WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED
A twisting, tree-lined road carried Constance Hollie-Jawaid and her family through the dense forest until they reached Slocum, a small unincorporated town dug into the Piney Woods of East Texas. A few miles southeast of the old high school, past two trickling creeks, the family pulled off the road near a small red farmhouse. A thick, leafy canopy shielded them from the cloudless midsummer heat as they exited their cars and began to quietly pace along the red fence.
It was July 29, 2018, a somber day for the Hollie family. Not far from where they stood, more than a century before, on July 29, 1910, white vigilantes attacked black communities surrounding Slocum. By most accounts, the violence lasted throughout the day and night as white men from across the region traveled to Slocum to join in the killing. Once the dust began to settle, the state’s major newspapers, including the Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Register, reported that white mobs had murdered as many as 50 black people during the massacre. The papers also described how victims were unceremoniously dumped into communal pits before the mobs scattered. Hollie-Jawaid believes some of the dead, including her ancestors, could be buried here beyond the fence line — and she intends to find their bodies.
“Piled upon one another in a mass grave, like dogs,” she said. “That is a history that needs to be acknowledged and remembered. For so long people denied that it even happened.”
The massacre in Slocum shocked people from Abilene to New York, who read about the killings in newspaper coverage in the days that followed the spasm of violence. Texas’ governor at the time, Thomas Campbell, who’d grown up near Slocum, was reportedly appalled that vigilante violence still ruled his home county. Authorities called the episode an embarrassing stain on the state and region and vowed justice.
The outrage was short-lived. Within a year, the criminal prosecutions of seven white men indicted for the killings had fizzled. Less than three years after the slaughter, a fire ate through the local courthouse, destroying records from the case. The story had all but disappeared from East Texas history by the time Hollie-Jawaid was a teenager and started to dig deeper into her family’s history. Black people from the region were reluctant
