Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  DEMOCRATS ORGANIZE AGAINST THE KLAN

  The Klan did its best to make the 1924 gubernatorial election about Prohibition. Governor Jim Ferguson could not run again because he’d been impeached, so he convinced his wife, Miriam, to run as his surrogate. The couple was known as “Ma and Pa Ferguson” and everyone knew a vote for the ever-popular Ma was really a vote for Pa. Running against Ma was Judge Felix Robertson, a Dallas County criminal judge who was an open member of the Klan and supported Prohibition.62

  The Fergusons and mainline Democrats made Robertson’s Klan membership the main issue, pointing out that unknown assailants had flogged or tarred more than sixty people in Dallas County without Robertson’s court indicting anyone for those crimes. Ferguson supporters openly questioned whether Robertson’s secret oath to the Klan was more important than the public oath he had taken as a judge. Kennedy wrote an editorial every week to explain how Robertson and his Klan allies opposed Prohibition until he decided to run for governor. He also remarked on how Ma Ferguson did not drink and banned alcohol from the governor’s mansion.63

  In a five-way primary, Robertson won the most votes, but Ma came in second and forced a runoff. In Marlin, the Klan celebrated at a meeting on August 6.64 But the loss terrified mainstream Democrats, and they mobilized their supporters for the runoff and minimized Klan influence at the 1924 state convention.65

  Ma Ferguson won the Democratic nomination and became the first female governor of Texas. Houston’s grand cyclops, Sam McClure, promised the Klan would get out of politics and transform into a strictly fraternal organization, open to any Christian gentleman.66 The following year, the people of Marlin elected Kennedy mayor a second time, and he served three terms, ending in 1933.67

  Klan membership reached its peak in 1925, when Indiana authorities arrested and convicted grand dragon David Stephenson for the rape and murder of a young white teacher. In Alabama, the group launched a violent terror campaign that garnered national media coverage, and dozens of Klan leaders across the country faced prosecution for fraud and embezzlement, along with federal investigations.68

  The anti-Klan movement gained steam when major Protestant clergy began denouncing it and civic groups like the Dallas Citizens League openly opposed it. The NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League publicized the Klan’s illegal activities and lobbied Washington and statehouses to pass legislation against it. The white middle class came to see the Klan as a group of low-class, uneducated individuals running amok, and they turned against it. Texas membership in the Klan dropped from a peak of 97,000 in 1924 to only 18,000 in 1926 and the Klan closed its Dallas headquarters on Harwood Street in 1929.69

  The majority of whites may have lost interest in the Klan’s secrecy and violence, but they remained convinced that God had created them superior to other races and that their Protestantism was the single true faith.70 The seeds of the civil rights movement were just beginning to be sown.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  You must allow some type of sedative, a safety valve, you know, to avoid an explosion.

  —Frank Wyman

  Urbanization and economic progress defined African-American life at the turn of the twentieth century. Black preachers and politicians taught parishioners that they could succeed, but they needed to be ten times better than any white man. The poorest parents worked hard to ensure their children went to school and saved as much money as they could manage. But they also celebrated life, and for many, that meant going out on Saturday night.

  Black cotton pickers mostly spent Saturday night on their corner of the large plantations with picnics, music, dancing, and some drinking. These celebrations, along with Sunday church services, produced skilled black musicians in the late 1890s who sang gospel music on Sundays and gave birth to the blues on Saturday nights.1 Performers used their voices as an instrument, accompanied by an acoustic guitar. They started with a spoken story and wove a narrative about the troubles of a black person’s life, gathering rhythm until it grew into a full-throated song. Gospel music praised the spiritual, while the blues centered on the flesh.2

  Many African-Americans moved to segregated cities at the turn of the century. Black entrepreneurs established restaurants, hotels, and red-light districts, where the beer and liquor flowed, a gambler could pick up a game, and a lonely man could hire a companion for the night.3 The red-light district in Marlin emerged on Wood Street, one block south of Marlin’s main thoroughfare and safely out of white society’s sight. The stretch of mostly single-story redbrick buildings—only 650 feet long from the railroad tracks to Island Street—became an entertainment destination for African-Americans within a hundred-mile radius. Whites described it as “the street where blacks find inexpensive entertainment in the beer joints, pool halls, liquor stores and cafes,” and because Wood Street saw so many fights and “cuttings,” Marlinites nicknamed it the “Bloody Butcher.”4

  In an age before jukeboxes and cheap amplification, live musicians and dancing attracted people to the cafés and bars on Wood Street, and famous black musicians made it a stop on their southern circuit. Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas, an itinerant Texas blues and gospel singer, traveled the state by hopping freight trains that delivered him to Wood Street among other stops. He recorded twenty-three songs for Vocalion Records between 1923 and 1929, and at age fifty, he was one of the oldest blues musicians recorded, providing the earliest examples of Texas blues.5 More than forty years later, the Loving Spoonful, Taj Mahal, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and the Grateful Dead recorded his songs.

  Thomas made a more immediate impact in Wood Street bars, where aspiring musicians listened to him. He usually invited onto the stage anyone who thought they could keep up. One of the more promising musicians, fourteen years younger than Thomas, was Huddie Ledbetter, later known as “Lead Belly.” Lead Belly was born on the Jeter Plantation, near Mooringsport, Louisiana, but his family moved to Texas when he was five years old. Lead Belly learned to play the guitar, piano, harmonica, violin, and mandolin at a young age and at fifteen performed on Shreveport’s equivalent of Wood Street. He played Marlin frequently. Many believe Thomas influenced Ledbetter’s blues playing before he went to prison in 1918 for murder, where he acquired the name Lead Belly. Explanations for the name range from buckshot lodged in his gut to a simple play on his last name and fat stomach.6

  Before he became famous, Lead Belly befriended Blind Lemon Jefferson, a child of sharecroppers, who grew up near Falls County. Jefferson performed on street corners in Marlin for donations dropped in his tin cup. Like most black musicians, he could sing gospel music in church or minstrel songs for whites on the sidewalk. He learned to sing the blues on Wood Street by listening to Thomas and Lead Belly play. Jefferson traveled with Lead Belly around East Texas and to Dallas’s Deep Ellum district from 1910 to 1915. While performing with Jefferson, Lead Belly learned to play the twelve-string guitar, which became his signature instrument. The two men influenced each other’s styles until Dallas police arrested Lead Belly for carrying a pistol in 1915, and he was sentenced to serve on a chain gang.7

  Lead Belly returned to Wood Street after serving seven years in prison on a 1918 murder change. He won clemency in 1925 and worked odd jobs until he was convicted of attempted murder in Louisiana five years later. While in Angola Prison, he attracted the attention of Texas folklorist John Lomax. After Lead Belly was released from Angola in 1934, Lomax took him to New York, and they began recording hit records such as “C.C. Rider,” “Jail House Blues,” “Ballad of the Boll Weevil,” “Midnight Special,” and “Irene Goodnight.”8

  While Jefferson was performing at a Baptist picnic in Leon County in 1919, an eight-year-old boy joined the blind man on stage. At first, Jefferson barked when the child played off-key and only realized he was a boy when Sam Hopkins spoke up. Jefferson then showed Hopkins a few things on the guitar and allowed him to play in the background. By the late 1920s, Sam was playing piano on Wood Street, using the nickname Lightnin’.9 Othe
r black musicians who likely played Marlin while traveling the blues circuit included Alphonso Trent, Troy Floyd, Teddy Wilson, Oscar Moore, Henry “Buster” Smith, and Budd Johnson.10

  Jefferson was playing in Deep Elum in 1925 when recruiters from Paramount Records asked him to record in Chicago. The small recording company specialized in country blues, but at first they paid Jefferson to record gospel songs under the name Deacon L. J. Bates and only afterward recorded his distinctive brand of Texas blues. Jefferson’s extraordinary guitar skills and two-octave vocal range brought a new complexity to traditional blues recordings, and he was an instant hit. His records also captured a very early stage in the genre’s history.11 One of his songs was “Blind Lemon’s Penitentiary Blues,” which was about Groesbeck, a town twenty-five miles northeast of Marlin.

  Take Fort Worth for your dressing and take Dallas all for your style.

  Take Fort Worth for your dressing, Dallas all for your style.

  If you want to go the state penitentiary, go to Groesbeck for your trial.

  I hung around Groesbeck, and I worked in hard showers of rain.

  I say I hung around Groesbeck, I worked in hard showers of rain.

  I never felt the least bit uneasy, till I caught that penitentiary bound train.

  I used to be a drunkard, I was rowdy everywhere I go.

  I say I used to be a drunkard and rowdy everywhere I go.

  If I ever got out of this trouble I’m in, I won’t be rowdy no more.

  Boys don’t be bad, please don’t crowd your mind.

  I said, boys don’t be bad and please don’t crowd your mind.

  If you happen to get in trouble in Groesbeck, they going to send you penitentiary flyin.’

  Jefferson was the biggest-selling blues artist in the country from 1926 to 1929, and, by some accounts, he lived well. His records made him famous and he toured the South as the “King of the Country Blues.” But by 1929 his heavy drinking and womanizing were catching up with him, and in December police found his body in a snowdrift in South Chicago, the cause of death a mystery. That afternoon he’d visited the Paramount offices and was scheduled to play a house party that night. Explanations range from a heart attack to murder.12

  Thirty-five miles southwest of Marlin, Willie Johnson grew up in Temple, where his stepmother, angry at Johnson’s father for beating her, threw lye in the seven-year-old’s eyes and blinded him. Johnson learned to play a homemade guitar and became a street musician who sang gospel songs. In the early days, Blind Willie Johnson played on a Marlin street corner across from Blind Lemon Jefferson, competing for tips. Later in life, he settled down in Marlin, performed at the Church of God in Christ on Commerce Street, and married Willie B. Harris. In 1927, Johnson went to Dallas and recorded gospel songs for Columbia Records. His first record sold 15,400 copies, better than most blues records of the day. In 1930, he recorded his last songs in Atlanta and sold only eight hundred records. Johnson played the streets, bars, and churches of Texas, anywhere he could make a buck. He divorced Harris in 1932 and moved to Beaumont, where he married again and became a preacher. He died in 1945, at the age of forty-eight, possibly from malaria.13

  In the 1960s, Johnson’s music was rereleased as part of the Anthology of American Folk Music and profoundly influenced folk revivalists. Bob Dylan recorded Johnson’s songs, and rock guitarists, including Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, copied his slide guitar playing. When NASA searched for sounds to place on a recording to blast into space on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977, one was Blind Willie Johnson singing “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.”14

  THE BLOODY BUTCHER

  Booze, gambling, and women attracted most of the customers to Wood Street, and white authorities left it alone for the most part, even during Prohibition. Whites really didn’t care what blacks did as long as whites didn’t get hurt. City marshals hired black officers to police the street on their behalf. Many of the city’s businessmen profited from renting the buildings or selling black businessmen wholesale goods. White farmers made the cheap beer and moonshine, and some Marlinites alleged the county sheriff and city marshals sold it to black barkeeps.15

  Churchgoing African-Americans stayed away from Wood Street and parents taught their children that the bogeyman spent time there. Vincent Tomlinson’s eldest daughter, Lizzie Mae, said she would peek down the street when she went to town with her parents, but they forbade her from even walking down it, saying only sinners visited Wood Street. Lizzie was also afraid of a legendary woman, more than six feet tall and heavyset, who could beat down most men.16 Treetop Georgia was the queen of Wood Street in the late 1930s, running a gambling den and at least one bar. She carried a straight razor, though she didn’t need it. The big, powerful woman could fight equally well with her fists or a broken bottle. She dealt directly with the law and the businesspeople who ran the street. She kept the chaos to a minimum and sorted out problems when they arose.17

  Gamblers on Wood Street preferred dice, usually craps. All they needed were a pair of dice and a hard surface, and they could shut down a game quickly if trouble started. During a visit to Marlin, Frank Wyman, a retired professor and a cousin of the black Tomlinsons, told me how professional black gamblers would wait on Wood Street for the farmworkers on payday, and how small a town Marlin could be:

  I was named after my father’s brother, and this man was a professional gambler. He womanized throughout the week, and on Friday evening he would put on his fancy clothes and go down to Wood Street and wait for those who worked in the cotton fields with his dice. And that’s how he spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday—he threw dice with field workers—and then Monday when they went back to the field, he just womanized until the next weekend.

  At any rate, one of the women he was womanizing with was also the mistress of what I think must have been a sheriff’s deputy, and when he arrived, seeing my uncle drinking his liquor and eating his food and sharing the same woman, they got into a fight. [Frank] actually hit him to the head with an ax, with the side of the blade. My uncle Frank hit a white sheriff upside the head with an ax!

  [Sheriff L. O.] Hay told my dad that because Frank’s mother had been the deputy’s nanny and had nursed him, fed him all his life, that was the reason that Frank wasn’t dead. That is the only reason. Other than that, he’d have been like any other black man in Falls County, and he’d been dead the next day.18

  The end of Prohibition in 1933 boosted business on Wood Street, and its reputation as a place for African-Americans to have fun. After the draft began for World War II, black soldiers from Fort Hood made the fifty-mile bus ride to Wood Street while on weekend passes. White businessmen certainly profited, but Wyman told me Wood Street, like Beale Street in Memphis and dozens of other streets across the South, played an important role in maintaining white dominance:

  You must allow some type of sedative, a safety valve, you know, to avoid an explosion. And Wood Street was a safety valve. It got people who would chop cotton all day in this type of heat for five dollars and see their families working with them. And on Friday night they’d get as drunk as possible for anyone to get. And Monday morning at 6:30 [they’d] get back on the cotton truck. So it became necessary, because if that was shut down, pretty soon it would be the beginning of a revolution.19

  Jukeboxes replaced the blues singers on Wood Street in the 1960s, and illicit drugs became more prevalent. When the district attorney brought murder charges in 1961 against Tom Webb, one of the black officers who patrolled Wood Street, for shooting and killing a suspect, Webb used Wood Street as his defense: “His attorneys emphasized that he was a good man in a tough job, keeping order in Marlin’s Negro section. Attorneys Robert Carter, Robert Peterson and Tom Bartlett Sr., all of Marlin, labeled the area “as tough a district as you could find anywhere.” People who want it to operate “wide open” would like to see Webb out of the way, said Carter.20

  The all-white jury acquitted Webb.

  FORTUNE STREET

  In the
1920s, R. E. L. lived on Fortune Street, six blocks from Wood Street. He was scaling back his business and easing into retirement. His Victorian home sat on a one-acre lot, and his wife Bettie oversaw a vegetable garden covering a quarter of it. They hired a black woman to work inside the house, and a black man to tend the garden.21 Bettie won the prettiest yard contest in 1928.22 The following year, the city granted a contract to McElwrath Paving Company to pave the city’s streets, the cost split between the city and residents. Fortune Street, stretching from the county courthouse to the white cemetery, was among the first finished.23

  R. E. L. and Bettie also saw the completion of their favorite community project, a new brick neo-Gothic chapel for the First Baptist Church on the northeast corner of Coleman and Oaks streets. Col. Harry Barton, founder of the Dy-N-Shine shoe polish company, donated a pipe organ.24

  The silent-movie theaters installed sound equipment in the late 1920s, and the arrival of “talkies” ended the community opera house. Only schools and community groups kept producing live theater.25 The Marlin Chamber of Commerce looked at the aging Victorian-style hotels that ringed the hot springs and wrote to Conrad Hilton, a New Mexico native who’d just finished building hotels in Dallas and Waco. Hilton agreed to build a $375,000 modern hotel if the chamber could raise a $50,000 down payment. Construction began in 1929, and Hilton hired a French firm to paint and decorate it.26

  The hotel was half-finished when stocks on Wall Street plummeted in October 1929. The crash had little immediate effect on rural Texas, where money was tied up in land and crops, not stocks and bonds. Hilton opened his ninth hotel on May 27, 1930, with a gala banquet, and he invited U.S. Senator Tom Connally and Amon Carter, publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The ballroom accommodated three hundred people, the largest in the region, with a hardwood dance floor in the center. A fight broke out after dinner, and Hilton called the celebration to a premature end, which turned out to be a bad omen.