This is a story about Austin. But it starts in Montgomery, Alabama, at , where more than 4,000 victims of racial terror lynchings are memorialized.
The victims' names are carved onto hanging steel monuments, each dedicated to a county in the United States where documented lynchings happened between 1877 and 1950.
Austin resident Debbie Dunn attended the memorial’s opening in 2018. To her, those hanging monuments look like railroad ties.
“By the time you get to the end, the railroad ties are hanging from the ceiling because the floor falls away,� she said. “It does evoke being where people have been hung.�
One of the monuments is dedicated to a triple lynching reported in AGÕæÈË°Ù¼ÒÀÖ County in 1894. Like many victims of lynching, the names of these three people are unknown, and details about their lives and deaths are scarce.
That’s why Dunn asked ATXplained if there was anything more we could find out about them: What were their names? Who were they?
“I think it's a part of our history we need to pay attention to,� she said.
What we know
The basics of this history can be found on a marker dedicated to these victims outside Wesley United Methodist Church in East Austin. The � the same nonprofit behind the lynching memorial in Alabama � worked with the Austin NAACP to have the marker placed.
The plaque says that in August 1894, a white mob seized a Black woman and two Black men from a small jail about 30 miles outside Austin. The woman had been the nurse for the child of a white family. When the child died, the nurse was accused of murder, and the two men accused of being her accomplices. The mob took them from the jail, tied them to stakes in a field and fatally shot them.
According to news reports at the time, there was reason to believe the victims were innocent of any crimes.
At least three newspapers that can be viewed through Sam Houston State University’s project reported on the incident. All of them were foreign publications � two based in England and another in Ireland. It appears that someone sent a dispatch from Austin through an international wire service. We don't know who sent that wire, but without these reports, we might have no record of this event at all.
It might seem strange that press in Europe was reporting on lynchings in Texas. This actually wasn’t uncommon, though, because of the work of pioneering investigative journalist Ida B. Wells.
Wells helped expose the practice of lynching. Around this time, white audiences in the U.S. were resistant to her reporting, so she took her campaign overseas to Britain.
Nelson Linder, president of the Austin NAACP, said it’s no surprise that foreign papers led the charge in reporting on lynching. From across the ocean, the stories Wells told seemed an unprecedented horror.
“The foreign papers were very interested in talking about American history, especially lynching, because at the time, it kind of stood out,� Linder said. “They took great pride in writing about it, and also, they were safe. It’s not easy to write about lynching in Texas during that period of time.�
Local publications react
Nineteenth century reporting on lynching crimes had its limitations, according to SHSU professor Jeffrey Littlejohn, the project director of . Local papers in particular sometimes published inaccurate reports, if they covered the events at all.
“When you're dealing with acts of racial violence, and the newspaper is white and the so-called victims are white and the alleged perpetrator is Black or Hispanic � in many cases, the newspapers are extremely biased,� Littlejohn said.
The paper that later became the Austin American-Statesman didn’t cover the lynchings when they occurred. It did, however, print a letter from then-Texas Gov. Jim Hogg responding to the overseas reports. It was an indignant denial of the lynchings, written to the secretary of the London Anti-Lynching Committee.
"That's what white Southerners would say: 'They're absurd. They don't know what they're talking about. They're outsiders.'"Jeff Littlejohn, professor at Sam Houston State University and project director of the Lynching in Texas archive
Later articles in the Statesman alluded to an English committee’s plans to visit Texas to investigate the practice of lynching. Many white Texans did not appreciate what they saw as an intrusion by outsiders.
One editorialist wrote, “[We] would advise the committee not to interfere with the lynching, but wait until the curtain drops upon the tragedy and then seek these men out in the quiet of their homes and tell them how they shock the moral sensibility of Christendom by being such bad boys.�
There you have it: an editorial in the flagship paper of Texas� capital city advocating for a hands-off approach to lynching. It said, essentially: “Britain, mind your own business.�
Littlejohn said he has encountered this attitude in his own research.
“That's what white Southerners who were in power would say: 'They're absurd. They don't know what they're talking about. They're outsiders. And I think that has been the case in the South during our entire history,� he said.
Many of the Texans who defended lynching claimed it was a kind of frontier justice. In fact, the authors of that Statesman editorial referred to Wells� campaign in Britain as a mission “on behalf of negro rapists of the South.�
Although lynchings often did follow accusations of rape and other violent crimes, Wells� reporting proved that many of these accusations were false. But the accused never got their day in court, so questions about guilt and innocence were never settled for the public record.
Limited recordkeeping
Local death records from August 1894 weren't helpful in uncovering the identities of the three lynching victims. Texas didn’t require counties to keep death records until 1903, so records from the 1890s are spotty at best. Even if there had been consistent death records from this time, Littlejohn said, lynching victims often didn’t receive death certificates.
A search through the archives at the Austin History Center also didn’t turn up much. Most of the resources related to African-American history there are focused on progress and accomplishment rather than the effects of racism and violence.
Linder has done a lot of work collecting Austin’s African-American history for the NAACP. He said Black history isn’t well-preserved in Austin, especially when it comes to racism and civil rights. He attributed this to a discomfort he said many people have talking about local acts of racism.
“They certainly weren't excited about it, and they were not used to it,� he said. “I think a lot of folks just didn’t touch it.�
Linder offered an example of important history he said has been ignored or swept under the rug: the beating of John Shillady.
Shillady was a white man who served as the national secretary of the NAACP back in 1919. That year, he came to Austin to try and start a Texas chapter of the organization.
Local officials called Shillady an agitator. He was attacked in broad daylight in front of the Driskill Hotel by a group of men that included then-county judge Dave Pickle. Badly beaten, Shillady fled the city.
The Statesman published an article compiling telegrams from various Texas officials praising Pickle’s actions. “Good Boy,� read a missive from Houston. “I wish I had been there.�
“It was done by public officials,� Linder said. “That's a huge incident, but it's not really covered hardly at all. It's kind of brushed aside in Austin.�
Bringing the memorial home
Linder said he wants to shed more light on these stories. That’s why he was eager to bring a historical marker dedicated to lynching to AGÕæÈË°Ù¼ÒÀÖ County â€� the one outside Wesley UMC now.
Linder said getting general support from people in Austin wasn’t hard, but finding folks willing to put it on their property was harder.
So he turned to a longstanding partner of the NAACP: the church. The Rev. Sylvester Chase Jr. at Wesley UMC said the marker could go right out front.
The choice was easy: “If the church can’t speak the truth, who can?� he said.
Chase said he is not surprised, though, that other people in Austin didn’t want this sign on their property, especially public property.
“That's negative publicity. We consider ourselves loving around here. Everybody's in love with each other," he said. "Austin don't want people to say that we were involved in lynching of Blacks. If anything, we want to hide that history."
The Rev. Chase recently retired after more than 30 years at Wesley UMC. In that time, he saw his congregation get smaller. It’s in a historically Black area of town. Eventually, most of the people Chase saw around the neighborhood were white.
Yet there is one thing that consistently brought new faces to his church, however briefly: the sign out front, dedicated to three unnamed victims of lynching. Groups come from around the city and state to see it. Chase said he sometimes sees schoolchildren outside through the window, sitting on the grass while their teacher explains.
“Every day when I see people stop to read it, I say, ‘Thank God that marker is here,’� he said. “They're going to read that marker regardless of whether they come to church here or know the name of the church. � They might not want to know about Jesus Christ, but they're going to stop and read that sign.�
There’s a lot to be learned from that sign. It can be the entry point to a new view of Austin’s history if you let it.
But I think it’s important for another reason, too. Three people were killed in this crime, three human beings. We don’t know their names. We don’t know how old they were. We don’t know if their loved ones were able to bury them.
It feels like a basic human dignity to have your memory preserved, to at least get the simplest honors we offer the dead: an obituary, a headstone with your name on it.
For these three people, a plaque in Austin and a monument in Alabama are as close to those honors as they get. And they are not forgotten.
