Disappearance
During the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, most racial violence in Denton County did not fit neatly into the definition of lynching. Neither Burl Stephens nor the members of the Johnson family were lynched according to any version of the definition. Even still, the documented lynchings in Denton County are missing proof of death and therefore were likely excluded by contemporaneous lynching counts. Through the wholesale purchase of lynching as the singular type of terrorism wielded against Black Americans in Jim Crow, historians allow the perpetrators to re-define reality based upon their own propaganda. The requirement of proof of a victim’s death allows the perpetrators to silence violence entirely through the omission of essential documentary evidence such as a death certificates, press reports, and justice system records. As a result, in the status quo, the narrative of racial violence is still defined by actions taken in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan. Without a broader term unencumbered by restrictive technicality, historians will never approach the breadth of violence committed against Black citizens during the Jim Crow Era.
The institutional power expressed in our present definition of violence is observable through the destruction of records. In the search for Ennis Johnson’s fate (along with the names of the men lynched in 1921 and 1922), I made sweeping record requests from law enforcement. First, I requested law enforcement records from the City of Pilot Point, but the records had been stored in a room underneath the water tower and so they became wet and destroyed. Second, I requested all records from the Denton County Sheriff’s Department between 1865 and 1930, but they could not find any records which fit my criteria. I was informed that all Sheriff’s Department records prior to the early 1950s had been destroyed because the county is not statutorily required to retain them. When I followed up with a request for records about the destruction, I was similarly met with zero records responsive to my request. Third, I contacted the Pilot Point Post-Signal for copies of its newspaper from the 1920s and found the newspaper had zero copies of their own publication prior to the 1970s. I followed this request by asking the Library of Pilot Point for their newspaper copies from the 1920s, but the City of Pilot Point does not have copies of their newspaper of record prior to 1964. Lastly, I requested legal records from the City of Pilot Point who informed me that they might have some copies of tickets from the 1920s locked in a vault and that they would get back with me shortly, but that the remainder of their judicial records had also been destroyed. They never called me back. These events draw to mind the series of fires on Denton’s square in the early history of the county. More so, in the 1920s, buildings which held records of the Ku Klux Klan in Denton were incinerated. If historians lean in to record loss, a narrative becomes clear from the spaces where records belong that are, instead, left blank. As the adage goes, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
There is a complex code of silence surrounding racial violence in Denton County. Privately, the Black community was all too aware of the crimes committed against itself and yet, a public silence was required by the white supremacist power structure. The same dichotomy is observable in the white population. The perpetrators of racial violence were members of the white community and therefore knew of the crimes as they were committed; however, like the masked costume of the Ku Klux Klan, white knowledge of these crimes was capped. It does not appear to this researcher that anyone discussed racial violence in Denton County in a public forum during the 1920s. This divide between private and public acknowledgement has led to a modern ignorance of local racial terrorism. Yet, despite the best efforts of white supremacist sympathizers at containment, the truth leaks out through folklore. Stories like that of the Goatman signal to a violent past without direct indictment of the participants.
Even in the articles available from local newspapers, evidence of a crime is opaque. Careful work was done to side-step the term lynching. Whether the goal of this action was to avoid martyrdom of the victim or avoid the negative publicity associated with being a lynching town, the impact is the same on historical records. Similarly, reliance on a white newspaper to honestly depict acts of racial violence -- especially those at the hands of law enforcement -- is a dishonest practice. Black newspapers existed, but rarely focused on singular violent incidents, and generally missed reporting acts of violence in rural Texas. “[H]e who counts heads always silences facts and voices. “Silences,” Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds us, “are inherent in the creation of sources.” Without a broader term, the narrative of a white press prevails and will continue to define our historical understanding of the Jim Crow South.
To combat the bias inherent in newspaper and local record accounts of Jim Crow violence, I have paid a great deal of attention to silence. This has required reading newspaper accounts, not just at face value, but also comparative to other articles in the same publication on similar topics. For example, I found that names were included as a rule and so I noted instances where the identity of the victim was obscured. It is through this similar method that I built a list of all individuals who had justice system encounters between 1909 and 1925. Because the court records were destroyed, newspapers provided a different approach to combat the archival silence.
It is also necessary to read between the lines in newspaper articles. Details listed within the pages of the Denton Record Chronicle were not just functional – they were also indicative of other processes less hidden. Much can be determined based upon the order in which law enforcement arrived to investigate a crime and how they learned a crime was committed. Paired with reports of who was visiting the town and who was strategically out of town, a sense of the practices of racial terrorism can be attained. This method requires a holistic approach to racialized silences and demands a broader study of racial terrorism in the South.
While the word lynching wields considerable power built upon a century of activism, we must, as a field, find the words to describe obscured acts of violence that cannot be defined as lynching. Jackie Goldsby argues the same point writing “The history of lynching poses too great a burden for one word to carry...To produce a history of lynching attentive to its constitution and operations through language, we need to invent a new name for the violence.” Still yet, Slavoj Zizek’s definition of violence there are three categories: symbolic violence, systemic violence, and subjective violence -- each of which would struggle to be contained in the singular word, lynching.
When we glance at the collection of visible and invisible violence in Denton County, its victims are best described as the disappeared. Disappearance is a term which includes racial violence obscured by record destruction, that which is only contextually visible, where key details have been omitted -- even if committed by law enforcement -- where the end result is erasure, not just of Black bodies, but also of Black identities. The act of disappearing someone is inclusive of deadly violence without possessing a mortality requirement.
The concept of disappearance has precedence in historical discourse. The term itself has been used to describe similarly obscured crimes in Latin America at the hands of the government. It is also used by magicians to describe sleight-of-hand tricks which distract the viewer from key changes to the environment and subjects of the act. Like the difference between military professionals who are suddenly missing, ranking officers assign likely outcomes based upon the surrounding facts without a guarantee of accuracy. These professionals are listed as killed, prisoners of war, or missing in action based upon an inference rather than certainty. Disappearance works through ruling out possible outcomes and, through exhaustive research, arrives at an unstable conclusion which can be argued but not always proven due to the unavailability of key details which would clarify the circumstances that surround the missing person.
Disappearance is more than a term that liberates historians from a word fraught with contention. The lynchings in Denton County were also disappearances. Lynching and other forms of named racial violence act to remove Black bodies from contested spaces and are, therefore, types of disappearance. This is especially significant to lynchings where records have been destroyed, identities have been obscured, and where press accounts are incomplete or non-existent. Simply because the Jim Crow Justice System ran a clean-up effort on their records does not mean these acts of violence did not occur. They should be named, chronicled, and shared so that we can learn from -- and not repeat -- the sins of our collective past. As long as these crimes go unacknowledged, the past will continue to live within us and surreptitiously guide the present.
Disappearance aims to dismantle both formulas of silence. Through the intentional construction of a term inclusive of all racial violence, each crime has inherent value. While Ennis Johnson did not die at the hands of the Jim Crow Justice System, his memory in Denton County did. Through intimidation -- both by the Ku Klux Klan and the Denton County Sheriff’s Department -- Johnson feared for his safety if he stayed in the community where he was raised. This intimidation forced Ennis to leave and never return to the county of his birth. This erasure is evidenced by the search for heirs of Ransom and Sylvia Johnson in 1986 -- a search that produced the names of every descendant with the sole exception of the youngest, Ennis Johnson. This forced removal is a form of violence. In 1922, sixteen-year-old Ennis Johnson was disappeared by the Jim Crow Justice System.
Disappearance is not as simple as death. In the case of the two men lynched and the two teenagers “flogged,” the close of their story in the Denton County community was at the end of a rope. Ransom Johnson died by hands unknown while it is known that Jim Walden was killed by the police. But for young men like Ennis Johnson and Burl Stephens, disappearance meant erasure. In Denton County, between 1921 and 1923, the Ku Klux Klan, in coordination with the Denton County Sheriff’s Department and the editors of the Denton Record-Chronicle and the Pilot Point Post-Signal, disappeared Black men without consequence. These masked and unmasked men acted on behalf of, and were protected by, the community they stoked with fear. The disappearance of Black men from Denton County in the early 1920s placated fears of otherness in the white community while they both gutted and terrified the Black community. These acts of disappearance were performances of white supremacy that utilized terrorism to remove communities of color.[1]
The result was the destruction of the bonds between Black citizens within the communities under attack. The Black men who were disappeared left families uncertain about the fate of their loved one. They pitted one against another – like Sam Gertin – to avoid the noose. These actions, which were taken to survive, resulted in suspicion between neighbors and friends. “He causes uneasiness in the clan,” the poem says, and modern residents echo this concern as they seek unity with one another to heal the wounds of the past.
Still, it is that very past which calls to us from unmarked graves and pastures long filled with water. Through the expansion of our view of violence – from lynching as the penultimate to lynching as one form of the broader crime of disappearance – we come closer to understanding the spectrum of atrocity hidden within the Jim Crow Justice system of Denton County.
[1] It also brings into question our present-day historical record maintenance. If criminal records are protected from the public while the accused is alive (for privacy reasons) and destroyed before the accused dies (due to limitations on how long a governing body must maintain records), how can the public ever have oversight? This is relevant in each of the cases of disappearance as the Sheriff’s Department destroyed all of its records prior to the 1950s at some point during the 1990s.