Читать книгу Freedom Facts and Firsts - Jessie Carney Smith - Страница 78

This event was the second of 25 major U.S. racial conflicts during the “Red Summer” of 1919. The small northeast Texas community experienced racial tension earlier because black leaders Samuel L. Jones, a teacher, and Dr. Calvin P. Davis had urged black cotton farmers to bypass local white cotton dealers in selling their crops. Cotton did not cause the riot; rather, it was an article in the July 5 issue of the Chicago Defender, a weekly national black newspaper, defending the reputation of Lemuel Walters, a young black resident of Longview. Walters was arrested for reportedly having a white woman from Kilgore, Texas, fall in love with him. Walters was killed on June 17, when he was handed over to a white mob. Jones, who was the local agent for the Defender, was held responsible for writing the July 5 article in defense of Walters, and he was attacked and beaten by three white men on the 10th, after the newspaper arrived in Longview. Whites were also angry because they had learned that Davis had formed the Negro Business Men’s League, which aimed to stop whites from exploiting black cotton farmers. On July 11, a group of angry white men came to Jones’s home, but they were fired upon and forced to retreat. One did not get away. He was beaten by a group of blacks who had come to defend Jones. The other whites gathered additional people, broke into a store to get guns and ammunition, returned to the black neighborhood, and set fire to the homes of Jones, Davis, and others. Local and state officials called in the Texas Rangers and the Texas National Guard, but Dr. Davis’s father-in-law, Marion Bush, was killed on July 12. The area was placed under martial law between July 13 and 18. Whites and blacks were arrested, but no one was tried for their participation in the riot.

Fletcher F. Moon