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For Lawrence Nixon and all who fight for the right to vote, whatever the odds
Prologue
It was November 1886, just after midnight, and the poll workers in Washington County knew something was wrong as soon as Dewees Bolton walked into the Flewellyn precinct.
Voting had concluded and now counting by official election workers was well underway. So it was an odd time for a stranger to burst through the door, especially one whose face was covered by a handkerchief.
Bolton was also wearing a slicker—a yellow oilproof coat—that further disguised his appearance.
And he had a gun.
This wasn’t the first time a Black polling location in Washington County had been attacked. Two years earlier, three Black elections officials had been murdered at a polling location ten miles away. And earlier this night, ballot boxes in the area had been stolen.
To the poll workers in Flewellyn, it would have been clear that a violent, organized plot to rig the election was underway.
So when the armed intruder made for the ballot box in a blatant attempt to destroy the votes before the count could be finished in this heavily Black precinct, the poll workers decided to fight back—to defend democracy.
In the struggle, one of them shot and killed Bolton.
It was later revealed that the intruder was in fact a member of a gang of ballot thieves organized by the “People’s Party” of Washington County, an offshoot of a movement that had recently burst onto the scene in the former Confederacy hoping to “redeem” communities from Black political participation. Their goal, in other words, was to keep the political system entirely white, even after slavery had been abolished. And violence was the primary tool they used to accomplish that objective.
Yet despite the clear evidence that it was the People’s Party that brought danger to Washington County that night, the only people arrested in connection with the events were those who stopped Bolton from stealing the ballot boxes.
Within a week of the election, the sheriff apprehended eight African American men for Bolton’s death. But within a month, and before a court could rule on whether or not they were guilty, an “unidentified” group of men broke into the jail where they were being held, abducted three of the prisoners, and took them to Sandy Creek, about a mile outside of town.
There, the three prisoners—Shad Felder, Alfred Jones, and Stewart Jones—were hanged. While some attempted to claim that the lynchings were directed by unknown members of the Klan, it soon became clear that the plot to steal the election—and perhaps the plan to kill the poll workers—was led by the man at the top of the countywide ticket, incumbent county judge Lafayette Kirk.
After visiting the Flewellyn polling location on Election Night, Kirk telegraphed Bolton with the message: “Things here look gloomy; do your work.” It was only after receiving those instructions that Bolton arrived with his handkerchief, slicker, and gun to steal the votes.
Nevertheless, the popular press blamed the hangings not on Kirk or the terrorists of the People’s Party but on the party that had been attacked in the first place. The Galveston News claimed the lynchings were the effect of “incendiary speeches” made by Republican candidates. “While all good citizens regret the hanging,” the paper wrote, “they cannot but think that tardy justice was done.”
The newspaper in Brenham, the county seat, agreed and argued that the lynchings were conducted with the utmost gentility.
The hanging of these negroes by a mob is an occurrence to be regretted, but it was brought on by the very men who professed to have the greatest friendship for the negro.… The negroes were scientifically hanged with new grass ropes.… The bodies were cut down and hauled to town.… New drawers, undershirts, and nice shrouds were purchased and good coffins procured … after which they were turned over to their friends and relatives, who took them to their former homes near Flewellen for burial.
Though Kirk would be brought to trial by the United States attorney in Austin, the case against the leader of the Washington County election thieves never stood much of a chance.
To start with, Kirk’s defense was provided pro bono by former Texas governor John Ireland. Also accompanying Kirk during the trial was sitting U.S. senator Richard Coke. There would be no mistaking where the real power in Texas stood, regardless of the facts of the case.
The attorney for the three lynched poll workers laid out the details of the ballot-theft plot and made the case that their murders were an effort to silence the witnesses to the original crime. He insisted that they were killed because they were the only ones who could provide the necessary incriminating testimony about Judge Kirk’s role in the plot. But whatever the evidence, the jury took the side of Kirk and the powerful men who stood with him.
After just three days of testimony and deliberations, they found Kirk innocent.
The failure to hold the ringleaders accountable not only made a mockery of the rule of law but also sent a chilling message to those who might still believe in free and fair elections: Not here. Not now. Not yet.
* * *
I first heard this story as I was working on voting rights in Texas in January 2021 with a group of new volunteers. We had started Powered by People the year before to register voters across the state and fight for the full franchise for all eligible citizens. More than twenty thousand volunteers eventually signed up, registering hundreds of thousands of voters and convening conversations on voting rights across the state, from some of the smallest rural counties to the biggest cities in Texas. These new recruits were stepping up to join the effort.
I did my best to make the case that the work I was asking them to do was urgent. I told them that since 2013, more than 750 polling locations had been closed across Texas—far more than in any other state, and most of them were concentrated in the fastest-growing Black and Latino neighborhoods.
I shared that a panel of three federal judges, two of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, described our congressional districts as a “racial gerrymander” for drawing voters of color out of competitive districts to diminish the power of their vote.
And I cataloged other extreme measures taken in Texas since the Voting Rights Act was stripped of much of its power to protect the right to vote by the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision, keeping millions from participating in our democracy.
I then asked them, “How can we get Texans, especially young Texans, to understand the stakes when it comes to voting rights?”
Tayhlor Coleman, a young volunteer whom I was meeting for the first time, was the first to respond.
“Something that really helped me view the stakes more plainly was getting grounded in the proud history of Black Texans’ place in the fight for the right to vote, beginning right after emancipation.
“By learning that history,” she continued, “I was able to recognize the direct through line to the fights we are still having over voting rights, suppression, and disenfranchisement today.
“A great example is what happened in Washington County in 1886. I’m reading the Senate testimony following the ‘election outrage’ there and it reminds me a lot of what just happened on January 6.”
She shared with us some of the story, which it turns out was personal for her.
Shad Felder—one of the three men hanged by the mob—was a relative of hers.
Shad Felder is not a household name, but he should be. The past is easily forgotten, but the urgent truth of our history is all around us if we choose to listen. Tayhlor carried the hurt of her family’s betrayal to that meeting of volunteers. She wanted me to understand that her story belonged to all of us. That bitter, life-and-death fight for democracy that took place in 1886 was not some relic of the past but an urgent warning for our future.
Meeting Tayhlor, listening to her story, knowing that, more than a century after one of her ancestors had been killed for defending the franchise, she was willing to do her part to fight for it, made me think differently about the work we were doing. I no longer saw the state’s effort to disenfranchise millions of Texans in the aftermath of Shelby as an anomaly. It was a return to the way things used to be and the way they will be for the foreseeable future unless we do something about it.
The lessons of our history clearly show us that fair elections—where all eligible citizens are able to freely cast their votes without intimidation, suppression, or obstruction—have always been the exception, not the rule.
That exception—the forty-eight years between the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and its undoing in Shelby in 2013—was a golden age. While far from perfect—Texas was found in violation of the Voting Rights Act in every decade following its signing—this era of
If history confirms that the right to vote was always under threat, sometimes violently so, it might also offer a guide for how we could overcome these threats, and make the exception of free and fair elections the new rule. I was looking for lessons to help me understand the consequences of the choice before us now: stand up and fight for democracy or stand back and hope that someone else will do it for us.
* * *
The “Texas Election Outrage” of 1886, as the Washington County violence came to be known, was the focus of a federal inquiry in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. The investigations documented the complete impunity with which white terrorists could steal elections and kill Black citizens. They also looked at widespread instances of voter suppression and intimidation throughout Texas and much of the South that effectively denied African Americans the franchise.
Poll taxes and literacy tests, for example, vastly reduced Black voter participation while leaving white voters untouched thanks to “grandfather clauses,” which exempted any man whose grandfather had been a voter from these new restrictions. (Given that slavery had been abolished less than a generation earlier in Texas, only white men qualified.)
The findings prompted Representative Henry Cabot Lodge and Senator George Frisbie Hoar, both of Massachusetts, to introduce legislation in 1890 to provide federal oversight and intervention in the elections administered by the states. The goal was to protect the franchise for Black voters and prevent the kind of political terrorism and Jim Crow election practices that had come to dominate Washington and other southeast Texas counties from becoming the norm in the rest of Texas and throughout the former Confederacy.
The Federal Elections Bill (known by its critics as the Lodge Force Bill) was the most significant attempt at guaranteeing the franchise since the adoption of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. A bill of this scope would not be matched again in federal legislation until Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.
The House passed the measure in December 1890, on a strict party-line vote, and Senator Hoar felt optimistic about its prospects in the upper chamber. But before a final vote could be taken, Senate Democrats initiated a filibuster that temporarily prevented action on the bill.
The Republicans had the numbers to overcome the filibuster and proceed with passage. They had recently won majorities in the House and Senate, and, with the election of Benjamin Harrison in 1888, controlled the presidency, too. In fact, Harrison and congressional Republicans had campaigned on securing voting rights, especially for the Black targets of voter suppression efforts in the South.
There was also no doubt around the country that this bill needed to be passed. After all, Texas wasn’t alone. Across the South, there had been violent attempts to interfere with the democratic process.
In 1871, the leading Black citizens of Meridian, Mississippi, were slaughtered for defending democracy—and in 1873, as many as 150 Black men were killed in the Colfax massacre following a contested Louisiana gubernatorial election. The following year, in Alabama, the killing of two Sumter County Republican leaders, one Black and one white, set the stage for a mob to murder seven Black citizens.
In this way, the violent election fraud in Washington County in 1886 was not an outlier, but part of a systematic effort to steal power and subvert the Constitution throughout the South.
And yet, the Republicans in Congress were ultimately unable to maintain their unity in the face of a filibuster challenge. At the time, this was blamed on infighting about short-term political priorities and a need to focus on the economy after the Panic of 1873. But it’s also clear that while the moral urgency was there, the political will was not. (Sound familiar?)
How else can you explain failing to move forward when the threat to democracy was so clear?
In the end, the filibuster organized by Senator Coke, an ally and friend of Lafayette Kirk (ringleader of the Washington County vote theft), won out—bringing down the last, best chance for voting rights in Texas and the rest of the South for generations.
“Let the people of each State alone,” he said to his colleagues in the Senate. “Let the men control who know each other, the men who are peers, the men who are raised together, the men who are neighbors; let them settle it. Just let us alone; just let the negroes take care of themselves … and those whom God has in His Creation … decreed by the structure and organization of their brain … rule.”
The bill was never even voted on in the Senate. It didn’t help that President Harrison, who, again, had campaigned on a platform of restoring voting rights, remained on the sidelines for much of the action. It looked like Harrison, along with some of the Senate Republicans, was more interested in solidifying alliances with Southern politicians than in justice for all citizens of the South.
The legislation was dead, as was any hope for federal protection of voting rights in Texas or anywhere else. And, not for the last time, justice for the people of Texas was a casualty of self-serving political expediency in Washington, D.C. Harrison’s inaction looks cowardly in the light of history. But if anything, it should remind us that we can’t rely on federal action—from distant and insulated U.S. senators and presidential administrations consumed by the calculations leading up to the next midterm election—to guarantee our rights.
In the subsequent decades, Black Americans and other communities of color would be systematically disenfranchised. As a result, they were denied the ability to fully participate in the affairs of their country, to affect the outcome of elections, to hold public office, to engage in civil society and the economy, and to participate in a system of justice that would treat them equally under the law.
But through it all, Black Americans, including in Texas, built a movement that would come closer than at any other time in our history to producing a government of, by, and for the people—all of the people. Their courage and persistence ensured that, seventy-nine years after the Texas Election Outrage, America finally began to look like a democracy.
They didn’t wait for the cavalry to come to the rescue. They were the cavalry.
* * *
If the squandered opportunity to extend and protect the franchise in 1890 was born of outrage that originated in Texas, then the successful one of 1965 was born of organizing that ultimately convinced the first Texan president that the right to vote was paramount.
When we think about what we’re up against today, it’s worth remembering that the challenges that voting rights advocates faced prior to 1965 were much greater. And yet they ultimately overcame them, demonstrating that victory isn’t just possible. It’s been won before against much bigger odds.
They show us that turning outrage into action is the key.
A little more than twenty years after the failure of the Federal Elections Bill in 1890, Ida B. Wells—the trailblazing journalist and activist—founded the Alpha Suffrage Club to advocate for the full enfranchisement of all Americans, including all Black Americans. She understood that the traditional bastions of political power were insufficient to the task of overcoming suppression. What was needed was a “new power, [a] new molder of public sentiment, to accomplish the reforms that the pulpit and the law have failed to do.” She also firmly believed that if democracy were to be fully realized in America, Black women must be at the vanguard.
Later, in the 1950s, Septima Clark’s “Citizenship Schools” taught reading and civics to Southern Black Americans interested in registering to vote, helping them withstand the indignity of the literacy and civics tests imposed by county registrars intent upon denying them the franchise. By 1961, she was supervising seven hundred instructors who were responsible for forty-two thousand new Black voters. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) adopted the schools and Clark was asked to run them on a much larger scale. Between 1961 and 1969, seven hundred thousand African Americans in the South were registered to vote.
