We Cannot Stay There and Live
The Arthurs in 1920
Image: Scott and Violet Arthur arrive with their family at Chicago's Polk Street Depot on August 30, 1920, two months after their two sons were lynched in Paris, Texas. Chicago Defender, September 4, 1920. Child standing, front center: Ervin Hill (1914–1989) – grandson (wearing knickers. Seven standing behind child, left to right: (i) Millie Arthur (1907–1975) – daughter; (ii) (unidentified); (iii) Scott Arthur (1836–1937) – father; (iv) (unidentified); (v) Violet Arthur (née Charles; 1860–1951) – mother; (vi) Eula Arthur (born abt. 1903) – daughter; (vii) Mary Lee Arthur (1905–1977) – daughter
Prologue: The Ground Beneath
There is a photograph.
It has, over the years, come to stand for more than the moment it recorded. It is not only the image of a single family on a single day, but a fragment of a much larger departure — the long, steady movement of Black Americans out of the South, the trains and roads that carried them from counties where their labor was bound to the land and their lives were bound by law and custom, toward cities whose names had been passed from mouth to mouth in letters, in church basements, in whispered promises: Chicago. Detroit. Philadelphia. This photograph was taken in Chicago, September 1920, in a small studio at the train station. Eight figures stand pressed together, shoulder to shoulder, against a plain wall. At their feet are two battered suitcases, the leather scuffed, the corners worn soft from years of use. They hold all that could be carried from Paris, Texas — all that could be taken in a single flight north.
The men are at the edges, standing square, as if to anchor the group. They are broad-shouldered, in long, heavy coats, their hats set level on their heads, the brims shadowing their eyes. Between them stand the women, coats and folded blankets clutched close. The weight of what they hold suggests more than the September chill of Chicago — it suggests the colder place they had come from, a place where the air in July could smell of kerosene and burning flesh.
In the center is a boy. His straw hat is too large for him. The sleeves of his coat hang almost to his hands.
No one smiles. The expressions are fixed — not in open defiance, but in a way that refuses to be easily read. Faces that do not invite pity, that do not offer explanation. Their clothes are plain, mismatched, worn; garments taken because they were at hand, not because they were chosen.
Behind the stillness in the photograph is motion: the train they had just stepped down from; the journey that began in the ashes of the Lamar County fairgrounds; the hurried leaving from a county where grief began.
In the photograph there is no caption. Only what can be read in the set of their mouths, in the way they hold themselves, in the narrow space between their backs and the wall behind them.
The train — the same one that carried so many northward — has brought them into the geography of the Great Migration, into the streets where other families stood with suitcases at their feet, into neighborhoods built by those who had also fled. Whether it has brought them to safety is another question.
A Story of Fire, Flight, and Memory
Paris, Texas. Summer, 1920. The courthouse stood at the center, a square of white stone and authority, its high clock tower visible from every road that led into town. On the lawn, in front of the steps where county officials passed each morning, rose the monument—Confederate soldier in granite, rifle at his side, eyes fixed outward. It had been there for sixteen years, dedicated in 1904, paid for by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who had written into its dedication that it honored “our heroes” and “the cause they fought for.” The monument was more than a statue; it was a declaration in stone that the Civil War had ended on paper but not in policy.
Image: Confederate Veteran Memorial Statue on the courthouse lawn in Paris, Texas. Besides the statue of a soldier, there are busts of four Confederate leaders around the base, sculpted by Coppini. Bell, Jim, November 13, 2008. The Portal of Texas History.
From that courthouse square, the streets radiated—north to the railroad depot, where freight cars carried cotton bales to the Gulf; east to the brick storefronts of Lamar Avenue; west toward the fairgrounds, where the county staged its livestock shows and, when the season came, its public punishments. Beyond the square, the town shifted. The streets narrowed. The paving gave way to dirt and ruts. Houses shrank from two stories to one, from wood frame to unpainted boards. This was the Black district. Here lived the men and women who picked the cotton, cleaned the houses, swept the streets, and cooked the meals that underpinned the county’s economy.
Image: Paris Texas in the early 1900s. Source: City of Paris Texas. https://selectparistexas.com/live-in-paris/our-history/
And beyond even that—five miles out, along the red-dirt roads that bent through the flat, sunburnt fields—were the tenant farms. This was sharecropper country. Here, Black families lived in weathered cabins on land they did not own, paying their rent not in dollars but in labor, bound to the plantation store by a cycle of credit that began each spring and was called in each fall. The store ledger, written in the landlord’s hand, decided the balance. The balance was always owed.
It was in this outer ring, in one of those cabins, that Herman Arthur, twenty-eight, and his younger brother Irving, nineteen, lived with their sisters under the roof of Scott and Violet Arthur. Herman had been away—in France with the United States Army’s engineers, laying track and repairing roads for the war effort. He had returned in uniform, a man who had moved through ports and cities where his skin was not a legal barrier, who had seen the wide streets of Paris—Paris, France—and come home to Paris, Texas. The war had ended in Europe in November 1918. Here, it had never ended at all. He was a skilled marksman, trained to handle a rifle with precision.
The man who owned the land under their cabin was John Hodges, white, a man with acreage and standing. The arrangement was clear: the Arthurs would work his fields in exchange for a share of the crop. But there were rules beyond the contract—rules not written in any ledger but understood by everyone who lived under them. One was that the workweek ended at noon on Saturday, and Sunday was a day of rest. This was not generosity; it was custom, and in a system where the landowner’s word was law, custom was the only ground the tenant could stand on.
In late June or early July, Hodges tested that ground. He told the Arthurs they would work past Saturday noon, and on Sunday as well. No pretense of emergency, no storm-damaged crop—just an order. The refusal that followed was small in act but large in meaning. It said: here is a line. And in Lamar County in 1920, a Black man drawing a line against a white landowner did not remain a private matter for long.
When the Arthurs refused, the conflict moved inside their cabin. Hodges and his son Will came armed. Furniture and food were thrown into the yard. The brothers and their sisters were ordered to strip under the pretense of debt, the humiliation calculated, the violence deliberate. Days later, as the family was preparing to leave, the two parties met again. Twice armed provocations by the Hodges men—both father and son—escalated the encounter. In the second, William Hodges allegedly fired first. The Arthurs returned fire. Both Hodges men were killed.
In Paris, the law did not stand between a Black suspect and a white mob—it stepped aside. The brothers were betrayed by a Black man, Pitt" McGrew (née James McGrew; 1875–1943), arrested in Oklahoma and brought back to Lamar County. On the evening of July 6, the square emptied toward the fairgrounds. By the time the brothers reached the jail, the crowd numbered in the thousands. Keys were handed over. The Arthur brothers were tied to a stake, the fire lit beneath them, the killing carried out in full public view. The brothers never made a sound, even as they burned. Ernest Christian Steen, a deputy from Choctaw County, stood within fifty feet of the pyre. He would later say he could never again witness such a thing—it was too terrible.
Image: July 7, 1920 US News coverage of the Lynching of Irving and Hermann Arthur.
While the fire burned in the fairgrounds, another violence was taking place inside the Lamar County jail. The Arthur sisters—aged 14, 17, and 20—had been placed there under the pretense of “protection.” As the brothers’ bodies were dragged through the Black district, the sisters were severely beaten, taken to the basement, stripped of all clothing, and, according to later accounts, raped by twenty white men. None of the mob wore masks. It was said later—by newspapers willing to print the excuse—that the darkness prevented identification. In 2018, historian Hollie A. Teague would write that it was “impossible to imagine a scenario in which some of those twenty white men were not jailers, police officers, or sheriff’s deputies… impossible to imagine” that those officials were not aware of the prolonged assault or its participants. Yet no arrests followed. The contrast with the South’s reaction to any alleged attack on a white woman or child could not have been sharper.
The Lesson
The next day, in Idabel, Oklahoma, Lamar County Sheriff William Everett “Eb” Clarkson confided to a fellow lawman that one, if not both, of the brothers would have been found innocent had the law been allowed to run its course. Clarkson insisted that one was not the murderer, and the other could not be positively identified. But such admissions—like the facts of the assaults—would remain outside the official record.
The law’s final gesture was a grand jury. Five white men were indicted for the killings. None were convicted. In the courthouse square, the Confederate soldier still stood watch; at the fairgrounds, no marker explained what had been done there. Paris had its own archive—in ash, in silence, and in the knowledge of who was allowed to act without consequence.
Image: thousand people gathered to watch the lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, on February 1, 1893. Source: J. L. Mertins/Library of Congress Prints
The Arthurs fled. In early September, the Chicago Defender published a photograph of Scott and Violet Arthur and their surviving children at the Polk Street Station in Chicago: faces tight, clothes plain, posture upright. Behind them, the city that had expelled them; ahead, the city where they would try to breathe. The caption named what the courts would not—“girls assaulted, sons burned at the stake”—and offered what Paris would not: refuge. That image has outlived the courthouse files and the grand jury minutes. It is the hinge on which the family’s story turns from South to North, proof that memory, like people, migrates to survive.
The sisters left Paris with their parents, but they did not leave it behind. The three Arthur sisters carried out of Texas more than the memory of a night in the Lamar County jail. They carried the knowledge of who had been in that basement, and who had looked away. In Chicago, they would be young women in a city swollen with new arrivals, where the streets east of State bustled with the sound of trains and the smell of coal, where the South Side was filling with Black southerners whose journeys north had the same unspoken refrain: we cannot stay there and live.
In the Defender’s pages, they were already part of a composite figure—the assaulted sister, the widowed mother, the orphaned child—that stood for the casualties of southern racial order. But in life they were individuals. The oldest found work as a domestic, moving between the South Side flats and the Gold Coast houses where she was called by her first name and told to enter through the alley. The middle sister married early; her children grew up hearing that “something happened” in Texas, but the details were never given. The youngest lived longest, through the Depression, through the war, through the waves of return migration that began in the 1970s, when some Chicago-born children of the South went back to Mississippi or Louisiana to reclaim land or look after aging kin. She never went back to Texas.
Their silence was not forgetfulness—it was a survival skill. They had stepped from one caste system into another, and survival in the North required a different choreography. The violence in Paris had written one kind of instruction into their lives: that a white man’s accusation could erase the law in an instant. The life they built in Chicago wrote another: that safety came not from the absence of racism, but from the presence of numbers, of neighbors who would see and testify.
Image: July 10, 2020, Chicago, IL, USA: From left, Ralph Sims, Evelyn Sims, Ryan Cooper, 5, Rufus Sims, Rameria Sims, 10, and Roshaunda Sims, photographed on Friday. Rufus Sims, 87, is the nephew of Herman and Irving Arthur, who were lynched in Paris, Texas, in 1920. His grandparents and mother fled to Chicago two months later and the picture of their family at Chicago's Polk Street Depot became an iconic symbol of the Great Migration. Source: Chicago Tribune.
A Return
The sisters’ absence from the 2020 ceremony was not accidental. They were gone by then, their names remembered in family circles, their photographs folded into envelopes or tucked in albums. But their absence was also a reminder: the people most wronged are often the least able—or least willing—to stand in the place where the wrong was done. Their lives in Chicago, and the deliberate distance they kept from Lamar County, are part of the memorial whether or not their names are etched on any marker.
The killing in Paris was part of a broader season—1919 into 1920—in which riots, pogroms, and rural massacres swept across America. The burnings, the shootings, the drownings all served the same dual purpose: to punish those who resisted and to reaffirm the racial hierarchy. Herman Arthur’s military service sharpened the symmetry. In July 1919 he was discharged from the United States Army, a Black engineer returned from Europe after serving a cause called democracy. One year later, in the county of his birth, that cause was shown to have no jurisdiction.
Image: Rufus Sims, 87, is the nephew of Herman and Irving Arthur, who were lynched in Paris, Texas, in 1920. “My uncles were burned alive in a field because they fought back,” Sims said. “A lot of people lost their lives for fighting back. It’s important for the younger generation to understand that.” Source: Chicago Tribune.
Violet lived almost a century—ninety-one years—but she never outlived her sons. The wound did not close. Her grandson, Rufus, remembered the pattern, the ritual. She would leave the front room, walk down the short hall, and pull the door shut behind her. Inside, the sound would begin—low at first, then gathering, groans that seemed to come from some deep place in the body, moans that rose and fell, the names spoken into the stillness as if summoning them back: Irving, her baby boy. Herman. Outside the door, the house went on—pots simmering in the kitchen, the radio murmuring—but in that room, time had not moved.
A century passed. Then, on July 7, 2020, they came back—descendants of both the Arthur and Hodges families—meeting at the Red River Valley Veterans Memorial. It was the middle of a pandemic; the gathering was small but deliberate. Melinda Watters, a Hodges descendant, had organized it. She stood in the town that had once looked on as the brothers burned and said aloud what had never been entered into the record: “I lament the monstrous lynching and murder of Herman and Irving Arthur… I am sorry for the way the white community and my family and myself have been complacent.” It was not legislation. It did not move a monument or reopen a case. But in a place where the official record was acquittal and forgetfulness, it was a breach in the script, an attempt to write new words into the public square.
Arthur descendants spoke, too. Janese Walton-Roberts, making her first return to Paris, admitted the cost: it was not a place the family had wanted to see again. But she said, “The time has come for forgiveness.” Properly understood, this was not erasure. It was an insistence that history be acknowledged in full, that forgiveness be grounded in fact. A local pastor confessed that one of the lynch leaders had been a member of his congregation. Plans were discussed to work with the Equal Justice Initiative on a memorial. The ambition was modest and exacting: to build a memory that would not again be allowed to recede.
Image: Arthur family descendants hold up a plaque that honors Herman Arthur’s World War I service. Janese Walton-Roberts, an Arthur family member, spoke at the ceremony held at the Red River Valley Veterans Memorial in Paris, July 2020. Source: https://ntcumc.org/news/an-apology-100-years-in-the-making
The work of the historian is to reconstruct the sequence: the confrontation, the killing, the arrest, the fire, the assaults. To pull from archives the telegrams, the indictments, the newspaper captions. But the work of the community is different. It begins when a town concedes what it did, and what it taught by doing it. In Paris there is now an apology, however partial; a ceremony, however small; a photograph that refuses to fade; and a return that turns private grief into public instruction. These are not reparations. They are the conditions that make them possible.
Set 1920 against 2020 and the lessons are clear. Racial order is maintained not only by lawmen and juries but by crowds, custom, and the choreography of public space. Silence is not neutral—it is a tool, with political effect—and it can be broken by a descendant’s decision to speak, a pastor’s decision to name names, a family’s decision to come back and say: remember. And the Defender photograph, a century old, remains more than evidence of flight. It is evidence of instruction: when a city drives its people out, it teaches them to build somewhere else. The moral is not catharsis. It is responsibility. The lesson given at the fairgrounds was never buried; it is still in the political soil of Lamar County. To change the lesson, you have to change the ground.
Books
Beck, E. M., and Stewart E. Tolnay. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Dray, Philip. At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002.
Equal Justice Initiative. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015.
Feimster, Crystal N. Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Ginzburg, Ralph. 100 Years of Lynchings. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988.
Haley, Sarah. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones, ed. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892–1900. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997.
Wagner, Bryan. The Tar Baby: A Global History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. 1895. Reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969.
Williams, Kidada E. They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Jett, Brandon, "Paris is Burning: Lynching and Racial Violence in Lamar County, 1890-1920," East Texas Historical Journal : Vol. 51: Iss. 2, Article 9. 2013. Available at: https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/ethj/vol51/iss2/9
Website Sources
An Apology 100 Years in the Making.” North Texas Conference of The United Methodist Church. Published September 2, 2020. Accessed August 2025.
https://ntcumc.org/news/an-apology-100-years-in-the-making
EPFL Graph Search. “Lynching of Irving and Herman Arthur.” Accessed August 2025.
https://graphsearch.epfl.ch/en/concept/64483608
Glanton, Dahleen. “After 100 Years, Paris, Texas, Confronts Lynching That Sent a Family to Chicago.” Chicago Tribune, July 13, 2020. Accessed August 2025.
Madewell, Mary. “Remembrance Ceremony: Descendants of Families Linked to 100‑Year‑Old Lynching Met for First Time.” The Paris News, July 7, 2020. Accessed August 2025.
“Lynching of Irving and Herman Arthur.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified May 9, 2025. Accessed August 2025.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Irving_and_Herman_Arthur