Owning our history
Houston should recognize its horrifying past by finding a place for a lynching memorial.
One Saturday night in Houston’s Fourth Ward, a couple of police detectives approached what was later described as “an unruly crowd” gathered at the intersection of Andrews and Genesee Streets.
One of the men in the crowd dropped a pistol on the ground, another man started running and one of the detectives chased him around the corner. A gun battle erupted, a police officer was mortally wounded, and a badly injured suspect was later arrested and hospitalized.
Robert Powell was charged with murder, but he never made it to his trial. Instead, three days after the shooting, a lynch mob armed with pistols stormed into Jeff Davis Hospital, dragged him out of his hospital bed and took him to a wooded area along Post Oak Road near what’s now the West Loop interchange with Interstate 10. His tattered body was found hanging from a bridge on the morning of June 20, 1928.
“Houston has been shamed before the nation,” said a front page editorial published in this newspaper. The killing triggered a wave of outrage not only from the city’s leadership, but also from newspapers and magazines across the country. Five men were arrested, but after the national spotlight dimmed, none of the suspected killers was convicted.
Robert Powell is one of more than 4,000 names etched on steel columns now displayed at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The lynching museum, as it’s better known, opened last month in Montgomery, Ala. Its founders have issued what amounts to a challenge, offering to give duplicate columns from the memorial to communities willing to confront their history of lynching. Houston should accept the invitation, finding a prominent place to display a monument to our county’s lynching victims.
The memorial highlights an era when racial segregation and white supremacy were enforced with horrifying mob violence. Victims were sometimes savagely tortured to death for minor social transgressions. The killings occasionally became public spectacles drawing thousands of jeering and cheering bystanders. A cottage industry produced gruesome postcards bearing photographs of crowds gathered around the maimed bodies of lynching victims.
At the newly opened memorial, victims’ names are engraved on more than 800 columns, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching happened, including Harris, Fort Bend, Montgomery, Galveston and Waller counties in Texas. Those columns hang from the ceiling of the memorial in a graphic representation of dangling corpses.
Outside the memorial, on six acres of park land, lies a field of identical columns, waiting to be claimed by each of the counties they represent. The staff of the Equal Justice Initiative, which maintains the museum, says it’s already having conversations with leaders of dozens of communities interested in moving the columns to their home counties.
Harris County should join that conversation and find an appropriate place in Houston to display the column bearing the names of local lynching victims. The museum’s staff found records of four such murders here in what’s now Texas’ most populous county; the column is engraved with remembrances of Powell, John Walton, Bert Smith and another victim whose name remains unknown.
Indeed, every county in the Houston area should contact the museum and get to work claiming the monuments memorializing their lynching victims. The staff says it works with local partners to find appropriate places to display the columns and help local communities “engage with this history in a constructive and meaningful way.”
Robert Powell’s lynching happened just days before Houston hosted the 1928 Democratic National Convention, which is much of the reason the crime attracted nationwide attention. Now Houston hopes to host another Democratic National Convention in 2020. Claiming Harris County’s column from The National Memorial for Peace and Justice before then would be an altogether appropriate way to confront and remember a dark chapter in our local history.