Kennedy, on the other hand, moved to Marlin from neighboring Limestone County with a mission to start an aggressive newspaper. He and his brother had started the Mexia Democrat and wanted to expand their business.3 The Kennedys joined the Associated Press news agency, which meant they received news from across the country via telegraph, and in return, they transmitted their stories to other newspapers. Both the Waco Daily News and the Dallas Morning News were also members of the AP and printed news from Marlin.
The first newspaper report of a lynching of a black person in Falls County came on January 2, 1891. The attack took place in the Lang community, about two miles from Tomlinson Hill. The Dallas Morning News carried two accounts from different newspapers:
Two o’clock yesterday afternoon Charles Beall, a negro 20 years of age, entered the residence of Mr. James Fisher, a farmer near Lang, Falls County, and finding Mrs. Fisher alone subjected her to the vilest indignities and cruelly broke her skull with a hammer. He then looted the house and left, taking away a small sum of money and a few articles of value.
Neighbors called and found Mrs. Fisher still alive. She rallied enough to tell her story and describe the assailant. A party of young men well armed and mounted on fleet horses took the trail and at 3 o’clock this morning they had the negro captive. He was caught not far from Cameron, Milam County.
The lynchers took him to the residence of the victim, who identified him, upon which he confessed. After this Beall got the shortest shrift. He was taken to a grove and allowed time to pray, after which a three-quarter inch manila rope was noosed to his neck and he was dragged to a tree and hoisted to a bough upon which he dangled until this morning, when an inquest was held by Justice Hedrick of Lott. The verdict was hanged until dead by unknown parties.
Mrs. Fisher was alive at noon, but there was no hope of recovery. Her skull is shivered and a portion of the brain was spilled upon the floor. After striking the lady with the hammer the negro chopped off part of her cheek and one ear with a hatchet. Mr. Fisher was absent at a neighbor’s helping to build a house, and the little children were at school.
Charles Beall, the negro, was raised by Mr. Fisher, and was a trusted servant in the household.4
The judge’s conclusion that the perpetrators of the lynching could not be identified points to the conspiracy of silence that often surrounds mob violence. Reporting breaking news can be difficult, since witnesses and authorities often twist the truth to appease the community. This later account of the lynching included further details:
Mrs. Joseph Fisher, the victim of the outrage at Lang, Falls County, last Wednesday, rallied yesterday and gave the full recital of the assault made upon her. She stated that Squire Beall and his son, Charles, the latter being the negro lynched the next day, Monk Johnson and William Paul, four negroes, all assaulted her in turn. Afterward they beat her with a hatchet, a coupling pin and a hammer. She became insensible under the blows. One of her ears was cut off and her skull broken. She was also beat over the body.
When the lady told her story Sheriff John Ward and Constable Dick Tucker were present with a squad of deputies. They immediately seized the negroes and started with them for Marlin, ten miles distant. Sheriff Ward, with one of the negroes, had no difficulty, but Constable Tucker with the other was closely pursued by lynchers that he took to the chaparral and arrived with the prisoner safe.
It will be remembered that Squire Beall, the old man, was removed to Marlin the day his son was lynched.
This morning more mounted and well-armed men passed through Lott, headed for Marlin obviously bent upon storming the jail and lynching the three negroes.
A dispatch from Marlin says Sheriff Ward put all three on the [rail]cars and sent them to Galveston for safekeeping so that the lynchers will be baffled after all.
When the house of Squire Beall, the old man, was searched his shirt was found soaked in blood, rolled up and hid in a crevice in the wall.
A startling feature in the case is that Monk Johnson and William Paul are said to have encouraged the lynching of their confederate Charles Beall. Yesterday they vociferously proclaimed their own innocence to Sheriff Ward and Constable Tucker and with equal vehemence accused old Squire Beall of participation.5
That report, too, had errors. The sheriff put only Squire Beall on the train to Galveston. He sent the other two to the McLennan County Jail in Waco. The jail there was made of stone and brick, with an iron cage to hold prisoners. McLennan County’s sheriff, Dan Ford, doubled the guard, fully expecting a lynch party to lay siege. Ward and his deputies patrolled the roads to Waco the night of January 4 to head them off.6 Based on the numbers and the geography, some of the Tomlinson men likely joined the mob.
All of the suspects had connections to Tomlinson Hill. Peter Tomlinson had married Josephine Beall in 1877, and she was related to Squire Beall. William Paul’s family was one of the largest in China Grove, and the Johnsons had worked for the Tomlinsons since emancipation, though Monk Johnson’s family lived on the Fisher farm at the time.7 The attack, the lynching, and the attempt to lynch the other suspects angered the residents of China Grove, which was less than a mile from the Fisher farm. The lynching mobilized the freedmen:
Last night the negroes along the Pond creek gathered near the Lang schoolhouse and held some sort of ghost dance. They built a big fire and were seen brandishing old cap and ball shot guns and sawed-off army muskets. They adopted a resolution that the four negroes are innocent or justifiable and that Charles Beall was infamously murdered by the whites. While they were in their pow-wow, the farmers came upon them and they fled.
RIDDLED WITH BUCKSHOT
A Chilton correspondent states that Mr. George Taylor, a young farmer who had been accused by the negroes of leading the lynchers in the hanging of Charles Beall last Thursday, was riddled with buckshot last night at a late hour just as he entered his door.
“This,” says the correspondent, “aroused the farmers and ranchmen to the highest pitch, and they gathered in Lott and Lang by hundreds. The three negro leaders fled and a posse is pursuing them, believing they shot young Taylor. The negroes at Cameron, a town south of Lang, met and appointed a committee to go to Lang and investigate the lynching of Charles Beall. The committee arrived near Lang and saw a troop of longhaired Texans galloping toward them, and abandoning their ponies, they took to the chaparral. They were caught and after an explanation were warned not to return to the vicinity anymore.8
Governor Lawrence Sullivan Ross, known as “Sul,” cabled the McLennan County sheriff and recommended that he send Paul and Johnson to the capital for safekeeping at the Travis County Jail. Ford was more than happy to oblige and he placed them on a railcar for Austin without the lynch mob noticing.9 Taylor later died of his wounds.
The mob’s attempts to intimidate the black community clearly were not working. The fact that African-Americans armed themselves, demanded justice, and lynched a white man themselves proves they were prepared to defend their freedom colonies from white terror.
No action was ever taken against the lynch mob. Texas law enforcement and politicians knew their legal responsibilities to prevent lynching, but they also knew that the mob had the support of the white public.
Editors, meanwhile, needed to sell newspapers, and the 1890s saw the rise of yellow journalism. Editors knew reports of black men “committing outrages” against white women drove sales. These stories almost always assumed the black man’s guilt, cited white eyewitnesses, and frequently ended with a white mob lynching the black suspect. Between three hundred and five hundred black Texans were lynched in the late nineteenth century. Most cases involved the murder or rape of a white person.10
Between 1860 and 1929, there were sixty-four lynchings in the counties surrounding Marlin. In twenty-two cases, the underlying crime was unknown. But of the forty-two cases where the motive was clear, seventeen involved a white woman and fifteen lynchings were in response to murders. Most of those lynchings took place in the 1890s.11
White Texas men during that time grew up on their fathers’ romanticized stories of forming posses to hunt down and kill criminal gangs or Indian raiders. They fundamentally believed the myths about southern chivalry and the South’s noble fight for “the Cause” during the Civil War. Secret societies became popular, each offering its own mystical purpose. Marlin had a Masonic Temple and chapters of the Knights of Honor, Knights of Pythias, and the Ancient Order of United Workmen. Texas society taught men to admire those who were violent and self-sufficient, so when young men found an excuse to kill, they got “excited,” to use the newspapers’ parlance, and took action, believing they were following in their fathers’ footsteps.
There is also no doubt that some victims of mob violence were probably guilty, and their crimes held symbolism. When one member of a community rapes a member of another, the act takes on a special significance, not only for the victim but also for the community. Rapists subjugate and terrorize their victims, taking away their sense of security and autonomy. Warriors throughout the ages have marked their victories by raping the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of their enemies. Rape is a profound demonstration of power, and the ultimate biological conquest is to spread your DNA and to dilute your enemy’s.
In an opinion piece about lynching on March 1, 1893, the Dallas Morning News recognized that rape elicited a very different response based on the perpetrator’s race. The editors made a perversely racist argument for lynching white rapists, not blacks:
Why not lynch with despairing regularity all white ravishers? Why not indeed? Why should it be the rare exception and not the rule for white violators of women and children to undergo mob execution? If this crime is beyond the law and above the law when perpetrated by a negro is it not made, if possible, more horrible when perpetrated by a white man?12
In the South, a black man raping a white woman eroded the white man’s perceived superiority and dominance in a place where whites and blacks lived in close to equal numbers. So white Texans made swift and unequivocal punishment of African-Americans who broke this taboo their highest priority. Some reasoned the more horrible and terrifying the execution, the greater its deterrent powers.13
THE DANGER OF BACK TALK
Sex and violence were not the only things that could get an African-American in trouble; merely standing up to a white man could end in death. One black man’s defiance in 1895 ended with what the Dallas Morning News depicted as the first terrorist bombing in Texas history.
Abe Phillips was a leader in the black community in northern Falls County, had a reputation for fearlessness, and feuded with the Arnold family, whites living on a neighboring farm. Abe was the only sharecropper who lived in the area; the rest of the African-Americans worked as hired hands. Phil Arnold had taken in two black orphans under the apprenticeship law and expected them to work in return for room and board. But the children kept running away and showing up at Abe’s house, asking for protection. When Phil and his brother Ed Arnold confronted Abe and his stepson Wesley Bragg and demanded they turn over the children on April 17, 1895, the men drew their guns.14 Abe fired the first shot at Phil Arnold and missed. Phil returned fire and killed Abe instantly. Bragg then shot Phil in the back with a shotgun, fatally wounding him. Ed Arnold then shot and wounded Bragg, whom the sheriff arrested.15
A jury acquitted Bragg in Phil Arnold’s death because he acted in self-defense. That led some white neighbors to decide they needed to make an example of the entire Phillips family. White men harassed the family over the next three months, poisoning their livestock and shooting randomly at their property, trying to convince them to flee. But the Phillips family kept on farming. The intimidation escalated on July 18, when a child living in the house died, apparently from eating poisoned meat from the family’s smokehouse.16
In the early hours of July 20, 1895, a group of men crept up to the Phillips home, twenty miles north of Marlin. The black family lived in a cottage surrounded by elm trees, a corncrib, and the smokehouse. The cottage was a one-room log cabin, with three lean-to sheds built along the outer walls and a porch on the front. On that night, Abe Phillips’s widow, Fannie, was asleep inside the sixteen-by-eighteen-foot main room with her three sons and a granddaughter. Fannie’s brother, Ben Harrison, and a hired laborer named Kid Taylor were sleeping in the shed on the west side of the cabin. Fannie’s son-in-law Henry Hill, his wife, and their infant lived in the east lean-to.17
That night, someone crawled under the cabin, which was built on stone blocks, and planted fifteen pounds of dynamite under the kitchen floor. At 2:00 A.M., the attackers triggered the blast. A Dallas Morning News reporter described the scene:
Tourists arrive and gaze at the hole in the ground and the elm trees, the boughs of which are hanging with the odds and ends of a negro household, the thrifty accumulations of fifty years, which on that sad morning went off in a blast and littered a farm of 600 acres as evenly distributed as if the successful design was to distribute the fragments as a means of fertilizing crops. The house stood on blocks and one of the blocks flew with the force of a cannon ball in a horizontal line nearly a mile making a tunnel through the cotton plants in its flight. The wheels of the sewing machine flew in all directions, one of the larger wheels descending like a [ring] on a corn stalk, 300 yards away.
Henry Hill’s wife owned an organ and one of the keys of this instrument was found a mile down the county road.… In Mart, the nearest town, it shook the houses and some of the merchants donned their clothes in haste and rushed to their stores thinking their safes had been cracked by burglars. Others thereabouts thought it was an earthquake.
[When rescuers arrived] they found an appalling spectacle. In the light of the early morning, Henry Hill’s wife was wandering around with the baby in her arms, partly singed. Kid Taylor, the hired hand, was leaning against the crib enclosure bleeding and inarticulate, and the corpses of Fanny Phillips, her three sons and Hannah Williams, her granddaughter, were scattered about the yard wrapped in flames which afforded a horrible light by which the three [rescuers] were able to survey the uncanny environments. They could not immediately rescue the bodies from the flames because of exploding cartridges which went off in successive volleys like musketry. The five-gallon can of oil which occupied the corner in the kitchen had been sprinkled over the bodies and over fragments of bedding and wardrobing.18
The attack horrified both the white and African-American communities. Murdering an African-American following a crime was one thing, but blowing up a home filled with women and children was going too far. Black leaders organized a strike in the cotton fields, demanding the sheriff track down and prosecute the perpetrators.19 To appease their angry laborers, on whom they depended just as cotton picking was set to begin, whites held public meetings, denouncing the attack and pledging to help the survivors. Between the governor and the black and white communities, they offered a fifteen-hundred-dollar reward for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of those responsible. The people of Mart also passed a resolution condemning the attacks and promising an investigation.20
The Dallas Morning News reported that dozens of private detectives combed through the blast site and tried to find evidence that would lead to those responsible. But the bombers were never caught. And as shocking as the bombing was, the lynchings in Falls County did not stop. There was a rash of vigilantism in the summer of 1897, and one case turned the whole idea of chivalric murder on its head.
AN INTOLERABLE INDIGNITY
Freedman Columbus Fendrick lived in a log cabin in western Falls County with his wife, Hattie, and worked for Robert H. Boyd, a white cotton farmer who owned land six miles from Tomlinson Hill. When Fendrick came home from the fields on April 25, 1897, his wife told him that Boyd had come looking for him. Finding the young five-foot, eighty-five-pound woman alone, Boyd had asked her for sex in return for money, which she had rejected.21
Fendrick sat at the dinner table, staring silently at his food. Hattie grew
nervous as she watched her husband become more and more angry. Eventually, Fendrick went to his friend Abe Sanders and asked if he had any cartridges for a Winchester rifle. Sanders said he didn’t know where they were, but Sanders’s uncle, Arthur O’Neal, had a few. The three men then went to Boyd’s house.22
Standing out front, Fendrick called Boyd outside. He told Boyd what Hattie had told him about the incident and wanted to know why Boyd had insulted his wife. Boyd threw his hand behind him in a threatening manner and said, “I will fix you, you.” Fendrick pulled the rifle’s trigger, shooting Boyd in the stomach. Boyd’s wife, Ruth, ran out of the house and saw the three black men running away. Boyd survived about two hours, long enough to tell Ruth that Fendrick was the shooter, and that he had accused Boyd of propositioning Hattie.23
Fendrick ran about three miles to the village of Travis, where he stopped to sleep. In the morning, Fendrick turned himself in to a constable and asked for protection. The constable testified that another officer warned Fendrick that he didn’t have to say anything, but Fendrick immediately confessed.24
The Falls County sheriff, D. R. Emerson, put Fendrick on a train to Waco for safekeeping and four days later arrested Sanders and O’Neal as accomplices. When the white men of western Falls County heard the suspects were in custody, two hundred men formed a lynch mob on Tomlinson Hill:
Sheriff Emerson noticed a number of men, whose homes are in the vicinity of the scene of the murder, lounging about town that afternoon and became suspicious of their actions. Advices were received later to the effect that the main body was marching on Marlin. City Marshal Coleman ordered the fire alarm turned on about 9:30 o’clock and the hideous screams of the whistle soon had the entire population of Marlin aroused.
Tomlinson Hill Page 17
