Word: houston
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...demonstrate how Alfred Emanuel Smith might return the Democratic Party to power in the land, proponents of the Brown Derby argued at Houston as follows...
Taking their way through Houston's Negro quarter, as it was their duty to do from time to time, Detectives Davis and Bradshaw of the Houston police force surprised a Saturday night crap game. One of the Negroes dropped a gun and ran. Detective Bradshaw collared that man. Detective Davis chased another one, a Negro named Robert Powell. Some one shot. Davis shot too, then dropped, wounded mortally. Powell, wounded in the abdomen, crept home to bed. But he was found and with him a discharged revolver. He denied shooting Detective Davis. He was arrested, removed to a hospital...
Another Negro, one Pete Chester, had killed Policeman P. P, Jones of Houston last year. Chester was sentenced to death, but got a retrial this spring before District Judge C. T. Harper, who had himself just been acquitted of killing a man in a roadside row. Judge Harper's lawyer argued Chester's case before Judge Harper and the Negro got off with a sentence of four years. Because of the lightness of this sentence, the Houston police force was restive after Detective Davis' death...
...Houston police chiefs feared the worst and lectured their men to refrain from oldtime Southern violence. Then, one night last week, seven men hustled the wounded Powell from his hospital bed, took him to a bridge outside the city, tied a rope around his neck, pushed him off. The dark shape at the rope's end did not stop squirming and groaning. So the rope was hauled up and tied shorter, tighter. This time there was a solid jerk and a muffled snap as the body dropped. The dead thing dangled there all night...
...Houston, with throngs of visitors in town for the Democratic Convention, was furiously ashamed. Witnesses declared that at least one of the lynchers had worn a policeman's uniform. But the police force cleared itself by obtaining from one A. B. Wheeler, boilermaker, a confession that he and six other rowdies, whom he named, had done the deed. One of the lynchers was an ambulance driver. Houston cried for justice upon what Jesse Hoiman Jones, the biggest man in town, called "a stigma and a blot on the good name of Texas...