Racial Massacre Caused By Rumors Destroy Slocum Texas

The fuse leading to the Slocum, Texas Massacre was laid a month earlier in Rusk, Texas when a Black man named Leonard Johnson was lynched for assaulting a White woman, then rumors began spreading among the White citizens in East Texas that the Black sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and others were preparing for a race war and were arming themselves because of Leonard’s lynching. These rumors added to the existing tension and then two other events set the spark to the powder keg.

First, a disabled White farmer named Reddin Alford argued over a debt with Black businessman Marsh Holley, although there was no violence between the two men the rumor began to spread that Holley mistreated Alford and demanded money, not something a Black man should do to a White man.

Then a Black man named Abe Wilson was put in charge of a local road construction hiring and a White man named Jim Spurger became enraged by this, not because he wanted the job but because he felt no Black man should be in a position where a White man had to answer to them. Spurger began agitating and demanding that men arm themselves and take action because the Blacks were overstepping their station and even threatening him.

On July 29th all these tensions erupted when at least 200 White men from all parts of Anderson County gathered in Palestine to take action and they gathered their women and children in schools and churches under protection.

District Judge Benjamin Howard Gardner ordered the closure of all saloons, taverns, hardware, and gun stores in an attempt to head off what was coming, this did no good because most of the armed men had already gathered and started to Slocum. These raiders targeted Black neighborhoods and started hunting every Black person they could find, shooting them on sight. After 16 hours they had killed at least 40 Black residents and many others fled the area through the woods. All of them leaving behind their positions and even property. One man Jack Hollie lost 700 acres, his dairy, and his granary.

Governor Thomas Mitchell Campbell ordered the Texas Rangers and state militia into Slocum to restore order and conduct an investigation. The Rangers were to assist Anderson County, Sheriff William Black. Black told the press that he only knew of 8 killings but suspected there were a lot of other victims, “they were shooting them down going about killing Negros as fast as they could find them.”

A death toll of 22 Negros and 5 Whites, was reported by the national newspapers, and eyewitnesses stated that the number was at least 100 victims. 

A grand jury was impaneled to review the incident and 11 arrests were made. Judge Gardner ordered a change in venue for the trials. However,  no one was ever indicted for the crimes even with the Rangers involved. As so often happened in the Jim Crow South there was no justice for the victims. Gardner was replaced and had to later defend himself with a pistol, he was the only White man fighting for justice. Over 150 Black pastors and ministers wrote to the Taft administration hoping to get justice but they never heard from anyone in the administration.

In the 1920 census, the unincorporated area that had been Slocum showed a collapse of the local Black population as it was half what had been in 1910. Even today the local Black population of Anderson County is just seven percent in comparison to the 20 percent in surrounding counties.

Sources:

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/the-slocum-massacre-1910/

https://www.texasobserver.org/where-the-bodies-are-buried/

https://tylerpaper.com/news/local/slocum-massacre-historical-marker-unveiled/article_4998e176-fe52-5445-ae5a-b4a2ebeee43a.html

Louisville Police Chief Determined To End Interracial Marriage In His City

 

In the Jim Crow South and frankly many Northern cities it was not rare for authorities to declare a person’s relationship illegal, and even go so far as to redefine who a person was.

At the end of July 1916 in the city of Louisville, Kentucky Police Chief H. Watson Lindsey determined that interracial marriage was of great concern to his department. “We will spare to effort to abate this practice in Louisville and Jefferson County,” Lindsey told the Courier-Journal after the arrests of three African Americans.

The three were Harry Jenkins, his alleged lover Alice Schmaker and an adolescent boy George Eaton. After being discovered together in the same house Jenkins and Schmaker were arrested for disorderly conduct. The problem was that Schmaker identified as Negro but the police chief, one of his patrol officers, and a corporeal felt certain that she was white and ordered her to give a blood sample.

Eaton was arrested for larceny when he tried to get money for a bicycle he allegedly stole. When arrested the young man was found to have photographs of three young white women. When questioned he stated that he didn’t know the girls but Lindsey ordered his chief investigator Corporal Sullivan to discover who the girls were.

The three arrests thereafter didn’t make any other news. What happened to the three who were arrested is unknown and lost in history.

What these arrests did do was increase the wild concern most citizens of Kentucky had regarding interracial relationships. The Courier-Journal and the other newspaper of the city the Messenger-Inquirer ran several editorials restating the moral panic of the residents and stories on how the level of Negro blood was determined. 

While interracial marriage had been outlawed in Kentucky since statehood in 1792, for whatever reason in the summer of 1916 Southern states became focused on making sure no miscegenation would occur. In July over 20 arrests were made in both Kentucky and Tennesee. In North Carolina, the crime could lead to at least two years in prison. 

It wasn’t until the Supreme Court's decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967 that these relationships became legal under the force of law, still, Kentucky did not overturn its law until 1974.

Sources:

https://sharetngov.tnsosfiles.com/tsla/exhibits/blackhistory/pdfs/Miscegenation%20laws.pdf

https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/jul/28

Regrettable Atrocity Leads To Outrage But No Significant Changes

Mae and George Dorsey, Roger and Dorothy Malcolm.

Two married couples were killed on this day in 1946 by the hands of “persons unknown” in Moore’s Ford, Georgia. This vile act gained national condemnation and helped push the national conversation regarding civil rights, except it was all for nothing in the end, four innocent African Americans were killed by a mob of White men and there were no consequences to the murderers.

The two men, Roger Malcolm and George Dorsey were sharecroppers working on the farm of Loy Harrison. Dorsey was a veteran who had served for 5 years in the Pacific theatre during the war; he was married to Mae Murry Dorsey. He had been working for Harrison first. Roger Malcolm had been working for another landowner Barnett Hester near Madison Georgia previously but on the 14th of July Hester ordered Malcolm and his wife Dorthy, who was seven months pregnant, to get off his property. The reason for the eviction was never stated but tempers were high and Malcolm stabbed Hester with an ice pick.

Remarkably for the time Hester’s family did not lynch Malcolm right then and held him until the Walton County Sheriff could come to arrest him. Malcolm was held in the Walton County Jail for the next 11 days until Mrs. Malcolm and the Dorseys could arrange for a bond to be paid. Harrison had agreed to pay the $600 bond if the two men would work in his fields.

After posting bond Harrison was driving the two couples back to his property when they were intercepted by 20 armed White men. The odd thing was that Harrison did not take the direct and shortest route back to his property but took a secondary road over Moore’s Ford Bridge between Walton and Oconee Counties. Although he was suspected of perhaps participating in the crime Harrison insisted he was innocent of any participation for the rest of his life, and being a stout, over-weight middle age man he stated he could do nothing to defend the two couples. I fact in his own account he states when the mob called to pull Dorsey from the car they called him ‘Charlie” and Harrison tried then to interfere but the mob leaders threatened to shoot him too.

Harrison also stated in his statement that at first the mob looked like they were going to leave the women alone until Mrs. Malcolm called out some of the men by name since they were not masked. It was then that the apparent leader of the mob ordered the two women to be brought over to the trees and tied there with their husbands. 

The mob then began firing their guns at the four hitting them at least 60 times each. Moore’s Bridge spanned the Apalachee River 60 miles east of Atlanta, and it was at the end of a dirt cut-off that Harrison later led law enforcement to the bodies.

The news of the killings was immediately nationwide news and rose to both the Georgia Governor’s office and the Presidency. 

Georgia’s Democratic Governor Ellis Arnell called for justice and better civil rights, but he was in a heated primary against former Governor, also a Democrat, Eugene Talmadge who was a White Supremacist who fought against voting rights and when Arnall called for equal rights Talmadge shot back that there was no valid reason to give equal rights and that nothing could be gained by doing so. 

Arnell offered a $10,000 reward but no one came forward with enough information to claim the reward. Arnell lost the election to Talmadge, who then stated that the lynching was regrettable and that he would do everything in his power to, “keep such atrocities at a minimum”.

While this wordplay went on President Truman ordered the FBI to investigate and they interviewed some 3000 people. Even though they took on the massive investigation they could turn up no witnesses. However many people had said that they saw Talmadge in Walton County talking with Barnett Hester’s brother. Although agents doubted Talmadge could be involved they sent the claim to Director J Edgar Hoover. What was concluded was that the Whites of the two counties were, “Clannish and silent and communicated to each other to stay quiet, the Negroes were fearful and wouldn’t talk either.”

While there were numerous questions about Loy Harrison and his decisions, Talmadge being in the area and the sheriff and arresting deputies not investigating the deaths no one ever went on record with testimony or allegations.By the end of 1946 the probe was quietly ended and the world moved on.

A federal grand jury was still empaneled in Athens, Georgia but failed to produce an indictment, deciding that the Malcolms and the Dorseys were shot multiple times, “at the hands of person’s unknown”

Sources:

https://coldcases.emory.edu/george-dorsey-mae-dorsey-dorothy-malcom-and-roger-malcom/

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/02/07/answers-last-mass-lynching-us-die-when-investigators-close-case-after-72-years

https://georgiahistory.com/marker-monday-moores-ford-lynching/

Loy Harrison

John Henry James Lynched In Virginia For Being Very Black

There wasn’t much, isn’t much known about John Henry James other than he was an ice cream salesman in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was lynched by a mob of 150 White men on a locust tree in Woods Crossing, Virginia. John Henry James was murdered like so many other men in the 100 years after the end of the Civil War because a White woman said a Black man had assaulted her. In this case, it was a woman named Julia Hotopp who was returning to the family farm from Charlottesville, and she had dismounted to open the gate at the farm when someone assaulted her. When she woke up she saw the horse had gone to the house and saw her brother riding towards her. She fainted when he got to her side but woke again back in the house. She told him that a, “very black man, heavy set with a slight mustache in dark clothes and shoes with his toes sticking out”, had done the deed. The newspapers of the times wrote a very detailed account of her words. These papers also reported Hotopp had then passed out again and was under several doctors' care. Other writings on this lynching and the reports of the time John Henry James wasn’t a well-known man, a few people knew him from his ice cream sales route, but whether he lived in his own home or a boarding house, no one knew if he had other jobs, as he probably did because vagrancy and idleness could lead to incarceration. The newspapers though did everything they could to portray him as a vagrant and transient tramp. Based on the description Hotopp had provided authorities they looked for the darkest negro they could find and found John Henry James in a bar called Dudley’s in the town of Staughton. The police chief of Charlottesville arranged for a train to take him and John Henry James back to Charlottesville from Staughton. While a grand jury had already been impaneled and Hotopp’s statement collected, she also said she could identify her attacker if needed. Yet White rage was exploding all over Albemarle County and a mob formed to meet the train before John Henry James could be secured in the jail. The mob of 150 men stopped the train at Woods Crossing and pulled John Henry James off the train and drug him to a tree about 40 yards from the train after a few minutes of him pleading for mercy and declaring his innocence the mob hung him, to make sure he was dead they shot his body to pieces. The mob then dispersed but left the body where others could collect souvenirs. A coroner’s jury a day later declared that John Henry James died from bullet wounds and the hanging at the hands of persons unknown. Sources: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lynching-of-john-henry-james-1898-the/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/72083419/?terms=%22John%20Henry%20James%22%20 https://uncommonwealth.virginiamemory.com/blog/2018/06/06/the-legacy-of-john-henry-james/

Anguilla, The Forgotten Prison Massacre In Georgia

 

Prison camp labor was a standard in the South in the 20th Century. Southern states loaned them out to help build roads, irrigation ditches, and other semi-public works. Basically, slave labor as convicts didn’t earn anything for a day of heavy labor.

July 11, 1947, Black men refused to go do this free labor for the state because they didn’t want to face ditches full of dangerous cottonmouth snakes. These prisoners refused to get out of the prison truck at the work site and only left the trucks when they were returned to the Anguilla Prison work camp near Brunswick, Georgia. The prison officials had requested the aid of the Glynn County Police Chief (not a sheriff)  to help get the prisoners to get off the trucks. There had been a lot of anger by the prisoners for days because of the demand by the warden that they work barefoot in the snake-infested ditches. In fact, some had been shot for trying to escape the work gang because of conditions. However, those reported escape attempts were nothing compared to what happened on this day.

The police chief eventually convinced the men to leave the trucks and lined them up to head into their barracks, this is when the warden and guards opened fire killing 8 of the 27 men in the road gang and wounding 5 more including a man named Willie Bell who was shot in the leg but who testified Warden W. C. Worthy, ”was half drunk and wanted to kill me.” 

Worthy swore he wasn’t drunk and that the men had either attempted to rush him and his guards or made to escape. Worthy was the official narrative though and his story of an attempted escape was the story the New York Times and many other papers ran with. The story of the attempted escape became national news with editorials and officials backing the shooting of the prisoners and Worthy.

The story might have died there and just become another tragic story of a prison riot except the NAACP received a handwritten letter from one of the prisoners who survived. Suddenly there were two competing narratives as the NAACP conducted its own investigation and fought against the ongoing reporting supporting Worthy’s story.

A grand jury was convened to investigate the shooting, but Georgia assistant director of the State Department of Corrections, J.B. Hatchett told the reporter that “his investigations of the shootings had led him to the conclusion that Warden W. C. Worthy was not drunk and had not been drinking, as charged by a Negro convict at a coroner’s jury investigation Saturday.” On July 18th, a grand jury exonerated Warden Worthy and five guards. 

The NAACP kept pushing back on the official story though and with a well-orchestrated letter-writing and protest campaign forced the state to conduct another investigation. During a hearing looking into the massacre Glynn County Commissioner Sam Levine went on record saying, “There was no justification for the killings, the police had men and tear gas they could have used.” Levine added that he was at the scene and saw two of the Negros fall and crawl under one of the bunk houses to di., “The only thing they were trying to escape was death,” Levine testified before the Georgia Board of Corrections.

The State Board of Corrections determined that the grand jury had conducted a one-sided investigation to white-wash the incident. The board ordered a new inquiry, closed the Anguilla Camp and ordered all 70 prisoners to be reassigned to other facilities across the state.

In October 1947 Worthy and four guards were indicted on federal charges for depriving the 8 men of their lives. The trial began on October 27 and was sent to the jury on Nov, 4th, sadly the jury took 8 minutes to come back with not guilty verdicts.

Image: "July 11, 1947, Brunswick Ga., Glynn County prison camp. Guards fired on 27 convicts, 8 killed, 5 wounded.by Stetson Kennedy (1916-2011), writer and civil rights activist, collected these photographs during the course of his career fighting for equality throughout the Southern United States. Sources:    https://www.anguillamassacre.com/ https://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2012/12/23/the-anguilla-prison-camp-massacre/ https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/digital/collection/SKennedy/id/13123

Elizabeth Lawrence Scolded Children And Was Lynched For It

 

Birmingham, Alabama July 5, 1933. Lynching had become so common in the Jim Crow South by this day in 1933 that all the local Alabama news sources had apparently agreed it wasn’t even newsworthy.

Elizabeth Lawrence was walking home on the afternoon of July 5th when a group of White children began jeering her and pelting her with rocks. She did what any mother would do and reprimanded the kids for their behavior. There would be consequences for this verbal redirection of terrible children as a mob of White men showed up at the Lawrence home later that night and drug Elizabeth out of the house and lynched her for the crime of disrespecting White children who were disrespecting her.

Her son came home and found his mother and their burned-out home he went to the local sheriff and tried to report the crime and was warned on his way there by another Black man that the mob was still looking for him so he ran away and headed north.

The story of Elizabeth Lawrence wasn’t even reported until her son Alexander had made it to safety in Boston and spoke to groups such as the International Labor Defense. Even then no news paper in the South mentioned it. The crime of being a Black woman scolding White children was once again a mortal one, like 361 other victims of the mob in Alabama during the Jim Crow era.

Sources: 

https://crrjarchive.org/incidents/434

https://www.al.com/opinion/2018/04/new_memorial_ends_the_silence.html

Mob So Angry They Can't Even Ask Black Man's Name Before They Kill Him

Rodney, Texas July 5, 1910. A geographic spot a few miles southeast of Corsicana, which is southeast of Fort Wort,h there wasn’t much to attract anyone to this rural community of farms unless one was already employed there or lived there. Sadly for a young unknown Negro he got lost in the wrong part of the country.

The story reported to the papers of the day is the same stereotypical story of the times, an unknown Negro  broke into the home of Hub Bailey, a local White merchant, who wasn’t home and tried to assault the man’s wife. In this case, the swerve in the story was that the White woman fought back and was able to get a razor away from her attacker even though he had cut her arm

Soon the alarm went out to the community, which was holding an Independence Day picnic, and all the men began to hunt this young Negro. They searched the Richland Creek area through some dense trees all day and night until finding him early Tuesday morning. 

The mob was reported to bring back the Negro to the Bailey’s home where Mrs, Bailey identified him as the one who attacked her. The engaged mob immediately then pulled the young man to a nearby cottonwood tree and hung him. There was no law enforcement involved or courts and all that was reported was that no one knew the dead Negro or where he came from. The local news did take the time to report that peace had returned to the community after the vile crime.