The Man Who Walked Backward

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The Man Who Walked Backward Page 7

by Ben Montgomery


  Sherman didn’t seem like a ripe locale for mob violence. Situated on the extreme edge of what folks called the cotton kingdom, it was known as “the Athens of Texas,” on account of the five colleges and twenty churches within its limits. People liked to talk about “the better element” in Sherman, the Rotarians, Kiwanis, and Lions Club types—businessmen, churchgoing, patriotic, hardly redneck. As far back as anyone could remember, there had been but one lynching in Grayson County, thirty years before, in 1901. True, the Ku Klux Klan had risen again in the last ten years, after going dormant in the 1870s and hibernating for fifty years. The racists had been revived by a failed Georgia preacher named William Joseph Simmons, who was inspired by a 1915 film considered a cinematic masterpiece. Made by the once-poor Kentuckian D. W. Griffith, The Birth of a Nation glorified the secret fraternity of the KKK as protectors of decency against carpetbaggers and freed slaves during Reconstruction. Woodrow Wilson even screened the film in the White House.

  While recovering from a car accident, Simmons dusted off the old Klan’s manual and wrote his own prospectus for a reincarnation of the organization. He and some buddies burned a cross atop Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving 1915, a ritual taken straight from the movie, and the Atlanta Constitution made small note. The group puttered along, almost lifeless, until Simmons hired a public relations man named Edward Clarke, who ran the Southern Publicity Association, the same firm that had successfully represented the Salvation Army and the Anti-Saloon League.

  Clarke established a system wherein a Klan recruiter got to keep a percentage of the initiation fee for each new member. Soon, the hierarchy stretched long, each rung keeping a chunk of the fee for each new recruit. And to get new recruits to sign on, the “Kleagles” were encouraged to appeal to whatever racist predilection was at play on the local level. Simmons broadened the targets of Klan hatred to include Jews, Catholics, leftists, Mexicans, immigrants, bootleggers, and adulterers. Everyone was fair game, so long as Klan members’ actions shielded the “sanctity of home and the chastity of womanhood” and maintained “forever white supremacy,” per the Konstitution. The Klan had become a sort of perverse pyramid scheme, making its leaders incredibly wealthy. And once a man became a member, he was encouraged to buy from the Klan all sorts of things, like robes, life insurance, robe dry-cleaning services, helmets, Bibles, and even Klan candy.

  A congressional investigation in 1921, prompted by a report of the Klan’s secrets in the New York World, brought down founder Simmons and his ad man, Clarke. A Texas dentist named Hiram Evans took over. He appealed to the lower-brows and yokels, describing himself as “the most average man in America” and saying the Klan was proud they were “hicks, and rubes, and drivers of second-hand Fords.” Membership grew fast.

  By its peak in 1924, the membership had grown to some 4.5 million men, or about 15 percent of the eligible population in the US. The new numbers earned the Klan political power. The group claimed to have helped elect governors in Oregon, Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio, California, Oklahoma, and Texas. And those governors often did nothing to prevent mob violence. Sometimes they did the opposite, stoking racial anger with supremacist language. Upon becoming president of the Oklahoma constitutional convention, soon-to-be governor William H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray explained that blacks were “failures as lawyers, doctors and in other professions” and called it “an entirely false notion that the Negro can rise to the equal of a white man in the professions or become an equal citizen.” He said, in the same speech, “I appreciate the old-time ex slave, the old darky, and they are the salt of their race—who comes to me talking softly in that humble spirit which should characterize their actions and dealings with white men.”

  It’s impossible to say whether the rising Klan rolls produced more racial violence, or whether their swelling was a symptom of something deeper, some dastardly social movement afoot on the front end of very hard times. In the photographs taken at many lynch scenes, the bystanders wear no hoods or robes, but jackets and neckties and floppy sun hats. The emotions of nationalism and group loyalty that rose up during the First World War lingered long after the intended enemy retreated, and it seemed to be finding new targets. Even though more than two million African-Americans were drafted into the war—with very few claiming exemptions—some of the seventy lynched in the first year after the war were still in uniform.

  Between 1889 and 1930, 59 whites and 290 blacks were lynched in Texas, a number exceeded only by Georgia and Mississippi. Lynchings generally were on the decline, though. In 1929, according to the record department at the Tuskegee Institute, ten people were lynched nationally—three whites and seven blacks—the fewest in any year since Reconstruction.

  But in May of 1930, the trend didn’t seem to be holding steady. In the two weeks preceding the arrest of George Hughes of Sherman, there had been three separate lynchings in the South. And what was widely known in Sherman was that after Hughes’s arrest a man named Slim Jones rode through the rural outskirts of town telling people about the case and the time of the trial. Whether Jones was an agent for a Klan organization trying to demonstrate its bloodlust is lost to history.

  On May 9, inside the building across the street from the McDonald Dining Room, where, eleven months later, Plennie Wingo would be digging into a lunch on the house, the hallways and staircases leading to the courtroom filled as George Hughes pleaded guilty to assaulting his employer’s wife. The crowd surged, then surged again. Then the judge suspended the trial, and it surged once more. Someone fired tear gas to disperse the mob, but the fumes made everyone gag and run to the windows for air. The fire department helped evacuate jurors and witnesses and clerks by ladders from second-story windows. The Texas Rangers on hand to quell the mob escorted Hughes to the district clerk’s office, a giant two-story vault of steel and concrete in the gut of the courthouse.

  Outside, the mob wanted blood. Reporters heard them chanting, “We want nigger meat!” During another surge, a Texas Ranger fired buckshot into the crowd, sending three to the hospital and the rest running. But soon they clawed back, one with a gas canister, and he heaved it through a courthouse window. Someone else lit a torch and touched off an inferno. When the fire department dragged hoses in to try to save the $60,000 courthouse, the mob slashed them. The Rangers would later claim they gave George Hughes the option of running for it or staying in the vault. He stayed. The last man to see him alive reported that Hughes was sitting in a chair in the vault, his head bowed upon his folded arms. According to a reporter, one old man “shook in his tracks with excitement and screamed: ‘Let ’er wilt like a cucumber in the sun! Let ’er burn till the last hobnail in the nigger’s boots is melted.’”

  The governor dispatched National Guardsmen from Dallas. The mob hurled bricks and pop bottles at the white soldiers. The Rangers retreated. One officer held the mob away from the county jail with pistols, a Thompson submachine gun, and a sawed-off shotgun. The mob used dynamite and acetylene torches to blast and cut open the courthouse vault. A man crawled inside and shouted, “Here he is.” Hughes was dead with a hole in his head, most likely killed by the dynamite blast. It appeared he’d been pacing the floor, attempting to cool himself with water from a two-gallon bucket.

  They heaved the body out of the vault and it fell to the ground and the women screamed and clapped and a great cheer rose over the Texas town. “Glory be!” one woman said. Someone else hitched the torso by a chain to a car, which started down Travis Street and turned on Mulberry, toward North Sherman, slowly, on account of the crowd packing the streets. “On to nigger town,” the mob leaders shouted.

  They found a cottonwood tree in front of the Smith Hotel and a two-story drugstore owned by a black man. They used a rope to hang the lifeless body from a limb, then piled wood and sticks and looted furniture beneath it and set them alight. They burned the Odd Fellows Hall, a building that housed a beauty parlor, a dance hall, two dentists’ offices, and a lawyer’s office. They burned two undertaking establishments, a
hotel, a movie house, and a life insurance office. They burned three blocks of black-owned homes and businesses. The black people of Sherman fled, hiding in brush thickets and storm drains. The only black resident anyone reported seeing was a single respected doctor, sitting still on his porch, a shotgun in his lap.

  By 2 a.m., when a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun arrived, the mob had been wilding for fifteen hours and seemed to have run out of rage. The fire under the body had dwindled and the reporter watched as a redheaded man who had rushed from Mesquite, seventy miles away, shamed what was left of the mob.

  The driver pushed through the throng, reached the tree and kicked away the wood that burned under what was once a man, albeit a black one. With one hand he grabbed the rope from which the body was suspended and with the other, which held a knife, he slashed through the strands. Then he lowered the body to the ground away from the scattered fire.

  “Anybody claim this yere?” he asked of the mob.

  Nobody replied.

  “Well, then leave it lay,” he continued and having issued his orders, pushed through to his car, climbed in and thundered back to Mesquite.

  The reporter identified the redheaded man as Schuyler Marshall, former sheriff of Dallas County who had five years before single-handedly repelled a mob bent on kidnapping two black prisoners under his watch. “Sherman goes in heavily for culture,” the reporter wrote.

  The nation woke to banner headlines like MOB MADNESS TAKES NEGRO and BODY DRAGGED THROUGH TOWN. The local daily paper, the Sherman Democrat, decried the violence. “It does not seem reasonable that the people of the civilized community should burn down their courthouse, their temple of justice, where the law is supreme, and where every citizen, no matter how rich or how poor, should be able to go and be given a trial on any charge before twelve of his fellow citizens,” read the paper’s day-after editorial. “The mob is never right. It is always wrong, and unreasonable, and dangerous, and no half dozen Texas rangers are able to cope with that number of men gone mad. Sherman’s name has been dishonored by the people of her own county. It will take a generation to outlive the stain on her honor, if it can ever be done.”

  The governor declared martial law in Sherman, and for several weeks machine guns were mounted around the square to keep the peace. The black neighborhoods remained empty for quite some time. Hughes was buried in an unmarked grave. A breath-stealing photograph survived, depicting Hughes’s charred corpse hanging from a tree, legs bent up froglike and odd at the knees, four white men on the ground behind him, quizzical looks on their faces. Fourteen suspected leaders were indicted, but the trial would take a year.

  They lynched another black man on May 17, fifty miles away, at Honey Grove, where two thousand or more dragged the body of Sam Johnson behind a truck for several miles, then hung his corpse upside down from a bois d’arc tree in front of a black church. And another on May 31, 160 miles away, at Chickasha, Oklahoma, when Henry Argo was murdered in his jail cell as a mob gathered outside. They lynched a total of twenty-one that year, more than double the number in 1929.

  And then they moved on. Years later, a historical marker would be erected in front of a new courthouse and fail to say anything about why the old one burned down. Plenty of Sherman children would grow up in the years after the lynching having never heard tell of that dark night.

  When Plennie finished his lunch, he stood facing the courthouse where George Hughes was cooked inside a locked vault, where women and children watched and men cut fire hoses and threw rocks at Rangers. In a few weeks, the state would make its case against J. B. McCasland, the nineteen-year-old who had hurled the gas can through the window, and the Sherman Democrat would proclaim the judgment “the first conviction in Texas in a case growing out of mob violence against a Negro attacker of a white woman.” McCasland would be sentenced to two years in prison for arson and rioting. A few months later, charges against all but three of the other men were dropped. Then those charges too would disappear, leaving McCasland the sole convicted culprit of the madness that would soon be swept away from the collective memories of the whites of Sherman, Texas. A mother in Sherman would write a letter to her absent son saying she was thankful he wasn’t there to witness the town’s “terrible disgrace,” like “a circus day crowd looking on a pageant,” and that, “Indeed, I’m glad I had no son to blush for in the midst of a spineless population. Were I a man I’d hang my head in shame. As it is, I feel polluted by the contact.”

  Plennie had made up his mind to respect all races, creeds, and nationalities on his walk, and he hoped they’d respect him. He’d be the stranger on the far side of the Atlantic, the pale man who stood out in a crowd. He said goodbye to Mr. McDonald, pointed his toes to the southeast, and backed down Houston Street and on out of town.

  8.

  Standoff at the Red River

  Plennie got his shoes resoled and spent two nights at the Hotel Denison, charging his twenty-five-cent meals to his room, like a traveling salesman would do, and that made him feel classy. He was a big hit in the hotel lobby and spent no small amount of time looking to introduce himself to anyone who might happen to be curious about his journey heretofore and who might want to help fund his trip through Indian Territory by purchasing a postcard. Sales were rather brisk, and when it came time to leave he was surprised to learn that his entire stay would be complimentary.

  “It has been our pleasure to have you as our guest,” the manager told him, “and we wish you the best of success on your journey around the world.”

  He’d come 109 miles in his first week and was none the worse for wear, and finding success with postcard sales gave him a level of self-assurance he had not yet felt. He was about to leave Texas for the first time in his thirty-six years and could use all the confidence he could find. He had clipped an item from the newspaper and pasted it into his journal, a four-word mantra to help him along: DON’T WORRY. DO SOMETHING.

  The first part was growing more difficult by the day. He had not yet sent word on his progress to his kin in Abilene, wanting to put considerable time and distance in before dropping them a letter, but he worried how they were getting along. A cold wave over the weekend had brought freezing temperatures to North Texas, destroying crops before harvest. Dry air and strong winds had decimated the spring wheat belt. The men at the weather bureau said topsoil was blowing away and many farmers were forced to reseed. They called the wind “very detrimental” and said it was wreaking havoc from the western Ohio River Valley all the way across the Plains, and the outlook for spring crops was not good. The cotton crop in Texas was late and said to be in only fair condition.

  And the news about finance was getting worse. The Huntsville State Bank down near Houston closed its doors to avoid a run, which caused, according to the papers, “considerable excitement among citizens.” The American National Bank in Paris, in East Texas, closed with assets and deposits totaling $1,631,000. The Athens National Bank, southeast of Dallas, locked its doors and posted a notice in the window that it would be voluntarily liquidated. The Miller County Bank and Trust in Texarkana failed. The Garfield National Bank in Enid, Oklahoma, failed. A little pile of pennies—forty of them—was the totality of the cash resources that remained in the vault of the People’s Exchange Bank in Archer City when it, too, locked its doors. It wasn’t just Texas. On the same single day in Nebraska, sixty-six banks closed, most due to the drought and farming crisis.

  And where was the president? Why had he not thrown out any lifelines?

  Hoover was fast making enemies, political and otherwise, by telling the American public that everything would be okay. Andrew Mellon, Hoover’s secretary of the treasury, had put the hands-off approach of the government bluntly in a statement representing those who thought the market would fix itself without government intervention. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he’d said. Some people might suffer, sure. But if they could just hold on it would be good for them in the lon
g term.

  Plenty of farmers and factory men wanted to drag Mellon and Hoover by their belt loops to stand on the breadline in Oklahoma City or eat at Al Capone’s free soup kitchen in Chicago or talk to the apple vendors in Manhattan. Or even closer, to the Welfare Restaurant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a short drive north of Washington, DC, where the tragedy of human existence played out at breakfast and supper every day. The joint opened January 12, 1931, with thirty-seven people at the first meal. The next day, as word spread, more than a hundred men showed up. From the third free supper on, the restaurant served its maximum of three hundred plates at every single meal, oatmeal and coffee in the morning, and beef stew or pork and sauerkraut or potpie for supper. If only Hoover could’ve heard the people talk.

  “Me and my boy here haven’t had work for months and we are unable to get anything but odd jobs now and then,” one man told a reporter for the local paper. “We walk up here from Steelton every day for these breakfasts and suppers. If we didn’t, we would have nothing to eat most days. And what little money we are able to earn wouldn’t allow us to eat anyway.”

  “I just got in from Reading,” another man chimed in. “I have been clean across the country and haven’t found a job. I heard there was work in the East but I ain’t been able to find it. Before I was in Reading I was in Lancaster and before that in Washington. I was two weeks in them towns and there ain’t a thing doing. It’s terrible. This feed is certainly swell, though.”

  “Butcha can’t get it more’n three days,” warned another. “You gotta either get a job or move on. This town ain’t feeding the whole United States.”

 

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