East Texas town struggles with the past

They’ve cut down the lynching tree on the town square.

It has no place in modern, progressive Center, a Shelby County hamlet 17 miles from the Louisiana line. Neither do the nagging memories of Jim Crow days — a time when African-Americans were accorded “back door” service at local restaurants, barred from good seats at the downtown picture show and menaced with potential violence whenever they forgot themselves and their decidedly inferior “place.”

Today, Center residents, white and black, like to describe their town, population 5,100, as a sylvan paradise where “big city blues melt away.”

“This is the best little town in Texas,” said Jerry Lathan, 67, one of two African-Americans on the City Council. “Those old days have changed so much.”

But even as the Piney Woods town, home to roughly equal populations of Anglos, blacks and Hispanics, moves into the 21st century, the specter of racial animosity lingers.

Now, at a time when President Barack Obama goes to Charleston, S.C., a bastion of the Deep South, to deliver the funeral eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, the pastor and state senator killed with eight others by a white gunman during Bible study, Center residents join Americans everywhere in grappling with a seemingly irreconcilable legacy of racism and slavery.

“Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives – you know that casts a long shadow,” the nation’s first African-American president observed in the days after the Charleston murders at the historic Emanuel AME Church. “And that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.”

In Center, an East Texas trade hub where more than 1 in 5 lives in poverty, recent national events — deadly encounters between white police officers and black men, the Charleston deaths, contention over the Confederate flag on South Carolina’s State House grounds — have resonated deeply.

“You really have to talk about it, bring it out,” said Y.D. Jackson Jr., 60, an African-American, speaking of his hometown and the nation. “It’s something you can’t hide no more. It’s here and here to stay unless we start dealing with it.”

Bishop W.C. Martin of Bennett Chapel Baptist Church, a black church, said: “This is kind of like having slavery back. Racism is like the bull coming out of the closet, finally coming out and sitting on the front porch. It’s been there all the time.”

Unchecked, he said, racism might generate another “civil war.”

It took a long time for Center residents to forget the first Civil War.

Settled by Southern immigrants and established in 1836, Shelby County quickly became a center of slave-fueled agriculture. In 1860, six years before Center became the county seat, more than 1 in 4 people in the county was a slave. Residents voted 333-28 to join the Confederacy; 750 fought with rebel armies.

The Rev. Michael Hale, the white pastor of First Baptist Church, said that when he prepared to move to the deep East Texas town from Corpus Christi 10 years ago, friends warned him that he was moving to a racist part of the state. “I just told them, ‘Maybe that’s where God wants me to go?’” he said.

While Hale acknowledged that nationally “racism is alive and well” and that it “cuts both ways,” he said he found Center surprisingly unbiased.

“Personally,” he said, “I never see ‘problems,’ I just see people. Often we tend to look at people who are different from us and we’re afraid. Why don’t we just get to know them?”

Hale said he has endeavored to build racial bridges. On one occasion, he hosted an African-American evangelist at his predominantly white church. Only one church member failed to attend.

Hale said he endeavored to “reach out and shake a hand.”

“The church is on the cutting edge in solving racism,” he said. “In 42 years as a pastor, I just wish that I had done more.”

A friend of Hale’s, the Rev. Robert Gipson, pastor of Mount Zion CME, an African-American congregation, said more needs to be done — locally and nationally — to ease racial friction.

“I think that in this small town we still have division,” he said. Nationally, his concerns are legion. “The playing field’s not level. We have to make change come.” Regarding the Charleston tragedy, he said: “Look at this Rebel flag. This has been inflicted on us as pain and anger. They need to take the thing off the pole and put it in a museum.”

When Gipson’s church recently marked its 139th anniversary, he invited Mayor David Chadwick, who is white, to address his congregation to help end blacks and whites “living at a distance.”

Chadwick, a town bank president, said he believes that Center’s race relations are good but deplored national events that have roiled racial waters.

Yet, from the gravest tragedy, he suggested, good might emerge.

The stricken congregation of Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, he said, has served as a model for the nation. “They’ve shown that they are a very forgiving congregation,” he said.

Eula White, 97, a longtime schoolteacher and widow of Center’s first African-American councilman, Marcellus White, said recent national events have left her troubled. “I wish I had the answer,” she said.

Still — as Obama did after the South Carolina killings — White acknowledged that over the long term, progress toward racial harmony has been achieved.

“It’s so much better than it used to be,” she said. “I don’t have problems in Center with any of the races. I really don’t.”

When her late husband first ran for office in the 1970s, though, she said, conditions for African-Americans living in a neighborhood bordering what is now Martin Luther King Street were primitive. “He wanted people to have what people in other neighborhoods had,” she said. “We didn’t have water or gas.”

Councilman Lathan noted that as recently as the 1960s, many black residents were had to use water wells. “We had outhouses in the ’60s,” he said.

Lathan, who returned to his hometown five years ago after living in Austin, Dallas and Shreveport, commended the city for making street improvements in black neighborhoods. Blacks have consistently been members of the City Council for 25 years, he said.

Still, he said, challenges loom. Blacks, he said, still are underrepresented at the police and sheriff’s departments. More attention needs to be placed on developing parks. Low-income housing desperately is needed.

He expressed confidence that the council, working with Center’s mayor and city manager, will succeed in addressing the problems. “We can work together whatever the challenges,” he said.

Nationally, he believes that Obama has moved blacks and whites toward racial harmony. “The president has had great influence,” Lathan said. “His change is felt. We now have a better way to live.” He is heartened, too, by the racial tolerance apparent in younger Americans. “There’s coming a day when the color of your skin won’t matter more than the color of your eyes. It’s already starting. We have a little more to go.”

Lathan’s optimism, though, was tempered by experience.

“There is still a lot of hatred out there,” he said. As a youth, he recalled the indignities of the Jim Crow era. And he clearly remembered a horrific photograph once shown him by a relative.

The image depicted the Aug. 3, 1920, lynching of Lige Daniels, a black 16-year-old black accused of murdering a white woman. In the picture, commercially reproduced as a postcard, a barefoot Daniels — one of 339 Texas blacks lynched between 1885 and 1942 — is shown hanging from a tree in the town square. Around him are many of the approximately 1,000 locals who had pulled him from his cell in the nearby Shelby County Jail.

Bennett Chapel’s Martin believes the attack on black worshippers in Charleston indicates that little has changed since Daniels’ murder. Nationally, he said, Obama’s election, viewed by many as a sign of racial healing, instead triggered a rebirth of racial animosity.

“Obama never was supposed to happen,” he said. “That started the retaliation. It has to stem from somewhere. People never wanted to accept a black person because he is black.”

Martin said he believes unchecked racism can lead to catastrophe. But he added: “It can stop today. We can start to love one another. It’s not a hard job to do. If you don’t love me, you better not die. God sent his Son, Jesus, to die for all humans. He will not tolerate people to be hated for the color of their skin.”

Racial healing, said Y.D. Jackson, who works for Triumph the Church & Kingdom of God in Christ, “must start in the church. Black preachers, white preachers have got to talk. We’ve got to communicate with each other. We’ve got a long way to go.”

Asked about the events in Charleston and the president’s eulogy at Pinckney’s funeral, he grew solemn.

“Man,” he said, “I was sad. I hated that, all those people getting killed in that church.”

Jackson stopped talking, his head pitched forward onto the table and he broke into convulsive sobs.

This story was originally published July 4, 2015 at 7:17 PM with the headline "East Texas town struggles with the past."