The Texas Observer
by Michael Barajas
July 15, 2019
 |
Where the Bodies are
Buried In 1910, East Texas saw one of America’s deadliest post-Reconstruction
racial purges. One survivor’s descendants have waged an uphill battle for
generations to ...
|
In 1910, East Texas saw
one of America’s deadliest post-Reconstruction racial purges. One survivor’s
descendants have waged an uphill battle for generations to unearth that violent
past.
–
A twisting, tree-lined
road carried Constance Hollie-Jawaid and her family through the dense forest
until they reached Slocum, a small unincorporated town dug into the Piney Woods
of East Texas. A few miles southeast of the old high school, past two trickling
creeks, the family pulled off the road near a small red farmhouse. A thick,
leafy canopy shielded them from the cloudless midsummer heat as they exited
their cars and began to quietly pace along the red fence.
It was July 29, 2018, a
somber day for the Hollie family. Not far from where they stood, more than a
century before, on July 29, 1910, white vigilantes attacked black communities
surrounding Slocum. By most accounts, the violence lasted throughout the day
and night as white men from across the region traveled to Slocum to join in the
killing. Once the dust began to settle, the state’s major newspapers, including
the Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Register, reported
that white mobs had murdered as many as 50 black people during the massacre.
The papers also described how victims were unceremoniously dumped into communal
pits before the mobs scattered. Hollie-Jawaid believes some of the dead,
including her ancestors, could be buried here beyond the fence line — and she
intends to find their bodies.
“Piled upon one another
in a mass grave, like dogs,” she said. “That is a history that needs to be
acknowledged and remembered. For so long people denied that it even happened.”
Hollie-Jawaid taught her
daughter, Imani Nia Ramirez, and son about Slocum “as soon as they could
understand words.” danny fulgencio
The massacre in Slocum
shocked people from Abilene to New York, who read about the killings in newspaper
coverage in the days that followed the spasm of violence. Texas’ governor at
the time, Thomas Campbell, who’d grown up near Slocum, was reportedly appalled
that vigilante violence still ruled his home county. Authorities called the
episode an embarrassing stain on the state and region and vowed justice.
The outrage was
short-lived. Within a year, the criminal prosecutions of seven white men
indicted for the killings had fizzled. Less than three years after the
slaughter, a fire ate through the local courthouse, destroying records from the
case. The story had all but disappeared from East Texas history by the time
Hollie-Jawaid was a teenager and started to dig deeper into her family’s
history. Black people from the region were reluctant to talk about the violent
past, she says, while many white people denied the massacre even happened.
Hollie-Jawaid and her
family started visiting this quiet patch of forest off Anderson County Road
1208 after reading letters from the local historical commission archives that
said the land might contain bodies. But they are constrained to exploring the
fenceline, as the landowner refuses to let them onto the property.
The
great-great-granddaughter of a man forced to flee racial violence after already
having survived slavery, Hollie-Jawaid has spent the past several years
struggling to unearth the region’s dark past, as did her grandfather, father
and uncle before her. Her family’s fight to correct Slocum’s whitewashed
history dovetails with the recent push across the United States to grapple with
the country’s racist past and the legacy of inequality created by racial
terror. While some cities reassess Confederate monuments erected during the
civil rights era, others have begun to confront the kind of racial violence
that shaped the South after Reconstruction. Officials in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
recently created a committee to oversee a search for mass graves connected to a
1921 racial massacre that was swept under the rug for generations.
“That is a history that
needs to be acknowledged and remembered. For so long people denied that it even
happened.”
The resistance the
Hollie family has faced in East Texas also underscores the profound hurdles
facing those who push communities to confront past racial violence. Five years
ago, when Hollie-Jawaid applied for a historical marker honoring Slocum’s
victims, local leaders called the idea “inappropriate,” “dishonorable” and “blackmail
by shame.” After officials failed to block the plaque, they carefully
negotiated its language to avoid offending white residents, and acknowledged
only eight victims.
Since then,
Hollie-Jawaid has searched for Slocum’s lost graves, both so that descendants
can honor the dead and to prove what really happened in 1910. The bodies, she
says, could force an undeniable reckoning with the region’s past and give
families like hers their history back. So far, local law enforcement,
historical commission officials, county leaders and landowners have refused to
help. In January, the landowner of the property that she believes contains
bodies sent her an official “notice of forbidden entry.”
“If these were
Confederate soldiers, they would be exhumed already, given proper burials and a
museum would have been erected,” Hollie-Jawaid said. “They’re not interested in
these bodies. These bodies only matter to us. Apparently their lives only
mattered to people like us.”
–
Some of the earliest
newspaper accounts called what happened in Slocum a “race riot.” Hollie-Jawaid
cringes at that description. She learned at an early age just how one-sided the
violence was.
Some accounts traced the
troubles back to a white man fighting with a black man who owed him money;
others told of a white farmer infuriated by a black foreman who asked him to
work on a road crew. That such an explosion of violence could follow these
minor squabbles points to the rancor many white people felt toward their black
neighbors. On July 30, 1910, the Houston Chronicle questioned whether whites
had launched “an attempt to exterminate the negroes” in the area. The Fort
Worth Register characterized the violence as “a culmination of smoldering hate
between races in a community thickly populated by blacks.”
The day the violence
began, men flocked to Slocum “to witness the trouble and aid the whites” in
such great numbers that a local judge ordered the county’s saloons and gun
stores to close. Officials later said that as many as 300 men joined the mobs.
Texas Rangers and state militia arrived the following day to impose martial law
and restore order, even in the county seat of Palestine, nearly 20 miles
northwest of where the killings took place. Newspapers describe most of the
mobs as attacking black communities nestled along Sadler and Ioni creeks, on a
strip of land a few miles outside of Slocum in far southeast Anderson County.
Archival photo: Jack
Holley, Constance Hollie-Jawaid's great-great-grandfather, survived the
violence in Slocum and fled with his family.
Jack Holley, Constance
Hollie-Jawaid’s great-great-grandfather, survived the violence in Slocum and
fled with his family. courtesy Constance Hollie-Jawaid
On August 1, 1910, Lusk
Holley, one of Hollie-Jawaid’s distant uncles, told the Dallas Morning News
that about 20 white men had attacked him and several others two days earlier.
Lusk, who was 19 at the time, described his assailants traveling single-file
through the woods, firing whenever a leader on horseback gave the signal. “When
the first man saw us, he whistled.”
Hollie-Jawaid was born
in Palestine, but her family moved to Dallas when she was young, after her
father returned from the Vietnam War. A longtime educator, today she’s a
principal at a Dallas-area school. She taught her daughter and son about Slocum
“as soon as they could understand words.” She wants her students to someday
learn about Slocum’s past in history books, to spur a more honest discussion
about the real legacy of racial terror in East Texas. She’d learned her
family’s history as a child visiting her grandparents in Palestine. They’d talk
about Jack Holley, her great-great-grandfather, who had been born into slavery,
was emancipated after the Civil War and eventually built the only general store
in a black settlement outside Slocum.
Jack Holley belonged to
a generation that escaped slavery only to face another historic wave of
violence and oppression. The failed promise of Reconstruction in the South was
soon followed by poll taxes and white only primaries, along with black codes
that criminalized poverty and led to convict leasing, a new kind of
prison-approved slavery. Meanwhile, gruesome and public acts of torture
traumatized and isolated black communities across the state. Large crowds of
Texans gathered to burn at least 31 black people at the stake between 1891 and
1922, averaging about one a year.
“They’re not interested
in these bodies. These bodies only matter to us. Apparently their lives only
mattered to people like us.”
East Texas became, and
in many ways has remained, a hot spot for racial tension and violence. Between
1877 and 1950, at least 22 people were lynched in Anderson County, the most of
any Texas county and one of the highest numbers anywhere in the country.
Jeffrey Littlejohn, a Sam Houston State University history professor who has
researched lynchings in the region, says the killings in Slocum weren’t an
aberration, but rather emblematic of the kind of white-on-black violence that
shaped the region and the state. “Basically,” he said, “when I think of East
Texas in 1910, I think of a place that’s at the nadir of American race
relations.”
The outrage that
followed the violence in Slocum was brief and inconsequential. Eleven white men
were arrested and seven were indicted for murder, but the prosecution waned
under a new governor and district attorney. On May 10, 1911, the Court of
Criminal Appeals freed the five men who remained in jail. The court’s ruling
included testimony from a local white man, a justice of the peace, blaming
Slocum’s black community for its own destruction. Before the massacre, the man
testified, black people had “become very insolent towards the white people, and
would ride by the houses where the white women were with their hats cocked on
the side of their heads, whistling.” Another witness testified, “The Negroes
down there are not disbehaving [sic] now.” The criminal cases were forgotten.
Winston Wilson shows an
old photo of his father, who survived the massacre. He still lives on the
property his parents fled to in 1910. michael Barajas
Winston Wilson grew up
knowing that his grandfather, Richard Wilson, was one of the eight victims
named in newspaper accounts of the massacre. Winston’s father, Justice Wilson,
was 19 at the time of the killings and recalled fleeing in the dark on foot,
spending hours inching through the countryside as he hid from men on horseback.
“He didn’t like talking about it, you could see it on his face,” Winston said.
Audrey Wilson, another
of Richard Wilson’s grandsons, learned a more graphic version of the story
growing up. His father, George, was 8 at the time of the massacre. George
recalled sitting in his father’s lap when the posse broke down the door.
Audrey’s grandmother begged the men to spare the boy. “She got up and came and
got my dad off his daddy’s knee,” Audrey said. “Then the man gave the command
to fire. They shot him right there in his rocking chair, then went on to the
next house.”
Many of the survivors
escaped and never returned. After the massacre, Jack Holley fled to the small
town of Oakwood, about 30 miles west of Slocum. The mobs had murdered his
grandson, Alex, and nearly killed his sons Lusk and Marsh. The family settled
in Oakwood, but only after changing their surname to Hollie.
“Basically, when I think
of East Texas in 1910, I think of a place that’s at the nadir of American race
relations.”
When Hollie-Jawaid was
young, learning about what the Hollies had endured and escaped made her proud.
It was proof that she was descended from people who could survive anything. “I
was the only black person in my class until I went to high school,” she said.
“I remember it being an immense source of pride, these stories that my uncle,
my father, my grandfather would tell me — just, like, ‘Wow, look at where we
came from.’”
In the mid-1980s,
Hollie-Jawaid’s father and uncle unsuccessfully pushed Anderson County to
acknowledge the tragedy with a historical marker. In high school, she joined
her dad on trips to the library to scour microfiche reels of old newspaper
records, which for her underscored both the scope of the bloodshed and its
absence from the larger recorded history of East Texas.
Hollie-Jawaid became
disturbed by the reaction her family kept getting from Anderson County
officials. “They would say, ‘It didn’t happen,’ or, ‘It was rumored to have
happened, but there’s no evidence,’ or, ‘Yeah, maybe a couple guys got into a
fight, but that’s it,’” she said. “They just really minimized it.”
–
While the mobs had
concentrated on the communities southeast of Slocum, the killing also stretched
across the county line into the small town of Percilla. Granville James Hayes
was born there months after the massacre and grew up hearing stories about it
from his father, a prominent white doctor from the region. In 1984, Hayes
offered to donate land to Houston County for its upcoming sesquicentennial
celebrations in exchange for officials hanging a plaque that finally
acknowledged the bloodshed.
Hayes also urged
officials to investigate the massacre. He claimed two men he grew up with, men
he believed had participated in the killing, told him that they dumped victims
in a mass grave near the Silver Creek School southeast of Slocum. He wrote that
as a boy, he picked bullets out of an old log house near the school. He seemed
to grow irritated after the county ignored his offer, writing in another letter
six months later, “Maybe we of the white community are a little too ashamed.”
“I remember it being an
immense source of pride, these stories that my uncle, my father, my grandfather
would tell me — just, like, ‘Wow, look at where we came from.’”
Officials denied Hayes’
request for a historical marker later that year, saying the only evidence of
the massacre was hearsay. Meanwhile, Jerry Sadler, a native of the area who
became a prominent state Democrat, dedicated sweeping passages of his 1984
memoir to what he called the Bad Saturday Massacre of 1910. Sadler wrote that
he was not quite 3 years old when his family took in people fleeing the mobs
around Slocum. “I did not fully understand all of what was happening, but I
recognized fear in the faces of the black people who came to see my father that
night,” he wrote. “I heard the terror in their excited but hushed voices as
they told him what was happening.”
After her father died in
2010, Hollie-Jawaid took the lead on the family’s push to remember Slocum. In
2011, her family worked with a Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter on a story
about the forgotten history, which spurred a resolution at the Texas
Legislature acknowledging the massacre. Three years later, E.R. Bills, a
freelance journalist and author who writes about the state’s history of
race-based violence, turned the newspaper stories, memoir passages, oral
histories and other archival records into a book, titled The 1910 Slocum
Massacre, that describes the episode as “an act of genocide in East Texas.”
E.R. Bills, who wrote a
book about the Slocum massacre, calls it “an act of genocide in East Texas.”
Elijah Barrett
The book bolstered the
case for a plaque. Bills agreed to help write and submit an application for a
historical marker commemorating the victims, but talks with local officials
soured almost as soon as they started. Bills claims that Jimmy Odom, chair of the
Anderson County Historical Commission, demanded to know whether he worked for
the NAACP. When Bills persisted, Odom told him the story of the massacre was
overblown and at one point quipped, “Ain’t you a white man?”
Hollie-Jawaid’s phone
call with Odom was even uglier. “He told me, ‘My colored people down here are
happy. Why are you doing this to us?’” she said. “I was like, ‘Your colored
people are happy? I didn’t know you still owned colored people.’” According to
her, the conversation ended with Odom accusing her of trying to kick people off
their land.
After that,
Hollie-Jawaid and Bills sidestepped the county and filed their application for
a plaque directly with the state. Odom submitted a four-page letter calling the
story of the massacre as told in the application “dramatically overstated.”
Odom also questioned the value of commemorating something so violent in such a
visible way. “It may be that the descendants know they will always remember it,
but may not want to see a daily reminder of it,” he wrote. “It would be a shame
to mark them as a racist community from now until the end of time.”
The marker reads:
“Racial tensions in America in the early 20th century were sometimes punctuated
by violent outbursts. One such occasion began near Slocum and Denson Springs
and spread across a wide area near the Anderson-Houston county line. Beginning
on the morning of July 29, 1910, groups of armed white men shot and killed
African Americans, first firing on a group near Sadler's Creek. Murders in the
black community continued during the remainder of that day and night. Accounts
in state and national newspapers brought widespread attention to the situation.
Judges ordered saloons and gun ammunitions to close, and state militia and
Texas Rangers were dispatched to the area. The murders of eight men were
officially recorded. The victims were Cleveland Larkin, Alex Holley (Hollie),
Sam Baker, Dick Wilson, Jeff Wilson, Ben Dancer, John Hays and Will Burly. Many
African American families fled the area and did not return. Eleven white men
were soon arrested, and District Judge Benjamin H. Gardner empaneled a grand
jury within a week. When its findings were reported on August 17, seven men
were indicted. The cases were moved to Harris County but were never prosecuted.
The events which came to be known as the ‘Slocum Massacre’ largely disappeared
from public view in subsequent generations. In 2011, the 82nd Texas Legislature
adopted a resolution acknowledging the incident and stating that ‘only by
shining a light on the previous injustices can we learn from them and move
toward a future of greater healing and reconciliation.’”
The Texas Historical
Commission approved a marker acknowledging the Slocum Massacre in 2015.
Michael Barajas
In January 2015, the Texas
Historical Commission unanimously approved the Slocum marker, which
acknowledges eight murders that were officially recorded but makes no mention
of the dozens of other victims reported but never named. Odom, who is white,
feels burned by the ordeal and insists he was unfairly painted as a racist. He
says he resisted acknowledging the massacre because the history is unsettled.
“We didn’t have no facts or anything other than what newspapers were saying,”
he said. “And I don’t copy anything that the newspapers say.”
After the historical
marker was finalized in 2015, Hollie-Jawaid and Bills felt like they’d forced
officials to acknowledge only a sanitized version of the Slocum story. So they
turned their attention to the bodies as a way to comprehend and memorialize the
whole story. At a ceremony in Slocum dedicating the new marker, Bills zeroed in
on the bodies. “They’re still ignominiously piled on top of one another in an
anonymous underground pit,” he said. “For this I am ashamed, because it’s folks
who look just like me who perpetrate this travesty.”
–
Hollie-Jawaid often felt
anxious visiting Slocum to research the massacre. Several times, she says,
white people warned her to leave before sunset. She says some black people
refused to be seen with her out of fear of reprisal. Eventually, she got her
concealed-carry license and started packing a gun for protection. After the
marker was approved, she and Bills began approaching local landowners for help
looking for lost graves. “The question that they all had was, ‘Are you going to
take my land?’” she said. “That was their concern, being displaced.”
Rumors of hidden graves
have hung in the air around Slocum for a century, but while working on his
book, Bills uncovered a lead: He found Granville James Hayes’ 1984 letters to
the Houston County Historical Commission, in which Hayes described perpetrators
bragging about burying victims in a pit near the old Silver Creek School.
At least once a year,
Hollie-Jawaid visits the red farmhouse on land where she believes she’ll find
the remains of victims of the Slocum massacre. Michael Barajas
In March 2015,
Hollie-Jawaid drove out to the area where the school once stood, hoping to find
the landowner. She brought a letter to leave at the fence line asking for
access to the property, but encountered a man mowing the grass when she got
there. Hollie-Jawaid claims he identified himself as the property owner’s uncle
and said that dozens of bodies were probably buried in the area. Later that
week, she spoke to the landowner, James Burleson, on the phone. She says he was
furious that she hadn’t identified herself to his uncle as a descendant of
people who fled the massacre. “He said if they find remains there, they’d be
kicked off their property. He said that wasn’t going to happen.”
In October 2017,
Hollie-Jawaid returned to the property with several family members, including
her son. This time Burleson was mowing the yard. When she asked him to let them
survey the land, he again refused, telling her to pay her respects from the
road. She broke down crying at the fence line.
“The question that they
all had was, ‘Are you going to take my land?’ That was their concern, being
displaced.”
Hollie-Jawaid has
persisted. In January, she sent Burleson a letter asking to schedule a time to
visit the property, citing state law allowing public access to cemeteries, even
if they’re on private property. Burleson responded with his own letter. “In my
55 plus years of growing up in and around this area and now owning the family
property, I have never heard anything about bodies being buried anywhere on the
property,” he wrote, asking Hollie-Jawaid to “provide first hand testimony with
the specific location of any burial or legal documentation for any
reconsideration.”
Burleson didn’t respond
to my many letters, phone calls and emails.
Despite the roadblocks,
Hollie-Jawaid sees some reasons to be hopeful. In the 1990s, pressure from
survivors of a 1923 racial massacre in Rosewood, Florida, and their descendants
led to publicly funded reparations for the victims and their families through
direct payments and a scholarship fund. More recently, city leaders in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, have formed a committee to search for mass graves ahead of the
100-year anniversary of a massacre that largely destroyed the city’s thriving
black community, called “Black Wall Street” because it was so prosperous.
In July 2017,
Hollie-Jawaid’s son, Eddie Ramirez, placed signs with names of the known
victims next to the historical marker for the massacre. courtesy
Constance Hollie-Jawaid
There are signs that
attitudes in Texas could be shifting, too. Following the white supremacist
violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, officials in Texas removed more
Confederate monuments and markers than any other state. That included a plaque
installed in the Texas Capitol during the civil rights era perpetuating the lie
that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. A bill that would have made it harder
to remove Confederate monuments also died at the Texas Legislature this year
following a Senate hearing that drew emotional testimony from black lawmakers
who opposed the measure.
Without the bodies,
Hollie-Jawaid fears the truth of what really happened in Slocum will remain
buried. Along with opposition from intractable landowners, well-meaning
ambivalence might also contribute to keeping the victims and their story
underground.
David Franklin, a white
man who traces his roots in the area back to the 1830s, initially opposed the
historical marker because he figured there was little evidence to support it.
He says he was “pleasantly surprised” by the language on the plaque. Recently
sworn in as the region’s constable, Franklin now patrols the precinct that
covers the region around Slocum. He drove through the area on a recent overcast
day, showing me where his family told him the killings happened. We took the
road leading away from the old high school, barreling south past Sadler and
Ioni creeks to the spot where the Silver Creek School once stood. We turned
down a dusty country road, passing through land where Franklin says his
ancestors lived.
David Franklin, a local
constable with. family roots in Slocum.
David Franklin, a local
constable with. family roots in Slocum. Michael Barajas
“I was always told that
it happened in this area right here,” he said, driving past fields bounded by
thick forest. Twice we passed the property Hollie-Jawaid keeps visiting. She
could use help, I told him, especially from someone local.
Franklin paused to
think. “It would kill me to think of my ancestors buried in an unmarked grave
somewhere,” he said. “I’ve heard rumors for years where the bodies might be
buried. But it’s always from people where there’s no way they could know that,
except if they were told by somebody who was told by somebody and so on.”
–
Jack Holley, whose
descendants call him “Papa Jack,” was buried in the Oakwood cemetery in 1934,
but Hollie-Jawaid didn’t know his exact resting place until recently. In 2015,
an anthropology professor at Stephen F. Austin State University helped her find
the grave with a ground-penetrating radar machine that resembles a push mower.
She hopes to someday take it to Slocum in search of more bodies. Hollie-Jawaid
gave her great-great-grandfather a headstone engraved with the words “Remember
Slocum,” which she visits on her annual pilgrimage to the area on the day of
the massacre.
Hollie-Jawaid, right,
recently traveled to Africa, tracing her father’s lineage to Cameroon. On a
2018 trip to Slocum, she sprinkled dust and bone she’d collected in Africa.
courtesy Constance Hollie-Jawaid
Last year’s anniversary
was a special one. Hollie-Jawaid had recently returned from a trip to Africa
tracing her father’s lineage to a village in Cameroon. “Papa Jack would talk to
his children about his people being who they were in Africa, that they were not
slaves, that they didn’t work for anybody,” she said. “I wanted to meet Papa
Jack’s people and learn who we descended from.” Hollie-Jawaid carried a photo
of her great-great-grandfather with her on the trip to show her distant
relatives. They pinned it on a wall alongside other images of village heroes.
They also gave her dirt and bone fragments from the village, she says, “to
reunite Papa Jack with his ancestral home.”
Last summer, members of
the Hollie family took turns sprinkling the dirt and bone into a small hole
they’d dug near Jack Holley’s headstone in the Oakwood cemetery. When they
arrived in Slocum, the family stopped at the historical marker commemorating
the massacre, dropping more bits of dirt and bone next to the plaque. Then they
drove another three miles down a narrow country road until they reached the
farmhouse near the old Silver Creek School site. Constance sprinkled more dirt
and bone along the fence line. She plans to return this year.
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Michael Barajas is a
staff writer covering civil rights for the Observer. You can reach him on
Twitter or at barajas@texasobserver.org.
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