Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  In 1880, Eldridge Tomlinson left Falls County to seek his fortune as a cowboy. He made his first cattle drive to Kansas for Beal and Shankle, a large ranching operation. After he returned, he enlisted in Company C of the Frontier Battalion of the Texas Rangers on July 15, 1881. His commander was Capt. George Washington Arrington, another immigrant from Alabama and a Confederate veteran.5 Arrington, however, was not the captain’s real name.

  Arrington was born John C. Orrick, Jr., and he was escaping a dark past. Orrick’s father was an Illinois doctor who joined the North when the Civil War broke out, while his son, then only sixteen, joined the Confederacy. Orrick junior ended up with the Forty-third Virginia Cavalry Partisan Rangers under John Mosby, known as the “Gray Ghost” and considered the father of modern guerilla warfare. Orrick junior scouted for Mosby and frequently went undercover as a spy. When the Civil War ended, Orrick fled to Mexico, but he returned to Alabama in 1867, where he killed a black businessman. He fled prosecution to Central America and gradually worked his way to Texas in 1870. He joined the Texas Rangers’ Frontier Battalion using his mother’s maiden name.6

  The governor promoted Arrington to captain in 1878 and his company moved into the Panhandle to fight Comanche, who were stealing horses near present-day Crosbyton. When Eldridge joined the unit, Arrington was launching long-range patrols into New Mexico to map Indian hideouts and water sources. The Rangers often angered U.S. Cavalry commanders patrolling the same areas.7 That the cavalrymen were African-Americans, known as “buffalo soldiers,” contributed to the tensions. The white commander of one unit called Arrington a “notorious hothead, with a particular feeling of disdain for the army, and Negro troopers especially.”8

  The Rangers broke up a major rustling ring and made Arrington a hero among local ranchers. He resigned in the summer of 1882, became a rancher, and ran for sheriff.9 Eldridge resigned with Arrington and worked for him as a ranch foreman.10

  While Eldridge was riding the plains with the Texas Rangers, R. E. L. turned twenty years old and received an appointment to Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College, the first land grant college in Texas. The college, now known as Texas A&M, had opened in 1876 and there were only 250 students on the campus in 1882. The campus was all male, and the school required students to participate in military training. R. E. L. made the sixty-mile trip by stagecoach to Bryan–College Station to enroll.11

  While R. E. L. was learning basic military and farming skills at the college, James and Gus built new, larger homes for their growing families and focused their attention on raising cattle. They left the farming to sharecroppers. From 1880 to 1885, beef prices reached new heights and cattlemen, including the Tomlinson brothers, filled up their unimproved fields with cows. This led to overcrowding and encroachment on cropland. Farmers started fencing their land, and that led to skirmishes with ranchers. Despite fierce opposition and a lot of fence cutting, ranchers eventually accepted farmers putting up barbed wire. The days of letting your cattle wander on the open range were over, but the greater demand for beef led entrepreneurs to open a packinghouse in Waco, ending the need for driving herds to Kansas. The cowboy era was over.12

  STOKING WHITE FEAR

  In the late 1880s, whites became increasingly concerned about racial mixing, probably because more and more people were moving into urban areas, and whites more frequently encountered African-Americans they didn’t know. Fear of miscegenation grew even though lawmakers had banned mixed marriages in 1858. The state legislature outlawed interracial sex in 1882.

  The Convention of Colored Men protested in 1883 that prosecutors never used the law against white men. They filed dozens of complaints against white men for visiting black prostitutes and, in some cases, living with their African-American children. But prosecutors refused to apply the law equally.13

  White politicians and newspaper editors also stoked white fears of “negro domination” with weekly stories about black men assaulting white women somewhere in the state. The papers approvingly described white mobs lynching the suspects rather than waiting for a trial that might embarrass the victim. Many conservatives considered this speedy, violent retribution to be chivalric.14

  Whites saw no problem with treating African-Americans unequally because the vast majority considered blacks intellectually and morally inferior and felt that a mixture of benevolence and violence was all they understood.15 White landowners in western Falls County treated their African-American neighbors in the 1880s just as Churchill Jones had treated them during slavery. To white Texans, their racial superiority was a natural law as obvious as gravity. They could not understand why blacks could not accept it as fact.

  Most African-Americans spent their time trying to better their lives, and in rural areas, segregation meant little. In 1880, twenty-six-year-old Peter Tomlinson lived in a cabin in Cedar Valley with his wife, Josie, their two children, and Josie’s mother, Becky. Next door, Jede Tomlinson lived with his mother and sister, both named Annie. Peter and Jede were sharecroppers for the white Tomlinsons. Ten of eleven households in Cedar Valley belonged to black families. Around the Stallworth and Tomlinson plantations, there were forty-two whites and fifty-eight blacks.16

  On the western side of the Brazos, black schools operated as part of the Lott school district, and the children of sharecroppers attended the single-room Tomlinson Negro School. The district built another school in 1880 for the children at China Grove, called the Perry Creek School. The Stallworths and Tomlinsons hired a twenty-nine-year-old, New York–born mulatto man named J. S. Murmer to teach at the Tomlinson school.17 In addition to his Texas-born wife and two-year-old son, Murmer had three adopted children between the ages of nine and twelve living in his cabin on Tomlinson Hill, next door to James Tomlinson and his family.18 Though attendance for the older black children varied depending on the phase of the cotton season, most children received four months of education a year. By comparison, white children attended school for six months.19

  When it became clear that the Tomlinson Negro School was too small to accommodate all of the black children, F. M. Stallworth and other white landowners opened two more small schools near the Landrum store west of Tomlinson Hill, and the Beulah Church, located on Deer Creek, just a half mile west of Tomlinson Hill. All three schools operated under the same set of trustees. In 1886, Benjamin Shields donated land for the white Shields Academy. White Baptist preacher J. R. M. Touchstone was the first teacher there.20

  The proliferation of schools and civic development in Falls County can partially be attributed to the harvest of 1882, probably the best year in the county’s history.21 Gus Tomlinson finally made enough money to start his own farm. He kept a share of Tomlinson Hill but bought a new farm near Lott in 1883, where he could build a substantial and elegant home for his wife, Lizzie, and their three children. He leased much of the new land to sharecroppers to grow cotton and corn, while he built a feedlot for cattle, a more profitable undertaking.22 In June 1883, R.E.L. returned home with his degree from Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College. Gus, James, and Eldridge—R.E.L.’s surviving older brothers—gave him a wallet that had belonged to the father he’d never known. The buckskin trifold was hand-tooled with a simple pattern and was sewn along the edges with tan thread. A thin strap wrapped around it to keep it closed. Inside was a coin purse and three compartments. R.E.L. recognized the significance of the gift and wrote on the inside cover with a fountain pen, “This Book is an old heirloom.”

  R.E.L. stayed on the farm for a year before deciding to become a schoolteacher, which required two more years of training. He left for Huntsville, one hundred miles southeast of Tomlinson Hill, to attend the Sam Houston Normal Institute, or teacher’s college, to earn a teaching certificate. The white Tomlinsons built their fortune just as their father and grandfather had done—by leveraging cheap black labor to produce cash crops on large acreages. Like most Texas whites, the Tomlinsons had recovered from the Civil War and Reconstruction with their way of life largely intac
t. R.E.L was breaking this tradition by working in the city.

  BLACK TEXANS ORGANIZE

  Barred from joining most white trade associations, African-Americans formed their own organizations. L. C. Anderson formed the Texas Colored Teachers’ Association in 1884 to promote the education and protection of black teachers, and black doctors created the Lone Star State Medical Association in 1886, with Benjamin Bluitt becoming the first black surgeon in Texas when he arrived in 1888. The following year, R. L. Smith created the Farmers Improvement Society of Texas to help black farmers get better prices and learn better farming techniques. Cotton pickers went on strike in 1891 and black longshoremen struck in 1893, both times failing to win concessions.23 The National Negro Protective Association fought at the federal level, complaining when the postmaster general said that blacks could not serve as postmasters in white communities.

  African-Americans in Texas turned out to vote in record numbers in 1890, casting 100,000 ballots. Despite the odds stacked against them, blacks continued to win seats in the legislature as Republicans. But the more that blacks participated, the more whites resented them, as shown in this account from the 1947 history of Falls County:

  For a long time, even to the 1890s, intense rivalry over the Negro vote existed. The votes of the Negroes were to be reckoned with, since most of them followed leaders. There arose a general adverse feeling against them, because of this—a feeling, which perhaps lingers, to the present (1946).

  Conservative thinking people did not lay all the blame for the evils at the feet of the Negroes.

  The commissioners’ court records show that Nelson Denson, a Negro, was elected Falls County commissioner and served on the court. His service was satisfactory, despite the prejudices of the day. Later Denson was elected alderman of the city of Marlin, but refused to serve “in the interest of harmony.”24

  That “general adverse feeling” against blacks was not limited to places like Marlin. Southern whites did not want African-Americans to feel equal, and as educated blacks and black associations began to assert themselves, the greater the need many whites felt to separate themselves. Old conservative Democrats, who had tried for years to pass laws denying blacks equal treatment, developed new strategies for passing racist laws. The first came in 1889, when the legislature allowed railroads to supply separate coaches for black and white passengers. Two years later, they made segregated railway coaches mandatory.25

  Black Texans watched helplessly as what little political influence they’d enjoyed in the legislature slipped away and the Republican party embraced segregation. In 1883, blacks made up 90 percent of Republican voters, and party delegates elected African-American N. W. Cuney, a member of the Republican National Committee, to lead the party. Republican president Benjamin Harrison appointed Cuney the customs inspector of Galveston in 1889 in order to secure black support. However, the move split the Republican party, with conservatives forming a bloc known as the “lily whites.” While Cuney attended the National Republican Convention and became the most powerful African-American in Texas, Democrats used his leadership to politically bludgeon Republicans among whites. Democrats won nearly every race in the state by 3–1 margins.26

  Many in the Republican party had worked tirelessly to create a coalition of blacks, liberals, and poor whites to create a majority against the conservative Democratic machine. But by the 1890s, white Republicans questioned the strategy, and even African-Americans started leaving the party. In 1892, more than 50 percent of blacks voted for James Hogg, a progressive Democrat who promised better public education and an end to lynching.27 African-Americans soon discovered that national Republican leaders were slowly withdrawing their support for black leaders, and by 1906, the Republican party was firmly in white hands.28

  Outside of party politics, Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois emerged as national African-American leaders advocating education and self-sufficiency. Washington ran the Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, which trained young African-Americans to teach farming and skilled trades as well as academic subjects. He became a national advocate for black colleges, and the Marlin Democrat regularly ran stories about the institute. Washington gave his most important speech in 1895 to a mostly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exhibition, which became known as his “Atlanta Address.” Washington was concerned that whites might turn to European immigrants for cheap labor and stop employing African-Americans. He was ready to accommodate white bigotry in return for patronage:

  To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted, I would repeat what I say to my own race, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South. Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and un-resentful people that the world has seen.

  The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.29

  Washington’s speech was the public affirmation of an informal deal known as the Atlanta Compromise, which he and other black leaders had reached with the white elite attending the exhibition. African-Americans would submit to white political rule and not seek the vote, equal rights, or integration. In return, they expected southern whites to guarantee due process of law and a public education. Washington was convinced that only by co-opting Southern moderates could African-Americans expect to succeed, and he was ready to delay the fight against racism to concentrate on literacy and self-sufficiency. Not all blacks agreed, and many continued the civil rights struggle. But Washington’s fame and influence persuaded many African-Americans to back his cause, and the white community embraced the Atlanta Compromise, even if they didn’t plan to honor the deal. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Plessy v. Ferguson. The case originated with lawmakers in Louisiana who passed a law requiring railroads to provide separate cars for blacks and whites. A civil rights group in New Orleans called the Comité des Citoyens, or the Citizens Committee, convinced Homer Plessy to buy a first-class ticket and take a seat in the whites-only car. The committee had made arrangements ahead of time with the railway, which didn’t want to accommodate the new law, and it hired a detective with arrest powers to charge Plessy with violating the Separate Car Act. When Plessy appeared in court, attorneys for the committee immediately argued that the Louisiana law violated the Constitution’s equal-protection rights in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments. The court rejected the arguments, fined Plessy twenty-five dollars, and the case began its journey to the Supreme Court.

  The Supreme Court justices, by a 7–1 majority, rejected Plessy’s arguments that the separate accommodation discriminated against him. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote that
separating the races was simple public policy and that, since the railroad supplied both white and black rail cars, asking members of different races to ride separately was nondiscriminatory. Brown’s ruling became the “separate but equal” doctrine, which would condone racial segregation for the next fifty-eight years. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote the sole, scathing dissent, calling the ruling a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He had long condemned the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups, and Harlan found the law utterly ridiculous because it discriminated only against blacks, not other minorities. In his dissenting opinion, he argued the policy would allow whites to ride in the same rail cars as Chinese, a race many considered equally inferior.30

  The Plessy decision opened the door for state legislatures across the South to pass countless segregation laws, as long as separate facilities existed. Lawmakers gave little concern to whether they were truly equal. The Texas legislature created a second black college as quickly as they banned African-Americans from attending the state’s best public universities. They just didn’t fund construction of the second black college.31

  COMPLETE DISREGARD

  Texas’s leadership became increasingly bold about doing whatever it wanted regarding African-Americans. The publisher of the Marlin Democrat, J. M. Kennedy, complained in an editorial about someone stealing a ballot box from the African-American community of Sutton during an election in 1897. The loss of black votes guaranteed that a white Confederate veteran, Col. W. R. Blackburn, won a state house of representatives seat over the African-American candidate, Alexander Asberry. Kennedy was shocked that no one else in Falls County seemed to care.32

  A stolen ballot box, though, was nothing compared to what happened in other Texas towns. Two white teenage boys in Leonard, 140 miles northeast of Marlin, went to a black church on Sunday, August 15, 1897, and began acting up. Services were under way, and several black men told the boys to go away, but they refused. One black man called one of the white boys “a very vile epithet.” When the white boys tried “to resent it,” a fight broke out, leaving one of the boys, Earl Meadows, badly injured. Constable J. H. Albright arrested a black man for the assault and sent him to the next county to keep him from being lynched. The boy died that night. The Dallas Morning News quoted Albright’s description of what happened next: