He catalogues historical lynchings through his ongoing project. An annex to the jail was built in 1955. The Arthur sisters eventually rejoined their father; mother and nephew and hid in the local woods until members of a local African American Masonic Lodge and a handful of white neighbors helped them escape. From a series of archive maps located in the J. Erik Jonsson Library, there is a marking of the Dallas County Jail on the corner of Main St. and Houston St., a location that remained fairly consistent between the years of 1901 and 1915. On July 2 the Arthurs began packing their things, but the Hodges reappeared with their guns up; Herman and Ervin responded in kind. The Campaign to Sabotage Texass Public Schools, Inside the Bro-tastic Party Mansions Upending a Historic Austin Community, Wendy Davis Returns to the Texas Capitol and a Whole New Political Landscape. Typically a rope is suspended around the neck, a black bag is placed over the face, and the victim falls through a trap door. However the most dominant language is by far English. On July 6, 1920 two African American men, Herman and Ervin Arthur, were burned at the stake in the Paris, Texas area. Reports sent to Austin by the Rangers and local ranchers suggestedthat those murdered in Porvenir were thieves, informers, spies, and murderers and that justice had been served. Eight years later, Barack Obama signed a similar national act. WebHome to vast mountain ranges, broad plains, beautiful beaches, rolling countryside and countless miles of uninhabitable desert, Texas is arguably one of the most awe-inspiring It was rhetoric similar to that of Patrick, who told Fox News host Laura Ingraham in mid-September that allowing migrants into the U.S. constituted a silent revolution by the Democrat Party and [President] Joe Biden to take over the country.. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing. As Black History Month comes to a close, continue, As Black History Month comes to an end, Daily Camp, Its not often that college students get to hear, SMU unveils 2023 football schedule in revamped AAC, SMU lights up Moody Coliseum in win vs ECU, Parents from Anti-Hazing Coalition speak to SMU Greek community as yet another organization faces hazing allegations, Former Mustangs set to face off in Super Bowl LVII, Muslim Student Association holding donation drive for Turkey and Syria earthquake survivors, The War on TikTok: Will SMU follow suit? Uncle Cato Miller, Patrick Jenkins, and Samuel Smith were three black slaves suspected of arson and the burning of downtown Dallas. 3. Nothing came out of the protest or the grand jury investigation and hundreds of African Americans subsequently left Paris. After fighting for his country in WWI, 28-year-old Herman Arthur returned home having glimpsed a world far removed from the Jim Crow South. Celebrate Women's History Month all March with JSTOR Daily. The county attorney publicly said the lynching was an expression of the will of the people and a local judge called the lynchings justice. Several newspapers reporting on the lynchings printed an image of two local sheriff officials posing with one of the lynching ropes, and both ropes were exhibited in a local drug store. Topics such as abortion and politics are likely to be highly controversial due to the states highly religious demographics. The incident serves as a reminder that over the past two centuries, hundreds of migrants and Texans of Mexican descent have been murdered. Even the victims names are lost to history. What Languages Do We Speak in the United States? Get your fix of JSTOR Dailys best stories in your inbox each Thursday. Includes two inset maps. We hope you'll find the stories below, and the scholarship they include in full,a valuable resource for classroom or leisure reading. International television coverage of the American Civil Rights struggle was critical in the construction of racial identity and experience in postwar Britain. In 1910, a posse hunted down a migrantvaqueronamed Antonio Rodriguez, accusing him of shooting a rancher at her home in Rocksprings, 140 miles west of San Antonio. Jennifer McNabb. In only three months, Texan forces successfully defeated the Mexican forces and so a year later signed the Texas Declaration of Independence, effectively making Texas a new republic. Both men succumbed to their wounds and Herman and Ervin fled. Harris County Takes Steps To Face A History Of Racial Lynchings A national movement to commemorate lynching victims could come to the Houston area One included the names of four black men who were shot, burned to death or hung in Harris County. Their smoldering remains were then dragged via automobile through the African American section of the city, their executioners all the while screaming Here are the barbecued Niggers.. Resources like these are made possible by the generosity of our community of donors, foundations, and corporate partners. In 1916, Governor Jim Ferguson did little to assail or even truly examine the Waco lynching of teenaged farmhand Jesse Washington. The plague of lynchings of Mexican-Americans in the American West has long been excluded from history books. While confined inside the county jail in Center, Texas, awaiting trial, news of William Allen Taylor, a black man, was tried and convicted of burglary and criminal assault. City Employees Are Heading for the Exits. The museum was founded by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization led by civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson, who recently was the subject of an, The number of incidents in Texas is much higher than previously understood, according to Jeffrey Littlejohn, a history professor at Sam Houston State University. Required fields are marked *. document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); The primacy of racial prejudice as motivation for lynching was underlined by the ritualized torture of victims, who were shot, burned, and mutilated before and after hanging. He was put in a local jail that was swarmed by a mob that tortured him and set him on fire. . The Lynching of Lige Daniels. document.getElementById( "ak_js_3" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); JSTOR Daily provides context for current events using scholarship found in JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, books, and other material. Follow. WACO - Of the nearly 500 lynchings that took place in Texas before the crime abated in the 1930s, the "Waco horror" is among the most notorious. According to a letter to the New York Age, J. H. and William fired on the Arthurs first and when Herman and Ervin fired back, J. H. was shot in the head and William was shot in the neck. Tags BakerRipley harris county Harris County Commissioners Court tax preparation underserved communities underserved neighborhoods. First, there must be legal evidence that a person was killed. Defining lynching as a retributive act of murder for which those responsible claim to be serving the interests of justice, tradition, or community good, Carrigan and Webb catalogued 597 lynchings of persons of Mexican origin or descent in the United States. The website, called Lynching in Texas, was started by Dr. Jeff Littlejohn, a history professor at the Sam Houston State University in Huntsville. Julius B. Robertson, aka Bubber, a black man, was hanged in the stairwell of the Dallas County Jail on May 13, 1910 for attempted murder and robbery. After the war, Texas grew increasely prosperous due to the growth of industries such as ranching and banking, leading to wealthier citizens and higher standards of living. He did not die from the lynching. Ben Rowen is a senior editor at Texas Monthly for News & Politics. Now, a new Texas-based project is trying to document more than 700 lynchings in the Lone State State on a website with an interactive map and detailed historical accounts and records of each event. It covers all aspects, from cities to airports, cruise ports to ski and beach resorts, attractions to events, and it also includes weekly travel news, features and quizzes. The heaviest concentration of mob activity was along the Scott Arthur died in 1937 at the age of 101. Explore The Map | Lynching In America ListenAudio stories from generations affected by Many of the attacks followed heated statements from public officials that Texas was going to be overrun by desperate migrants surging across the river, and that the intruders were going to be bringing a host of plaguescrime, disease, poverty, and even socialism. 37, No. WebReasons given for these lynchings varied wildly, including accusations of cattle theft, murder, cheating at cards, refusing to play the ddle, shouting Viva Diaz! even witchcraft. The influential African American newspaper the Chicago Defender organized a fund for the Arthurs and eventually raised enough money for them to get their own home. Texas Lege Watch: A House Republican Fights for Chicken Freedom, American Dream Deferred: Two GOP Bills Would Block Some Legal Immigrants from Buying Texas Property, How Florence ButtNot Her SonLaunched the H-E-B Empire. Bush demurred, saying that Texas was already willing to hand out stiff penalties. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. As a matter of comparison, in the same period rates of lynching for African Americans in the South varied from North Carolinas 11 per 100,000 to Alabamas 32.4 per 100,000. When they discovered only two of the Arthur girls at the shack, they threw out the food the girls had been cooking and kicked the familys stove into the yard. Within three hours of being accused of murdering a local man, he wasabducted, dragged by a chain, and strung up on a ladder leaning against a telephone pole. The lynching of Henry Smith, a Black laborer in Paris, Texas, on February 1, 1893, was extraordinarily grotesque. Violet passed in 1951 at the age of 97. While Mississippi Governor Ray Mabus had nominated him for the U.S. Hodges managed to escape his binding and reported the crimes committed against him. On November 12, 1935, a mob of at least 700 white men, women, and children killed two teenaged Black boys15-year-old Ernest Collins and 16-year-old Benny Mitchellin Colorado County, Texas, in a public spectacle lynching. Three Black men were Lynched in Kirvin, Texas for allegedly murdering a young girl. Not far behind, Spanish is spoken by 27% of the population because of Texass close proximity to Mexico. However, this wasnt successful and the Spanish declared Texas as a colony and in 1691 appointed Texas with its first governor Domingo Tern de los Ros. Walter Stevenson and Leonard Dodd, two white males, were hanged May 24, 1918 at the new Dallas County Jail for kidnapping and criminal assault. What was left of the Arthur family arrived in Chicago on August 30, 1920. The website project is run by Littlejohn and several history grad students at the university in Huntsville, with funding from the university and Humanities Texas. 2 (Winter, 2003), pp. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. @SMUBasketball 35, @ecubasketball 28. In 1799 the Spanish ceded control of Louisiana to the French but the agreement was unclear over borders. Top of page. According to Bakers text, following the hanging of Douglas, in 1923, the Texas State legislature passed an act requiring all legal executions to be held at the Texas state prison in Huntsville. Dering was later killed by an armed mob in a tale of racial violence that happened so frequently in the American South, and particularly Texas, that a decade after this incident, the Chicago Tribune began documenting lynchings across the country. An official website of the United States government. A Right-wing Cabal Took Over Odessas Municipal Government. The sharecropper arrangement the Arthurs had with the Hodges was a losing proposition and it eventually grew worse. Continued disagreements rumbled on but in 1845, the US congress passed a bill allowing it to annex the Republic of Texas, thus making it a US state. While the sheriff was transporting Benny and Ernest to the Colorado County courthouse, several cars filled with armed white men stopped them on a bridge crossing and demanded to lynch the two boys. Note: These maps are for informational purposes only. No one was ever held accountable for their deaths. Under interrogation, he implicated two other men, Johnny Cornish (19) and Mose Jones (46). According to the Paris News they were buried at an undisclosed location in Lamar County. His executioners continued down the road to a Black church and then tossed Byrds mangled torso in front of it. Since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, racial terror lynchings targeting Black communities had killed thousands of men, women, and children throughout the U.S., but repeated calls for a federal anti-lynching law had failed due to obstruction by Southern white lawmakers. Learn More. In 1877, the murder of a white man was Their brutal repression of the Mexican population was tantamount to state-sanctioned terrorism., Texas had been carved out of Mexico by pro-slavery forces who would go on to enshrine white supremacy in their state constitution. This same report lists 344 lynchings of African-Americans occurred in Texas between the years of 1877-1950, with Anderson county ranking 13th, with 22 victims, on the top 25 list of counties with the most lynching victims. Our Spectrum News app is the most convenient way to get the stories that matter to you. In 1893, Henry Smith, a Black handyman, was set on fire in Paris, in northeast Texas, after being accused of attacking a white child. Cat Cardenas is a writer focused on culture, entertainment, and the states Latino community. Several elements inside and outside the state of Texas believed that the Arthurs had been innocent because they acted in self-defense, and some officials suggested they were innocent altogether because they hadnt been involved in the shooting at all. Patricia Sharpe writes a regular restaurant column, Pats Pick, for Texas Monthly. Nearly one hundred other migrants bodies had been discovered in the county this year, but this one was hanging from a noose that had been fashioned from the remains of a shirt and was tied to a limb on a rugged old oak tree. The tragedy, at first, seemed a familiar one in the ragged brushlands of South Texas. The couple, wanting to escape the disapproving public eye, moved to Houston. The Equal Justice Initiative works to end mass incarceration, excessive punishment, and racial inequality. Once Dering returned to Walker County in 1878, he was taken to a vacant house in Riverside that was being used as a temporary jail. Wesley Jones, a black man, was hanged August 11, 1876 for the rape of a white woman while a crowd of 6000 to 8000 watched. Published: Feb. 23, 2023 at 4:42 PM PST. A lock Law enforcement officers arrested Ernest and Benny and, soon after, reported that the young men had confessed to the crime. When the war ended, Texas began its transformation and modernized to what it is today along with the rest of the US. Your email address will not be published. Hangings and Lynchings in Dallas County, Texas 1853-1920. Border Patrol agents late last week spotted a badly decomposing body in a patch of trees on a ranch in Brooks County, about an hour north of McAllen and the Mexican border. She is the only female listed in Bakers text. Some historians estimate there have been over seven hundred lynchings in the stateand perhaps countless morewith hundreds targeting Mexicans or Texans of Mexican heritage. George Hughes, left, in custody in Sherman, Tex., in 1930. [3] Author Monte Akers in his book Flames After Midnight: Murder, Vengeance and the Desolation of a Texas Community, concluded that McKinley "Snap" Curry conspired with Claude and Audey Prowell to kill Eula Ausley and that Mose Jones and Johnny Cornish were innocent.[7]. Southern Methodist Universitys student-run publication News tips or questions? All three were lynched on the bank of the Trinity River, which met at the foot of Main St. at the time, but resonates more closely today near the triple underpass and Dealey Plaza. Leave them blank to get signed up. For the period 18 89 to 1918, Texas had 335 lynchings^^ A map on the Lynching in Texas website shows the number of cases researchers have documented to show more details about these horrific crimes. In an interview with Jennifer McNabb, a doctorate student at SMU and one of the leaders of the Human Rights Research cluster, she detailed this linkage: I see more clearly a connection between the lynchings in the past with the killings of young black men by both police and other citizens with impunity in the present. This year, Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick have framed the arrival of thousands of migrants from Central America and Mexico in exactly that wayas an invasion. The beginning of the European colonisers began with the arrival of the Spanish exploration headed by Alonso lvarez de Pineda in 1520. The researchers define lynching using four criteria. [1] An African-American man accused of rape and who was tried in court died on May 9 when the Grayson County Courthouse was set on fire by a White mob, who subsequently burned and looted local Black-owned businesses. Teaching with Reveal Digitals American Prison Newspapers Collection, The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928, Racial Violence as Impetus for the Great Migration, Prisoners Like Us: German POW and Black American Solidarity, Hysteria, Indigenous Identities, and Cocaine Bear, Fast and Pluribus: Impacts of a Globalizing McDonalds, About the American Prison Newspapers Collection, Submissions: American Prison Newspapers Collection. He was simply a victim to the witnessing of a murder and his unwillingness to comply with the suspects alibi is what got him killed. or https:// means youve safely connected to the .gov website. Thiswas during the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, when a large part of Mexico was annexed and colonized by the U.S. Carrigan and Webb call this period one of unparalleled danger from mob violence for people of Mexican ancestry. Eula Ausley's family was in a feud with another family and the local Sheriff Horace Mayo already had two white suspects of that family in custody when the wife of McKinley "Snap" Curry told the Sheriff that he had suspiciously come home with blood on his clothes. Texas has no official language. The incident made national headlines, with reporting led by crusading journalist Ida Wells, and is credited with helping to awaken America to the scourge of racially motivated mob violence. WebThe lynching of George Hughes, which led to what is called the Sherman Riot, took place in Sherman, Texas, in 1930. Public-spectacle lynchings like Washingtons occurred throughout the country around the turn of the twentieth century. This article was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2016 at 10:41am and is filed under Racism. If you hear a Texan refer to "the season," they're not talking about Labor Lynchings A number of the lynchings in the area were related to labor unrest. It is by no means the first documentation of the states lynching history, and plenty of historians have focused books on the topic, Littlejohn said. In one notorious 1911 case, the burning alive of a Mexican national by a Texas mob sparked riots outside the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and led to a boycott of U.S. goods. An exploration of one prison newspapers commitment to celebrating Black History with a unique focus on its home state. Long was hanged December 19, 1913 for murder of a special officer. In February of 1910, Allen Brooks, a 65-year-old black man, was found in the loft of his white employers home with their three-year-old daughter who had been missing for about four hours. WebLynching in Kirvin, Texas; Part of Jim Crow Era: Kirvin Lynching news coverage. Although unsuccessful, eventually, in 1821 Texas became a part of Mexico, which was newly independent from Spain. Past governors often responded only belatedly to condemn lynchings, while others did little to tamp down the fears and hysteria that might fuel unofficial executions of Mexican Americans, migrants, and Black Texans. Territories, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) English Language Learners (ELL), ELL Fast Facts, States with the Fastest-Growing Foreign-Born Populations, English Proficiency and Languages Spoken at Home- July 10, 2018, Language Diversity and English Proficiency in the United States- November 11, 2016, The Limited English Proficient Population in the United States-July 8, 2015, Modern Language Association, Language Map. Were trying to make the information accessible to a wider public.. A massive manhunt was conducted, but the Arthur brothers had already escaped to Oklahoma. The 100th anniversary of the burnings at the stake of Herman and Irvin Arthur is a few years away. A comprehensive guide to the worlds best travel destinations, its print heritage stretches back more than 30 years, with the online portal reaching its 20-year anniversary in 2019.