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By Dr. Meredith May
[Daniel Hoskins with guns deposited at Gregg County Courthouse, Longview, Texas, following race riot during Red Summer]
Longview had been a city built since its founding on the segregation and oppression of African Americans, just like its counterparts throughout the South. During Reconstruction, the era of Longview’s founding, African Americans formed vibrant communities. The St. Mark CME Church traces its roots to 1867 and possibly earlier. John Magrill sold an acre of the place where African Americans worshipped outside, present-day Magrill Park, to the congregation. They built a formal church in 1880. By that same year, the African American population in the county had grown from about 37%, at the end of the Civil War, to 55%.
African Americans in Longview were confined for the most part to jobs as tenant farmers, sharecroppers, unskilled laborers, and domestic workers from the time of Longview’s creation until the Civil Rights Movement. Legal segregation separated African Americans into separate schools, businesses, and even libraries. This oppression could and did take the form of racial violence. Five lynchings have been recorded in Longview by the Sam Houston State University’s Lynching in Texas Project. These extralegal acts of mob violence resulted in the deaths of Harrison Spencer in 1888, beaten and hanged for his political activism, Henry Foster, also in 1888, for reportedly attacking a white woman, Julius Stevens in 1905, shot for reportedly assaulting a white man, and Albert Fields in 1908, hung for “insulting” a white woman.
The fifth lynching was a part of Red Summer in 1919. Following World War I, racial tensions erupted into violence in Longview and across the nation. The Red Summer of 1919 resulted in hundreds of casualties at the hands of white supremacists. In Longview, violence began after an article in the Chicago Defender described a lynching in Longview resulting from an interracial relationship. Lemuel Walters and an unnamed white woman from Kilgore had fallen in love. The article stated that the woman claimed they would have married if they had lived in the North. Walters was murdered by a mob on June 17th.
The white community turned their ire over the article on local African American leaders. Suspected of authoring the article, Samuel L. Jones, a teacher, was beaten on July 10th. On July 11th, the white mob grew in size and burned a dance hall and multiple houses, beating a woman as she begged for her home to be spared. One African American man, Marion Bush, was killed while fleeing law enforcement. The mayor requested aid from the governor, who sent guardsmen and placed the city under martial law.
The marginalization of African Americans continued. Many respected leaders of Gregg County openly joined the recently revived Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s, although it faded in membership and prominence along with the national membership by the end of the decade. Jim Crow laws lasted in the city until federal intervention in 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and African Americans continued to attend segregated schools until a 1970 court order forced integration. The summer before integrated classes were scheduled to begin, two men blew up dozens of school buses in protest, receiving eleven year prison sentences.
Longview has come a long way from 1919 but still has a long way to go. Racial reconciliation is not possible without recognizing these roots.
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