Jennifer Lawrence

Kenneth Wayne Howell

James Smallwood

Keith Volanto

Charles Grear

A Narrative History of Texas

Beyond Myths and Legends

Virginia Durr of Alabama was a major reformer whose public career spanned almost fifty years. She fought against the Poll Tax and other restrictions of the franchise that stopped millions of whites and blacks from voting, a development favoring only the Souths aristocracy. She became a leader of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Education Fund. Most notably, she directed the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. As well, she actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement by working with people like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mary McLeod Bethune. Because of her reform activism, Durr became a target of J. Edgar Hoovers FBI, Americas secret police, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. She, along with her husband, was hounded by reactionaries from 1938 through the early 1960s. In the United States in the modern era, suppression did not begin with President George Bush; rather, suppression began much earlier; Virginia Durrs career is a case in point.

Virginia Durr, Prophet of the New South

Reform, Red Scare, and Ruin

James C. Kearney

Bill Stein

Two family names have come to be associated with the violence that plagued Colorado County, Texas, for decades after the end of the Civil War: the Townsends and the Staffords. Both prominent families amassed wealth and achieved status, but it was their resolve to hold on to both, by whatever means necessary, including extra-legal means, that sparked the feud. Elected office was one of the paths to success, but more important was control of the sheriff’s office, which gave one a decided advantage should the threat of gun violence arise. No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell concentrates on those individual acts of private justice associated with the Stafford and Townsend families. It began with an 1871 shootout in Columbus, followed by the deaths of the Stafford brothers in 1890. The second phase blossomed after 1898 with the assassination of Larkin Hope, and concluded in 1911 with the violent deaths of Marion Hope, Jim Townsend, and Will Clements, all in the space of one month.

The Stafford-Townsend Feud of Colorado County, Texas, 1871-1911

No Hope for Heaven, No Fear of Hell

Barry A. Crouch

Larry Peacock

In the states of the former Confederacy, Reconstruction amounted to a second Civil War, one that white southerners were determined to win. An important chapter in that undeclared conflict played out in northeast Texas, in the Corners region where Grayson, Fannin, Hunt, and Collin Counties converged. Part of that violence came to be called the Lee-Peacock Feud, a struggle in which Unionists led by Lewis Peacock and former Confederates led by Bob Lee sought to even old scores, as well as to set the terms of the new South, especially regarding the status of freed slaves. Until recently, the Lee-Peacock violence has been placed squarely within the Lost Cause mythology. This account sets the record straight. For Bob Lee, a Confederate veteran, the new phase of the war began when he refused to release his slaves. When Federal officials came to his farm in July to enforce emancipation, he fought back and finally fled as a fugitive. In the relatively short time left to his life, he claimed personally to have killed at least forty people—civilian and military, Unionists and freedmen. Peacock, a dedicated leader of the Unionist efforts, became his primary target and chief foe. Both men eventually died at the hands of each other’s supporters. From previously untapped sources in the National Archives and other records, the authors have tracked down the details of the Corners violence and the larger issues it reflected, adding to the reinterpretation of Reconstruction history and rescuing from myth events that shaped the following century of Southern politics.

The War of Reconstruction in Texas

Murder and Mayhem

James Smallwood

About

Books

Join the club