The Houston Lynching That Wasn't

Why do we tend to want to believe the worst in times of strife?

As we all will recall, the nation was very much on edge this time last year. Embers were still burning in Minneapolis following the police murder of George Floyd, and cities in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere were riven with nightly unrest. Statues of old dead White men were coming down coast to coast — most with some semblance of reason, a few casualties to misinformed mobs. Covid was clenching its icy fist on us all, and Trump was spewing his usual deranged word salad diarrhea on Twitter and on camera nightly. All in all the country felt as much like a tinderbox as it had at any time in my own memory.

And for a minute, it all came bearing down on me and mine in my own neighborhood. Social media reports came crackling through reporting the straight-up lynching of a Black man about five blocks from where I was then living — with Sheryl Starry and Tom Burkholder, in Shady Acres, near Ella and 610. Which is pretty much exactly where a body was found hanging from a tree — in a vacant lot behind a hardware store across the street from the Memorial - Hermann Hospital campus there on Ella, near the Lowe’s.

I was intensely skeptical from the get-go. What were the mechanics of this lynching? How did a group of presumably White people manage to snag a Black victim and transport him to a mostly liberal, mostly White neighborhood, hang him from a tree, and then escape, entirely unnoticed? Why would they choose that tree, in that place? Had I for all these many years blithely ignored a positively snarling current of foul racism in my hometown, one whose last lynching took place in the 1920s and was one of a relative few when compared to other Southern places? Could it be that somehow the racial clock had been set back 100 years overnight by Trumpism and backlash against Black Lives Matter in the wake of the George Floyd atrocity?

A whole lot of people seemed to want to believe all that was true. This is common to many such disasters, I’ve noticed. People leap to the worst possible conclusion and then stand by it, even as countervailing facts come in. There is a tendency amongst all of us to want to believe the worst, so long as it supports some underlying belief we have long held. You do this sometimes. I do as well. We all do.

So, because I lived a few blocks away, and once was an actual reporter, I walked up to the site of this lynching to see what I could see. I filed the following report, one year ago today:

Citizen journalist John Nova Lomax checking in with a spot report from the scene of the Shady Acres hanging....HPD has said the victim was Hispanic, not African American, and word was he was not homeless, but drove himself to this tree in a PT Cruiser...A Bible was found near his body....There was apparently a lot of bloodshed somehow, as the lot reeked of death, even through a COVID mask. The homeless colony under the 610 bridge I hoped to canvass had either dispersed themselves or been scattered by HPD.

Those are the facts as I observed them. There were no witnesses or police for me to talk to at this late hour.

Pic is close-up of limb on which the body was found facing southwest. Those stains in the grass were very much buzzing with flies.

So — the suicide of a semi-homeless Hispanic man, not the lynching of a Black man. Even given that report, some on the scene claimed the police were lying. My question, then as now was this: where are this grieving Black man’s relatives? And are the actual grieving relatives — the Hispanic family who were reported to have told HPD that this man was their relative — Alex Jones-style Sandy Hook “crisis actors”?

Well, it’s been a year now, and the official story still stands: Hispanic man, unnamed because he took his own life. (It took me a week or two to get the fetid smell of Texas sun-ripened death out of my nostrils; that pic above brings it back.)

And it calls to mind some of the wisest, most compassionate words I’ve ever read.

To wit, from Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis:

"The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred."

The right, I fear, ensconced in their perpetual sauna of pure hatred, ever clings to the version of events that offends them most; everything else is “fake news.” And in light of decades of covered-up police murder, it is very easy to jump to the conclusion that all cops lie about everything all the time. However….that’s just not true. There was no Houston Heights-Area Lynching of 2020. It seemed too shocking to be true and it was, even if some seemingly wanted it to be true, for reasons I think I understand but are no business of mine to speculate on.

But I will say this: It is our duty as thinking, compassionate, and logical beings — humans — to transcend this most seductive of moral traps or we become nothing more than the Fox News zombies we love to decry.