Before I Forget

My Wiser family once lived in Liberty County, Texas. The Liberty Vindicator newspaper has been digitized and made available online. 

This took only a couple of mugs of coffee to locate in the search engine. Plenty of cousins named: Weiser, Wiser, Barrow, Abshier, Harmon, Faulk, Reavis, Bond and Carr. 

Next time you take the back roads, stop and pick up a local paper in a small town.

The same type of news is printed today. 

          While in search of ancestors in newspaper archives, I found this chilling tidbit from a 1922 southeast Texas paper. Apparently an editor was still nursing his anger over losing our nation's bloodiest war. 

          Curious as to when lynching of citizens was outlawed, I found only a 2005 apology sponsored by 80 U.S. senators for not passing anti-lynching laws. I've read this article twice, and don't see that ANY lynching law has yet passed. Ever.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/06/13/senate-apologizes-for-not-passing-anti-lynching-laws.html

          Really? From 1882 to 1968, "nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, and three passed the House. Seven presidents between 1890 and 1952 petitioned Congress to pass a federal law."  

          I firmly believe that laws are not a deterrent to criminal behavior. But laws sure as hell aid prosecutors when seeking to press charges and to later convince juries to give  l  o  n  g  lengthy sentences to those found guilty.

          So no, Mr. Editor from a town called Liberty. Your right to murder by (white) cloak of darkness or by public hanging was not deemed unlawful in 1922, as you had earlier feared. 


FEBRUARY 2020 UPDATE:  Were S L O W L Y  making progress, folks, towards a federal law against lynching, FFS:

"Previous attempts by Congress since 1900 to pass similar legislation repeatedly failed. The Senate approved a similar version by unanimous consent in February 2019. But because of minor discrepancies, the Senate will need to vote on the House's in order for it to land on the president's desk for approval. If the measure becomes law, violators would face substantial fines and/or jail time.

Between 1877 and 1950, the Equal Justice Initiative estimates that more than 4,000 black people were lynched in a dozen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

The bill, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, was written after the 1955 racist murder of a black teenager in Mississippi, which spawned civil rights action."

Newspapers.com/ has Liberty County, Texas newspapers going back to the 1880s. My paternal grandfather, Elton, was born in that small southeast Texas community in 1896. I was happy today to find brief mention of him and his older siblings in a July 24, 1908 edition of The Liberty Vindicator. He would have been 12, and the sister whom he left home to visit for a week was Nora Jones and her husband Edward.

I don't find Nora and Ed in the 1910 census yet, but in 1920 they are living in Norman, Oklahoma. So I don't know what town young "Master Elton" spent his vacation. But clearly his older sister Nina had a "pleasant" visit there, too.

And brother Rufus was under the weather. Do you suppose Rufus Wiser, teenager, wasn't happy to see the news of his illness in the paper? I wouldn't have liked seeing my health condition trumpeted. (Ask me about my great-aunt's goiter making the paper once, good grief!). 

Rufus' good health returned by the time the Fairchilds offered their home to guests for an evening of "charming hospitality." This page follows the one above--both on page 2 of The Vindicator:

The full page is below if you have a hankering to read about kidney trouble, theological difficulties and the Man Zan Pile remedy for er, well, you know. If you have trouble viewing it, right-click to save to your device for enlargement.