There is nothing more repulsive to me than slavery and lynching. Having said that; if you look at the grand scheme of things, compared to the rest of the south, Collin County was not nearly as bad. These were the most terrible times for our nation and even during those years Collin County paled in comparison to the rest of the worst.
Do you know what saved us all? Christianity and the freedom to practice it. If you look back on the years leading up to the end of slavery in America; Christianity was at it's strongest and most pure.
I am going to try to piece together articles I have placed here in the past about Slavery and Lynching. I will try to not make this about any political party or statues.:
A Civil Rights Museum honoring Mississippi's "She-Ro" of the civil rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer. The Civil Rights Museum features the Old Storyteller, who tells stories that has been passed down from generation to generation, centered around slavery, the Civil War, sharecropping and the blues, gospel and civil rights movement. Children and adults alike enjoy the stories told by the Old Storyteller, who always has a sense of humor, education and entertainment.
Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum, Orangeburg, S.C.: https://www.cecilwilliams.com/
Sign the petition: The Senate must make lynching a federal crime by passing the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act.
The Senate recently passed legislation awarding the Congressional Medal of Honor to Emmett Till, who was brutally murdered in a 1955 lynching. But passing the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act to prevent such a tragedy from happening again would have been better
Till's mother, Mamie, fought for the rest of her life to keep the memory of Emmett alive.: https://www.dailykos.com/campaigns/petitions/sign-the-petition-the-senate-must-make-lynching-a-federal-crime-by-passing-the-emmett-till-anti-lynching-act
After more than 100 agonizing years and 200 failed attempts, lynching is just one signature away from officially being a federal crime.
This horrific weapon of racial terror which ran rampant in the late 18th and 19th centuries has been wielded by the hateful and the weak to silence, dehumanize, and defile Black Americans for generations, locking us out of power by threatening our lives.
Named for 14-year-old Emmitt Till, whose brutal murder at the hands of white supremacists helped ignite the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the signing of this legislation will mark a watershed moment for safety and equality in our nation.
As an organization originally founded to confront this very evil, we at the NAACP call on President Biden to IMMEDAITELY sign this long-overdue anti-lynching legislation into law and committ the full force of the U.S. government to bear upon those who commit this heinous crime.
The work to achieve equal justice for all cannot succeed unless our country confronts its racist past. Join us and add you name to demand President Biden advance history and sign the Emmitt Till Anti-Lynching Act into law >>: https://support.naacp.org/a/em_pet_b1_031922_ac_30d-1-1-2
I have been saying for years that McKinney Texas, was the last city in America to outlaw public hangings. This may not be accurate. I can not prove this online. My wife's college history teacher told her this, years ago. I looked it up about a week ago. I was struck by this haunting photo I saw and decided to do a post here as a result of that research.
It turns out that, that Collin County college teacher may have exaggerated the truth a little. Maybe I remembered wrong. It is hard not to get worked up about history stats like this. So I understand how people can exaggerate sometimes about these kind of sad day's of our country.
It turns out that, that Collin County college teacher may have exaggerated the truth a little. Maybe I remembered wrong. It is hard not to get worked up about history stats like this. So I understand how people can exaggerate sometimes about these kind of sad day's of our country.
The following article is proof that one of the last legal public hangings in Texas was in 1921; in McKinney, Texas.
Collin County had only three legal hangings before the state took over that responsibility in 1922.
Stephen Ballew - for killing James Golden in 1870. The trial was held in the Christian church because the courtroom was too small. This would have been during the time of the two-story wood-frame courthouse, before the stone courthouse with the towers was constructed. He was hanged at the south edge of McKinney.
Shack Culwell - an 18-year-old black man who killed his boss, W. R. Norvell, in a dispute over $5. He was hanged from a tree north of McKinney near the current VFW hall. He was taken to the site in a wagon, sitting on top of his coffin and was buried at the foot of a tree.
Ezell Stepp - for killing Hardy Mills, 1921. He was hanged on a scaffold at the county jail. This was one of the last legal hangings in Texas.
This next article about Gainesville, Texas has got to be the worst public hanging's ever.:
The Great Hanging at Gainesville was the execution by hanging of forty-one suspected Unionists in Gainesville, Texas, in October 1862 during the American Civil War. Two additional suspects were shot by Confederate troops while trying to escape. Some 150–200 men were captured and arrested by state Confederate troops in and near Cooke County at a time when numerous citizens of North Texas were opposed to the new law on conscription. Many suspects were tried by a "Citizens' Court" organized by a Confederate officer. It made up its own rules for conviction and had no status under state law. Although only 11% of county households owned slaves, seven of the 12 men on the jury were slaveholders, determined to suppress dissent.
I found this article in Google, after actually talking with someone who remember's seeing some Paris, Texas hangings
February 1, 1893, in the town of Paris, Texas:
Smith was put to death in the same manner as thousands of other African Americans, many of them freed slaves, who were publicly lynched between 1877 and 1950. He was stripped, beaten savagely and brought to the town square with his hands bound. In front of a crowd of about 10,000, including families with children, he was forced to climb onto a high platform and then tortured by the executioners for more than an hour. Finally, he was burned alive to the jubilant shouts of the mob, who immediately purchased his bones and organs, sold as souvenirs of the event.
Read more here: https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-racial-terror-permanently-altered-americas-demographics-1.5462682
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| This is a map of almost every documented lynching between the 1830s and 1960s. It is from this website: http://www.monroeworktoday.org/explore/ |
I found this about Collin County on the http://www.monroeworktoday.org/explore/ website:
Maria Ines Ramírez
Mexican female lynched in early May 1880
Collin Co.
She was lynched (burned) for alleged Witchcraft
This is from this book:
Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928
Carrigan, William D. & Clive Webb
New York: Oxford University Press, 2013
'Commodure' Jones
Black male lynched in Aug 1911
Farmersville, Collin Co
He was lynched for allegedly insulting a woman.
The source for this is: Tuskegee University Archives
Box 132.020 - database typed on paper
Guzman, Jessie (Editor)
Mapping the history of racial terror
SMITHSONIAN.COM
JANUARY 24, 2017
The Civil War may have freed an estimated 4 million slaves, but that wasn’t nearly the end of acts of racial violence committed against African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism against black people include the thousands murdered in public lynchings. Now, an interactive map provides a detailed look at almost every documented lynching between the 1830s and 1960s.
Maria Ines Ramírez
Mexican female lynched in early May 1880
Collin Co.
She was lynched (burned) for alleged Witchcraft
This is from this book:
Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928
Carrigan, William D. & Clive Webb
New York: Oxford University Press, 2013
'Commodure' Jones
Black male lynched in Aug 1911
Farmersville, Collin Co
He was lynched for allegedly insulting a woman.
The source for this is: Tuskegee University Archives
Box 132.020 - database typed on paper
Guzman, Jessie (Editor)
 |
| From website: http://www.monroeworktoday.org/explore/ |
Mapping the history of racial terror
SMITHSONIAN.COM
JANUARY 24, 2017
The Civil War may have freed an estimated 4 million slaves, but that wasn’t nearly the end of acts of racial violence committed against African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism against black people include the thousands murdered in public lynchings. Now, an interactive map provides a detailed look at almost every documented lynching between the 1830s and 1960s.
More from this amazing website I found: http://www.monroeworktoday.org
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| From website: http://www.monroeworktoday.org/explore/ |
Refugio Ramírez
⸬ Mexican male lynched in early May 1880
⌖ Collin Co.
She was lynched (burned) for alleged Witchcraft
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| From website: http://www.monroeworktoday.org/explore/ |
Silvestre Garcia Ramírez
⸬ Mexican female lynched in early May 1880
⌖ Collin Co.
She was lynched (burned) for alleged Witchcraft
The rise of Lynching
Lynching means more than homicide: it is condemning someone to death by the whims of a mob or entire community — no judge. Over time, it became racist, common, and brutal.
However, the word lynching has evolved in meaning over time, and the methods looked different in distinct regions of the US. In the original 13 colonies, lynching referred to punishing someone in public (such as tar and feathers) outside of the official law.
By 1835, this public punishment was becoming lethal more often, and the group of people who did it still expected impunity. The perpetrators felt no one should ever question the ‘justice’ being served by murdering their suspect. In the 1830s, remember, the United States was still in the times of slavery and expanding to the Far West.
In the middle of the century, lynching could be found as a crude form of frontier justice done by vigilantes "keeping the peace"— about 40% of all the recorded lynchings by this time were done to white men (there are two cases recorded of a white woman as well). Yet studies have discovered lynching was used more often in towns that had a functioning courthouse. This seems to contradict the idea that it was just a time of lawlessness. Lynching became a tool that people engaged in hatred: it was applied viciously as Anglos clashed in tensions with Mexican-Americans on the southwest border. It was an ultimatum leveled against Chinese families who were living alongside white settlers in the middle of California, Oregon, and Washington.
1880 — Fifteen years after the Civil War, black men had created social progress with the new right to vote (but still no women in the US were allowed to vote). Black Americans were successfully becoming businessmen, property owners, and electing their own state legislators. Then the defenders of a whites-only South (Dixie) escalated lynching to a scale it had never been used before. After 1886, the proportion of times it was used against white suspects in the South was strikingly small. But entire white communities would gather in the streets to seize and kill black people outside the law. In the South, nearly 80% of such mob murders would be attacks against black Americans specifically: mostly men, sometimes women, even sometimes teenagers. Watch video: http://www.monroeworktoday.org/lynching.html#
Activists in the 1890s struggled to define the word lynching to try to capture this rise in terror.
I am thankful for Juneteenth; even though the indiscriminate murders of African Americans, continued up until the 1960's, especially in the south, because of racism. Reading this page made me sad for America and it's roots.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom
I recommend giving it a quick read.
Of course as you all must know; no matter what, my allegiance is to our great country. I do not see how you can read my posts without coming to that conclusion eventually. Just in case; I like reminding myself of that here. We can always do better. I will never stop looking for better red, white and blue ways of doing things better.
A proposed Louisiana chemical plant may be building on the graves of formerly enslaved people.
We’re saying “no.”
RISE St. James, a faith-based grassroots community group, recently learned that graves of enslaved people have been found on the proposed site of Formosa Plastics in St. James Parish, a fact the company did not bring to the community’s attention while it was seeking a land use permit.
They discovered the presence of graves on the proposed site after reviewing the company’s submissions to the permitting agencies, which they obtained from a public records request. The records also revealed that Formosa representatives have considered the possibility of removing remains if found on certain portions of the property, because preserving them in place would be a “difficult option” for the company.
“We are going to fight for the respect [our ancestors’] resting places—and our community—deserve as we continue our fight to stop Formosa Plastics from being built at all. Governor John Bel Edwards should join us and protect our communities,” said Sharon Lavigne of RISE St. James.
Learn more here: https://ccrjustice.org/sites/all/modules/civicrm/extern/url.php
