I was a freshman at Austin College in 1988 when I learned about the Sherman Riot of 1930. George Hughes, a black man wrongly accused, was lynched by a white Sherman mob. To pull off the act, the mob burned down their own courthouse and cut the hoses of firefighters trying to extinguish the blaze. The lifeless corpse of Hughes was then dragged around town, as the mob proceeded to destroy a prosperous black neighborhood in Sherman.
I learned about the riot from Dr. Light Cummins. And I remember my own reaction at the time. The 1930s were only 50 years ago! I associated that brutality with the 19th century. And why was no one talking about it? The civil rights movement surely meant that Americans were quite open about our unpleasant history. Of course that was young, naïve Marc, unaware that the forces of American injustice had never really disappeared.
Roo Tales have paid a lot of history dividends to me. Because of all that research and writing, the Sherman Riot of 1930 no longer seems odd and out of place. Grayson County was front and center in America’s racial war in part because of Sherman’s initial hostility TOWARDS the Confederacy. Settled by border state farmers, Grayson County opposed secession and celebrated the Union victory at Richmond. That victory led to a 12-year Union effort (Reconstruction) to implement multiracial democracy in Texas.
But that effort failed. A second civil war erupted in Grayson County after 1865, with pro-slavery Texans driving out the original Union sympathizers and bringing the anti-Confederate counties on the Red River into the fold. New arrivals from south Texas transformed Grayson County into one of the most racially intolerant places in the state. Those new arrivals included Austin College Kangaroos, when the school relocated in 1876. The entire period is documented in the book “Murder and Mayhem: The War of Reconstruction in Texas,” by James Smallwood.
One of the new arrivals in the 1880s was a Kangaroo named J.C. Edmonds. Edmonds fought at Richmond for Robert E. Lee, survived the defeat of the Confederacy, and made his way from Virginia to Austin College. He was an AC professor, administrator, resident director, fund raiser, and Austin College cheerleader who kept the school alive during trying times. He was also the father of Austin College baseball. And he was a violent Southern racist.
Edmonds left AC to run for mayor of Sherman in the 1890s. That decade was the beginning of Southern “lost cause” revisionism in Texas, when numerous counties erected monuments of honor to Confederates over the next few decades. But the first one erected was in Grayson County. In 1896, Edmonds watched as his work as Sherman mayor reached fruition. His Confederate monument was dedicated with the fanfare normally reserved for places in the Deep South.
And so, Grayson County for most of the early 20th century was a place of rigid racial injustice. Incidents were commonplace and usually unreported. What distinguished the Sherman Riot of 1930 from other incidents was its size. The riot forced the Texas Governor to send in the Texas Rangers, who refused to use lethal force against the huge mob. The extreme actions of white Sherman residents, the powerlessness of the state of Texas, and the martial law which resulted made the Sherman Riot of 1930 almost impossible to ignore.
For about 100 years anyway.
Yesterday, Sherman residents led by Melissa Cole successfully installed an official state of Texas historical marker about the 1930 riot. The day included an exhibit at Austin College, with a poetry reading from a descendant of a riot victim. The ceremony at the new Grayson County Courthouse was well attended and even included a face with whom Roos are familiar: Dr. Light Cummins, the former state historian of Texas and AC Professor Emeritus of Austin College history.
Dr. Cummins was asked about the day’s events and said the following:
“I had to talk to some of the old white people who didn’t want to hear about this, and they were not particularly interested. I talked to the members of the Grayson County historical commission, and they said that’s a part of the history that we don’t want to remember. They seem to think that history is civic boosterism and it really isn’t. History is for everybody. History belongs to everybody.”
Dr. Cummins, thanks for letting me know about 1930 way back in 1988. Glad we are both still around to see the state of Texas getting up to speed with both of us in the year 2025.
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