Descendant of massacre answers call of her ancestors
Jul. 29—Search for answers continues 111 years after Slocum Massacre
Constance Hollie-Juwaid wants to unearth the truth.
The great, great granddaughter of Jack Holley, who was a survivor of the attack on Black residents in Slocum and surrounding areas 111 years ago, has taken on what she sees as a responsibility passed from her ancestors.
"It is a massive weight," Hollie-Juwaid said. "I tried to put it down and walk away."
But she could not.
She wants to be sure her ancestors are not forgotten and her goal is to see them paid proper respect and burial, but she believes the work is not yet done.
"The voices in my head won't let me walk away," she said. "I feel them. I hear them."
Hollie-Juwaid's ancestors and those of many other families with roots in Slocum were victims of a multi-day melee that left a still-unknown number of the town's Black residents dead.
"There are people out there, not just my relatives, but people who descend from these victims and their bodies are still buried," she said. "I feel like if I call the Governor of Texas right now and said, 'sir, we have found a mass grave of Confederate soldiers...they would be exhumed by noon. But because they are Black it doesn't matter."
Hollie-Juwaid cited graves of Indigenous children in Canada currently being unearthed and a construction site in Sugarland, Texas where the school district discovered bodies of enslaved Black people, saying that in those cases the right thing is or was being done.
"We are not getting the same support," she said.
July 29-30, 1910
The reports of Black citizens being murdered began arriving in Palestine in the early morning hours of July 30, 1910. Now, more than a century later, the origins of what author E.R. Bills calls a "frenzy" are convoluted at best.
Rumors circulated, tempers flared.
Newspaper reports and multiple sources confirm accounts that include a white farmer named Reddin Alford trying to collect a disputed debt from a Black businessman named Marsh Holley, son of Jack Holley.
A construction foreman chose an African American farmer, Abe Wilson, to round up help for road improvements. A prominent white man named Jim Spurger did not take to the idea, the Houston Post reported.
Whisperings within the white community began that there was a plot by the Black community to organize an attack.
The details of how and what exactly set it off are difficult to trace, but the setting, the tensions, the history of racial conflict were fertile ground for what erupted into a massacre that officially left eight Black residents dead.
That is the number of Black victims who were identified and accounted for, but the conflicting newspaper accounts, testimony from law enforcement officials, reports of mass burials and family stories make clear the real death toll may stretch into the hundreds.
The first to be attacked were three young Black men who had spent the night together at Charlie Wilson's grandma's house. Fifteen-year-old Wilson (son of Abe), 18-year-old Cleveland "Cleve" Larkin and 18-year-old Willustus "Lusk" Holley (son of Marsh) headed out early on July 29 to take care of family livestock when they were met by armed white men who fired on them without a word.
Larkin died.
Wilson and Lusk Holley managed to escape although Holley would later be shot and survive while his brother Alex Holley did not.
The assault began near Sadler's Creek, lasted throughout the day and into the following day. It continued further south, into Houston County as groups of white men, ranging from six to seven up to mobs of 30 to 40 or more made their way through the area firing on any Black residents they encountered.
Spurger along with other agitators gathered, armed themselves and continued their grisly attack. Black families who owned land and farms hid and ran.
The Palestine Daily Herald's July 30, 1910 edition assessed the incoming information in grim detail explaining Dr. E. L. Rose had received a message from the southern part of the county which said 15 Black men were known dead. The story said "Men are flocking to Slocum from all parts of this section of the country, and a veritable army of men is already congregated there."
The paper continued its report including an order by Anderson County District Judge B. H. Gardner to close saloons and forbid the sale of ammunition or guns from all local dealers. The report, however, was that the dealers were already sold out.
Anderson County Sheriff William H. Black was called in by the Houston County Sheriff John C. Lacy when the word got out about men being attacked in Anderson County.
Black would later tell the New York Times that men were going about killing Black residents "as fast as they could find them, and so far as I was able to ascertain, without any real cause. I don't know how many were in the mob, but there may have been 200 or 300." He said people were being hunted like sheep.
The Texas Rangers were called in as well as state militia.
Some early reports claimed it was a race war, but Sheriff Black and other law enforcement officials would report to local papers that the fleeing Black residents were unarmed.
Numbers and arrests
Reports at the time varied on how many had died—from Sheriff Black who said at least a dozen or more to the Palestine Daily Herald initially claiming 12-15 to a letter from John Siddon, the white postmaster in Volga, Texas who pleaded for help and claimed 20-30 had been killed.
Sheriff Black told the papers that the buzzards would find the bodies before they could.
The August 1, 1910 edition of the Houston Post reported scouting parties were were sent into the woods and would return "every little while" with another dead Black resident. The report detailed a trench "twelve feet in depth had been dug during the early hours of the day and in this ditch the bodies were placed and covered." Relatives were taking bodies to secluded spots throughout the night.Because of this the report concluded the exact number dead would never be known.
The indictments brought against the seven white men were a first—the first time a Texas white man had been arrested for killing a Black man.
Gardener made the decision to move ahead with the grand jury, acknowledging the task of tracking down all the bodies would be all but impossible. He told the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram on July 31 his duty was "to bring to account those guilty of the killings."
In the August 2, 1910 edition of the Palestine Daily Herald, Gardener's instructions to the grand jury made clear his views by explaining to the jurors whether there were rumors of uprisings or not, there was no excuse to take matters into their own hands and "there is no justification for shooting men in the back, waylaying or shooting them in their houses. It cannot justify any violence committed by these parties."
His conclusion: "I regard this affair the most damaging that could happen in the county; that it is a disgrace, not only to the county, but to the state, and it is up to this jury to do its full duty in the premises."
Despite his efforts, the Slocum cases were eventually moved to Houston County where they were never prosecuted.
In his memoir, Gardener wrote that the district and county attorney in Harris County received most of his pay from convictions. Consequently, prosecuting white men for killing Black men would not merit the effort.
Justice was not served and so much was left undone, including the proper retrieval and burial of victims' bodies thought to be scattered throughout the piney woods.
Hidden history
"It is unfortunate history," said Bills author of the book, "The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas."
Bills, like many others, had never heard of the event until a few years ago.
The freelance journalist and author who resides in Ft. Worth was researching another story, but kept coming across pieces of the Slocum event.
And he could not ignore it.
In a phone interview Bills said even now, seven years since the book was published, it is consuming and a hard story to tell.
Bills' efforts coupled with those Hollie-Juwaid, has shone a light on a very dark time in East Texas history.
The two collaborated, shared research, bore the burden together.
The efforts eventually led to the erection of a marker on FM 2022 in front of the Kilgore Cemetery in Slocum in 2016.
Hollie-Juwaid enlisted Bills to write the application which was met some opposition before the two took the matter to the Texas Historical Commission. It was approved unanimously.
It was the first historical marker in the state (out of about 16,000) to acknowledge racial violence against African Americans.
"The people that got the marker for Jesse Washington, they were at the marker ceremony asking us how," Bills said.
Washington was a Black man who was lynched in front of Waco's city hall with an estimated 10,000 spectators including police and city officials.
In his book, Bills compares the event to the Rosewood Massacre in Florida and the Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma, saying the body counts may surpass them both.
"And yet today it's almost never spoke of, much less widely acknowledged, sufficiently researched or historically considered," he wrote.
The placement of the marker near another cemetery only prompts Hollie-Juwaid to continue her pursuit.
"Each time I go there and I see white families going through their funerary rituals years after that person has been deceased, I want that opportunity too," she said. "I want that opportunity for the descendants as well. Even if you don't agree with how someone pays homage to those who came before them, just respect that those people who were buried are just that—people who deserve a proper disposal. Piled up on each other is wrong, secondly it is a crime scene."
"It's ugly and it's not over yet," Bills said.
