Not many people have heard of Slocum, Texas. It is a small unincorporated community in East Texas. Only 198 people lived there during the 2018 census, however, it was the scene of one of the deadliest race massacres in Texas history.
There is an old saying which goes everything in Texas is bigger. Well, I can believe that. I know the racists are sure enough bigger and many people say they are uglier too but I’m not going there today. Anyway, we don’t need to go any further than June 19, 1865. On June 19, 1865, African Americans in Texas were informed that they were no longer enslaved. So, the story goes that when Abraham Lincoln put out the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it freed all the slaves in states that were in rebellion against the United States. So, Ima tells you right now, the Confederates weren’t thinking about Lincoln.
Racist: “If you want to free a nigra… come ova heh and free him.”
I’m telling you this to dispel the myth that the enslaved African Americans in Texas, were freed after the proclamation. Not now a slave in any Confederate state was freed after the proclamation. As a matter of fact, azz whopping’s went up 120 percent in Confederate states after Lincoln said that. Yes siree, a lot of blacks got the Lincoln memo, but didn’t get the Confederate reply…
Racist: Which one of ya’ll know how to read!!? Ima cut sumpin off if I find out who!! Now anybody who thinks they free… dump dey bag of cotton on the ground right here in front of me and this bullwhip, then walk out that gate over there… Yeah… that’s what I thought…”
So that’s how that went. What really happened was that after Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, the Texans didn’t surrender until June 2, 1865. It took another 17 days before the Union Army reached Galveston and informed the African Americans there, that they were free. By the way, no slaves were freed in the slave states that fought on the side on the Union, like Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri during the civil war. Legally, African Americans who were enslaved in those states were not affected by the proclamation. Those four states were called the border states. The last “official” “Yass Suh Massa” came in December 1865 when Missouri became the final state to abolished slavery. Although the 13th Amendment which outlawed slavery in the United States and its territories was ratified on December 6, 1865, Delaware didn’t ratify it until February 1901… thirty-five years after the Civil War. They should have gone over there and kicked a little bit of it… that would have gotten them in line sooner. Anyway, back to Slocum…
(Picture of Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries heavy weight championship bout on July 4, 1910.)
So historically, there are a number of reasons why they say the massacre occurred. One of the reasons was that they weren’t even feeling the beat down and planet moving azz whooping that Jack Johnson gave to Jim Jeffries in the first heavy weight title fight between an African American and a white boxer. They say that Johnson was also talking to white women in between rounds… I don’t know that for sure… but that’s what they say. In the end Johnson put it on Jeffries and walked away with the undisputed heavy weight title. As for the racist… well… “THEY LOST DEY DAMN MINDS!!”
Racist: YOU BETTER HOPE ALL THESE OTHER NIGRAS CAN FIGHT LIKE THAT!!!
They called it the “Fight of The Century,” and black folks were paying for that win with their lives all over the country.
Another rumor that was going around was that a black man was in charge of a maintenance crew that was repairing the roads. A white farmer thought it was an affront to white supremacy that a black man were supervising white workers. However, after the massacre it was said that the real reason for the attack was that the farmer was mad that the black man was involved with his daughter… true story according to this rumor. I know I always joke about white women and black men back in those days, but historically, miscegenation was no joke. Miscegenation means a personal or sexual relationship between different ethnic groups or religious backgrounds. Anywho, there are thousands of black men and white women who have been killed because of those relationships. Well maybe not thousands of white women… but you can bet there are thousands of black men who lost the breath of life… and that ain’t all they lost… fuquing around back in the day. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court banned anti-miscegenation laws as being unconstitutional in the landmark case Loving v. Virginia. So yeah, after Reconstruction ended in 1877 and all the way up to 1967, white women were one of the leading causes of death for black men, followed by back sass.
Blackman: Honey, forget him… we can leave and go up North and be together…
Racist: Up North??? Boy you will be lucky to get pass that tree in the front yard…
Finally, it was rumored that the Nigras were rising up and planning to kill all the white folks. Yeah, I can believe that… a small group of black folks deep in the rebel south, outnumbered ten to one…surrounded by angry armed white racists, who were feeling some kinda way about how they lost everything because a nigra wanted to be free and told a white man on them… who proceeded to kick nothing but… “PURE” “A”… I mean in our defense… we did look through all the other letters… PURE “K”… PURE “H”… PURE “S”…, but they wouldn’t settle for nothing less than kicking “PURE” “A”…. so how was that our fault… Anyway, we all know that the last thing a Moe wanted was to antagonize those people. So yeah, that was a low-down skank rumor.
(House in Slocum displaying a warning flag… So don’t say you didn’t know…)
So, while these were some of the rumors as to why the massacre occurred, we may never really know what event caused the massacre. Historians generally believe that the white mob was envious of the gain’s blacks had been making despite the obstacles the southerners had put on us. Guided by their racist attitude toward African Americans, this narrative has been seen repeatedly in American history. This perspective of events surrounding the massacre came about because of a dispute between a black businessman named Marsh Hollie and a white farmer named Reddin Alford over an unpaid debt. Hollie was said to have thought that the argument wasn’t a big thing, at least not big enough to risk his life over. However, things went south when somebody said Hollie was trying to cheat a disabled white man and that he had threatened to kick PURE “A,” if he didn’t have his dough on the table next to his gun by the time the sun went down. Of course, that was a baldfaced lie. PURE “A” was not even in the vocabulary of a black man living in Slocum, “Cause I Said So Nigra,” Texas in 1910… believe that. Anyway, Charlie Wilson, Cleveland Larkin, and Willustus “Lusk” Hollie, three black teenagers became the first casualties of the Slocum Massacre. Willustus Hollie was Marsh Hollie’s son. They were on their way to tend to the family’s livestock, when they were shot. Hollie and Wilson survived, but Larking died from his wounds. Afterwards, gangs of armed racist traveled from street to street and house to house shooting black folks. The racist were wilding for two days. It got so bad that even white folks were asking the governor to put a stop to it. Governor Thomas finally sent in a company of U.S. cavalry troops and Texas Rangers to shoot first and ask questions later any white man in a sheet and wearing a hood smelling like Pine-Sol or bacon fat… okay… no he didn’t… Anywho, it was two little too late. No one really knows how many black people were killed in the race riot. The official account was between “eight and twenty-two,” but even then, official believed that far more blacks were killed. Some suggest as many as ten times those numbers were killed. A lot of bodies were found with bundles of clothes and personal effects by their sides as if they were trying to escape. When the journalist arrived on July 31, more than two dozen murders had been reported, but officials only had eight bodies. As reported to the New York Times:
“It would be difficult to find out just how many were killed because they were scattered all over the woods and buzzards would find many of the victims first. Men were going about killing Negroes as fast as they could find them. These Negroes have done no wrong that I can discover. I don’t know how many were in the mob, but there may have been 200 or 300. They hunted the Negroes down like sheep.” –Sheriff William Black, July 31, 1910″
Building destroyed by racist in Slocum, Texas- 1910
Now I am sure after reading that account, a lot of folks might want to go down there and make it happen… but I wouldn’t go down there faquing with those folks if I was you. This article is called the Slocum Massacre. Slocum is in Andeson County, Texas, but they were killing folks in Houston County too, which was right next door. We don’t need nobody going down there and “finding out” sumpin. That mess is probably the same way it was in 1910. As a matter of fact, a group of ministers… and when I say group, I’m talking about over 150, sent a signed letter to the Justice Department back then demanding they do something about the lynchings. In the six months leading up to the Slocum Massacre, mobs were lynching at least one black man a week in East Texas. The Justice Department sent a reply back basically saying, ” They hear it’s a lot safer in Africa…” okay no they didn’t say it like that, but it amounted to the same thing…
“The protection of life and property is generally a duty devolving up the state authorities. Your letter and petition deal with the subject of the treatment of colored persons generally and therefore furnish no facts which would warrant this Department in taking any steps to redress the wrongs complained of.” James McReynolds- Attorney General of the United States. 1910
In other words, we ain’t lifting one finger to help you and from now on if you have any complaints, send them to your governor, Grand Dragon Ambrose “Hang That One Too” Beauregard. So yeah, the federal government was no help. They sent the letter to the Taft administration. We gave him a “3” (We will count to three before we let the dogs out if you come to our house,) in “By The Numbers.” His mantra was basically, any nigras caught voting at a poll location, would also be caught swinging on a tree outside one too. If you missed it, I put a link to the article above. Now as hard as it is to believe, there was a trial to address the Slocum killings. As a matter of fact, it was well known that in that time period whenever they massacred a bunch of black folks, they would hold a trial to see who would get credit… uh… I mean convicted for it. More than 700 hundred witnesses had been questioned and out of those people, seven were indicted. Among the men indicted, were Jim Spurger and Anthony Kirkwood, two of the men who attacked the three teenagers and killed Larking. I am mentioning Spurger and Kirkwood, because even the judge wanted those men kept behind bars. Bejamin Gardner was a District Court Judge who was sympathetic to the injustices of black people. He was in charge of overseeing the prosecution. He called a grand jury to investigate the massacre to the ire of Spurger and Kirkwood who both were eventually indicted. On one occasion, Spurger while out in public, attacked Gardner, hitting him in the face. I think nowadays we say that Spurger smack the (cuss word) out of him and on another occasion, Gardner had to pull out his pistol on Kirkwood… who I presume was gonna smack the (cussword) out of him too. I guess Gardner was like… fool me once and shame on me… fool me twice and Ima put a hole in yo dome… Anyway, to make a long story short, there were seven men who were indicted, including Spurger and Kirkwood. All seven men were freed on bail. Somehow during the proceedings Gardner was replaced and all seven men never saw the inside of a courtroom. Yep… no one ever went to jail for the slayings.
After the massacre and the mass exodus of African American from Slocum, it was noted that the holdings of the white inhabitants “fortuitously increased”. The abandoned African American properties were absorbed or repurposed. For instance, Marsh Holley’s General Store was now called Colonel Sanders Chicken Palace… okay no it wasn’t… but you get my point. Until this day, Slocum remains a majority white community. While neighboring communities have African American populations of at least 20 percent… Slocum’s African American population is below 6 percent and the only reason that they are there is that they still need Negra’s to sweep off the sidewalks and drive Miss Daisy… so don’t yall go down there… Anywho, in 2011 the 82nd Texas Legislature adopted House of Representatives Resolution 865 basically saying “Yeah we did it… now get over it.” However black folks down there didn’t get over it and in 2016 a historical marker to the Slocum Massacre was unveiled. Of course, there was local opposition to the marker, but that was overcome by telling them we moving back to Slocum and this time we gonna be locked and loaded… then we gonna open up a Popeye’s and a Dollar Store right in the middle of town. Needless to say, local opposition was overcome, and the atrocities of the Slocum Massacre were finally… fully acknowledged.
“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. April 3, 1968
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