Racial Violence in Denton County During the Rise of the Second Ku
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IN THE TALL GRASS WEST OF TOWN: RACIAL VIOLENCE IN DENTON COUNTY DURING THE RISE OF THE SECOND KU KLUX KLAN Micah Carlson Crittenden Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2020 APPROVED: Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Major Professor and Chair of the Department of History Todd Moye, Committee Member Andrew Torget, Committee Member Tamara L. Brown, Executive Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Victor Prybutok, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Crittenden, Micah Carlson. In the Tall Grass West of Town: Racial Violence in Denton County during the Rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan. Master of Arts (History), May 2020, 145 pp., 3 figures, bibliography, 99 primary resources, 63 secondary resources. The aim of this thesis is to narrate and analyze lynching and atypical violence in Denton County, Texas, between 1920 and 1926. Through this intensive study of a rural county in north Texas, the role of law enforcement in typical and systemic violence is observed and the relationship between Denton County Officials and the Ku Klux Klan is analyzed. Chapter 1 discusses the root of the word lynching and submits a call for academic attention to violence that is unable to be categorized as lynching due to its restrictive definition. Chapter 2 chronicles known instances of lynching in Denton County from its founding through the 1920s including two lynchings perpetrated by Klavern 136, the Denton County Klan. Chapter 3 examines the relationship between Denton County Law Enforcement and the Klan. In Chapter 4, seasons of violence are identified and applied to available historical records. Chapter 5 concludes that non- lynching violence, termed “disappearances,” occurred and argues on behalf of its inclusion within the historiography of Jim Crow Era criminal actions against Black Americans. In the Prologue and Epilogue, the development and dissolution of the St. John’s Community in Pilot Point, Texas, is narrated. Copyright 2020 by Micah Carlson Crittenden ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The work, writing, and thoughts presented within these pages would not have been possible without the guidance and grace given to me by my academic advisor and committee chair, Dr. Jennifer Jensen Wallach. I am grateful, as well, for the continued encouragement of Dr. Todd Moye and Dr. Andrew Torget. Additionally, my path has been immeasurably impacted by my friend and mentor Dr. Debra Liles. To each of you, I am grateful beyond words. In the original St. John’s course and subsequent semester of study, my research was driven by the work of many fellow students whose ideas have surely crafted my own. I am grateful for their deep thoughts, research, and above all else, their friendship during the difficult transition into graduate study. I am also grateful to the colleagues who became friends along this journey including Shane Silagi, Alicia Stafford, Cecelia Harris, and the entire Equal Justice Coalition in Denton County. I am especially thankful for the friendship of Chelsea Stallings, whose master’s thesis on Quakertown paved the way for scholarship on race in Denton County. Lastly, to my little family who has traveled with me to cemeteries, meetings, libraries, county offices, and storage units; who has listened to each of these stories hundreds of times and has yet to grow tired, I am and will always be grateful. To my daughters – Charlie, Sophie, and Chloe – thank you for being the best study buddies I could have imagined. I am also thankful to my mom and dad, who blazed the path into academia I am following today. Lastly and most importantly, my heart is full of gratitude for Johnny, my partner in life. Without you this would never have been possible. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iii LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... v PROLOGUE ....................................................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1. LITERATURE REVIEW: VIOLENCE DEFINED BY LYNCHING ............... 9 CHAPTER 2. THE LYNCHING PATTERN OF DENTON COUNTY .............................. 28 CHAPTER 3. THE KEYS TO THE JAIL ........................................................................ 56 CHAPTER 4. SEASONS OF VIOLENCE ...................................................................... 82 CHAPTER 5. THE DISAPPEARED............................................................................. 106 EPILOGUE .................................................................................................................. 123 APPENDIX A. KLAVERNS OF THE TEXAS REALM.................................................. 128 APPENDIX B. KLAN TERMINOLOGY ........................................................................ 134 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................... 138 iv LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: Violence, Arrests, and Homicides in Denton County 1921 ............................ 89 Figure 2: Violence, Arrests, and Homicides in Denton County 1922 ............................. 90 Figure 3: Violence, Arrests, and Homicides in Denton County 1923 ............................. 91 v PROLOGUE In a grove of trees in the northeast corner of Denton County, Texas, lies St. John’s Cemetery. Within its haphazard fencing are the final resting places of several hundred freedmen, women, and children who worked, worshipped, and built a community in Pilot Point, Texas, at the turn of the twentieth century. The first known burial in St. John’s Cemetery is that of Angeline Williamson who died in 1882. Angeline lived in the Oakdale Community, just across the northern county line. The next two burials were also from Oakdale. Charles Oliver died in 1883 and was followed by his wife, Peggy, in 1884. Burials at St. John’s picked up in 1889 and an average of one person per year was buried in the cemetery from 1889 until 1925. The last confirmed burial in St. John’s was George Truitt who died on July 16, 1938.1 Louis Whitlow Sr., formerly enslaved in Chambers County, Alabama, saved money from emancipation until 1880 to move to Texas. He left Chambers County, Alabama after harvest in the fall of 1880 and took sixty-five freedmen and women by train to a new life in Sherman, Texas. Upon arrival, part of the group moved south and founded the Oakdale Community in southern Cooke County near the line with Denton 1 “Angeline Williams,” Uncovering St. John’s, May 2018; “Charles Oliver,” Uncovering St. John’s, May 2018; “Peggy Oliver,” Uncovering St. John’s, May 2018; “George Truitt,” Uncovering St. John’s, May 2018. This statistic is based upon an aggregation of death certificate and headstone data. While much effort has been made to use burial as a way of discerning community membership, the data available lends an alternative explanation. St. John’s served the Pilot Point Freedmen’s Community from 1882 until 1916 when Pilot Point Memorial Cemetery’s use in interment began. Both cemeteries had burials between 1916 and 1925 when St. John’s no longer had new burials (with the notable exception of two in the late 1930s). In fact, it appears as though any headstones in Pilot Point Memorial Cemetery prior to 1916 were moved there as a product of the cemeteries which were relocated during Lake Ray Roberts construction. Therefore, St. John’s served as the cemetery for the totality of the Pilot Point Freedmen’s Community until the early 1920s when burials were shifted to Pilot Point Memorial Cemetery near downtown Pilot Point, Texas. Denton County Tax Records, “R S Seal,” 1894, Denton County Clerk, Denton (TX). FamilySearch shows the home of R. S. Seals in an area east of Sanger which was eventually flooded by Lake Ray Roberts. Seals now rests in Pilot Point Memorial Cemetery. He died in 1907. “R S Seals,” Find-a-Grave, April 8, 2019. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/135580962/r-s- seals. vi County. The establishment of the Oakdale Community marked the beginning of the greater Pilot Point Freedmen’s Community, the largest association of freedmen in Denton County, Texas.2 County Line Baptist Church was founded by Louis Whitlow Sr. in Oakdale in 1881. By 1890, Whitlow had saved enough money to purchase 150 acres – at the high price of twenty dollars per acre – in the southeastern corner of the Charles Smith survey, about three hundred yards from the northwest corner of the St. John’s Community. The County Line Baptist Church was new and without common burial grounds in the early years, so when Washington Whitlow (the likely brother of Louis Whitlow Sr.) died in 1891, he was buried in the St. John’s Cemetery. Cross membership was common as preachers delivered sermons on a circuit throughout the greater freedmen’s community. In fact, two of the founding members of County Line Baptist Church, Aaron Phillips and Hezekiah Griffin Sr., both married women from the St. John’s Community. Many years later, as their community disappeared, several St. John’s congregants became members of the County Line Baptist Church.3 The first record of St. John’s in Pilot Point was on January 30, 1886. The St. John’s Community was geographically defined as the land which surrounds the St. John’s Baptist Church and St. John’s Cemetery. The center of this location