06/21/2026
When we talk about the work of “recovering history” it goes beyond research…
For ninety years, the city of Sherman, Texas treated one of its own darkest days like something to be buried rather than remembered. Researchers who tried to document what happened at the Grayson County Courthouse in May of 1930 found notes left on their windshields telling them to leave town. One had all four tires slashed. Another had his research notes stolen outright. It took until 2025, nearly a century later, for a historical marker to finally go up acknowledging what the town had spent generations trying to forget.
In the spring of 1930, a Black farm laborer named George Hughes was accused of assaulting his employer's wife during a dispute over unpaid wages. He was arrested and scheduled for trial within a week, the standard pace of the era. But as word spread through Grayson County, a crowd began gathering outside the jail each night, growing larger and angrier. By the morning of May 9, the day of the trial, county officials were worried enough to request help from the state. Governor Dan Moody sent the Texas National Guard and a unit of Texas Rangers led by the legendary Captain Frank Hamer to keep order at the courthouse.
It was not enough. An estimated five thousand people packed the courthouse grounds and surrounding streets that day, far more than any law enforcement presence could contain. For a time, Rangers held the crowd back with warning shots, but by mid afternoon the mob broke through and set the courthouse on fire. Hughes had been placed inside a two story document vault for his own protection, and as the building burned around him, he suffocated before anyone could reach him. When firefighters arrived to fight the blaze, members of the mob cut their hoses.
That night, the mob used dynamite to force open the still smoldering vault, recovered Hughes's body, and dragged it through the streets of Sherman to the city's Black business district. What followed was a night of arson and destruction that local historians would later call the effective end of Black owned business in Sherman. An entire commercial district, built up over years by Black families and entrepreneurs, was burned to the ground in a matter of hours. The site is a parking lot today.
Governor Moody declared martial law the following morning, and it remained in place for two weeks. Sixty six people were taken into custody. Fourteen men were eventually indicted. Only two were ever convicted, one for arson and one for inciting the riot, and both served just two years. No one was ever charged with Hughes's death. He was buried in an unmarked grave at the county poor farm, his resting place unknown for decades afterward.
For most of the twentieth century, the Sherman Riot barely existed in the public record of the town where it happened. It took the persistence of local historians and researchers who refused to let it stay buried, facing real intimidation for trying to tell the truth, before the Texas Historical Commission finally placed an official marker at the courthouse in 2021, unveiled publicly in 2025. As one county judge said at the unveiling, no place truly becomes a community until it is willing to be honest about its own history.
This is not an easy story, and it was never meant to be a comfortable one. But it happened in Texas, and the people who fought for decades to make sure it would not be erased deserve to have that fight remembered too.
