In 1919 Longview was a cotton and lumber town of about 5,700 people, 1,790 of them Black. Two of its Black leaders were Samuel L. Jones, a teacher and agent for Black newspapers, and Dr. Calvin P. Davis, a physician. They belonged to a local chapter of the Booker T. Washington Black Businessmen League and urged Black farmers to sell to Galveston buyers instead of white cotton brokers.
Lemuel Walters
In June two white men from Kilgore whipped a Black Longview man, Lemuel Walters, for alleged indecent advances toward their sister, and he was jailed. On June 17 a mob took him from the Gregg County jail and shot him dead. Accounts differ on Sheriff D. S. Meredith's part. Jones, Davis and nine others asked County Judge E. M. Bramlette to investigate, and no investigation followed.
Then the Chicago Defender printed an unsigned story, dated July 5 or July 10 in different accounts, saying Walters's only offense was being loved by a white woman and that the sheriff had let the mob in. Local whites blamed Jones, the paper's correspondent. He denied writing it.
The house on Harrison Street
On July 10 the woman's brothers reportedly beat Jones across from the courthouse, and Davis treated him in his office. Officials, including Mayor G. A. Bodenheim, advised both men to leave town. They stayed, and about twenty-five Black men guarded Jones's house. Around midnight twelve to fifteen white men, by one count, came to the house and were met with gunfire. Three of them took birdshot, none seriously.
Before dawn a white crowd, estimated at a hundred to nearly a thousand, gathered at the fire station, and some broke into a hardware store for guns. Near four o'clock the crowd burned Jones's empty house, then Davis's home and office, a dance hall and other Black homes.
Governor William P. Hobby sent eight Rangers under Capt. W. M. Hanson and about a hundred Guardsmen. On Saturday, July 12, Sheriff Meredith went to the home of Marion Bush, a sixty-year-old Kelly Plow Company worker and Davis's father-in-law. Bush fled, and he was killed in a cornfield. One historian's research names a farmer, Jim Stephens, as the man who shot him. The Dallas Morning News reported armed white citizens. Whether the sheriff meant to protect or arrest him is not settled.
Hobby declared martial law from noon on July 13 under Brig. Gen. R. H. McDill, with a curfew. Residents turned in an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 guns. It ended on July 18.
What followed
Rangers arrested sixteen or seventeen white men for attempted murder and nine for arson, and all were released on $1,000 bonds. Twenty-one Black men were arrested and sent to Austin. No one was ever tried. The same historian suggests officials wished to avoid trials before all-white juries.
Davis left by train disguised as a soldier. He and Jones reached Chicago, and on August 18 they described the events to the NAACP's John R. Shillady; a summary appeared in The Crisis that October.
The 1919 Longview Race Riot marker stands on the Courthouse Square in Longview, open to anyone who wants to read the story in the town where it happened.