October 21, 1921

This page is under construction

According to newspaper reports, two teenagers broke into the home of Sam Norrod on Wednesday, October 19, 1921, while he and his family lay asleep. The young men did not take any property and the only evidence of their presence was the testimony of Mary Norrod, thirteen-year-old daughter of Sam, who asserted visually witnessing two young invaders in her home before their empty-handed departure.

The following morning, based upon the description provided by Mary Norrod, two Black teenagers were arrested and placed into jail in Pilot Point under suspicion of “immoral conduct involving white women.” With no property missing, no additional witnesses, and no evidence, the detention of the youths was wholly based upon a thirteen-year-old's sleepy recollection of Black figures in the night rather than any reported interaction between the three teenagers. Facts not withstanding, the legal suspicion announced by law enforcement indicated Pilot Point police suspected rape was the goal of the Black teens and that their target was a young white girl. 

The suspects were not charged with a crime but were forced to remain in the small jail while the police investigated. If evidence of rape had emerged (or if the prisoners had confessed to the crime), the young men were to be charged by the county attorney and transferred to county jail in Denton where they would be protected until their trials; however, no confession occurred and evidence of a crime simply did not exist. As the sun set on the second day of investigation, law enforcement officials from Pilot Point and Denton County delayed announcement of their lack of evidence, declared the investigation incomplete, and held the young men uncharged in the unguarded Pilot Point jail overnight. 

At 11:10pm, three vehicles approached the downtown square and parked near the jail. Several members of the Ku Klux Klan exited the vehicles, but darkness hid any distinguishing features, such as masks, that might have otherwise identified the kidnappers to the many onlookers in town who heard the cars approach. Only minutes after they arrived, the faceless mob entered the unguarded jail and captured the defenseless teens. The prisoners were loaded into one of the cars, which immediately departed for the remote pasture north of town owned by influential Pilot Point banker, Joe B. Burks. There they met up with twelve other vehicles, waiting.

Before the mob went home for the night, they made their way to the opposite end of the town square where they tacked a message, written on the back of a white envelope, to the door belonging to the editor of the Pilot Point Post-Signal, W. J. Miller. The note was clearly visible when Miller opened the office door on the morning of Friday, October 21, 1921. Scrawled in pencil across the white paper was a message left for Miller’s dissemination: “Yes we did it -- applied the lash. This should be a warning to all loafers and lawbreakers. K. K. K.”

While in the custody of the mob, the young men were beaten. The extent to which the teens were brutalized by the faceless assailants beyond “flogging” has been erased from historical records; however, based upon similar reports a year later, it is likely that the two young men were lynched by forty members of the Denton Ku Klux Klan. While many of the records that could traditionally tell the story of their ultimate fate have been destroyed, the pattern of violence in Denton County during the rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan is sufficient to establish that, on October 20, 1921, Klavern 136 lynched two young Black men.