Post-Reconstruction whites killed over a thousand Black Texans in three years

Evidence

The result was catastrophic. After the war, President Andrew Johnson had sent a former general, Carl Schurz, to tour the South and report back on conditions there. Schurz unveiled a travelogue of death. He documented hunting parties where Black men were chased down and shot, with dogs left to devour their faces. Near Montgomery, Alabama, he wrote, “negroes leaving the plantations, and found on the roads, were exposed to the savagest treatment.” At Selma, he relayed the report from Major J. P. Houston that twelve “negroes were killed by whites.” In Choctaw County, Alabama, on separate occasions, Black men were roasted alive; one of them was “chained to a pine tree and burned to death.” Then there were the “ ‘gallant young men’ [who] make a practice of robbing [Black people]…. If any resistance is made, death is pretty sure to be the result.” Between 1865 and 1868, white people murdered more than one thousand African Americans in one area of Texas. In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, white people “set fire to a black settlement and rounded up the inhabitants. A man who visited the scene the following morning found ‘a sight that apald (sic) [him] 24 Negro men woman (sic) and children were hanging to trees all round the Cabbins.’ ” As Black people tried to defend themselves, white people massacred African Americans in Memphis; New Orleans; Colfax, Louisiana; and Hamburg, South Carolina. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 805

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘over one thousand murders in one area of Texas’ figure is a specific contested empirical claim a reader would want to verify against historian sources.