The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP

Epilogue: “One of the Best Vote-Getters the County Ever Saw”

Epilogue “One of the Best Vote-Getters the County Ever Saw” Old-timers speak of Fleming as one of the best vote-getters the county ever saw. He was a buggy salesman for the McLennan Hardware Co. when he was elected to office 40 years ago. —“Former Sheriff Fleming Buried,” Waco Times Herald 192 A S the outlook for blacks in America improved by degrees over the decades, time passed for all of the reformers—and for the major players in the Waco portion of this story, as well. Some reached ends that fit the lives they led; others suffered or prospered in ways that do not seem to match the part they played. And some ended in unhappy confusion. One who fits into this last category is William English Walling. When America entered World War I in 1917, Walling turned against the Socialist Party and began to write impassioned, feverish articles demanding the suppression of all dissent and opposition to the war effort in the United States and condemning old colleagues as treasonous.1 After the war, his fulltime occupation became attacking evidence of American “bolshevism” everywhere he imagined it to be, even in the pages of the “stodgy” Book Review Digest.2 It was a startling transformation for the man whom Charles Edward Russell had once called “the reincarnation of some old exultant crusader.”3 The magnificent “revolutionary romance” between Walling and his wife was also falling apart.4 Walling had an affair and he and Anna separated bitterly in 1932. In 1936, Walling died suddenly of pneumonia in Amsterdam at the age of fifty-nine. By then the handsome aristocrat, the impassioned, trailblazing reformer, had become an aging, angry man who had betrayed many of his friends and abandoned his family. But Walling had gone to Amsterdam to meet with underground opponents of Hitler who had been smuggled out of Germany, so perhaps a true desire to make the world better, not just more conformist , still burned within him to the very end.5 Moorfield Storey, the elder statesman of the NAACP, died in 1929, as honored in death as he had been in life. Toward the end, in a letter to a friend, Storey expressed in his gentle way his dislike of the modern era and his longing for the world of the nineteenth century. “The world does not seem so good a place as it was in my youth,” he wrote, “before the days of automobiles, radios , enormous wealth, and cheap men in power, but perhaps this feeling is only a sign of age.”6 His comments are poignant and express the focus of his entire life. Storey was still motivated by ideals and appalled by those who were inspired only by the struggle for wealth. And he was still self-deprecating—a man who, in his many political struggles, always fought vigorously for the cause at hand, but never believed that his moral exactitude made him either important or infallible. Oswald Garrison Villard, on the other hand, who never questioned his absolute conviction that he was right, continued to battle fiercely for principle to the end of his life. In 1940, he even abandoned The Nation because he remained a pacifist and was convinced that the rest of the editorial staff had capitulated to warmongering as war broke out and intensified once more in Europe. Villard wrote the editor of The Nation that she had “prostituted” the journal and that he hoped it would “die very soon or fall into other hands.”7 Villard, who had fiercely struggled with his colleagues at the young NAACP, declared later in his life that his involvement with the group was one of the activities of which he was proudest. As he got older and reviewed his life, he even had kind words for his old nemesis Du Bois. In his autobiography, Villard says that the NAACP “was one of the movements which I helped to originate as to which I have no regrets, in which I can take unqualified satisfaction.”8 His list of the names of those who were important in building the NAACP is headed by Du Bois, “so many years the editor of our monthly publication The Crisis.”9 He has even kinder words for Mary White Ovington. “To the Negroes,” he Epilogue 193 says, “she has given the greater part of her life with an...