Rioters burned down a previously prosperous district of Black-owned businesses in the town.
George Hughes, left, before he was lynched by a white mob.
In May of 1930, the North Texas city of Sherman changed forever. During the trial of George Hughes, a 41-year-old Black farm worker accused of raping his white employer’s wife, a mob barged into the Grayson County courthouse and stopped the proceedings.
“And they set fire to the courthouse, and they dragged the Black man over to the Black business area,” said the late Njoki McElroy, a Sherman native, playwright and professor who spoke to the Texas Standard in 2021.
After Hughes was taken by the mob from the courthouse, he was lynched. Then they set his body on fire. Then they burned down the Black business district.
“It was like everything had just been taken from us. So the terror was palpable,” McElroy said.
The story was largely forgotten with time. But in recent years, a group of citizens has pushed to get a historical marker at the county courthouse to remember the events of 1930.
That is going to happen at last on Saturday, March 29, in a Day of Healing in Sherman.
The historical marker will be installed at the Grayson County Courthouse at 10:00 a.m. And at 2:00 p.m. at Austin College (1201 E. Brockett Street), there will be an interactive reading of Njoki McElroy’s play called “The Ninth Day of May,” which is about Sherman’s Black community and the lynching.
McElroy’s daughter, Marian McElroy, spoke to Texas Standard about the significance of the marker going up. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: So how does it feel to know that this is going to happen, that this marker is going to go up and your mother’s work is going to be staged?
Marian McElroy: Well, it was a very emotional moment for me actually when I heard that the marker was going to actually be installed. It’s as if I am healing for my great grandparents.
It’s been a long time in the making – 95 years. And I think that the healing process can actually begin because, as someone recently told me, you can’t heal what you don’t acknowledge.
Well, the play that she wrote entitled “Ninth Day of May,” as I said, it’s going to be read as part of this Day of Healing ceremony. What can you tell us about it?
My mother, it’s based on her memoir. Her memoir is entitled “1012 Natchez.” And that was actually the address where her grandparents lived. It was their home. And in the memoir, she talks extensively about Sherman and her life there as a child.
She was particularly interested in describing the successful Blacks who lived in Sherman, the thriving businesses. There were four medical doctors, dentists, a pharmacist, tailors, a movie house, and it’s something that unfortunately a lot of people, even in Texas, don’t realize that there was such a thriving Black community.
And that’s why my mother wanted to tell that story, because it’s often ignored. And she felt that people needed to know about it. And so that was one of the reasons why she wrote the book. And then later, just a few months before she passed away, she completed the play.
You know, the reason we’re talking right now – the reason that any of this occurred – is because there was a terrible thing that happened in Sherman, Texas, in 1930. But it seems to me that an emphasis of your mothers in telling this story was to bring forth the sense of joy and prosperity and good feeling that also existed in that community.
We should remember that things were good. Is that a reasonable assessment?
Oh, absolutely. She was concerned that when people thought about Sherman, all they knew was the lynching of a Black man and the destruction of the courthouse and the Black community.
So it was all very traumatizing – so traumatizing that she said that her grandparents never talked about the lynching. It was too painful.
And so she didn’t want the joy and the success of that community to be buried with that riot. And being an author and being from Sherman, because she was born there, she felt that she was the messenger and she wanted to do that for my brothers and I – but then for Sherman, Texas, the country and the world.
And she felt it was a story that needed to be told. And I’m just immensely grateful for her taking the time to do that.
I wonder, Marian, you were born many years after this event occurred, but what effect do you think the events of May 9, 1930, have had on your life?
First of all, I think that I have to heal from it. That generations – from my great-grandparents, going to my grandparents, then my mother, and then to my siblings and me – we all have to heal. And the only way to really heal from this is to talk about it.
And I think sometimes people, in situations like this, feel that it’s too awful to talk about and in doing so, they bury those feelings. And it was important for my mother to write the book, because she wanted us to heal. Because even though we weren’t there and born many years after that, we were still affected generation after generation because that is part of our family story.
And so I think that’s one of the reasons why it was very important for me to continue my mother’s work – not only for the community, but also for me personally. Because I realized, by doing this work here in Sherman, that I had not completely healed.
And so going through this process, I think will help me on that journey.
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