source: Statesman.com
Town’s 1910 racial strife a nearly forgotten piece of Texas past
Descendants of some of the victims of the 1910 Slocum Massacre in East Texas participate in a Texas House ceremony honoring the victims in 2011. At the commemoration were, from left, L.D. Hollie, Constance Hollie-Ramirez, Colecia Hollie-Williams and David Lee Hollie.
The Rosewood Massacre, which 90 years ago last month claimed the lives of six blacks and two whites in Florida, is remembered as a national tragedy, even receiving Hollywood treatment in the 1997 film “Rosewood.”
The anniversary of that event brings a more gruesome slaughter and chilling injustice to mind. The 1910 Slocum Massacre in East Texas officially saw between eight and 22 blacks killed, and evidence suggests African-American casualties were 10 times these amounts. Yet the massacre has become a dirty Lone Star secret, remarkable more for the inattention it has received than for its remembrance.
Unlike most Texas communities in the early 20th century, the unincorporated town of Slocum — like Rosewood — was mostly African-American, with several black citizens considerably propertied and a few owning stores and other businesses. This alone, in parts of the South, might have been enough to foment violence.
But in the area around Slocum, roughly 100 miles east of Waco, there were other issues, according to newspaper reports and other sometimes conflicting accounts of the massacre.
When a white man reportedly tried to collect a disputed debt from a well-regarded black citizen, a confrontation occurred. Hard feelings lingered. When a regional road construction foreman put an African-American in charge of some local road improvements, a prominent white citizen named Jim Spurger was infuriated and became an agitator.
Rumors spread, warning of threats against Anglo citizens and plans for race riots. White malcontents manipulated the local Anglo population and, on July 29, white hysteria transmogrified into bloodshed.
Stoked and goaded by Spurger and others, hundreds of Anglo citizens from all over Anderson County converged on Slocum armed with pistols, shotguns and rifles. That morning, near Saddlers Creek, they fired on three African-Americans headed to feed their cattle, killing 18-year-old Cleveland Larkin and wounding 15-year-old Charlie Wilson. The third, 15-year-old Wilustus “Lusk” Holley, escaped, only to be shot at again later in the day while he, his 23-year-old brother, Alex, and their friend William Foreman, were fleeing to Palestine. Alex was killed and Lusk was wounded. Foreman fled and disappeared. Lusk pretended to be dead so a group of 20 white men would not finish him off.
White mobs marched through the area shooting blacks at will. John Hays, 30, was found dead in a roadway and 28-year-old Sam Baker was shot to death at his house. When three of Baker’s relatives (Dick Wilson, Jeff Wilson and Ben Dancer, 70) attempted to sit up with his body the following night, they, too, were gunned down in cold blood.
In addition to the murders in the southern, Slocum area of Anderson County, Will Burley was killed near the northern edge of Houston County.
Every initial newspaper report on the transpiring bloodshed portrayed the African-Americans as armed instigators, but these accounts were heinous mischaracterizations. When district judges in Palestine closed saloons and ordered local gun and ammunition stores to stop selling their wares on July 30, it was not to quell a black uprising; it was to defuse what the Galveston Daily News called an indescribable, one-sided “reign of terror” that resulted in numerous bullet-ridden corpses strewn along scattered, “lonesome roads.”
When reporters gathered on July 31, up to two dozen murders had been reported, but local authorities had only eight bodies. Once the carnage had begun, hundreds of African-Americans ran to the surrounding piney woods and marshes. By the time the Texas Rangers and state militia arrived, there was no way to estimate the number of dead. On Aug. 1, a few Texas Rangers and other white men gathered up six of the African-American bodies and buried them (wrapped in blankets and placed in a single large box) in a pit four miles south of Slocum.
Farther north, Marsh Holley, father of Alex and Lusk, was found alive on a road just outside Palestine. He asked the authorities in Palestine for help, requesting that he be locked up in jail for protection. Marsh, whose family owned a store, a dairy and several hundred acres of farmland, identified himself as the black citizen involved in the debt dispute, but denied that that affair ever grew into a serious provocation.
After the first several murders, much of the African-American community began leaving, but this didn’t stop the white mobs. They shot blacks in the back, even if they were clearing out. Two bodies found near the town of Priscilla still had travel bundles of food and clothing at their sides.
Anderson County Sheriff William H. Black said it would be “difficult to find out just how many were killed” because they were “scattered all over the woods,” and buzzards would find many of the victims first. And it’s reasonable to suspect that after the initial bloodlust had subsided, some transgressors returned to the crime scenes to remove evidence of the murders. Certainly with the arrival of the press — and after early attempts at spinning the reports to portray the African-American victims as violent insurrectionists had failed — the guilty Anglo contingents engaged in damage control efforts. But Sheriff Black was inexorable.
“Men were going about killing Negroes as fast as they could find them,” Black told The New York Times.
“These Negroes have done no wrong that I can discover,” Black continued. “I don’t know how many were in the mob, but there may have been 200 or 300. Some of them cut telephone wires. They hunted the Negroes down like sheep.”
Sheriff Black and law enforcement leaders insisted there were at least a dozen more deaths than the official toll of eight, and some reports suggest there may have been dozens more. Frank Austin, the president of the First State Bank of Frankston, reported the death of an African-American named Anderson Austin near Slocum, but it was never investigated. Abe Wilson, who Houston County Justice of the Peace Pence Singletary identified as the African-American who had been put in charge of the local road improvements, disappeared. A reliable fatality count was impossible, especially with the perpetrators likely covering their tracks.
Surviving African-Americans began to disappear as well. It was one thing to return to your home or your daily routine after the odd murder or infrequent lynching of a friend, neighbor or relative — blacks in the South were not unused to that. But a localized campaign of genocide, where the executioners surrounded you and cut phone lines to prevent you from getting help? That was not something Slocum-area African-Americans could easily relegate to a list of bygones. With a large contingent of the black community running for their lives, the disappearance of many who lost their lives might well have gone unreported. The arrival of the Texas Rangers and the state militia simply made it safe enough for many of the remaining African-Americans to pack their belongings and leave without being shot at in the weeks and months that followed.
At the initial grand jury hearing, nearly every remaining Slocum resident including whites was subpoenaed; some refused to testify and were arrested. The grand jury judge, B. H. Gardner of Palestine, told the all-male, all-white jury that the massacre was “a disgrace, not only to the county, but to the state,” and that it was up to them to do their “full duty.”
According to the Aug. 2 edition of the Palestine Daily Herald, Gardner said there could be “no justification for shooting men in the back, waylaying or killing them in their houses.”
By the time the grand jury findings were reported on Aug. 17, several hundred witnesses had been examined. Though 11 men were initially arrested, seven were indicted — and they were only accused in the murders of five of the identified victims. Jim Spurger was indicted in two cases, B.J. Jenkins in four cases and Curtis Spurger, Steve Jenkins, Isom Garner and Andrew Kirkwood in three cases. The seventh indicted man was not arrested or named; only Kirkwood was immediately granted bail. No charges were filed for the killings of John Hays, Alex Holley or Anderson Austin or the disappearances of Abe Wilson, William Foreman and others.
Gardner moved the trial to Harris County, distrusting the potential jury of peers the defendants might receive in Anderson County. The indictments received no interest or justice in Harris County.
On May 4, 1911, Palestine Judge Ned Morris petitioned the Court of Criminal Appeals in Travis County to grant bail for the remaining defendants, and it was granted. Eventually, all those charged were released, and none of the indictments were ever prosecuted.
In the meanwhile, the personal holdings of many Slocum-area Anglo citizens fortuitously increased. The abandoned African-American properties were absorbed or repurposed as the now-majority white population saw fit. The standard southern Anglocentric world order was restored.
The community reflects effects of the event to this day. While most nearby towns have African-American populations of 20 percent or more, Slocum’s is just under 7 percent.
In the Rosewood Massacre, a special, governor-appointed grand jury found no one to prosecute; in the Slocum Massacre, seven men were indicted by a grand jury, but no one was ever tried. In both cases, thriving African-American populations vacated their own communities to survive racially-motivated bloodbaths — part of a pattern of such events throughout the South in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
In the Rosewood Victims v. the State of Florida decision in 1994, Florida became the first U.S. state to compensate the victims and the descendants of victims of racial violence and, 10 years later, the site of Rosewood was designated a Florida Heritage Landmark. In Texas, the Slocum Massacre hasn’t even received a historical marker, and there have been no investigations to determine the extent of the carnage or the number of victims. As contemporary headlines, law enforcement officials and present-day oral histories passed down by descendants of massacre victims attest, scores of African-Americans lost their lives.
On March 30, 2011, about a month after story on the Slocum Massacre ran in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Texas Legislature adoped a resolution acknowledging the incident and stating that “only by shining a light on previous injustices can we learn from them and move forward.” But the little-publicized gesture hardly aids in either endeavor.
“It’s inadequate,” says the Rev. Kyev Tatum, Sr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and spokesperson for the descendants of the Holley family. “Our research suggests that at least 200 African-Americans lost their lives in the massacre and they never received justice. It’s a sad statement in regards to where the state of Texas was then and where it is now.”
In testimony presented at the bail hearing on May 10, 1911, Slocum-area defense witness Alvin Oliver criticized the “insolent manner and conduct” of the local African-American population during the period preceding the massacre and brazenly noted that things were different after the bloodshed.
“The Negroes down there are not disbehaving now,” Oliver observed.
And he was right. There were hardly any left.
<hr>
One incident among many
The expulsion of African-Americans from Slocum in 1910 followed a pattern of such events across many states over several decades, as chronicled in the American-Statesman in 2006. Find that story online at http://bit.ly/13adsA2.
Town’s 1910 racial strife a nearly forgotten piece of Texas past
Descendants of some of the victims of the 1910 Slocum Massacre in East Texas participate in a Texas House ceremony honoring the victims in 2011. At the commemoration were, from left, L.D. Hollie, Constance Hollie-Ramirez, Colecia Hollie-Williams and David Lee Hollie.
The Rosewood Massacre, which 90 years ago last month claimed the lives of six blacks and two whites in Florida, is remembered as a national tragedy, even receiving Hollywood treatment in the 1997 film “Rosewood.”
The anniversary of that event brings a more gruesome slaughter and chilling injustice to mind. The 1910 Slocum Massacre in East Texas officially saw between eight and 22 blacks killed, and evidence suggests African-American casualties were 10 times these amounts. Yet the massacre has become a dirty Lone Star secret, remarkable more for the inattention it has received than for its remembrance.
Unlike most Texas communities in the early 20th century, the unincorporated town of Slocum — like Rosewood — was mostly African-American, with several black citizens considerably propertied and a few owning stores and other businesses. This alone, in parts of the South, might have been enough to foment violence.
But in the area around Slocum, roughly 100 miles east of Waco, there were other issues, according to newspaper reports and other sometimes conflicting accounts of the massacre.
When a white man reportedly tried to collect a disputed debt from a well-regarded black citizen, a confrontation occurred. Hard feelings lingered. When a regional road construction foreman put an African-American in charge of some local road improvements, a prominent white citizen named Jim Spurger was infuriated and became an agitator.
Rumors spread, warning of threats against Anglo citizens and plans for race riots. White malcontents manipulated the local Anglo population and, on July 29, white hysteria transmogrified into bloodshed.
Stoked and goaded by Spurger and others, hundreds of Anglo citizens from all over Anderson County converged on Slocum armed with pistols, shotguns and rifles. That morning, near Saddlers Creek, they fired on three African-Americans headed to feed their cattle, killing 18-year-old Cleveland Larkin and wounding 15-year-old Charlie Wilson. The third, 15-year-old Wilustus “Lusk” Holley, escaped, only to be shot at again later in the day while he, his 23-year-old brother, Alex, and their friend William Foreman, were fleeing to Palestine. Alex was killed and Lusk was wounded. Foreman fled and disappeared. Lusk pretended to be dead so a group of 20 white men would not finish him off.
White mobs marched through the area shooting blacks at will. John Hays, 30, was found dead in a roadway and 28-year-old Sam Baker was shot to death at his house. When three of Baker’s relatives (Dick Wilson, Jeff Wilson and Ben Dancer, 70) attempted to sit up with his body the following night, they, too, were gunned down in cold blood.
In addition to the murders in the southern, Slocum area of Anderson County, Will Burley was killed near the northern edge of Houston County.
Every initial newspaper report on the transpiring bloodshed portrayed the African-Americans as armed instigators, but these accounts were heinous mischaracterizations. When district judges in Palestine closed saloons and ordered local gun and ammunition stores to stop selling their wares on July 30, it was not to quell a black uprising; it was to defuse what the Galveston Daily News called an indescribable, one-sided “reign of terror” that resulted in numerous bullet-ridden corpses strewn along scattered, “lonesome roads.”
When reporters gathered on July 31, up to two dozen murders had been reported, but local authorities had only eight bodies. Once the carnage had begun, hundreds of African-Americans ran to the surrounding piney woods and marshes. By the time the Texas Rangers and state militia arrived, there was no way to estimate the number of dead. On Aug. 1, a few Texas Rangers and other white men gathered up six of the African-American bodies and buried them (wrapped in blankets and placed in a single large box) in a pit four miles south of Slocum.
Farther north, Marsh Holley, father of Alex and Lusk, was found alive on a road just outside Palestine. He asked the authorities in Palestine for help, requesting that he be locked up in jail for protection. Marsh, whose family owned a store, a dairy and several hundred acres of farmland, identified himself as the black citizen involved in the debt dispute, but denied that that affair ever grew into a serious provocation.
After the first several murders, much of the African-American community began leaving, but this didn’t stop the white mobs. They shot blacks in the back, even if they were clearing out. Two bodies found near the town of Priscilla still had travel bundles of food and clothing at their sides.
Anderson County Sheriff William H. Black said it would be “difficult to find out just how many were killed” because they were “scattered all over the woods,” and buzzards would find many of the victims first. And it’s reasonable to suspect that after the initial bloodlust had subsided, some transgressors returned to the crime scenes to remove evidence of the murders. Certainly with the arrival of the press — and after early attempts at spinning the reports to portray the African-American victims as violent insurrectionists had failed — the guilty Anglo contingents engaged in damage control efforts. But Sheriff Black was inexorable.
“Men were going about killing Negroes as fast as they could find them,” Black told The New York Times.
“These Negroes have done no wrong that I can discover,” Black continued. “I don’t know how many were in the mob, but there may have been 200 or 300. Some of them cut telephone wires. They hunted the Negroes down like sheep.”
Sheriff Black and law enforcement leaders insisted there were at least a dozen more deaths than the official toll of eight, and some reports suggest there may have been dozens more. Frank Austin, the president of the First State Bank of Frankston, reported the death of an African-American named Anderson Austin near Slocum, but it was never investigated. Abe Wilson, who Houston County Justice of the Peace Pence Singletary identified as the African-American who had been put in charge of the local road improvements, disappeared. A reliable fatality count was impossible, especially with the perpetrators likely covering their tracks.
Surviving African-Americans began to disappear as well. It was one thing to return to your home or your daily routine after the odd murder or infrequent lynching of a friend, neighbor or relative — blacks in the South were not unused to that. But a localized campaign of genocide, where the executioners surrounded you and cut phone lines to prevent you from getting help? That was not something Slocum-area African-Americans could easily relegate to a list of bygones. With a large contingent of the black community running for their lives, the disappearance of many who lost their lives might well have gone unreported. The arrival of the Texas Rangers and the state militia simply made it safe enough for many of the remaining African-Americans to pack their belongings and leave without being shot at in the weeks and months that followed.
At the initial grand jury hearing, nearly every remaining Slocum resident including whites was subpoenaed; some refused to testify and were arrested. The grand jury judge, B. H. Gardner of Palestine, told the all-male, all-white jury that the massacre was “a disgrace, not only to the county, but to the state,” and that it was up to them to do their “full duty.”
According to the Aug. 2 edition of the Palestine Daily Herald, Gardner said there could be “no justification for shooting men in the back, waylaying or killing them in their houses.”
By the time the grand jury findings were reported on Aug. 17, several hundred witnesses had been examined. Though 11 men were initially arrested, seven were indicted — and they were only accused in the murders of five of the identified victims. Jim Spurger was indicted in two cases, B.J. Jenkins in four cases and Curtis Spurger, Steve Jenkins, Isom Garner and Andrew Kirkwood in three cases. The seventh indicted man was not arrested or named; only Kirkwood was immediately granted bail. No charges were filed for the killings of John Hays, Alex Holley or Anderson Austin or the disappearances of Abe Wilson, William Foreman and others.
Gardner moved the trial to Harris County, distrusting the potential jury of peers the defendants might receive in Anderson County. The indictments received no interest or justice in Harris County.
On May 4, 1911, Palestine Judge Ned Morris petitioned the Court of Criminal Appeals in Travis County to grant bail for the remaining defendants, and it was granted. Eventually, all those charged were released, and none of the indictments were ever prosecuted.
In the meanwhile, the personal holdings of many Slocum-area Anglo citizens fortuitously increased. The abandoned African-American properties were absorbed or repurposed as the now-majority white population saw fit. The standard southern Anglocentric world order was restored.
The community reflects effects of the event to this day. While most nearby towns have African-American populations of 20 percent or more, Slocum’s is just under 7 percent.
In the Rosewood Massacre, a special, governor-appointed grand jury found no one to prosecute; in the Slocum Massacre, seven men were indicted by a grand jury, but no one was ever tried. In both cases, thriving African-American populations vacated their own communities to survive racially-motivated bloodbaths — part of a pattern of such events throughout the South in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
In the Rosewood Victims v. the State of Florida decision in 1994, Florida became the first U.S. state to compensate the victims and the descendants of victims of racial violence and, 10 years later, the site of Rosewood was designated a Florida Heritage Landmark. In Texas, the Slocum Massacre hasn’t even received a historical marker, and there have been no investigations to determine the extent of the carnage or the number of victims. As contemporary headlines, law enforcement officials and present-day oral histories passed down by descendants of massacre victims attest, scores of African-Americans lost their lives.
On March 30, 2011, about a month after story on the Slocum Massacre ran in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Texas Legislature adoped a resolution acknowledging the incident and stating that “only by shining a light on previous injustices can we learn from them and move forward.” But the little-publicized gesture hardly aids in either endeavor.
“It’s inadequate,” says the Rev. Kyev Tatum, Sr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and spokesperson for the descendants of the Holley family. “Our research suggests that at least 200 African-Americans lost their lives in the massacre and they never received justice. It’s a sad statement in regards to where the state of Texas was then and where it is now.”
In testimony presented at the bail hearing on May 10, 1911, Slocum-area defense witness Alvin Oliver criticized the “insolent manner and conduct” of the local African-American population during the period preceding the massacre and brazenly noted that things were different after the bloodshed.
“The Negroes down there are not disbehaving now,” Oliver observed.
And he was right. There were hardly any left.
<hr>
One incident among many
The expulsion of African-Americans from Slocum in 1910 followed a pattern of such events across many states over several decades, as chronicled in the American-Statesman in 2006. Find that story online at http://bit.ly/13adsA2.
