The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas - Hardcover

Bills, E R

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 154020958X ISBN 13: 9781540209580

Publisher: History Press Library Editions, 2014

Synopsis

In late July 1910, a shocking number of African Americans in Texas were slaughtered by white mobs in the Slocum area of Anderson County and the Percilla-Augusta region of neighboring Houston County. The number of dead surpassed the casualties of the Rosewood Massacre in Florida and rivaled those of the Tulsa Riots in Oklahoma, but the incident--one of the largest mass murders of blacks in American history--is now largely forgotten. Investigate the facts behind this harrowing act of genocide in E.R. Bills's compelling inquiry into the Slocum Massacre.

About this title

About the Author:

Born in Fort Worth and raised in Aledo, E.R. Bills received a degree in journalism from Southwest Texas State University in 1990. When he's not wandering Texas back roads, he does historical, travel and editorial writing for publications around the state.

Review:

"As the United States and its people make some effort to come to terms with their racist past, they stand to benefit from those whose diligent research has homed in on incidents of racially motivated violence that have marred the republic's history. In the last two decades alone, professional historians, journalists, and other researchers have published dozens of titles treating lynching and race riots, and there seems to be no sign that the possibilities for investigation have been exhausted.
   Freelance journalist E. R. Bills contributes to this literature on racial violence with the study of the 1910 murders of an unknown and unknowable number of African Americans that began near the East Texas town of Slocum in southeastern Anderson County on the evening of July 29 and spilled over into Houston County to the south, where additional black residents (again the number of casualties is uncertain) were shot indiscriminately by white mobs. The author makes excellent use of contemporary local and state newspapers to piece together details of this massacre and to place the events in their appropriate historical context.
   Bills follows the lead of a number of students of racial violence who have sought to restore historical memory to communities where incidents of racial violence are seldom spoken about. His evidence leads him to challenge the official body count of seven or eight African American victims and to claim that perhaps hundreds were buried in unmarked mass graves, 'probably establishing the Slocum Massacre as the single, largest pogrom of blacks in modern American history,' exceeding the casualty rate of the more well-known Tulsa, Oklahoma riots of 1921 and the Rosewood, Florida, massacre of 1923. Following a wide-ranging, sometimes speculative analysis of the precipitating events leading up to the massacre, Bills concludes, 'Regardless of the impetus, what followed was an act of genocide that went unprosecuted, unpunished and unresolved and remains so to this day.'
   In the final analysis, however, Bills is less concerned with historical memory than he is with historical amnesia. His frustration leaps from the pages of this brief and occasionally repetitive volume as he describes a deceitful official of the Houston County Historical Commission who ignored requests to erect a permanent marker in memory of the incident; indifferent Texas politicians who 'acknowledged' the episode in 2011 with the passage of House Resolution 865 but who, according to the author, should have instead appointed an investigating committee to research the event thoroughly; and the officials of the Museum of East Texas Culture who have provided space for African American exhibits absent any mention of the Slocum Massacre and who appear, according to Bills, much more interested in the 2013 opening of the Confederate Veterans' Memorial Park in downtown Palestine, Texas. For Bills, substantive efforts toward racial reconciliation in post-James Byrd Texas, similar to the proactive steps taken in the past decade in Rosewood and Tulsa, mark the only hope for Texans, southerners and all Americans to remedy the ongoing racial tensions that confront the United States. This volume, accessible to both scholarly and general audiences interested in the history of racial violence, African American history, and Texas history, seeks to assist in that ambitions goal."
James M. SoRelle, Baylor University
JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY, August 2015, Vol. LXXXI, No. 3, p. 756-757.

"Bills' writing style is straightforward andengaging. He's obviously done his homework, and the book includes endnotes andsources. . . It's a good read, an astonishing record of man's inhumanity toman."

from a review entitled "Days of Shame" (by Margaret Allyson) in Fort Worth Weekly, May 28, 2014. 

The most complete account of the Slocum racial strife is E. R. Bills' recent book, The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas. Bills persuasively argues that the earlier figures were inadequate to explain the extent of anti-black violence, as he reports: "The consensus among the descendants of the Slocum Massacre victims is that hundreds died in the bloodshed, and this estimate is not unreasonable. In fact, the evidence clearly suggests it."Bruce A. Glasrud, Anti-Black Violence in Twentieth Century Texas (2015)

About this edition

• Publisher: History Press Library Editions
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 154020958X
• ISBN 13: 9781540209580
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 162