. Burton would go on to serve seven years in the Texas Senate, where he championed public education for newly freed Black citizens, and helped establish what is now Prairie View A&M University, one the state’s oldest historically Black institutions of higher learning.
More than 150 years would pass before Fort Bend County elected another Black sheriff. In November, voters elevated Eric Fagan, a longtime Houston police officer, to the post, making him the first Black sheriff in the county since Reconstruction.
Fagan, elected during a larger national reckoning on race and law enforcement, will lead an office that has been under fire for racial profiling. An investigation by the Houston Chronicle this summer revealed that a drug task force overseen by the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office overwhelmingly stopped and searched Latinx drivers, according to the paper’s analysis, in numbers that “defy statistical probability.” Fagan says he plans for more racial bias training for officers on the task force, as well as a citizens’ review board to oversee the office and flag concerns in the community. “Citizens shouldn’t fear being stopped and searched just because of the color of their skin,” Fagan says.
