"Where the Bodies are Buried"

Texas Observer
05/1/2020

In 1910, East Texas saw one of America’s deadliest post-Reconstruction racial purges. By most accounts, mobs murdered as many as 50 black people in a small town called Slocum. The massacre shocked the country and was covered by local and national news media. But the outrage was short-lived.

Within a year, the criminal prosecutions of seven white men indicted for the killings had fizzled. Then a fire at the courthouse destroyed case records. The event largely disappeared from history—until five years ago. That’s when Constance Hollie-Jawaid, a descendant of one of the survivors, applied for a historical marker honoring Slocum’s victims. Local leaders decried her efforts, calling the idea “blackmail by shame.” They were unable to block the plaque completely, but it officially acknowledges only eight victims.

After the marker was finalized, Hollie-Jawaid felt that officials had only recognized a sanitized version of the story. So she turned her attention to the bodies.

Hollie-Jawaid believes some of the dead are buried on a property in Slocum, and she’s intent on finding the lost graves. But local leaders and landowners have refused to help. “The question that they all had was, ‘Are you going to take my land?’,” she told Texas Observer reporter Michael Barajas.

In his story, “Where the Bodies Are Buried,” Barajas explains how the fight to remember Slocum dovetails with a broader push to address the country’s racist past and the profound resistance by communities unwilling to confront their legacy of racial terror.

“They’re not interested in these bodies,” Hollie-Jawaid told Barajas. “These bodies only matter to us. Apparently their lives only mattered to people like us.” This proclamation—both true and shameful—is what moved the Observer to tell Hollie-Jawaid’s story, so people understand why lives lost more than 100 years ago still matter today.

Instead of sticking to the narrative offered by officials and a marker full of half-truths, Barajas went back to re-examine history from the viewpoint of some of its victims. Unfortunately, 110 years later, this is an innovation--and that’s part of the tragedy that continues to unfold in Slocum.

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Submitted by Michael Kanin.