Harrell Bolton and assaulting his female companion, Margaret Hays, near Waco on May 25, 1922. Thomas was wrongly accused of murdering W. In fact, the dates on the other photos in Teddie’s album made it likely that this picture showed the burning of Jesse Thomas, a 23-year-old Black man. In that lynching, historian Patricia Bernstein writes, Washington was “beaten, stabbed, mutilated, hanged and burned to death on the Waco town square, before an audience of 10-15,000 screaming, cheering spectators.” This date proved crucial, because it meant that the victim in Teddie’s photo album could not be Jesse Washington, the 17-year-old mentally handicapped young man who was lynched in the infamous “ Waco Horror” of 1916. Indeed, my research soon revealed that the pictures belonged to Mary “Teddie” Kemp, a white woman from Pennsylvania who moved with her husband, Gene Kemp, to Waco, Texas, in 1922. Teddie’s photo album, which also included pictures of Teddie and her husband doing normal, everyday things like riding donkeys and going to wedding anniversary dinners, presented a direct challenge to this interpretation. Scene of the burnings of Johnny Cornish, Mose Jones and Snap Curry in Kirvin, Texas, on May 6, In other words, this official state interpretation holds that slavery, racism and racism’s deadly manifestation, lynching, did not serve as systemic forces that shaped Texas history but were instead aberrations without any fundamental meaning for Texans – or even beyond the state. In 2021, for example, Texas Republicans enacted Senate Bill 3 to prohibit K-12 educators from teaching that “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from … the authentic founding principles of the United States, which include liberty and equality.” Greg Abbott and Republican legislators in Texas want to ban from public schools. In fact, I was engaging in the very kind of historical analysis that Texas Gov. I immediately set out to identify the victim and to discover the story behind “Teddie’s pictures.”Īs I did so, I realized that what I was doing would be controversial, if not illegal, had I been a K-12 teacher in Texas. It read: “Burning of negro in front of old City Hall, Waco, Texas.” Revealing history lessons In this photograph, the charred remains of Jesse Thomas are barely visible.
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