'We Are The Mexicans!'

In the mid-1800s, the fertile land surrounding Waco in Central Texas attracted countless settlers from the Deep South who introduced slavery into the area. The 1860 Census was the last time the federal government took a count of the South’s vast slave population, and the greatest rate of increase in a state's slave population appears to have been in Texas where the number of slaves more than tripled from 58,000 in 1850 to 182,566 in 1860. By 1860, slaves made up almost forty percent of the population of Waco and surrounding McLennan County. There was a white population of 3,799 and a slave population of 2,404, which was worth more than a million dollars in currency of that time. In 1950s South Waco, our neighborhood adjoined a large but overlooked black community that remained as a racial and cultural island where plantations with slaves had once existed. The children who lived there attended segregated, all black schools in East Waco. By comparison, East Waco made South Waco appear upscale. East Waco was a virtual no-man's land secluded on the other side of the Brazos River, which early Spanish explorers had named the Rio de los Brazos de Díos,“the River of the Arms of God.”

On May 15,1916, an almost unspeakable act of violence occurred in Waco that would forever link it to the tragic annals of the racial divide that later consumed the South. Jesse Washington, a seventeen-year-old African American farmhand who may have been mentally retarded, was convicted of raping and murdering a white woman in the outskirts of Waco. His trial lasted all of four minutes, and a jury of twelve white men found him guilty and sentenced him to death. But just minutes after his conviction, an angry mob seized the young man without resistance from the authorities. Members of the mob put a chain around his neck and dragged him to the downtown square surrounding City Hall. There, at the base of a tree, the mob castrated an already physically brutalized Washington, threw him onto a pile of wooden boxes, doused it with coal oil, and set it ablaze.