Introduction To Tyler’s Very Racist History
The Tyler, TX Skyline, 1935 After Adopting Apartheid-Like City Plan
For much of America, Tyler is a beautiful, small metropolitan city nestled deep among the lakes and rolling hills of pine country in Northeast Texas. Known as the “Rose Capital of The World,” Tyler proudly boasts of being a central cultural, educational, medical, and economic hub with a low crime rate. Retirees love its safe and secure small-town feel. College and university students enjoy a relatively affordable top-notch education. Entrepreneurial locals are busy developing a fun, modern culture complete with breweries and wineries, film and comic-con festivals, and creative niche restaurants. Add that almost 75% of its residents self-describe as religious, and it’s easy to see why for so many, Tyler is a slice of heaven on earth.
So why document Tyler’s history of racism and hatred? There can’t possibly be any merit to the claim Tyler, Texas was a white supremacist stronghold! If there is, it has had no real impact on the culture. “Tyler’s not racist,” right? At least not anymore. Surely, “Tyler is post-racial!” Or as one black City of Tyler official said, “Tyler’s progressive!”
Maybe there is more to the story. Indeed, there is a reason why so many people firmly believe Tyler is so prejudiced and bigoted. There must be a reason why, just under the thin veneer of southern gentility, Tyler remains deeply divided. This division is not a new development. Tyler has long been separated, segregated, in fact, since its conception: people of color are separated from whites, North Tylerites are separated from their neighbors to the South, and the wealthy are separated from the impoverished.
Blog posts categorized Tyler’s History of White Supremacy have two specific purposes. First, I will reveal a clear and consistent line of evidence or people, events, and local legend detailing white supremacist thought and deed beginning in the early 1800s extending to the 1970s. I attempt to frame Tyler’s people and events within the broader context of state and national happenings. I want the reader to understand most of the influences upon the city and their power on local culture and patterns.
This past must be acknowledged.
Secondly, there must be a reckoning with the history presented. That is why I will encourage the readers, the city, to take action steps toward healing and racial reconciliation.
Today, we all live in the dark shadow of white supremacy - haunted by its ever-changing tactics and often veiled hooded face. I believe that the cumulative effects of these happenings developed what many people of color (POC) in Tyler and Smith County believe is today’s racist culture.
While reviewing the culture-making happenings, it is my desire that the reader considers how, for example, the slave trade and chattel slavery created multigenerational trauma. Consider how that trauma was further compounded by the continued experience of oppression and institutionalized racism after the Civil War that lingers to this day. The weight of this trauma has physical, mental, socio-emotional, and economic consequences for all parties, both the victims and also the victimizers. While writing this book, I heard, “You’re digging up the past! You’re going to start a race war! You’re a racist race baiter!” The fragility displayed on the discussion of race was yet further evidence that the ever-present past has injured white Tylerites. Do not think our land is unwounded by the oppressive weight of hate. That would be dishonest.
Pouissant and Alexander’s book Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African Americans described the cancer of white supremacy on our national soul as “the persistent presence of racism, despite the significant legal, social, and political progress made during the last half of the twentieth century.” The authors of the book are certain that white supremacy “created a physiological risk for African American people that is virtually unknown to European Americans.” White Americans are not exempt from trauma, though. Among countless other experts, Ryan Parker, LCSW, believes that white Americans suffer too. In her project Slavery in the white psyche: how contemporary white Americans remember and making meaning of slavery[3], she writes, “The findings indicated that many contemporary white Americans have an intense and conflictual emotional and psychological relationship to U.S. slavery. Participants’ responses suggested that psychological defenses, such as denial and disavowal, are used to avoid intense feelings of shame and guilt associated with slavery. Another critical finding was the pervasive interpersonal silence around slavery among participants. This study indicates that slavery is an important site of white racialization and that talking about slavery is essential for the mourning process that all Americans must undergo if we are to mediate slavery’s pernicious legacy in the United States.” It is obvious, white supremacy is equally injurious both to those who endure its pains and those who inflict it, though one party suffers much differently and more severely than the other.
Tyler’s history reveals white supremacy’s first injured party was Native Americans. It would be appropriate to call the anti-Indian campaigns a genocide. Those who managed to survive the onslaught were rounded up and moved to territories or settlements; they were separated from their ancestral lands.
Mexican peoples have also suffered from the perpetrators of the wicked ideology and its seemingly endless thirst for the acquisition of land, wealth through cheap labor, and raw power.
Lastly and perhaps most critically, white supremacy has waged a relentless campaign against African Americans. Some of the harsh realities of chattel slavery included: “beatings, floggings, rape, lynching, family dissolution, food and water deprivation, and other forms of inhumane treatment.”
Then Jim Crow moved into Tyler. White supremacy has engaged in a relentless campaign of trauma. This book will expound further on each of these campaigns, leading up to the Civil War, the War itself, and the subsequent years and provide the people and the places that created and kept the spirit of white supremacy alive.
So, it is my firm belief as a humanitarian the weight (burden) of white supremacy, racism, and hate needs to be discussed among Tylerites and East Texans of all races and of good faith. It requires a reckoning. Why? Because I am not alone in thinking the soul of America has been suffering under the weight of sin. According to a Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll in July 2020, 56% of the public agrees, “American society is racist.”[4] 78% of African Americans believe that racism is alive and well. And 60% of Hispanics agree. Our culture is sick. Tyler is sick. And we need to experience healing.
I believe that the good people of Tyler want to move toward becoming a more welcoming and loving city. Which requires we heal our divides by engaging in the process of truth-telling, acknowledgment, and confession. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission used this method. Not long ago, South Africa was much like America’s South. Jim Crow was called Apartheid. Likewise, in America, poor race relations threatened life, and tensions kept the nation in a state of civil war.
Church and government officials arrived at a consensus regarding a healing process. Newell Stultz Phd., Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Brown University, explained the process undertaken by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “First, you bring out into the open the sins of the past. And if the sinners of the past would own up morally to what they had done, then there is at least the possibility of forgiveness and healing. Then once parties begin to make confessions, all could move forward to reconciliation.”
Lastly, Tyler’s History of White Supremacy has the earthly salvation of lives in mind. The posts have the gospel-centered goal of acknowledging and confessing the race-based sins of the past, reckoning with their damage, then moving toward reconciliation. Its truth-telling today is for a Gospel-good here and now, not just the sweet by-and-by. These writing should inspire a communal confession that exposes sin and helps to deny its power. Reckoning helps to restore - it’s what was envisioned by the Biblical Jubilee. It’s what the life of a Christ-follower should reveal in our interactions with one another. Lastly, reconciliation is what prophets like John The Revelator foretold,
“I looked again. I saw a huge crowd, too huge to count. Everyone was there—all nations and tribes, all races and languages. And they were standing, dressed in white robes and waving palm branches, standing before the Throne and the Lamb and heartily singing: Salvation to our God on his Throne! Salvation to the Lamb!”
