In 1883 an old black man was taken from his tent in Alexander, beaten and shot. Local citizens were afraid to interfere. A man who spoke against lynch mobs found a note on his door threatening his life if he “did not cease to give his opinion on the subject.” Stephenville Empire

I forgot to include the sources for the Stress post.

DeNeen Brown, “The Preacher who used Christianity to Revive the Ku Klux Klan,” The Washington Post, (April 10, 2018); “New Look at 1918-1919 El Nino Suggests Link to Flu Pandemic,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, United States Department of commerce, NOAA Public Affairs, 2010;”Brutal Winter Weather of December 1917 and January 1918,”Louisville, Kentucky: Weather Forecast Office; and Patricia Bernstein. “Apology for Slavery from Texas Wouldn’t be Enough,” The Houston Chronicle (March 28, 2007), and my lecture notes from decades in the classroom.

On April 22, 1922, the Stephenville City Council approved the removal of African-American bodies to a new cemetery to be called mount Olive. The Stephenville Tribune ran an article in May of 1922 entitled “Negro Burial Grounds” which spoke of beautification by black community leaders, but failed to mention that the removal was forced. Many of the earliest graves lost their wooden markers during the removal, among those was the first Stephenville family, an enslaved couple who names are lost, were sent a year ahead of the settlement of Stephenville, by John M. Stephen, to build a trading post and establish relations with the two Indigenous groups that frequented the area, the Anadarko and the Comanche. The Anglo-friendly Anadarko Natives and the Anglo-tolerant (at the time) Comanches, traded smoked buffalo hams, deer-skin bags of honey and other articles for hardware. A year later, in 1855, Stephen and George Erath, led thirty families up the Bosque River from Waco to build the village of Stephenville around the current square. The peace established by the black couple only lasted three years before Stephenville’s residents angered the Natives, causing years of Comanche raids.

“Segregated History Haunts Cemetery,” Texannews (February 26, 2013)

Spectacle lynching and pogroms directed at African-Americans accelerated into the 1890s and really took off across the South in the 1920s. After Civil War Reconstruction failed, the Ku Klux Klan had gone dormant with the onset of Jim Crow because there was no need for a faith-based insurgent group when the local governments promoted white supremacy. Nobody wore robes at the Comanche purge because the extremest were in sync with enough public opinion. In 1915, Methodist preacher William Joseph Simmons brought out the flag, a sword, and the Bible on Stone Mountain, Georgia and tried to bring back the klan. There wasn’t much interest because the economy was good and it rained. By 1920 it was a very different story and klan membership shot up to five million. What had happened? During WWI President Woodrow Wilson stoked bogus treasonous fears and the Red Scare of Communism which lasted long after the war; then President Wilson had a stroke during which his wife concealed and together with a few others, made dingbat decisions for a year, contributing to a horrendous recession; 1918-1919 were drought years (of course) and the knockout punch – in 1918-1919 , the misnamed Spanish Flu which swept the globe, killing fifty million people and around 500,000 in the United States; and the winter of 1917-1918 was brutal. These years were (probably more stressful than today) happened just as the boll weevil ruined cotton production and high wartime wheat prices collapsed, as did the Erath and Comanche populations as young people moved to Fort Worth and Dallas, where they developed a taste for motor cars, speak-easies, female employment, and evolution taught in the public schools. [I obtained a stack of recent KKK newspapers and had my history class list the most frequent articles – the winner was The Horrors of Women who Worked Outside the Home.] So. What did the Stephenville City Council decide to do on the night of April 22, 1922? They voted to exhume the graves of black pioneers from the West End Cemetery.

The night after the hanging of Tom Turner [another oral tradition says his name was Tom McNeel] isolated, demagoguery- susceptible, rural vigilantes listened to hateful speeches about how “Negroes were evil, and similar crimes might happen at any time unless some action were taken. Of the men who remained after the hanging not one voted against the proposal” to ride the following night to ride from house warning blacks to leave the county by sunset on August 6, 1886 or be killed. The action did not go unopposed in town where more reasonable people approved of the hanging, but not the expulsion. It just didn’t seem right to hold the entire black population responsible for the murder of Sallie Stephens. The Comanche townspeople were much more tolerant toward the 40+ blacks in the county. Several worked in town and were respected members of the community, one family had an adopted four-year old African-American girl. Many of the tolerant townspeople were probably members of the Human Party, referenced in an earlier post and described as an early manifestation of the left-leaning Populist Party. Fifty-five residents held what came to be known as the “Law and Order Meeting” at the courthouse. These citizens passed a resolution that “we regard the demonstration in the town of Comanche on last night in ordering the negro population out of the county as uncalled for, wrong and lawless.” As the days passed the gulf between the townspeople and the farmers grew even wider.” Those refusing to send their employees and the four-year old girl away received several death threats until they complied. One man, Captain J.F. Manning received a warning that he would “pull on the tight end of a rope” if he didn’t stop criticizing the vigilantes, Manning was sure he knew who sent that note and pistol-whipped Tom Stewart, even though Steward swore it wasn’t him. Sheriff John Cunningham told the Law and Order Committee that since a squad of Texas Rangers was still a week out, that he could deputize 100 men to oppose the mob, but that “would be arraying neighbor against neighbor and be productive of feuds that would be handed down to the net generation.” While waiting for the Texas Rangers, there were “small skirmishes fought between the ‘law and order’ and the mob. Vigilantes posted notes to people they thought opposed them, signed ‘Comitty.'” The Rangers arrived on August 4 and stayed until September trying to piece together what happened, but nobody dared testify for fear of reprisal. The Comanche County grand jury report at the beginning of September described the county as “gripped by fear.”

Elliot Jaspin. “All ‘Difficult History’ is Local and ‘Rises with Depressing Regularity’ to this Day,” in The Austin Statesman July 9, 2006; and Billy Bob Lightfoot. “The Negro Exodus from Comanche County, Texas,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, January, 1953, Vol. 56, No. 3, pp. 407-416.

The spark that led to the purge of black residents of Comanche County came with the murder of Mrs. Ben Stephens (Sally) on a farm nine miles north of Comanche. Ben Stephens had just gone into town to buy parts for his plow when a man on a mule rode up and told him his wife had just been killed. According to interviews 75 years later, a farm worker, 18 year-old Tom Turner, was angry that he was not allowed to accompany Ben to town. Using hawk near the chickens was his excuse for bringing out the family shotgun and then shooting the farmer’s wife in the back. Posses were immediately organized to search for the young man. Tom was barefooted and everyone thought he would be caught right away, but Tom was able to make it nearly to Stephenville before he was captured two days later. He was returned to the Stephen’s farm where a large crowd was waiting to see the hanging. Frank Sherill, who had a rabid hatred of black people, argued that Tom should be burned alive, but “Zack Hulsey, the father of the murdered woman, said, “Now boys, the laws of our land say hanging, not burning; so we’ll hang him.” Deputy W.D. Cox made a weak attempt to take the prisoner from the mob for a legal trial, but rode away when threatened by a shotgun. Tom was placed in a wagon to be used as a gallows platform, as the rope was being fitted around his neck, Hulsey asked Tom if Sally had mistreated him. Tom replied, “No sir, she’s the best kind to me.” “Then why did you kill her?” Tom replied, “Just for meanness.” [Keep in mind this is 75-year-old oral tradition] When the wagon was pushed Tom’s weight broke the limb. While a boy attached the rope to a stronger limb, Frank Sherill, jumped upon a stump and harangued the crowd to ride house to house to demand that all black families leave the county in ten days. Later”there was a lucrative business in souvenirs carried on by an itinerant peddler who sold ‘authentic remains’ of the Last Negro.'” These sales lasted as late as 1889. Lightfoot, The Negro Exodus from Comanche County, Texas, 1953.