A Hanging in Nacogdoches: Murder, Race, Politics, and Polemics in Texas's Oldest Town, 1870-1916

Introduction

Introduction this is the story of the hanging of a black man in the South for a grisly crime that he almost certainly committed. Whether or not Jim Buchanan was guilty, his execution for the murders of three members of the same family was described many years later by the sheriff who brought him to justice as a “legal lynching.” Buchanan died in the town square of Nacogdoches, which calls itself the “Oldest Town in Texas,” just six days after the bodies of Duncan, Nerva, and Allie Hicks were found in their rural home in the hamlet of Black Jack, twenty- five miles east of Nacogdoches. By the time Buchanan was hanged in front of hundreds of people—a goodly number of whom wanted to skip the legal niceties and burn him alive—his name was a household word across the South. Newspapers breathlessly recounted the desperate measures taken by lawmen to keep Buchanan from the lynch mobs determined to kill the young man—actions taken so that he could be brought back to Nacogdoches and legally executed. This is also an account of race relations, politics, violence, and newspapering during one of the darker periods in southern history—when the promise offered by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation soon turned into bitter fruit, as blacks exchanged one form of bondage for another. The freedmen were no longer physically and legally bound to their masters . But the economic stranglehold of tenant farming and sharecropping meant that, in effect, little had changed. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the few remaining political rights of blacks vanished as well, because Jim Crow laws ruled supreme everywhere south of the MasonDixon Line. For a brief time, however, it appeared that Nacogdoches County— which had once been home to some of the luminaries of the Texas Revolution , though its shining light as a Texas star had long dimmed—would be a leader in a progressive movement that would battle not only to include blacks in the political process but also to push for economic justice for the xii } A Hanging in Nacogdoches have-nots of both races. That movement in Nacogdoches County was led by an East Texas lawman who became a larger-than-life figure during his three-plus decades in politics. His bitterest enemy was the powerful local newspaper editor, and their feud became the stuff of legend. It was a violent, fascinating time in southern history. It is this writer’s hope that this modest account sheds some light on what it was like to live in Deep East Texas in and around the turn of the last century. A Hanging in Nacogdoches THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK ...