Sherman Final Reading
Sherman final/reading
5/28/2007
Lynching’ End?:
The Texas CourthouseRiot
[AL1]
Narrator intro: Between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement, thousands of African-Americans were lynched, anddozens of communities devastated in “race riots.” The causes of that nationwidedecades-longreign of terror–and the best way to fight thebeliefs which motivated it—are still debated. One of the last of these incidents—and one of the hardest to explain—occurred near Dallas, in northeast Texas’Grayson County.
EFXMUSIC: Till Times Get Better, Jabbo Smith FADE UNDER after piano intro
1. Idyll & …Reminiscence; nostalgia —(PARADISE)
Hill(AA 7:10): Prior to 1930 (K: mm-hmm) it was delightful to be a Black person in Sherman, …
Narrator [AL]: —William Hill of Sherman, Texas:—
Hill (cont.): …you didn’t get much for your work or anything but all the Black people had a lot pride, wanted to develop themselves…
Narrator[AL]: By 1930, black and white had reached a kind of rough, separate (‘tho’ sometimes brutal) balance. [AL2] Black Dallas included the “Deep Ellum” music district, while White Dallas broadcast the nation’s first barn-dance radio program.
EFX Music: Prince Albert Hunt & Harmon Clem: -How do ya feel, Prince? –Feel like a jug of molasses. All ‘round but not stuck up! (Fiddling starts)
And while both races were suffering the Great Depression, Blacks had to struggle for even the lowest-paid jobs.College-graduate Alexander Bate:
Bate(@11:00): We built a new school here, and every book, desk, and everything was used when they put it in the new school, nothing new in it.
Narrator [DK]: My name is Donna Kumler; I’m an historian, and I interviewed Bate and Hill and other witnesses to the event that changed their lives in Sherman,more than fifty years later.
Hill@22:08: Sometimes the Ku Klux Klan would have a parade, and we’d get in the car and drive up to where we see them … [Fade under]
EFXMUSIC: Tramp Tramp Tramp the Klan is Coming…
Narrator: **Just a few years before, nationwideKlan membership had soared into the millions. But [still/even though White supremacy was the order of the day], Hill’s family didn’t take the Klan too seriously:
Hill (cont): …. And certain white people that were in this Klu Klux Klan you could recognize them by the build y’know, (K: mm-hmm) such as the banker, we would sit in the car, and I’ve often heard my mother and sisters and others say, there goes Mr. So-and-so, and there’s Mr. So-on and look who’s in there, there’s So-and so!
EFX: Klan song out
Bate (AA): 33:50-35:30 Klan in area, in church…. !
Narrator [DK]: Like that banker, Blacks shared in Sherman’s prosperity, with their own 3-block commercial district….
EFX MUSIC: Till Times Get Better reprise, UNDER…
Bate@12:30: They had good negro business, big building there, called Andrews Auditorium …
Hill@20:00: …that area covered almost a block! They had the restaurant, they had the tailor shop, upstairs they had the motion picture and the medical doctor, dentist; downstairs was the drug store, (K: mm-hmm) and was it Masonic or maybe it was the Knights of Pythian lodge hall…
Bate@12:45: …a grocery store, a pool hall, a restaurant, and a barber shop, and the barbershop had about three bathtubs y’know, (K: mm-hmm) ’cause we didn’t have no modern conveniences, (K: mm-hmm) so people would go in there and take a bath in the bathtubs, and they had a pool hall in the bottom and a theatre at the top (K: mm-hmm) and they gave big band dances.
EFXMUSIC: Till Times Get Better Up: “…gonna get wetter/ I’m gonna stay right here until times get better.”SONG ENDS
2. Rumors and Trouble
Narrator [DK]: But [AL3]much of that came to an end soon after May 3, 1930. The newspapers of Sunday May 4 reported “Negro Held for Assault Near Luella.” One Mrs. Pearl Farlow—a white woman—had allegedly been tied to her bed and raped by a black farm-laborer named George Hughes:
Bate (AA) @ 40:54: We didn’t know anything, nobody in Sherman knew him, I don’t know, I mean Black folks didn’t know anything about him, somebody just drifting through I understood.
40:07: We didn’t know anything, nobody in Sherman knew him, [K: uh-huh] I mean Black folks, didn’t know anything about him, somebody just drifting through I understood…. [K: uh-huh] They said, that he was just a kind of a loafing man coming through town….
EFXMUSIC: Hey Little Girl, Snuff Johnson, under, [& continue grandfather clock ticking under]
Hill: This account in the paper said this Hughes fella had worked for these people on the farm, and when he went for his money /she\ told him her husband had gone to town and she couldn’t pay him until he came back and when he went back he wasn’t there so he went in and raped her.
Narrator [AL]: Rape was the most frequent reason given for lynching. But the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, thenthe South’s leading liberal—or rather racially moderate—group, had concludedthat it reflected a phobia—not the facts. Sociologist Arthur Raper:
Raper rsrch-nont sex: We had done the research on why people got lynched—most of it was not for sex or sex-related crime23:55 crimecras reported by the white newspapers,but mostly economic and etiquette matters …
There was just an assumption in some areas that you had to have a lynching every now and then to preserve equitable race relations!
TRX/Raper Reader: The explanation accepted by many Negroes locally was that Hughes… went to his employer’s house asking for wages and that the employer, being unwilling to pay him, had his wife to report that she had been assaulted…. [ToL 319]
Narrator [AL]: —a reading from Raper’s 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching, based on an investigation by the Southern Commission for the Study of Lynching:—
Bate: I don’t know she and her husband had been having some problem. …
Narrator [DK]: —Alexander Bate:—
Bate: ..she brought this big scare, and they got after and that’s where theyshot at him and that kind of thing,got him…
TRX/Raper Reader: Hughes was not openly accused of the assault until after he had been in jail for two days.
EFX MUSIC: Gene Autrey Dallas County Jail Blues UP: “…in the Dallas County jail…” CONTINUE UNDER
Narrator: While Hughes was being held, a white mobtried to break into the jail.
EFX MUSIC: Gene AutreyUP: “…No-one will go your bail.” FADE UNDER & CONTINUE
TRX/Raper Reader: It is almost unanimously reported that Hughes was mentally unstable, some saying that he was crazy and others that he had “spells.” The county attorney, maintained that it is “damned foolishness to claim that Hughes was feeble-minded; he had as much sense as any nigger—just a damned beast who knew what he wanted and meant to have it, hell and hanging not withstanding..” [ToL pp329-330]
EFX MUSIC: Leadbelly, Death Letter Blues, UNDER
Narrator [DK]: Monday’s Sherman Daily Democrat was headlined “Quick Trial Promised for Negro….”
TRX/ Raper Rdr(ToL 320-1): …Exaggerated versions of the crime were widespread. It was reported that the Negro not only had raped the woman three times in succession, but that he had mutilated her throat and breasts, and that he was diseased….
Bate (cont.): … after they said it wasn’t true—that he chewed her breast, on her breast, gnawed it, anything to, arouse Mob rule, y’know.
Narrator [AL]: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been fighting mobs by trying for fifteen years to force a national anti-lynching law through a reluctant Congress. Southern leaders stopped them by filibuster—that is, talking the bill to death. They promised instead to keep Blacks safe from vigilantes—and protect white women—by dealing with rape suspects legally and swiftly.
[DK:] On Thursday the 8th—just five days after the alleged attack—authorities brought suspect Hughes to Grayson County’s landmarktwo-storeybrick courthouse in Sherman.
Hughes pleaded guilty. He was brought back the next morning for trial, in chains; the accuser Mrs. Farlow was brought in on a stretcher.
By noon the jury had been selected.
EFXMUSICSEGUE TO:Memphis Slim: Trouble in Mind [piano, harmonica…]
[AL4]
TRX/ Raper Reader: It had been raining for several days and for weeks the ground had been too wet to work… a case like that against Hughes always attracts a large crowd; the continued rains, leaving farmers with little to do, resulted in an unusually large crowd….
Narrator [AL]: —from Sociologist Arthur Raper’s The Tragedy of Lynching.
EFXMUSICMemphis Slim UP: “…Trouble in mind, I’m blue…”
Narrator [DK]: As William Hill recalled:—
Hill(16:15): All I remember was the many cars that came into the city into the city from the Fred Douglass school where I was attending** cut, and streets full of people….
My mother called the school and told them to send me home, and tell me not to go through town that day, so the school dismissed early that day…
Bate (AA@42:55): …that day and boy, they was going around that courthouse with sticks,and marching around and hollering and going on…
Narrator [DK]:—Alexander Bate:—
EFXMUSIC:Memphis Slimsegues to Bob Wills UNDER …
Bate [cont.]:(26:45) We had a whole lotta people in Sherman that participated in it, and (K: mm-hmm) a whole lot of people come from Mississippi, Alabama and all around they heard, they’re gonna, what they gonna do….
SFX: cars
Hill: Cars were just coming in, drove from Oklahoma, and I guess they were hungry for something to do… and they came in to join in, you know people like a
disturbance, some do, and of course I think they were just with nothing to do in a small town, they just thought they’d stir up something….
EFXMUSIC:Bob Wills UP: “…trouble in mind, I’m blue…” FADE UNDER & CONTINUE…
3. Riot
Narrator [DK]: The crowd, reportedly egged on by an out-of-town woman, forced their way into the courthouse. Local officials, reinforced by four Texas Rangers, tried to keep them out of the courtroom with teargas and buckshot. By two o’clock the crowd had broken many courthouse windows. And around 2:30 two teenage boys (reportedly) threw a can of gasoline and a lighted match through one of those broken windows.
EFXMUSIC:Bob Wills UP, spoken: “…rave on brother, rave on!...”FADE UNDER & CONTINUE…
As the courthouse burned, the lawmen hustled the jury, the victim and others down ladders to safety. [AL5]The accused man Hughes they locked/isolated into the building’s fire-proof steel and concrete vault.
EFXMUSIC: Wills X-FADE TO Prince Albert Hunt,Houston Slide, UNDER
Hill@15:15:…and we could see from my classroom, we could see the papers burning, the smoke and the blaze coming over…
@16We could look out several blocks away to the highway going into Denison and we could see colored people with sacks and things going down the road, these people were just scared to death.
Elliot@10:19: We could look over /from Denison\, and see this enormous cloud of smoke…
Narrator [DK]: 17-year-old Ralph Elliot and his friend, Hulen Johnson, were on school-break.
Elliot (cont): …and we had heard that there was a large crowd in Sherman and much excitement, so we decided thatwe would go over…
Narrator [DK]: The two white teenagers hitched a ride…
Elliot: We got to Sherman around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and there we saw an enormous crowd that extended throughout all of the square area, standing room only, and extended up some of the streets adjacent to the courthouse …
Narrator [DK]: The Dallas News reported the handful of Rangers retreated from Sherman around this time.
Elliot@15:10: They were putting out extras it seemed like about every 10 minutes and newsboys would hawk those papers through the crowd…
EFX MUSIC FADE IN UNDER Bob Wills Crippled Turkey
Elliot [cont]@15:10: The Fire Department would string their hoses through the crowd, they would no sooner get the hose there than someone back in the crowd would chop the hose in two and it would go writhing through the air like some giant serpent…
Narrator: By 4 o’clock the courthouse was gutted. [Hill HERE: you could see the fire and everything even into the night…] And as daylight began to fade, 55 soldiers arrived with machine guns and tear gas bombs. Ralph Elliot:
Elliot@17:45-26:30ish: The Texas National Guard appeared on the courthouse square and endeavored to/ push the crowd back by taking their rifles and turning them sideways and shoving it forward, and I remember distinctly there was a nice looking gentleman, a short stocky man in a blue serge suit and white sailor straw hat. The young soldier kept hitting this man in the breast with the gun and the man, warned him two or three times not to do that any more, and at about that time the man turned to me and said, “hold my hat,” and he tore into the soldier and put him on the ground. And if that were sort of a signal everyone else started assaulting the soldiers too. **
Narrator: —urged on, reportedly, by women **screaming at the “yellow nigger-loving soldiers:”—
Elliot (cont.)@17:45-26:30ish: …And the Guard began a retreat backwards… They were throwing rocks and bricks and clubs and wood, through the air, falling on the soldiers as they retreated, and many of them were knocked out or unconscious….
Narrator DK: The Guardsmen fell back on the town jail…
Elliot: ‘Bout that time Hulen and I thought we detected a shot that had hit the automobile that we were behind and we decided that we had better not go any further; right in that area there was a bakery, which the smell of baking break is almost sure to excite the appetite of anyone I think, and so we stopped and bought us a loaf of bread and ate it!
EFX MUSIC: Crippled TurkeyUP & OUT
[AL6]
Narrator [AL]: But Hill and Bate and African-Americans nationwide knew that this was probably just a brief lull. The newspapers, and the grapevine, were loaded with stories about mobs targeting “negro” businesses andproperty. Experts, white supremacists and anti-lynching activistsagreed the rioters’ goal was to keep Blacks “in their place.”
EFX MUSIC:Blind Willie Johnson ‘Dark Was the Night,’ UNDER
Hillca. 15:45 (AA): I suppose it must have been about 10 or 11 o’clock that someone knocked on our door and it was the principal of the school, his wife and one of the doctor’s wives. They spent the night, and some of the men went back to protect homes with water hoses and various things, because they were afraid it might burn…
Bate(@27:xx): I was back here on top of the house with a bucket of water and a shotgun. / 32:40And I didn’t have but four shells. During those times you didn’t have no money to buy shells with./ And my Dad was walking in front of the house and he had a pistol, a 32-20, and everybody on the street left but me and Papa. So he said “Son, we’re gonna stay here and protect what we got…”.
EFX MUSIC: Dark Was the Night, OUT
4. Release
Narrator [DK]: Night had fallen.
Elliot@28:30: A portion of the courthouse was still upright, the rest of it had all disintegrated into rubble and brick, the windows were all burnt out but the shell was still standing. On the South side you could see the vault…
EFX MUSIC: FADE INRudy Vallee Deep Night, UNDER…
Eliott: … And lights, great lights somewhere came, /the lights were very large, it was fully illuminated, you could see everything they were doing just like a movie….
Hill: …You could see everything, even into the night….
Elliot@30:xx-34:xx: Half-a-dozen men or so men would go up the side of the courthouse and inspect the door of the vault, they said “we need some crowbars,” the next thing I knew crowbars would show up! Then they wanted dynamite. And someone in there must have known how to use dynamite, ‘cause they then set dynamite off in the vault…
Bate ca. 28:30: …and they blow up that vault….
Elliot (cont.): They would come down and the crowd would all fall back, and the blast would go off, they would climb up, again, could not get the door open, this went on for some period of time…. And they needed an acetylene torch, and right away, just a short period of time there they’d show up with torch, and when they had completed burning through, they took hammers and balls and bars and tried to beaton it, but it would never did do any good, so they called for more dynamite;the crowd fell back and the dynamite went off and it blew the cut-out piece into the vault.