On May 3, 1930, George Hughes, a 41-year-old Black farmhand from Honey Grove, was accused of assaulting a white woman at a farm southeast of Sherman. He had lived in Grayson County about two months and said he had gone there to collect wages her husband owed him. He fired at the men who chased him, then surrendered. A grand jury indicted him on May 5, and trial was set for Friday, May 9. Rumors that the woman had been mutilated spread through town; medical examinations showed they were false.
The ninth of May
Captain Frank Hamer of the Texas Rangers brought Hughes to the courthouse that morning. A crowd came from across North Texas and southern Oklahoma, counted at three thousand by one newspaper and at more than five thousand by later accounts. At noon, with the jury sworn, Hughes pleaded guilty. Minutes later the crowd forced the courtroom doors. The rangers used tear gas, and Hughes was moved into the district clerk's vault. Hamer told Judge R. M. Carter he did not think the trial could go on in Sherman without bloodshed.
About 2:30 two youths threw a can of gasoline through a window, and the mob cut the firemen's hoses. By one account Hughes chose to stay in the vault when deputies offered to bring him out. Guardsmen sent by Governor Dan Moody were driven back to the jail. Just before midnight the mob opened the vault with dynamite and acetylene torches. Accounts differ on how Hughes died.
Mulberry and Branch
His body was taken to the corner of Mulberry and Branch, the heart of Sherman's Black business district, hanged from a tree and burned. The mob then burned the buildings around it and kept firemen away. By daybreak most Black-owned businesses were gone: a hotel, a drugstore, a movie house, a restaurant, a barbershop, two undertaking parlors, and the offices of a dentist, a doctor and the civil rights lawyer William J. Durham. Insurance policies excluded riot damage. Many Black residents fled. With the Black undertakers burned out, a white undertaker took Hughes's body, and he was buried that morning at the county farm in an unmarked grave. People who lived there said the district was never rebuilt.
The reckoning
Two hundred and twenty-five guardsmen arrived on May 10. That night Moody declared martial law at the request of fifty community leaders, and soldiers were ordered to shoot anyone trying to burn Black-owned property. A grand jury returned seventy indictments against fourteen men on May 20. None was for lynching. One man, J. B. McCasland of Sherman, was convicted of arson in 1931 and of rioting, two years for each; charges against the others were dismissed by 1932. No one was tried for killing Hughes.
The Commission on Interracial Cooperation asked its Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching to examine the twenty-one lynchings of 1930. Its 1931 report found that Sherman had felt the Depression more sharply than comparable Texas towns.
The courthouse on Houston Street was rebuilt after the fire and finished in 1936. A state marker on its grounds, the Sherman Riot of 1930, was unveiled on the courthouse steps in March 2025.