Juneteenth in Texas

Growing up in Houston in the 1960s, I often heard that Blacks did not take to the streets and burn entire neighborhoods because “we” had treated them so well through the years. “Our Blacks” had not been abused. “They” appreciated what “we” had done for them.

I liked believing that story. Though many of my parents’ friends the first twelve years of my life were openly racist, members of the John Birch Society, George-Wallace-is-right fanatics, my parents were not. It was nice knowing that my Texas had been better than the rest of the United States.

Granted, my parents’ willingness to hang out with people who believed that whites got cooties (if not VD) from drinking at water fountains reserved for “N******” confused the hell out of me. And in 1966 as I turned twelve, I still vacillated between my family’s insistence that people of all races and creeds were created equal in the eyes of God, and their friends’ dogged contention that people of color were decidedly inferior.

Rational thought prevailed. Disciples of Wallace wielded less and less influence on my life. My sounding board became high school teachers and college professors and a tight-knit group of friends whose attitudes towards life and society brought out the best in me. Even my parents found a saner circle to hang out with, though they inexplicably would never ditch despicably racist pals of their youth.

Yet through it all, I held onto that idea that “we” had been kind to Blacks in our midst, that Houston had not been like Detroit or Selma, Gary or Birmingham. “We” had been different.

Mid-2011, I ran across the hundreds of photographs I had inherited from my grandmother. Why not turn it into a light Houston history, I wondered. My great-grandfather had settled in Houston in 1892/1893. These pictures dated from the last of that century, covering the first five decades of the next. It would make a nice change from the Holocaust education work I’m otherwise immersed in, I thought.

The book – One Family’s Houston – never was going to be a mere scrapbook. I wanted to tell my great-grandfather’s story in its historical context. But that would still make for a lighthearted effort, at least in contrast to the relatively dark words I write about life during the Third Reich.

Indeed, one of the first “contextual” news items lifted my spirits and validated my childhood idealism regarding race relations in Houston. My great-grandfather’s business had been one of the only white participants in Houston’s Juneteenth parade in 1899!

That confirmed stories I’d heard about him all my life. Progressive in every way but financially (where he was a true conservative), he had studied the Quran instead of accepting his era’s abhorrent rhetoric about Islam. One of his mentors had been a man who would later help draft the charter of the League of Nations. That man’s emphasis on diplomacy and understanding colored my great-grandfather’s thinking. Upon his death, a Houston newspaper lauded my great-grandfather for having been a man of tolerance, one who knew Torah, the Bible, and Quran equally well.

The good feelings did not last long. Within a few weeks, it became clear that the “we/they” legend I learned growing up was nothing more than that: Legend.

My Texas had fully embraced Vardamanism, named for the Mississippi governor who thought lynching of Black Americans should be legalized, and if necessary, all Blacks exterminated. Yes, exterminated.

My Texas had maintained two separate but completely unequal legal systems. In one, wealthy white men who murdered business rivals in cold blood were routinely acquitted. They had only to claim that they feared maybe-possibly-somehow-probably-perhaps that rival thought about or could have thought about killing them, and juries found them innocent, guilty only of self-defense.

Sometimes those same wealthy white men would be acquitted once, only to turn around and murder a second time. And once again be acquitted.

And yet Blacks who had the great bad luck of being anywhere within a mile of a crime scene were immediately apprehended and lynched (unless rescued by the rare ethical law enforcement official). If not lynched, they were almost without exception found guilty on the flimsiest of evidence. Police hardly seemed to bother collecting evidence. It was enough to have nabbed a suspect.

The first time the Batson oilfield erupted in flames, nearby Black oilfield workers were blamed. Posses formed to hunt them down, intending to kill every man they could find. Of course, when the Batson oilfield continued to erupt in flames over the next five years or so, with no Blacks in sight to act as scapegoat, investigations were nonexistent. Oilmen learned to accept that it was a most unstable reservoir with a potent mix of oil, natural gas, and sulphur.

“Wets” and “Drys” could – and did – start a gunfight in the courthouse in Hempstead, Texas, killing a United States Congressman (among others). It was deemed a tragedy beyond proportions, but no one set out to hunt down all Prohibitionists and string them up.

And when George Blount and Lige Hays kidnapped, then brutally and repeatedly raped thirteen-year-old Delphia Creek, only Blount was prosecuted. He was not sentenced to death, but rather given a prison term. Hays was not prosecuted, because he had forced the child to marry him before he raped her. The marriage was eventually annulled, but Hays still faced no consequences for the terror he inflicted on the girl.

Of course, Blount and Hays were white. The outcry would have been much louder had either been Black.

My Texas also perpetrated one of the worst injustices on Blacks in the military that the country has ever seen. When the people of Brownsville learned that a Black unit (the Twenty-Fifth United States Infantry) was to be stationed at Fort Brown, they set about making life miserable for the men. The soldiers were not allowed in most taverns or businesses, and they were shoved on city streets. It was a concerted effort to provoke an incident.

When that did not work and the soldiers maintained their composure, citizens of Brownsville concocted an elaborate scheme in which they shot up their own town, and then blamed it on the Twenty-Fifth United States Infantry. They even planted evidence. “Eye witnesses” came forward to “prove” it had to have been Black soldiers (even though much of the testimony was contradictory and obviously well-rehearsed).

Even when reading the 1906 newspaper accounts of what they liked to call ‘the massacre,’ it’s shamefully obvious that it’s a manufactured story. The witnesses could see the brand of rifles the shooters were firing? In the dark? All 200 shots fired into houses happened to miss bedrooms where people were sleeping? The men were wearing khakis? (Yes, that was used as proof.)

Although all evidence pointed to the men’s innocence, President Theodore Roosevelt succumbed to pressure and dishonorably discharged all 167 soldiers without pensions and without severance pay. In 1972, Richard Nixon’s administration reopened the investigation and determined that the evidence used against the men was false, and that ballistics proved that not one of the men had been involved. Not one.

The sole living survivor of the Twenty-Fifth United States Infantry was given a check for $25,000. The dishonorable discharges were changed to “honorable.” And the matter was considered closed. You can read about the so-called Brownsville Massacre here.

In 1906 and 1907 while all this was taking place, the Houston Post was one of the loudest defenders of the citizens of Brownsville. A Houstonian named Judd Mortimer Lewis – also an occasional Post columnist – wrote blatantly racist poetry that was picked up by papers across Texas (residents of Brownsville loved him).

Judd Mortimer Lewis described Blacks’ goal in life as “his only dream to rape and kill.” If governor and president would not defend white women of Texas, Judd Mortimer Lewis proposed in rhyming verse that Texans take care of matters themselves, a clear call to vigilante justice and the lynchings that Texans had been itching to legalize.

A subsequent poem by Judd Mortimer Lewis called on the spirit of Napoleon Bonaparte to take up the cause of (white) people in Texas. Now there’s a role model for you.

My Texas, it turns out, was anything but a place where Blacks were treated kindly.

Writing this book has left me with more questions than answers. Largely due to our Holocaust education work, I do not believe in either collective guilt or collective innocence. It is not right to say that all white Texans lynched Black neighbors, or that all Black Texans behaved morally and honorably. There is individual guilt, individual innocence.

Some Texans, such as Sheriff Albert Egg of Edna, Texas, sought to uphold the law and refused to allow mobs to murder the first Black man found near the scene of a horrific murder. At great personal risk, Sheriff Egg protected Henry “Monk” Gibson. Gibson’s blood is on the heads of the individuals in Edna who successfully railroaded him through the legal system, ensuring his death, though another man would confess to the murder.

Remaining logically consistent with my belief in collective shame, but not collective guilt, it’s more difficult to consider the “what now” that follows the acknowledgment that people in my Texas committed grave injustices. Occasionally, and usually during Black History Month, talk of reparations resurfaces.

How would we quantify the damage that unequal justice wrought? Looking at the specific example of Dorsie Willis, the lone survivor of the Twenty-Fifth United States Infantry, how in the world did a check for $25,000 even begin to compensate him for almost seventy years of dishonor? For lost wages and pension? For his public humiliation? For being falsely accused? The false accusations constituted libel!

Who can predict how Dorsie Willis’ life could have been different had he stayed in the military till he chose to leave? How could things have been different for his children and grandchildren?

And what of the 166 men whose families received no compensation, no back pay, no pension?

The men of the Twenty-Fifth United States Infantry represent a tiny fraction of the number of Blacks who saw their lives, careers, education, and families destroyed by racism. Every time a white mob chose to lynch the nearest suspect without establishing guilt, they destroyed not only that individual’s life, but the family he supported and cherished.

“We” hardly limited “our” injustices to Blacks. Texans invited a Japanese citizen to come to the state to teach Texas farmers how to grow rice. Seito Saibara did so. He convinced the Emperor of Japan to donate Japanese grain as a starter crop. Saibara in turn gave the first season’s harvest to other farmers.

In a short time, yields had almost doubled. Before Saibara came to Texas, average harvest was 18–20 barrels of rice per acre. Post-Saibara, around 34 barrels.

Saibara had even converted to Christianity, so he brought no ‘strange’ religion to Texas. He supplied Japanese labor, again at his own expense. Yet when he filed for citizenship, Texans would not consider his application. Mr. Saibara was treated like an illegal immigrant, his “race” held against him as he pursued citizenship, legally.

How should we compensate Mr. Saibara’s heirs for having stolen from him? He came to Texas because he was invited. Is there a statute of limitations on fraud? Are there legal remedies when a government entity misrepresents a matter to an individual?

And Mexican-Americans shared the pain known by Blacks, frequently executed for crimes they had not committed. Although when immigration was tightened in September 1906, Texans protested the loudest. Who was going to bring in the cotton crop, if farmers in Texas couldn’t freely bring labor across the border? Even back then, that was something that white men rarely did.

When I read the historical record, I know that we may not continue to pretend that the Civil Rights Act suffices to make up for injustices of the past. Violence against our fellow Americans based on race was too frequent and too destructive to ignore, and continues to be so.

Some of these old cases where Black Texans were accused of heinous crimes they likely did not commit show up on racist Web sites even now as reasons cited for talk of white supremacy. Hate has not died.

This post offers no ready solutions – there are likely no ready solutions to be found anywhere in the universe on this topic.

And yet… we should recognize the horrors contained in our newspapers, horrors where our beautiful, precious, valued legal system failed a large number of our fellow citizens. And as we think about it, we should consider ways to rectify that past. And present.

Hey, “we” figured out that “we” didn’t get VD or cooties from drinking out of water fountains used by Blacks! Maybe together we the people can figure out the rest.

Judd Mortimer Lewis would be designated the first poet laureate of Texas in February 1932. An elementary school in Houston is named for him. I am sending a copy of this column to John Whitmire, current mayor of Houston, and to Mike Miles, Superintendent of Houston Independent School District.

Lewis’ name should be immediately removed from that elementary school. That may not “repair” the damage that Lewis did, but it certainly is a start. Here is a change dot org petition you can sign to have his name removed once and for all!

My work on the autobiographical fiction novel -- social media working title Middle Earth Houston -- continues.

Comments worth keeping

My God. This is an excellent piece of history. Thank you for sharing this important essay. Your work should be lauded throughout our fractured land.

--Susan Wingate, June 19, 2024.

I could not put this body of work down, this Essay should be in The New Yorker, in every School. I deeply resonate w/this History, ur words, so many of my own thoughts and feelings since before age 6. As an Adult, broken AND fractured long term friendships due to racism, LGBT harm, the suffering of many at the hands of hate, AND religious untruths about others. I will re-read this many times.

Thank You!

--GK Butler, June 22, 2024.

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