Thread by @thatgingerish

On December 14, 1922, two black men were arrested by local police in Pilot Point, Texas, on suspicion that they stole two horses from another black man (Sam Gertin). These men were placed in the Pilot Point jail caboose for the night.

In the morning, the men were gone but a note was left for W.J. Miller, the editor of the @postsignal which read, "Both Negroes got what they had coming. Let this be a warning to all Negro loafers. Negroes get a job or leave town." (Citation: @DentonRC Dec 14, 1922 PM edition)

That night, the members of Klavern 136 abducted and lynched the two men. In the morning, Sheriff Goode and Deputy Nick Akin arrived to investigate the disappearance and found that the jail had been left unguarded and the missing horses were found back where they belonged.

Thanks to an article by @DentonRC on the work of @eji_org to honor the 4500 victims of lynching in the United States, I began a search for the two men taken from jail on 12/14/22. My goal was to give names to their memorial in Alabama...

...I hoped that one day the memorial to these two men who were killed by mob violence might come back home to the cemetery which marks a community of freedmen that lived, worked, and thrived in Pilot Point following emancipation. (2018 article is here: dentonrc.com/news/old-newsp…)

I began a search for articles about the lynching, of which there were surprisingly many. This was because news of the event was run on the @AP wire.

The story made it all the way to @nytimes and @tulsaworld along with the Minnesota Western Appeal, McKinney Courrier, Montgomery Advisor, Wichita Daily Eagle, Buffalo Morning Express, Nebraska State Journal, Indianapolis Star, @startelegram, and the Dallas Express.

So I thought - perhaps the Pilot Point Post Signal can give me a copy of their newspaper from 12/14/22 and inside of it will be the name! No luck. They haven't retained copies from prior to 1975. Maybe the @PilotPointTX library? No copies of the newspaper of record prior to 1964.

So I reached out to the city of Pilot Point. Surely they have some old jail records or police records that can shed light on who was arrested, right? Unfortunately all records pertaining to arrests were stored in a room under the water tower which flooded. #recordloss

So then I cast my net wider. I thought, since @DentonCountyTX sent the sheriff to look into the case, perhaps there would be record of it in arrest records. I cast a big wide FOIA net. I requested all jail and arrest records in Denton County from 1865 to 1925.

Two weeks later I got a reply by email. My request produced zero records.

What?

How?

If no one saved the old government records, how would we ever give names to the two men lynched almost 100 years ago? I asked around. "Where am I not looking?"

After several conversations with historians I respect and trust, it seemed I was looking everywhere.

Turns out, disappearing two black men in 1922 was easier than I had previously thought.

While I was coming to terms with the idea that perhaps no answer would exist, I began an email conversation with my mentor. She said in situations with broad record absence we can "use the silence."

So I started over.

WHO was missing? How could I tell?

I began reading the Denton Record-Chronicle. I started in 1909 and my goal was to pull and include every person of color who was arrested or killed from 1909 to 1925. This turned out to be a much larger task than expected.

About six years into my sixteen-year search I started to see something. Some sort of pattern - an ebb and flow, a build up and release. Arrests and violence were clumped together both geographically and chronologically. I didn't know what that meant, but I knew it meant SOMETHING

Hannah, Emily, and Jessica and I started to arrange the articles into an excel spreadsheet. Hannah started pulling articles related to KKK activities in Denton County during the same time period. She created a second spreadsheet to chronicle the coverage of the klan.

Emily decided to learn more about who the arresting officer were and what the arc of their lives looked like. Jessica organized our madness into a chronological form. What we found was surprising.

Here's a graph of the activity in 1920:

In 1921, as Klan activity rose in preparation for the December 20, 1921 Klan parade (the first to occur in Denton County), so did arrests, violence, and homicides:

The pattern fell into even greater sync in 1922 as we approached the December 14, 1922 lynching of two men in Pilot Point:

A few weeks ago, we shared these findings with @DaveLieber from @dallasnews who saw what we saw. His article on our findings is available online here:

dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/…

We continue to work with Chelsea Stallings, Shaun Treat, and @eji_org as well as cannot wait to see the results of the comprehensive study of the Denton County klan by Jessica Luther Rummel. It has been our pleasure to work together with Willie Hudspeth, a longtime advocate for..

Equality in Denton County. We provided preliminary findings to @Shanesilagi for use in his upcoming documentary entitled "Crossroads" (which can be accessed here: vimeo.com/300872164?fbcl…)

And lastly, we have been working with @DentonCountyTX commissioner's court on the restoration of St. John's cemetery as well as the Denton County Office of History and Culture on securing a permanent historical marker in the cemetery.

We continue to seek ways to engage the people of Denton County, the State of Texas, and the nation on the preservation of records and the importance of unearthing the complete and shared history of our American communities during the Jim Crow Era. /end