Longview Race Riot of 1919
10 - 18 July 1919Longview, Gregg County, TX
Two Black leaders in Longview told cotton farmers to sell direct to Galveston buyers and bypass the local white brokers. A white mob burned their homes and a Black dance hall; the state put the county under martial law, and nobody was tried.
Longview was a cotton and lumber town of 5,700 people in north-east Texas in 1919, nearly a third of them Black. Samuel L. Jones, a teacher and the local correspondent for the Chicago Defender, and Dr. Calvin P. Davis, a Black physician, had been urging Black farmers to stop selling through the town's white cotton brokers and deal directly with buyers in Galveston. That was the grievance underneath what followed.
The immediate trigger was a story. On 17 June a white mob had murdered Lemuel Walters, a young Black man held in the Gregg County jail, after the sheriff handed him over. The Chicago Defender's issue of 10 July reported the killing and said that Walters and a white woman from Kilgore had been in love. Jones was held responsible for the article and beaten that day by two of the woman's brothers. Around one in the morning twelve to fifteen white men drove to Jones's house and were met with gunfire; three of them took superficial birdshot wounds. The mob burned Jones's house, Davis's house, other Black homes, and a Black dance hall they suspected of holding ammunition. On Saturday evening Marion Bush, Davis's father-in-law, was killed after fleeing Sheriff D. S. Meredith.
County Judge E. M. Bramlette and Sheriff Meredith telephoned Governor William P. Hobby, who sent eight Texas Rangers, then a hundred National Guardsmen, then a hundred and fifty more, and placed Longview and Gregg County under martial law from noon on Sunday 13 July until noon on Friday 18 July. Seventeen white men were arrested for attempted murder and released on a thousand dollars' bond; nine were charged with arson. Twenty-one Black men were arrested and sent to Austin, for their own safety. None of them, white or Black, was ever tried.
Marion Bush was killed during the riot. Lemuel Walters, whose lynching three weeks earlier set it off, is not counted here. No tally of the homes burned survives.
Sources
- The Longview Race Riot of 1919Handbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Associationtshaonline.orgKen Durham's entry: the cotton dispute, the Defender article, the arson, Marion Bush's death, the martial law dates and the arrests that produced no trials.
- RiotsHandbook of Texas, Texas State Historical Associationtshaonline.orgPlaces Longview among the Texas riots of the period.
- Racial Massacres and the Red Summer of 1919: A Resource GuideLibrary of Congressguides.loc.gov