Background
In Spring 2018, Micah Carlson participated in a research project to uncover the history of a freedmen’s community in Pilot Point, Texas. The St. John’s Project was led by Dr. Andrew J. Torget and Dr. Todd Moye at The University of North Texas and relied heavily upon the support and education provided by Rev. John White and Denton County NAACP President Willie Hudspeth. At the close of the semester, Carlson organized a small working group (Hannah Stewart, Jessica Floyd, Emily Bowles) to research the dissolution of St. John’s which happened quietly over two decades at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the summer, Dr. Andrew Torget sent the group an article by Peggy Hinkle-Wolfe which describes the December 14, 1922, lynching of two Black teenagers in Pilot Point and asked if it fit into the dissolution of St. John's. The article cites the work of important Denton County historians such as Chelsea Stallings whose master's thesis describes the removal of Quakertown in Denton and Dr. Shaun Treat. Re-acknowledgement of lynching in Denton County was directly caused by the construction of a pillar at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice which which acknowledges the December 1922 lynching but in the place where the names of the the names of the lynched teens should be are the words “unknown, unknown.”
What began as a brief search for the names of the young men lynched fused with the missing members of the St. John’s Community (especially, though not exclusively, Ransom Shears). As Carlson wrestled to find a research foothold from which to uncover the lives of the disappeared as they left Denton County, the archival silence which continues to surround racial violence became an insurmountable hurdle in telling either story in full. In October 2018, Carlson met with her advisor, Chair of the Department of History at UNT Dr. Jennifer Jensen Wallach, to ask for guidance on finding records that were wholly missing. Wallach said "sometimes we have to learn to read the silence."
Wrestling with how to read silences of record became a preoccupation and Carlson compiled a list of the known facts surrounding the December 1922 lynching. According to newspaper reports, the two young men were arrested and incarcerated prior to December 1922 so, Carlson began a sweeping newspaper study of arrests and criminal records. Connected by Dr. Todd Moye, Carlson met with Jessica Luther Rummel who was researching the construction of the Confederate Soldier Monument on the lawn of the Denton County Courthouse by The United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1918 for her honors thesis. Through discussion of dates and newspaper sources both women had uncovered, Luther Rummel and Carlson were surprised to find notable intersections between the re-establishment of the Ku Klux Klan and arrests by Denton County Law Enforcement.
This discovery solidified the three categories of research completed by Carlson’s research group: arrests, violence, and the Klan. Hannah Stewart began digging into press accounts of the Ku Klux Klan while Carlson continued the search for arrests and acts of violence against Black members of the Denton County community in the 1920s. In an effort to make visible a sense of waves of violence, Carlson created graphs of racial arrests and racial violence from death certificates, newspaper articles, and other primary sources. Late one night in December 2018 and out of curiosity, Carlson included Stewart’s collection of press reports of Klan activity in her graph of arrests and violence. The result was irrefutable. Arrests of Black men and women by law enforcement, violence against Black bodies, and press coverage of the Ku Klux Klan moved together in distinct seasons of violence during the 1920s in Denton County.
But questions remained: how did the Ku Klux Klan cause arrests? How did they get the keys to the jail? The search for a way to view communication between the Ku Klux Klan and law enforcement became one of the central research questions of Carlson's master’s thesis “In the Tall Grass West of Town: Racial Violence in Denton County during the Rise of the Second Ku Klux Klan” (May 2020). If a method of communication could be found, perhaps the disappeared Black men could, too, be found.
In June 2018, Hudspeth, Stallings, and Hinkel-Wolfe traveled to the Memorial Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, to view the marker beam and returned with a shared dedication to acknowledge and commemorate the lynching in Denton County. In October 2019, Stallings authored the proposal for a historical marker to the two young men lynched in Pilot Point on December 14, 1922. Together with former Mayor Pro-Tem Linnie McAdams, Dr. Treat, County Judge Andy Eads, Carlson, and many others, the trio began work with The Equal Justice Initiative to "Bring Home the Beam." On December 14, 2019, The Denton County Remembrance Project held a Soil Collection Ceremony outside the calaboose where the two unnamed teens were taken from jail and lynched. The scheduled installation of a memorial beam from the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Denton County, planned for Summer 2020, was disrupted by the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Rethinking Violence was proposed to Dr. Torget by Carlson in April 2020 as a dream to democratize access to the archival sources upon which "In the Tall Grass West of Town" stands. First published in October 2022, Rethinking Violence remains a living archive in search of the Black men and women disappeared by violence at the hands of the Jim Crow Justice System of Denton County.