In the Tall grass west of town
My master’s thesis, “In The Tall Grass West of Town: Racial Violence in Denton County During the Rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan” (2020), examines lynching and non-lynching racial violence in Denton County, Texas, between 1920 and 1926, tracing the entanglement of local law enforcement with Klavern 136, the Denton County Klan. Against a historiography that lets a narrow definition of "lynching" screen out comparable violence, it identifies a category of unresolved cases I term "disappearances" and argues for their inclusion in the Jim Crow-era record of anti-Black violence. Framed by a prologue and epilogue on the rise and dissolution of the St. John's community in Pilot Point, the thesis moves from a definitional literature review through the county's lynching pattern, the jail's complicity, and a periodization of violent "seasons" toward that final argument for the disappeared.
After I finished “In The Tall Grass West of Town”, I built an omeka-powered digital hybrid project to return the sources to the community from which they came.
Rethinking Violence is the repository of 993 items with full metadata and five public history exhibits which translate much of my research into racial violence in Denton County into material better-suited for popular reading.
Learn more about Rethinking Violence and my other digital humanities projects here.
“The institutional power expressed in our present definition of violence is observable through the destruction of records. In the search for Ennis Johnson’s fate (along with the names of the men lynched in 1921 and 1922), I made sweeping record requests from law enforcement. First, I requested law enforcement records from the City of Pilot Point, but the records had been stored in a room underneath the water tower and so they became wet and destroyed. Second, I requested all records from the Denton County Sheriff’s Department between 1865 and 1930, but they could not find any records which fit my criteria. I was informed that all Sheriff’s Department records prior to the early 1950s had been destroyed because the county is not statutorily required to retain them. When I followed up with a request for records about the destruction, I was similarly met with zero records responsive to my request. Third, I contacted the Pilot Point Post-Signal for copies of its newspaper from the 1920s and found the newspaper had zero copies of their own publication prior to the 1970s. I followed this request by asking the Library of Pilot Point for their newspaper copies from the 1920s, but the City of Pilot Point does not have copies of their newspaper of record prior to 1964. Lastly, I requested legal records from the City of Pilot Point who informed me that they might have some copies of tickets from the 1920s locked in a vault and that they would get back with me shortly, but that the remainder of their judicial records had also been destroyed. They never called me back. These events draw to mind the series of fires on Denton’s square in the early history of the county. More so, in the 1920s, buildings which held records of the Ku Klux Klan in Denton were incinerated. If historians lean in to record loss, a narrative becomes clear from the spaces where records belong that are, instead, left blank. As the adage goes, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”