TX - Slocum Massacre marker recalls racial slaughter

One day in the 1960s, when young Michael Vickery was hunting in the rolling, pine-shrouded hills near this East Texas village, his grandfather pointed to a bullet-scarred post oak.

“Buckshot,” Vickery recalled the old man saying, adding that there were eight black people “buried in one hole right here.”

For more than a century, that was how one of the nation’s worst racial pogroms in post-Civil War history was kept alive — in quiet conversations across generations, among both whites and blacks. Otherwise, what is now known as the Slocum Massacre of 1910 — when at least eight African Americans, and possibly many more, were slaughtered by marauding white residents — was conspicuously absent from official history.
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“The citizens of Slocum today had absolutely nothing to do with what happened over a hundred years ago,”

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“It was being ignored, and by ignoring it, you’re spitting in the face of those who died during that tragic event. You’re basically saying either it didn’t happen or it was not important, and it’s very, very important.”

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