Failed Lynching Leads To Creation Of Ultimate Sundown Town

The Tribune — Seymour, Indiana — Aug. 15, 1903

August 12, 1903, ~ Whitesboro, Texas. This East Texas cotton farming town has a history of terrible treatment of its Black residents. Beginning with the birth of the city itself. A Black man named Robert Diamond settled the area in the early 1800s and the settlement of “Wolfpath” but this is ignored by most historians. A hotel in the settlement and the Butterfield Overland Mail route called this route, the Diamond Route. This changed in 1848 when Captain Ambrose B. White and his family settled in Wolfpath. White had been in the army in the frontier Indian wars in Illinois. White had come from Illinois with a few other families and Wolfpath changed first to White’s Colony. The area remained fairly isolated due to the heavy forests of the area until the Civil War, although White had built the Westview Inn as a stage stop and supplied horses to the Butterfield line.

In 1860 a formal post office was built and the town was incorporated as Whitesborough and was primarily a Texas frontier town. In the next few years, the city grew as a farming and timber community and in 1879 was added to a train line running to the county seat of Dennison Texas, at that time the town was renamed Whitesboro. Like all areas of Texas and the South during Reconstruction and Jim Crow lynching was an agreed-upon way of dealing with African Americans that the White citizens found troublesome. Whitesboro was no different in, 1885 in the nearby town of Bells, Texas a Black man named John Martin was hung. In 1901 a man named Abe Wilder was brutally lynched and burned to death in Sherman. Today, Whitesboro, Bells, Sherman, and Dennison are included in the same metropolitan area.

Racial tensions were always running high in Grayson County and in 1903 someone tried to ignite a race war by placing notes in very public spots in Whitesboro and Sherman that stated the “Anti-White Mans Club” was going to kill a white girl to avenge Wilder and poison several of the wells owned or used by Whites. The person who posted the notes was never found, and while it is believed to be a sign of things to come there was barely in mention of this in the local papers.

On Aug 12th a Black man named Jonas Brown was arrested for an assault on a “Mrs. Hart”. There was no reporting on what this assault was if it was a rape or robbery or what. Other reports say he hadn’t touched her but frightened her near a barn and she ran screaming. Regardless, by 8:30 pm that night though a mob of several hundred men had come to the jail and broke Brown out and beat him and then took him to hang from a local elm tree.

After this, the mob left the scene and the sheriff and his deputies came to collect the body. Amazingly Brown had survived, the sheriff quickly cut him down and they rushed him to the jail in Sherman. During the evening the mob remained busy though and posted warnings to all Blacks in Whitesboro to leave town or die. Soon the rumors that Brown survived and had been taken by the sheriff and the violence began. White men broke into Black homes forcing out residents and burning the house down. By morning Blacks had begun fleeing town by taking the train or running into the wilderness, then north or west. For the next four days, armed White men patrolled the streets looking for Black residents. Those they found were tied to a hitching post. On the morning of Aug 15, White men savagely whipped 17 men for ignoring the order to leave town. All Black residents in Whitesboro and the immediate vicinity had fled, there were none left.

The sheriff and county attorney had requested aid to restore order and U.S. Marshalls and officers from Sherman and Dennison headed to Whitesboro to restore legal order. However, this did not mean any former Black resident felt safe to return.

The creation of one of the ultimate Sundown Towns had taken place in the four days since the attempted murder of Jonas Brown. No one was ever arrested for that attempted murder, and no one was arrested for the whippings of the 17 other men or the burning of Black homes. Angry Whites in town had successfully removed the Negro from their environment.

This remained the case for decades in the census. In 2020 of the 4,074 residents of Whitesboro only 33 were African American, or less than 1 percent of the population. 

Sources: