Millican massacre
Texas
A rumor about one missing man set off three days of violence in a Texas railroad town, and historians still cannot agree whether five people died or a hundred and fifty.
In July of 1868, word went around Millican that a freedman named Miles Brown had been killed near a farm outside town. A Black preacher, George E. Brooks, sent Harry Thomas to gather men and search for the body. Thomas assembled about thirty men and marched them through Millican in military formation. Another twenty joined near the Brazos River bottom. The farmer, Andrew Holliday, sent word into town that armed Black men had surrounded his house. About thirty armed white residents set out toward his farm, with the deputy sheriff and the mayor along. The two groups met at a bend in the road. White witnesses said the freedmen fired first. A wounded freedman said Holliday did. A Freedmen's Bureau report put it plainly after that: a general firing commenced from the whites. The fighting went on for three days, from the fifteenth of July to the seventeenth. Texas A&M has since called it the worst incident of racial violence in Texas during Reconstruction.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
The violence began after a rumor spread that Miles Brown, a Black freedman, had been killed near the farm of Andrew Holliday.
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