Designated Negro

              

Fluttergirl found the grave. In Evergreen Cemetery you might say she found the city’s conscience buried next to a black guy with burns on his scalp and arms. In the coming weeks and months as her discovery is debated or not—in this town remember that we prefer to look forward not back. And please remember Fluttergirl’s role was limited. She’s not political. She just likes to take pictures. In the Live Music Capital of the World we actually like parts of our history well-buried, six feet down or more—when remembrance is unpleasant or conflicts with our well-meaning view of ourselves. Texas may be full of rednecks and political trogs but the white majority in the capital city is touchy-feely and completely comfortable with black and brown neighbors. We live side by side and get along.

Some of our best friends are black or Hispanic as the case may be or even white if we are people of color. And if from time to time those people—whoever those people are, although in this town they are usually black—become unmanageable or have too much to drink or too much to smoke, or forget the rules of polite liberal society. The police—one of the best forces in the nation we're told—shoot him or her once or twice with a nine mil or Taser and hustle the offending Negro, if still breathing, away on the non-stop to Huntsville, in the custody of the Department of Criminal Justice, with the understanding that he or she may one day come back to become, once again, a valued member of our Hill Country community. Samuel Holmes did not have that opportunity. Due to various legal oversights you could say. He came back from Huntsville feet first—upsetting any plans he might’ve had about a return to his wife and the future prospect of white fellowship. Intervening were three jolts of 1800 volts of electricity, a permanent kind of behavior modification popular in the South at the time. Oh well. Mistakes get made even in a tolerant community like Austin, Texas. We would know more of the detail of Samuel Holmes' passing except the police say they've lost the file. Oh well again.

What makes you curious now though, more than five decades later—Fluttergirl didn’t go this far when she was taking pictures although she did ask questions. What makes you wonder even today is why the good people of the city were so anxious to see Sammy Holmes got his final rest. So, like, the police have lost his file unfortunately. The whole thing, yes sir—or madam. Even the microfilm, isn’t that odd? Which is a coincidence because the Travis County District Attorney’s Office which prosecuted Mr. Holmes back in the day—based upon the now missing police file—reports they’ve mislaid their documentation too. Which doesn’t make you suspicious, not in this town, because we’ve always been selective about our history, what we keep and what we discard, deciding what baggage to carry as we move forward, rejecting anything too heavy or odious to the senses. Some police files need to disappear. Some things just need to be let go, you could say, to help the healing. For what follows—the reconstruction not of the crime but of the punishment—we owe a special debt of gratitude to Travis County District Clerk Amalia Rodriguez-Mendoza and her staff in the Criminal Division who take a different approach to maintaining the record than police or prosecutors. They keep the paperwork. To the Texas State Archives—although they too were reluctant to disclose everything about Mr. Holmes’ trip to the electric chair. And to the Department of Criminal Justice, aka the state prison, which has maintained a history of an important aspect of crime and punishment in the Lone Star State, sometimes you learn more about Texas, than in any other way, by studying its prisons. 

The backstory is that in January 1959 a middle-aged white woman was raped on the westside of town, Tarrytown apparently, somewhere in there, in the bosom of white privilege in the Live Music Capital of the World. She never saw her attacker, except his hand, which was placed over her mouth and was black, she said. The victim was a civilian employee of the U.S. Army, a widow alone at home while her roommate was out and about and who heard a noise while in the shower. To set the scene. Thinking it was her returning roomie, she opened the bathroom door, which is basically all the detail you need to know: Wrestled to the ground—informed by her attacker, “I just want a little pussy”—beaten when she refused, the phrase “a little pussy” might tend to implicate a black man, that was the thinking at the time, since the p-word was not generally a part of the lexicon of white Biblebelt America, not yet, even in the sexual offender class, back in the day. But we digress. The victim relented, we are told, keeping her eyes closed while she was “ravished,” as the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later put it. 

Samuel Holmes who was an African-American dishwasher at Brackenridge Hospital, where the victim was taken after said attack, was arrested, apparently because a car carrying him as a passenger had been seen in the area, which might not have been surprising since he lived in the black end of the same neighborhood. Polygraphed by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Samuel Holmes was observed during the lie-detector test by the head of the city homicide squad, a Lieutenant Wells who also investigated sex crimes. Wells would later say in court that he became convinced based only upon the polygraph that the defendant was guilty of other rapes as well, which were never charged and never actually elucidated in any other detail. Just enough information was given to inflame the citizenry. A confession was obtained. 

We pick up the case at trial. 

Imagine a Texas courtroom with no AC, it’s May and presumably hot as hell, or getting there, only fans turning slowly overhead. The men are wearing white short-sleeved shirts and those hipster-narrow dark ties. The women are in below-the-knee summer dresses and with eyeglasses that angled out like angel wings. People were certainly smoking and probably chewing tobacco. A spittoon near the door? This is a pre-P.C. era, John Kennedy is running for president and he will win Texas but in Austin the defendant is still referred to as “the boy,” “that boy,” occasionally “Samuel” or “Sammy.” He’s 20 years old and he's a little nervous because he's about to be lynched.

Counsel for the defense is the Hon. Johnnie B. Rogers, former State Senator representing the capital district and he has a hard row to hoe in court. Representing the State of Texas is District Attorney Les Procter who has a reputation as a bulldog. Lieutenant Wells is on the stand explaining to the defense attorney how the defendant’s confession came about.

Q. Holmes called for you?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. All right.

A. I went in there, and he said he was ready to tell me. I sat down there, and I told him—

Q. Before you start that, let me ask, all right, you told him what, then when he said he wanted to tell you?

A. That he didn’t have to make a statement. That any statement made by him could be used against him in this trial or trials concerning this offense. That was told him before he ever started. And then after he made the statement and before he signed it, he read it. And then after he signed it—

Q. Let’s don’t get to the statement yet. Then at what point did you tell him that that polygraph test showed that he had committed not only this rape, but eighteen or nineteen others, and that he was a sick boy, and that if he didn’t admit to this one and all those other rape cases, that nobody would ever believe that he was a sick man. Unless he told about these, he couldn’t get any help, because he was sick?

A. The polygraph showed, Johnnie, let me tell you this. The polygraph showed that he was guilty of about four other rapes, and I believe it.

Q. Did you make as thorough an investigation as you possibly could about that?

A. Yes, sir. We took him up there and had the people look at him. There’s been a length of time in there that these things have happened, and the people did not identify him. But on the polygraph it showed that he was actually guilty of it and had guilty knowledge of it.

Q. Now you read this polygraph test? Did you find it to be that yourself?

A. No, that’s what Mr. Wheeler was telling me, and—

It's like a bad movie, someone's conception of what a rape trial would be for a black defendant in the Jim Crow South. You couldn't make it up or you could but nobody would believe it. Then it's compelling again. 

The confession read by the district attorney as, according to Lt. Wells, was set down on a manual typewriter in real time: “My name is Samuel Morris Holmes. I live [sic] 1713 West Eleventh Street in Austin, Texas. I am 20 years of age. I was born Feb. 27, 1938 in Austin, Texas. I am married [sic] Lucy Lee Holmes. We live together at 1713 West 11th St. We have one son 18 months old and my wife is about three or four months pregnant at this time. I am employed since November of 1957.

“On Monday, January 19, 1959 I was working at the hospital and a boy there by the name of Ralph Bowser, who is also employed there, had bought him a 1956 Ford and he wanted me to go with him to try it out. We went by the Bargain Corner liquor store at 11^th and Red River St., and bought a fifth of wine. We then drove around in east Austin and drank this fifth of wine . . . ." They went cruising. Cut to chase. “When he got to the next corner from Enfield Road I told him to stop and let me out. He asked me why and I told him that I needed some money. I started walking back east on this street. I don’t know the name of this street but have been told that it is Summit View. I walked east on this Street until I was almost to Woodlawn when I looked over and I saw a woman on the bed and she looked like she was naked. She was raising her legs up in the air. I went over to the window where this woman was and watched her for a while. She got up after a while and went into the bathroom. When she went to the bathroom I got a stick and punched a tear in the screen over the window and then I raised the window. . .  I then heard this woman call a name out and then I reached in and turned the light off in the bathroom." If you read it aloud, the confession sounds just like natural speech, doesn’t it, no prompting needed? 

"Today, January 31, 1959, while I was at work two officer’s [sic] came and arrested me and brought me out to the DPS where I submitted to a lie dector [sic] test and after it showed I was guilty. I gave the above statement which is true and correct to the best of my knowledge. I have read the foregoing statement and it is true and correct to the best of my knowledge. I went to the 11^th grade in Anderson High School. This statement consisted of two typed pages. All of the foregoing events happened in Austin, Travis County, Texas. Signed: Samuel Morris Holmes.” 

Ignore for a minute that there were no blacks on the jury. They were in the courtroom audience including members of the Holmes family and in the jury pool, those who had paid the poll tax to appear on the voter rolls. The District Attorney used six challenges to remove any African-Americans from consideration.

According to a prominent local attorney who was in college at the time and remembers the trial, and later went to work for the D.A.’s office himself, not only would no blacks have been the standard of the era in the city but, “in a capital case, it would have been a Tarrytown jury,” in other words not just white but of good means and high social level. Ignore also the use of the death penalty primarily in cases involving black defendants. In the quarter-century prior to Samuel Holmes’ trial three other men from Travis County had been executed, two of them black and one of those also for rape, presumably also of a white woman. Forget that for the moment too. A mistake was made in the Holmes trial that actually had nothing to do with choosing the jury or deciding punishment. The defendant claimed his confession was coerced. He claimed that he was denied rest, or food, and was left standing for hours, he said, and his family was threatened. That was the issue before the court during most of the trial. How was the amazingly-detailed confession obtained? 

On the witness stand Lieutenant Wells was asked to step down and the defendant was brought forward to testify directly about how the confession came about. Not about the crime—but about the interrogation. There had been no direct identification of the suspect by the victim and the only physical evidence was a fingerprint the police said they obtained from the window through which the attacker entered the home. All circumstantial evidence, as even the judge called it. Instead of leaving the courtroom after his time on the witness stand, Lieutenant Wells took a seat in the audience and listened to the defendant’s testimony about what he, Wells, was alleged to have done in order to obtain a confession. Torture basically. The lieutenant then returned to the witness stand and countered the allegations point by point.

Judge Mace Thurman who presided over the Holmes lynching is the Thurman of the Blackwell-Thurman Criminal Justice Center, by the way, the building that presently houses our criminal courts. He was trying his first capital case and he wouldn't call anything done in his courtroom a mistake. The prosecution was worried enough to take an extraordinary step—a possible first in the annals of criminal law. The D.A. entered into evidence the sworn statements of three white members of the trial audience that they felt sure Lt. Wells would have testified exactly the same way he did whether he heard the defendant on the stand before or not. That issue settled—the jury voted guilty and death was the penalty. Reports at the time noted that Judge Thurman was pale and shaking as he condemned Samuel Holmes to the electric chair.

In response to Holmes’s later appeal—before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals—the district attorney wrote, “The defendant, a person of the negro race, did not take the stand.” Case closed. 

Samuel Holmes spent the better part of the next year-and-a-half in Huntsville awaiting what even he must have known was inevitable. In the run up to the execution the so-called race agitators began to surface. A protest letter from a woman in a small town in Germany arrived—addressed to the Governor, University of Texas and “Minister of Justice for Texas”—noting, in German laboriously translated by Governor Price Daniel’s staff, that the European understanding was that black men in the American South were sentenced to death for rape of white women but white men who raped black women were not so severely punished? Is that right? That was actually a coincidence. Sammy Holmes' sister was raped by a white man after the Holmes' trial and the white defendant was sentenced to prison time. A news clipping still attached to the governor’s file, which can be found in the State Archives, recounts the cases of two white brothers in East Texas, one who raped a black girl and was sentenced to twenty-five years and one who raped a white woman and was sentenced to death. The race of the victim was more important than the race of the defendant, it seemed, the violation of white womanhood. To receive justice it helped or hurt to be Caucasian, depending on if one was victim or perp, and it was always a disadvantage to be black. Samuel Holmes continued to assert his innocence, at one point saying he would not accept a commutation of his sentence to life. Only acquittal would be enough.

“I am not afraid,” he told a reporter. “It takes more than the electric chair to scare me,” although the bravado soon passed. One evening his skull was shaved to allow better contact with the electrodes and he was dressed in the suit he would be buried in. 

He arrived at the execution chamber with a toothpick in his mouth, or so it is said, and a smile on his face, with attitude, you feel me, his powerful black male persona unbowed even in the press reports. According to the pastor who walked with him to the death chamber, the condemned Negro maintained his innocence to the end. He died a man. As part of the administrative loose ends, the prison sent a $25 bill to Travis County for electricity and staff time. 

From the moment of his arrest, blacks didn’t enter the picture again until he was loaded into a hearse belonging to King Tears Mortuary, which has traditionally served our bucolic River City’s black community so well, the long ride home and burial on the colored side of Evergreen Cemetery. That’s where Fluttergirl appeared on the scene with her camera 50 years later. 

Has anything really changed? That's the question. Our sheriff is black. The police chief is Hispanic. The district attorney is a self-described progressive who happens to be a white lesbian. Her chosen successor is an African American male. The county attorney who prosecutes misdemeanors is Hispanic. The City Attorney who advises the pigs is a sistah. The present judge and his predecessor in Mace Thurman’s old 147th District Court are both black men—it’s hard to imagine more diversity in a majority-white Southern city like our own. But what are the outcomes? That's another question. And the answer is pretty similar to when Sammy Holmes got strapped into Old Sparky, back in the day.

There’s been an aversion to maintaining the record not just by the police and D.A. but at the History Center, as well, where you can find out who was Miss Bluebonnet in 1960, but like the pigs and prosecutors—and Board of Pardons and Paroles—the History Center has no record of Samuel Holmes.

During a candidate’s forum last year Assistant D.A. Gary Cobb, who is arguably black, brushed off calls for a death penalty moratorium at the courthouse in Austin. “I can only speak about how we do things at the Travis County D.A.’s office,” he told potential voters. “A moratorium isn’t going to affect us one way or another,” he said to an audience of mostly white women, like Samuel Holmes' alleged victim. As Gary Cobb outlined the way his office approaches the ultimate penalty. If you watch his comments on YouTube there’s a pause after his remarks, and then applause, and Cobb’s relieved smile as he realizes that he has successfully told white people what they most want to hear. This is an art form in the black community and Cobb does it better than most.

“Because of that I do not support a moratorium in Travis County,” he said, adding, “There are other places that have issues they need to deal with.” You can think of Samuel Holmes the designated Negro of his era. He was the black man chosen in 1960, as still happens today, to show that white people are still in control. These two men, Cobb and Holmes, actually have a lot in common. They shared the same job description, except for Gary Cobb there’s possibility for advancement, which is what the assistant D.A. seeks.