A century has passed since Scott and Violet Arthur fled Paris, Texas, with their family and headed to Chicago.
Far away from the cotton fields of Northeast Texas, generations of the Arthur descendants were allowed to prosper in the Midwest, free of the burden of a lynching that ripped the family apart and threatened its survival.
The photograph of the Arthurs’ arrival at Chicago’s Polk Street Depot on Aug. 30, 1920, eight weeks after their sons, Irving and Herman, were burned alive became an iconic symbol of the Great Migration. The finely dressed family, with their tattered suitcases, personified the mass movement of African Americans to the North and West in the 1900s to escape the perils of the South.
In Paris, the Arthur brothers’ legacy still looms large. This town, like many in America, has never come to terms with its racist past. It was easier to bury this defining moment in history than reconcile it by bringing it into the open.
Recently, a small group of people with ties to Paris decided it was time to acknowledge the travesty, apologize to the Arthur family and begin moving the town forward. A week ago, they gathered at the regional war memorial to observe the 100th anniversary of the lynching. More than 20 descendants of Scott and Violet Arthur attended.
This was a small step toward bridging the divide that has long separated Black and white people in this semirural town of 25,000 just over an hour’s drive from Dallas. It occurred as many Americans are reexamining the role racism plays in sustaining social injustices that have unfairly burdened Black people for centuries.
Only a handful of Paris residents attended, largely because of social distancing restrictions imposed by COVID-19. But for 87-year-old Rufus Sims, the nephew of the Arthur brothers, the remembrance was momentous.
As one of three surviving grandchildren of Scott and Violet Arthur, along with Dorothy Williams, 93, of Country Club Hills, and Annie Sims, 84, of Atlanta, Sims finds this chapter of his family’s story particularly painful. But he is pleased that it is being told.
“It was a beautiful thing to bring everything out, especially with the way things are going (in America) at this particular time,” said Sims, who was unable to travel to Texas from his home on Chicago’s West Side.
“My uncles were burned up, burned alive in a field because they fought back. A lot of people lost their lives for fighting back. It’s important for the younger generation to understand that.”
The Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization that founded the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, documented 6,500 racial terror lynchings of African Americans across the South between 1865 and 1950. The first lynching in Paris happened in 1893, when Henry Smith was burned alive after being accused of killing a 3-year-old white girl.
Though lynching has been the most terrorizing hate crime against African Americans throughout history, it is not a federal crime in the United States. Nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress during the first half of the 20th century, yet none made it into law. In February, the House passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, named after the Chicago teen murdered while on a visit to Mississippi. But Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky blocked it in the Senate.
As America engages in perhaps the most honest conversation about race since the end of slavery, Paris could offer a guide for communities wishing to discard antiquated social codes that victimize Black people while giving white people an advantage.
The event to mark the lynching of the Arthur brothers was not organized or sanctioned by the city. Most residents were unaware of it beforehand but were invited to watch a livestream on Facebook. The remembrance was the work of a handful of people who decided to take the first step at the risk of being ostracized by some residents who remain reluctant to change.
It was the idea of Melinda Watters, the great-great granddaughter of John H. Hodges, the white landowner whose refusal to release Irving and Herman from sharecropping on his farm precipitated the series of events that led to the lynching.
Watters, 43, said the story of her relatives’ involvement has haunted her since childhood. Though her family maintains that their ancestors were not supportive of the lynching, Watters said, they bear some responsibility.
“They participated and upheld a white culture and system that exploited and oppressed Black people and even questioned their full humanity. I have benefited from that system as well,” said Watters, who grew up in Paris and now lives in Fort Worth. Her parents are still in Paris.
“I don’t know what my great-great-grandfather’s views of the world were or what his views on the Black community were, but my family was part of a perpetuating system of white supremacy. They were trying to keep the family there and used terrorist methods to do it,” she said.
Herman Arthur, 28, returned to Paris on July 5, 1919, after serving in World War I. In the Army, he traveled to parts of the world that others who had spent their lives tending farms in Texas could not imagine. After a year back home, he was no longer content earning near slave wages on the Hodge family farm.
So he convinced his family to leave the farm, where Hodges furnished the tools and mule, and at harvest time, took more than half the crop.
But Hodges, 61, wouldn’t agree to let the family leave. He insisted that the Arthurs owed him money. According to 1920 newspaper reports, he ransacked the Arthurs’ home, while his son, William, 34, held a gun on the family. Days later, as the Arthurs loaded their truck to leave, Hodges returned and began throwing the furniture off the truck.
One of the Arthur brothers went inside, got a shotgun and killed both men. The brothers knew the fate that awaited them, so they fled to Oklahoma, only to be captured and brought back to Texas four days later.
Within hours of their arrival, a mob of 3,000 white people formed and placed signs throughout town announcing that a lynching would take place that evening.
The brothers were taken from the jail to the fairground, where they were chained to a flagpole, tortured, saturated with oil and set on fire. Afterward, the mob chained their charred, smoking bodies to a truck and dragged them for hours though the street.
Meanwhile, their three sisters, while being held in “protective custody” in jail, were beaten and raped by 20 white men, news reports said at the time. Afterward, the women were given a bucket of molasses, a sack of flour and some bacon and told to “hit the road.” They wandered for two nights before reuniting with their family.
Fearing for their lives, the entire family hid in the woods for weeks until the Black Masons lodge raised enough money to get them safely out of town. They boarded a train for Chicago and never looked back.
Janese Walton-Roberts, 47, Scott and Violet Arthur’s great-granddaughter, said the story has been passed down in her family for generations. She spoke at the commemoration on her family’s behalf.
No one ever wanted to go to Paris, she said. But after the recent civil unrest across the country, it seemed like the right time.
“If anything comes out of this, then it was worth it to go back,” said Walton-Roberts, who grew up in Chicago and now lives in Killeen, Texas.
Though they had been in contact with Watters for weeks, the family was unaware that she was a descendant of the Hodgeses until she read a letter apologizing for her family’s role.
“The city never offered any type of apology,” Walton-Roberts said. “I appreciate it because her letter was something that needed to happen.”
In the letter addressed to the Arthur family descendants, Watters did not seek to explain her family’s actions, even though her own relatives had been killed by the Arthur brothers. She acknowledged what her family did and asked for the Arthur family’s forgiveness.
Then she went a step further and described the privilege she experiences by being born to the Hodges family.
“I have lived a lifetime of always receiving the benefit of the doubt. I have never had someone clutch her purse when I walked by in a store due to the color of my skin. When I have been pulled over for a speeding violation, I have always been able to expect that I would likely get off with a warning, a ‘have a good day’ — never the possibility that I would be harmed or unjustly charged or lose my life,” she wrote.
“I am writing you 100 years belated to say that I lament the monstrous lynching and murder of Herman and Irving Arthur. … I admire Herman and Irving’s courage to remove their family from an unjust labor system and sacrificing their lives to do so. I am sorry for the ways the white community, my family and myself have been complicit in both my biases against black people and in accordance with a system that continues to disproportionately allow violence upon their bodies.”
Watters hopes that the event to mark the lynching will start a conversation in Paris, where racial tensions have risen in the aftermath of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. Many young African Americans are frustrated by the lack of advancement in the town and the determination by many white residents to maintain the status quo.
Westley Martin, 29, an African American freelance videographer who organized a Peace and Power rally the day before the Arthur event, described his hometown as a place where many people still have Confederate flags waving on their home or the back of their truck.
There have been three Black Lives Matter protests since Floyd’s death, he said, and each time, white people countered with a Blue Lives Matter event.
“Black people don’t have many opportunities here. It’s like you stay over there and we’ll stay over here,” he said. “But something crazy is happening right now, and people are very vocal and don’t care. It’s like ‘Mississippi Burning’ with a 2020 spin without the Ku Klux Klan.”
Several racial incidents recently put the town on edge. The Rev. Gary Savage, pastor of predominantly Black Mount Pisgah Baptist Church and one of the organizers of the Arthur event, described the climate in Paris right now as “chaotic turmoil.”
Days before the event, a video of an incident in town involving three white adult men and two Black teenagers began circulating. The teens, ages 16 and 17, were walking along when they noticed a man fueling his truck staring at them.
A fight ensued between the man and the 16-year-old. Two other white men approached and ordered the teens to the ground. One had a handgun and the other had an AR-15 rifle. One of the men, who was later found to be a felon, was charged with assault with a deadly weapon.
African Americans are demanding charges be brought against the others as well, but officials say they aren’t warranted.
“Race relations are terrible here,” said Brenda Cherry, 62, a local activist. “But it’s silent and unspoken. Most of the Black people won’t complain openly, so there’s always racial tension.”
But there has been a bright spot, she said. At least half the participants in the Black Lives Matter protests she organized since the Floyd killing have been young white people, unlike previous marches, she said.
Savage said the Arthur event could not have been held at a better time.
“Every time there is racial tension in Paris — and that’s what we’re known for nationwide — the lynchings come up,” Savage said. “It’s a perfect time for healing, and that’s what we’re trying to promote.”
The Rev. Rob Spencer, pastor of the First United Methodist Church, believes that many white people in Paris are ready for change, but they don’t know how to accomplish it.
“We have a lot of work to do on the racial reconciliation front. Much of it is work that most of us are unaware even needs to be done,” said Spencer, who also helped organize the Arthur event.
“Part of the reason people in this area don’t stand up is they don’t believe there are enough willing to stand together. We are hopeful that what we’re doing will allow more people to say, ‘Look, we’ve got to go at this differently and work on these things together.’”
His church, which is 99% white, has a long history in Paris. The Rev. Bob Shuler, the pastor in 1920, is said to have gone to the courthouse and attempted to stop the mob from breaking the Arthur brothers out of jail.
Spencer is hopeful that spirit exists today. It is a good sign, he said, that the group organizing the event was able to raise $10,000 in donations to pay the Arthur family’s travel expenses.
Watters, an artist, presented the family a painting she adapted from the photograph of the Arthurs arriving in Chicago. She also tracked down Herman Arthur’s military records and obtained an official paver commemorating his service. But she has bigger plans.
Her goal over the next six months is to engage residents in the required race and justice dialogue needed to obtain a historical marker from the Equal Justice Initiative, to be placed at the site of the lynching.
It will not be easy.
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“It was a shameful thing in Paris and nobody wants to talk about it. They want to leave it there and never bring it up again,” Watters said. “For us to experience healing, we have to acknowledge what happened and lament the fact that it happened and move forward as a community.
“The story of Paris is the story of our nation. Future generations should have the true version.”
Twitter @dahleeng