Monument to a forgotten ‘war’
Statue a symbol of Richmond’s historic divide
RICHMOND — The obelisk looms largely unnoticed beside City Hall.
Few know the story it commemorates. No plaque explains what is left untold. A notation at the base reads, “OUR HEROES.”
Its support for three men who died championing white supremacy is all but lost to history.
While debate over Confederate statues is sweeping the nation, not all monuments enshrining racist beliefs have yet been caught in its wake.
In Richmond, a small but growing city 30 miles southwest of Houston, no one is demanding removal of the obscure obelisk. Some residents believe their fellow townspeople are too scared to take action, or don’t believe in capacity for change. Others see it differently.
“It’s sort of been forgotten,” said Mayor Evalyn Moore, who is white. “It doesn’t have any significance anymore.”
Fast-growing Fort Bend County stakes its reputation on its diverse population. At last count, more than half of Richmond’s 11,679 residents were Latino, a quarter were white and nearly one-fifth were black.
Still, the city is far from integrated — and far from unified.
“Go stranger and to the Jaybirds tell, that for their country’s freedom they fell”
Several black residents said that, of course, they would like to see the statue go. Others saw no reason to revisit the past.
“Black people have been wishing things were different ever since there was existence,” said James Foley, 71. “It is what it is.”
Some white residents, meanwhile, contend the obelisk is not about race. They believe it stands in homage to men who kept corruption out of government.
“They fought for what they believed in,” said Becky Haas, 59, a white Richmond native who sits on the city historical commission and offers ghost tours from her antique shop.
The divisions can be seen clearly, however, if one knows where to look. The brick mansions on a hill are occupied by prominent white residents, including the mayor. The historically black Freedmen’s Town is down below. The neighborhood north of the railroad tracks, bounded by the Brazos River, is home to mostly black and Hispanic residents.
Then there is the monument standing watch by City Hall, free of public protest.
Walking through history
Richmond today can feel like a place stuck in time. In ways, that is intentional. It’s a city that respects its history, where leaders made efforts to preserve their heritage.
Members of Stephen F. Austin’s famous “Old 300” first settled there in 1822 in the bend of the Brazos River. Some of their descendants remain residents today.
Buildings and homes owned by the town’s earliest residents still stand. There is a cottage that once belonged to Jane Long, known as the mother of Texas. And the home of John M. Moore Sr., a state legislator and congressman whose late grandson, Hilmar, served as Richmond’s mayor for 63 years — the longest mayoral tenure in the country. A shining statue of the younger Moore also stands by City Hall; the current mayor was his wife.
A brochure for a historical walking tour traces each stop. A church founded in 1839. The Fort Bend County Courthouse built in 1908, with its statue of former Richmond resident Mirabeau B. Lamar, a one-time president of the Republic of Texas.
Joseph’s coffee shop, established in 1903 as a retail business, sits at one end of nearby Morton Street. Men meet there to smoke cigars in a back room. Nearby is the Morton Masonic Lodge, located there since at least 1913.
The Richmond Barber Shop operates a few blocks down, as it has for more than 100 years, marked by a candy-striped pole. Owner A.D. Eversole, 77, has looked out the shop windows at a street largely unchanged since he began there as a barber in the 1960s. The late mayor routinely came in for a haircut and beard trim.
“It still is Richmond,” he said. “We still have something a little different.”
Farther along, the walking tour mentions the home of one freed slave. Several sites across the tracks are also listed — the cemetery, the former county jail and the old train depot, among them.
The tour lists the monument at City Hall, too, calling it “a tribute to those who lost their lives in a political feud.”
Jaybird Woodpecker War
The Jaybird Woodpecker monument, as it’s known, pays homage to three men: H. H. Frost, L.E. Gibson and J.M. Shamblin.
Together, the trio supported the so-called Jaybirds, a group that jockeyed for power in Richmond in the years following the end of the Civil War. Jaybirds, many of whose fathers and grandfathers had fought for the Confederacy, permitted only white men to hold local political office.
Their opponents, known as the Woodpeckers, allowed former slaves to run in elections. The Woodpeckers swept elections in the predominantly black county.
Tensions increased. The killings began, according to historians.
Shamblin became the first Jaybird to die, shot in August 1888, allegedly by a black man accused of stealing Shamblin’s cotton. Gibson died next, in June 1889, murdered by a Woodpecker.
Conflict built — and then erupted. The results would lay the political foundation for generations to come.
The storied Jaybird-Woodpecker shoot-out occurred Aug. 16, 1889, at the monument’s location on Morton Street.
The Jaybirds won, but Frost, the third and last name on the monument, died from his wounds. As the story goes, he asked on his death bed for the monument to be erected.
And so the statue was unveiled March 18, 1896, according to local author and researcher Pauline Yelderman. It rises from a pedestal, topped with a stone bird figurine.
“These brave and noble sons of Fort Bend County, whose names are here enshrined, gave their lives in order that the people of this county might have a just, honest, and capable county government,” the inscription reads, “and their fellow citizens have reared this monument to their memory and as a promise to them that their principles shall be maintained for all time to come.”
From time to time, storms have knocked the bird off its perch at the monument’s top. It has always been replaced.
Differing viewpoints
Historian Haas knows the story of the Jaybird-Woodpecker War by heart.
She can imagine the day of the shoot-out. The dirt roads. The horses.
The aftermath is something of which she is not proud and was not right, admits Haas, an Old 300 descendant. But she urges people not to jump to conclusions. Race was not the central issue, she says. White men fought other white men.
“You have to have an open mind,” she said recently at her antique store, Jay-Wood Trading Co. “You have to think about it.”
Yelderman, the local author, described the Jaybirds as “courageous and determined white men whose efforts brought honest and decent government to Fort Bend County.” Her 1979 book includes details provided by local residents, newspaper clippings and records.
Rice University graduate student Leslie Lovett, in her 1994 master’s thesis, argued another take, based on newspapers, books, articles and other accounts. Lovett found that the conflict has more to do with race than corruption. The war, she wrote, “brought a violent end to a unique twenty-year period of biracial government in Fort Bend County, notable for outlasting Reconstruction in the rest of the former Confederacy.”
After the shoot-out, a Jaybird primary preceded the Democratic primary, so only white men could participate. As a result, only white men could hold county office.
“They held their political power like that for the next 60 years,” Fort Bend History Association Chief Curator Chris Gobold said.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the practice in 1953, saying Jaybirds illegally denied political participation based on race.
The Jaybirds disbanded, leaving their remaining funds to the museum. Today, it displays a small diorama of the fight.
“Fort Bend County has an extremely rich, and at times violent, history,” the display concedes.
Life across the tracks
A racial divide in Richmond today remains obvious but complex. Morton Street, where the statue stands, illustrates it well. Many white clientele fill establishments like the famed lunch spot Sandy McGee’s, while black residents gather nightly behind it and across the railroad tracks to play dominoes on a concrete slab.
Sixty-one-year-old Debrah Cobbin, who is black, arrived at the slab Wednesday evening, dancing as she stepped out of her car. She wholeheartedly supports the mayor, who is white. Cobbin’s mother once worked for the mayor’s family. And making improvements in the city takes time.
“We are family, we are family here in Richmond,” Cobbin said.
The slab is all that remains of a stretch of black-owned businesses known as “mud alley,” which nearby residents say was cleared in an effort to rid the area of drugs.
The community held a funeral for it.
Addressing the drug issue marked a step in the right direction, but residents in largely black and Latino North Richmond still lack city improvements, explained residents Henry Wilkerson Jr., 55, and Henry Bonner Jr., 75.
Sitting on Bonner’s porch as a slight breeze cut through the heat Wednesday, the pair listed the problems. Without sidewalks, kids had to walk on the streets, lined by ditches on either side. Cars whizzed so quickly down one thoroughfare that they refer to it as “little 59.”
An overpass crossing the river around them has yet to be built, leaving the only way in and out of the neighborhood over the railroad tracks.
Stray dogs wander the streets. Homes sit vacant. They have no fire station, but they do have the police department and its jail.
The community endures the burden so well that it appears they don’t see the issues, said Curtis Ray Lucas, 65, the pastor of First Mount Carmel Baptist Church, which dates to 1865.
“We make it,” Lucas said. “We just help each other and go on.”
Wilkerson and Bonner felt an anger their neighbors perhaps didn’t share. Residents didn’t mobilize to vote in May for a black mayoral candidate, whom Wilkerson, Bonner and Lucas supported. People remain in a “slavery mindset,” resigned to how things are, Bonner said.
“It never evolves,” Bonner said. “It just revolves.”
Neither Lucas, Bonner nor Wilkerson much like the Jaybird statue. It wasn’t at the top of their concerns.
Wilkerson laughs when he talks about the monument and other inequities.
Otherwise, he said, he’d cry.
“Black people have been wishing things were different ever since there was existence. It is what it is.” James Foley, 71