Frank Stallworth, R.E.L.’s cousin and brother-in-law, was elected mayor in 1921, defeating W. E. Hodges by only ten votes. Stallworth had served two terms as city marshal and one as the alderman for Ward 2.59 After Frank became mayor, he made R.E.L. a census enumerator and an election judge in 1922.60 Their cousin Sanford J. Stallworth, a grandson of Churchill Jones, joined them in city and county politics.
One pressing political problem was the county’s roads and bridges, which had not kept up with Marlin’s rapid growth. The rail lines to and from Marlin were excellent, but the roads remained largely unpaved and subject to flooding. The banks of the Brazos River eroded easily and the river cut a new path after every major flood. The Falls Bridge, which connected Marlin to Waco at Tomlinson Hill, constantly needed work.
Heavy rains in May 1922 made the Brazos run high and fast, cutting away at the bridgehead and loosening the bridge’s piers.61 No one was surprised that the old one-lane bridge, made of iron and wood, was near collapse, and county engineers closed it until they could make repairs. Mayor Stallworth convened a meeting of the town’s top businessmen and asked for their help to cover the costs. They agreed on a plan and the county workers, along with volunteers, drove out to start pouring sand and cement to shore up the bridgehead. Stallworth led the volunteers, along with Walter Allen, the town’s most prominent physician and one of its wealthiest men. The normally placid and muddy Brazos roared, with millions of gallons a second flowing under the bridge. The men set to work on the western side of the bridge, at the foot of Tomlinson Hill. They drove two cars and a truck loaded with tools and cement onto the span. A seven-year-old African-American boy, who had followed his dad to work that day, was sitting in one of the cars. At about 2:30 P.M., the workers heard a huge snap and the main pier collapsed beneath them and the western span dropped and twisted, sending seventeen people into the rapids below. People standing on the eastern span had about ten seconds to run onto the shore before the water swept the three hundred feet of twisted iron and splintered wood downriver fifty yards to the western bank.62
The victims who survived the thirty-foot fall grabbed onto debris or swam for the shore. Witnesses saw two African-Americans floating down the river on a plank of wood. Stallworth and Allen apparently struck some of the wreckage. Witnesses said they saw Stallworth with a deep gash across his face as he floated away, apparently unable to swim. Another witness saw Allen, who appeared similarly injured. The boy in the car, B. J. Briggs, apparently drowned inside it. Three other people also died that day. Rescuers found Stallworth’s and Allen’s bodies a week later. The Marlin Democrat reported: “The Brazos has again proved its claim to a treacherous stream. The channels and its currents are constantly shifting. Its caprices are weird, peculiar and tragic. In this horrifying instance it has more than maintained it gruesome history.”63
Falls County commissioners sent a telegram to Fort Sam Houston, near San Antonio, asking the Army Corps of Engineers to install a pontoon bridge across the river. A week later, the Corps of Engineers arrived and assembled the pontoons. Soldiers manned it for months until the county could build a new bridge.64
A PARALLEL UNIVERSE
The turn of the century in the Gravel Hill freedmen’s colony brought months of hard work as farmers and laborers rebuilt their homes and prepared their fields for another planting after the floods of 1899 and 1900. Peter Tomlinson may have rented his home and farm on Tomlinson Hill, but he was a tenant, not a laborer, which meant he had a contract, not an hourly wage.65 The distinction is important because Peter had more autonomy than a hired hand, but he also assumed more risk. He made a greater effort growing his crop than a worker paid by the day, hoping to put away a little extra money by bringing in a better harvest. He and Josie were active in the Gravel Hill Baptist Church, where they had been married and took their seven children.66
The only black Tomlinson subject to the World War I draft was Peter’s son Vincent. He was twenty-one and he had attended the Tomlinson Negro School, placing him among the first generation of black Tomlinsons to have a formal education. When the war started, he registered for the draft on the first day of selective service. The registrar described Vincent as a medium height, slender black man working on Albert Tomlinson’s farm and stated he claimed no exemptions from service. Despite the young man spelling his name Venson, the registrar signed the form on his behalf as Vincent. His draft number never came up.
Four days after the armistice was signed, Vincent married his sweetheart, Julie Ward, at the Gravel Hill Baptist Church. The Reverend Tom Broadus, one of the few black landowners and a leader in the community, presided over the ceremony on November 15, 1918. Julie was eighteen years old and had been born in a cabin in Falls County to Nathan and Emma Sorillas Ward. The Wards also lived on Tomlinson Hill, where they rented a house a short distance from the white Tomlinsons. Unusual for the era, the Wards could read and write, though Nathan was only a farm laborer. The Wards sent Julie to school, so she, too, was literate.67
Though supposedly equal to that of white schools, the education at black schools was anything but. The Texas Education Survey in 1924 found that 75 percent of black schools had no librarian, industrial rooms, or playground equipment, and at least 38 percent had no textbooks, while 11 percent had no toilets. In 1925, the state counted 150 black high schools, but only 34 were accredited. To help black education, the Julius Rosenwald Fund built schools across the country and completed 130 new rural schools in Texas, where, surprisingly, the state’s lawmakers appropriated more matching funds than any other state.68 The foundation built one of the schools in Marlin, where the school district couldn’t keep up with the growing population.69
In 1920, Julie gave birth to her first child, Lizzie Mae, in the cabin she shared with Vincent on Deer Creek. They lived next door to his older brother James and his wife, who already had a full house with a five-year-old son, a brother-in-law, and a niece, all of whom shared the two-room home. Another brother, Ellie, and his seven children lived nearby also, as did members of the other African-American clans, the Scotts, Travises, Baileys, and Broaduses. All of the families were related by marriage and formed the nucleus of the Tomlinson Hill black community. Julie became a leader in the Gravel Hill Baptist Church, and the couple had four more children by 1930.70
Vincent earned Albert Tomlinson’s respect through hard work and loyalty, and Vincent’s clean-living habits increased his stature in the black community, where the black Masons in Lott welcomed him into their ranks. African-Americans saw the advantages that white men enjoyed by forming fraternal orders, and black chapters also saw rapid growth in the 1900s. The Masons counted 30,000 black members, while the Knights of Pythias had eight hundred lodges, with 35,000 black members in 1921.71
These organizations became important for an increasingly mobile population. The number of blacks working in agriculture was dropping by 1920, and farms employed less than 48 percent of black laborers. Low commodity prices and a boll weevil plague destroyed cotton crops in the 1920s and encouraged many blacks to move to the cities. Tractors started showing up on Falls County farms at about the same time, and they became commonplace by 1930, reducing the need for black labor.72 But Vincent loved the land where he was born and enjoyed living in a community that shared his name. He had no plans to go anywhere.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Now as to the Klan. I have watched the order grow from its infancy to its present period of greatness, and I want to say that so far as I know, the criticisms that have been made of it have been without foundation.
—Dallas mayor Louis Blaylock
White Tomlinsons celebrated their heritage at the Old Settlers reunions on the Hill every summer. At the 1922 reunion, Dr. J. W. Torbett, whose father had founded the general hospital in Marlin, gave a speech entitled “Inventions: Past, Present and Future.” The association also invited Marlin’s congressman, Tom Connally, to speak. The Marlin Democrat recapped the event:
A reading ent
itled “Marse Robert’s Asleep,” by Miss Alice Summers received merited applause and brought tears to the eyes of many of the old veterans who followed the Great Robert E. Lee, who said that the sublimest word in the English language is “duty.”
The forenoon exercises were closed with a great address by Miss Decca Lamar West, president of Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, in which she called to mind the great achievement of those who wore the gray, and called attention to the fact that history has not done justice to the great name of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy.1
The old settlers were indeed passing away at a quickening pace. R. E. L.’s father-in-law, William Etheridge, died two months after the 1922 reunion at the home of one of his twin daughters, Billah Stallworth. The death of Billah’s father, just four months after that of her husband, was devastating for the whole family. Sadly, Etheridge probably never attended the Old Settlers reunions, because while he was one of the earliest of settlers, he’d fled Texas rather than serve the Confederacy. To him, men like Jefferson Davis were traitors and unworthy of praise.2 But after generations of revisionism, Etheridge was in the minority in Texas, where the effort to portray the fallen South as a noble, lost cause found fertile ground in the early twentieth century. Within a few years, white southerners would embrace white supremacy in a new wave of terrorism.
State and federal authorities had cracked down on the Klan following Reconstruction, and the gangs had dissipated. White supremacy groups didn’t disappear entirely; they just became ad hoc vigilante groups at the turn of the century because blacks posed no threat to white power. But as African-Americans gained greater cultural visibility and educated blacks formed professional organizations, white conservatives saw a slow erosion of their authority. Perhaps nothing angered a poor white man more than the rare encounter with an African-American who had a higher education or more money than he did.
Many upper-class whites despised how the races mixed in poor parts of the state or in red-light districts, and they condemned white men who took black mistresses. There was a growing number of mixed-race children in the South, and white men favored mixed-race women as mistresses. African-Americans had a folk song about these women:
A yaller gal sleep in a bed
A brown skin do the same
A black gal sleep on de floor
But she’s sleepin jes de same.3
Despite countless Sunday sermons and numerous laws banning sex between the races, whites and blacks socialized across the South, and white supremacists felt a need to stop this.
THE KU KLUX KLAN REBORN
A Baptist preacher from North Carolina named Thomas Dixon, Jr., released the second part of his fictional trilogy about the Ku Klux Klan in 1905. The Clansmen portrayed members of the KKK as well-organized, noble, and chivalric keepers of white, Christian, and American values. They were exclusively Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and the author considered all other races and religions inferior. Dixon hoped his book would inform northerners about the fiction of racial equality, writing that if given freedom, blacks became savages. The novel is set during Reconstruction and the plot involves a Yankee Speaker of the House trying to place African-Americans in control of the South in order to subjugate whites. When northerners try to give blacks equal rights, the Klan rises up to defeat the northerners and return blacks to second-class status, under the watchful care of benevolent Klansmen. Dixon wrote a play with the same plot. Northerners protested both the novel and the play, but in the South, the play incited even more nostalgia for all things antebellum.4
D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation was adapted from the play and was originally called The Clansmen. The film became a phenomenon in 1915 because it pioneered advanced filmmaking techniques and glorified slavery and the Klan, while denigrating African-Americans, Unionists, and Reconstruction. The Kentucky-born filmmaker amplified Dixon’s portrayal of the federal government oppressing the civil rights of white southerners. Griffith himself understood southern culture and white poverty well, having grown up on a farm that failed shortly after his father died, when he was ten years old. His mother moved her children to Louisville and he quit school to support the family. As an adult, he became a film actor in New York, which led to his directing films.5
The film and play validated a romantic view of southern history, where noble whites provided for inferior blacks. Confederate veterans applauded the film’s portrayal of the cause. The play and film inspired a Georgian named William J. Simmons to form a new Ku Klux Klan, modeled not on the original Klan, but on Dixon’s and Griffith’s fictional group. The only connection to Reconstruction-era Klansmen was the founding document, “The Prescript.” The Klan’s robes and burning crosses came directly from the costumes and practices imagined for Griffith’s film.6
Simmons loved secret societies and had joined dozens of fraternal organizations, so he based the Klan’s organization on the groups he liked best, such as the Masons and Knights of Pythias. The Klan’s rules called for secrecy and anonymity, since the KKK performed their “good deeds” under cover of the night, with credit going to the organization as a whole. As a result, almost no membership records survive, and while rumors circulated about who was in the Klan, members faced expulsion if they revealed themselves without a grand dragon’s permission. The Klan ran announcements in local newspapers, but it tried to keep the location of its meetings secret. Many members referred to the local Klan chapter merely as “the Lodge” to throw off anyone who might be eavesdropping, since all fraternal organizations referred to their meeting spaces as lodges.7
Fraternal societies were incredibly popular, and not so secret. Marlin had two Masonic temples, the order of the Eastern Star, the Knights of Pythias, the United Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Odd Fellows, Rotary Club, Lion’s Club, the Old Settlers and Confederate Veterans Association, and, after World War I, the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Many men and women joined multiple lodges and one could go to a different meeting every night of the week and probably see the same people. Some groups attracted the same membership, and the UCV and UDC shared the same values as the Klan. In 1916, a UDC chapter president in California wrote a book called The Ku Klux Klan to promote the new group. Annie Burton Cooper wrote:
Every clubhouse of the United Daughters of the Confederacy should have a memorial tablet dedicated to the Ku Klux Klan; that would be a monument not to one man, but to five hundred and fifty thousand men, to whom all Southerners owe a debt of gratitude; for how our beloved Southland could have survived that reign of terror is a big question.
The very name Ku Klux shows that the order was formed among men of letters. It is a Greek word meaning circle. Klan suggested itself; the name complete in turn suggested mystery.8
The rest of her history of the Klan, which she dedicated to her father, is as fanciful and hyperbolic as Dixon’s novel. But for a white male southerner taught simultaneously to fear and oppress African-Americans, the organization offered the chance to join a mythical, paramilitary organization that purported to be doing God’s work on earth.
In Texas, white vigilantism was already routine, and the modern Klan offered a veneer of respectability, since many Texans already held the historical Klan in high esteem. The 1906 Texas A&M yearbook features a photo of ten men in Klan robes and with swords, calling themselves “the K.K.K.’s.” In the summer of 1918, reports of secret organizations tarring and feathering people for immoral acts began popping up across the South. In Texas, a group of teens called the Ku Klux Kids in Wharton covered one of their members with sorghum molasses and rolled him in sharp cotton hulls as punishment for telling their club’s secrets. Rumors of a Klan chapter forming in Beeville led four hundred residents to hold a town meeting and approve a resolution opposing the Klan to keep vigilantism out of their town.9 But by 1920, dozens of Klan chapters began to pop up openly across the state.
Another impetus for the Klan came from a spike in immigration that
brought thousands of foreign-born people to Texas. Most past arrivals had come from northern Europe, but more and more new immigrants came from eastern and southern Europe, as well as from Latin America and Asia. By 1920, 54.4 percent of immigrants arriving in Dallas came from these places, compared to less than 16 percent in 1900. White Texans saw more people who did not look like them than ever before, people who did not speak English fluently and who practiced different religions. These new immigrants were also poor and lived in slums upon arrival.
Wealthy whites with northern European heritage wanted distance between themselves and anyone not Anglo-Saxon. In 1916, Dallas passed the first formal residential segregation law, allowing the Deere Park Improvement League to develop a new subdivision exclusively for whites. The city council justified segregation by declaring that blacks posed a risk of infectious disease.10 Real estate men challenged the law, and the state supreme court overturned it in 1926. But the legislature passed a law the following year that allowed cities to use building permits to segregate cities.11
The Klan began to influence Texas politics in 1921 when Klan members paraded through towns and their leaders gave public speeches. The organization was made up primarily of lower- and middle-class whites who resented immigrants, Jews, Catholics, and African-Americans. The Klan’s secret nature rubbed many established politicians and businessmen the wrong way. In dozens of editorials, Marlin Democrat publisher J. M. Kennedy railed against anyone who refused to put their name to their ideas, but particularly those who wanted to take rights away from others.
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