One weekend in June 1892, Isaac Bruce traveled to Hillsboro to celebrate Emancipation Day.
But by the end of the festivities, Bruce had lost his freedom after being falsely accused of rape. The Bruce case led to deep soul-searching in a racially charged Lone Star State. It began with the approach of Juneteenth, the anniversary of the day Texas slaves learned they’d been freed.
Bruce’s journey through the legal system demonstrates how standards of fairness have evolved but also how some of the same troubling questions about justice remain more than a century later. It resonates today as a parade of wrongfully convicted men continues to march across America.
The Dallas Morning News retraced Bruce’s journey from the scene of the crime, to the square where a sheriff and armed residents held off a lynch mob, to the courthouse where his trial occurred and to the jail where he was held while the scaffolding for his hanging was being built.
This is his story.
HILLSBORO — From inside the bowels of the Hill County jail, Isaac Bruce could hear hundreds of men clamoring for his head. “Let’s hang him!” “We must protect our homes!” “Juries turn rapists and murderers loose!”
The black man, only in his 20s, must have been bewildered. A few hours earlier, he had been in that crowd, sitting quietly atop his horse, waiting for the feed store to open, as they milled about, outraged over the rape of a white girl.
Now those same men wanted to kill him.
All that stood between Bruce and a stretched rope was the sheriff who arrested him, John P. Cox. The father of eight had moved his children out of their jailhouse living quarters, locked the door and drafted dozens of deputies to guard the jail. Cox’s wife remained at his side.
Bruce could hear Cox, described as a fearless Confederate veteran, address the mob from a window: “My friends … I want you to go home, for I don’t want to hurt you. … I will be a dead man before a prisoner in my custody is harmed.”
Bruce must have hoped that Cox meant it, because he had good reason to be afraid.
Reason to fear
Across the United States, 1892 was the peak year for lynching, according to archives from the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. At least 230 people were murdered by mobs that year.
In Texas, attacks by “the court of Judge Lynch” had long been terrifying. In October 1891, a black man had been snatched from the jail in Linden in East Texas after the sheriff’s wife or the jailer turned over the keys. The mob of mostly blacks and a few whites took the man to where a woman and her child had been murdered a few days before. After the man allegedly confessed, he was chained by the neck to a persimmon tree and burned alive.
Now a similarly enraged crowd gathered in Hillsboro. Cox’s speech the morning of June 20 calmed the crowd of between 800 and a thousand people for a while. But the threat of vigilante justice ebbed and flowed for the next 36 hours.
That night, a committee of five demanded that Bruce be turned over to the mob. Cox, with the support of a score of deputies armed with rifles, some positioned in the upper windows of buildings, remained unmoved. “I have men here who will defend this jail to the end,” he said, “and I will die before you get this prisoner.”
The mob remained past midnight. The next morning tension rose again, with downtown businesses closing early and the hardware store running out of firearms sold to vigilantes or lent to deputies.
Cox told the mob that he doubted Bruce’s guilt and that Bruce appeared to have an alibi. And he repeated his determination to do his duty.
The crowd adjourned to the county’s ornate new courthouse for a “law and order meeting.” A statement from the victim was read, insisting she was not mistaken in her identification of Bruce. But some also noted there was “in the minds of a great many conservative men grave doubts.”
The group, composed of some blacks as well as whites, wrote a manifesto denouncing the person who committed the “infamous crime” and pledging to use “all lawful means” to bring “speedy justice” to him.
More people answered a call from Cox for help, bringing the number of deputized citizens to more than a hundred.
Finally, Cox gave in to the urging of friends. After 48 hours without sleep, while holding the vigilantes at bay, he moved Bruce to Fort Worth for his safety. When a train whistle sounded around 4 a.m., Bruce, heavily guarded and handcuffed, was pushed on board the slow-moving train.
Others were not so lucky. Several months later, another man, Henry Smith, was turned over to a mob in Paris in northeast Texas after the murder of a 3-year-old girl. As many as 10,000 spectators flocked to see “justice” done. Smith was paraded through town on a carnival float to a waiting scaffold where small braziers glowed.
He was stripped and bound and his body was burned with irons for almost an hour. Hot irons were pushed into his eyes and down his throat, and he was doused in oil and set ablaze. The mob poked through his ashes to collect body parts as souvenirs.
Unlike Henry Smith, Isaac Bruce had, at least temporarily, escaped a lynch mob. But his life remained in peril.
Reason to hope
Despite his dire circumstances, Bruce had reason to hope: his alibi. A judge appointed two experienced, though unpaid, attorneys, and the prosecutor’s case hinged on one piece of evidence — eyewitness testimony.
Bruce, who was known as “Ike” and grew up in Waxahachie, had been working as a laborer in the McLennan County town of West Station, now known simply as West. On Friday, June 17, he and several friends, including Terry and Ella Williams, traveled to Hillsboro to spend the weekend with Anderson and Lucy Flournoy.
Bruce said he attended Juneteenth festivities all day Saturday, June 18, walked a girl home that night and went to church at Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist on Sunday.
After evening services, Bruce ate dinner with the Williamses and Flournoys, then went to bed.
At the same time, a poor white transient cotton chopper, C.L. Sherrill, and his daughters, Ella and Ola, were camped at Abbott’s Grove, on the edge of Hillsboro.
On Sunday morning, C.L. left camp to walk to town, where he downed several glasses of whiskey. On his way back around sundown, Sherrill got lost and a lone black man guided him to the grove. There, Ella, 16, dished out beef and bread for supper and the men shared a chew of tobacco. After the man left, the Sherrills turned in for the night.
Around 2 a.m. Ella awoke to find a black man pulling a ring from her finger. C.L. asked what he wanted. “Give me another chew of that tobacco, like you gave me this evening,” he said.
Sherrill gave it to him and asked if the man, who had drawn a pistol, was going to hurt them. When the man replied that he intended to kill them, the Sherrills ran.
But when C.L.’s exit was cut off by the armed man, C.L. called out to the girls for help, and they raced back. Ella placed herself between the two men as the girls pleaded for their father’s life. At Ella’s urging, C.L. then ran to get help.
By the time her father returned with several men, Ella had been raped. Ella and Ola, 13, gave detailed descriptions of the assailant, including what he was wearing and what he looked like: He was “a tall black, young Negro man, but not coal black; with very little fuzzy moustache.”
The Sherrills also said the man carried a knife and gun.
Sheriff Cox immediately mounted a manhunt. Around dawn, John Jackson was arrested in front of a dance hall in the black neighborhood known as Freetown. Not only did Jackson match the description, he also carried a knife and gun and used tobacco. And he ran when approached by officers. Between eight and 10 other black men, including Isaac Bruce, were also rounded up that day for the lineup.
Eventually, Ella Sherrill was escorted to the jail, followed by her sister and father, for a lineup. The black men were told to remove their coats and hats, then put them back on, to ensure proper identification.
Bruce was calm. After all, he was elsewhere at the time of the attack and bore little resemblance to the girls’ description: no moustache, no weapons, and he didn’t smoke or chew.
Prosecutors cautioned the Sherrills not to identify anyone unless they were sure.
C.L. Sherrill did not pick a suspect. But when Ella was told to place her hand on the man who raped her, she reached out and touched Isaac Bruce.
Jackson, the man who fit the description and had no alibi, was held for more than a month and then released.
The trial for Bruce’s life began Nov. 2, 1892, in Hillsboro. From jury selection to sentence, the case lasted three days.
Ella took the stand first. She told jurors that she was assaulted in the middle of the night but said she saw her assailant clearly between flashes of lightning as a storm moved in.
“I know positively that defendant is the … Negro who outraged me,” she said. “I know him by his form and I know him by the way his hair was cut and I know his features.”
Another witness testified that Ella “shuddered” when she saw Bruce in the lineup.
C.L. took the stand to explain that he hadn’t identified Bruce from the lineup because he was afraid he would be detained as a witness. But now, he told jurors, he was certain Bruce was the attacker.
After a series of prosecution witnesses, Bruce and his friends testified.
Bruce told jurors he had never met the Sherrills, had not gone to their camp, did not pull a pistol, did not chew tobacco and “did not commit the crime of rape.” He also pointed out that, unlike the described rapist, who had a moustache: “I never shaved. I never could find anything to shave.”
Anderson and Lucy Flournoy testified that Bruce slept on a pallet in their home the night of the rape. Anderson said when he got up after 1 a.m. for a drink of water, Bruce was asleep. Terry Williams, sleeping in the same room as Bruce, swore he saw him on the floor all night because his wife was ill and they were awake until after 4 a.m.
Others, including Bruce’s white employers, John and James Valentine, testified to Bruce’s good character.
But Bruce was on trial before some of the same people from the mob who had already tried to kill him. That jury of 12 white men believed the eyewitnesses.
On the third day of the trial, Bruce was declared guilty. After escaping a hanging by a lynch mob, he seemed destined to die in the first legal hanging in Hill County.
Bruce’s fate eventually would lie in the hands of the 6-foot-2, 300-pound son of a Confederate general, Texas Gov. James Hogg.
COMING MONDAY Condemned to die, Isaac Bruce spends months awaiting his fate.
THEN AND NOW
Lynching: For decades, lynching was an accepted practice, even by prominent Texans. Between 1885 and 1942, at least 468 people were lynched in the state. With the help of anti-lynching laws, the practice faded from use, and the last recorded Texas lynching took place in 1942.
But some of the complaints that gave rise to lynching are still heard today: fear of crime, the slow pace of the criminal justice system, leniency from the courts. Because of population growth and the increase in the number of laws that can be broken, the wheels of justice turn even slower than before. Fear continues to dictate public policy. Since the 1990s, punishment (“lock ’em up and throw away the key”) has been given more importance than rehabilitation (such as drug treatment programs rather than jail time).
Eyewitnesses: A large number of men were included in Isaac Bruce’s lineup, and they were dressed in a variety of clothing. Law enforcement officials also cautioned the witnesses not to identify anyone as the suspect if they weren’t sure.
But the identification process would be far different now: The victim and suspect would never physically meet. Multiple witnesses would not see the lineup while together. Awareness of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony is growing, so “show-ups,” where a person found near the scene of the crime becomes a suspect, have been widely discredited because they are too suggestive of guilt.
Some departments, such as the Dallas police, now follow stringent procedures in which the person showing photos to witnesses does not know which photo is of the person police suspect. That ensures no unwitting cues are given to the identifying witness.
But the importance of eyewitness testimony continues to be hotly debated, with some experts saying it has proved to be so unreliable that it shouldn’t be used without corroborating evidence.
The jury: Jury selection then took a few hours; now it can take several weeks.
Though prosecutors insisted Bruce’s all-white jury consisted of fair-minded individuals, uninfluenced by public opinion, today he would be entitled to a racially and gender-diverse jury pool. Despite rulings requiring diversity, however, some say discrimination in jury selection continues through routine exclusion of minorities.
The trial: Now, attorneys in death penalty cases have months instead of weeks to prepare. Because of the media attention generated by the crime and attempted lynching, today Bruce also might receive a change of venue, with the trial in a neutral county.
Bruce was lucky to have experienced, but unpaid, attorneys in the late 1800s. The U.S. Supreme Court didn’t require indigent defendants to have appointed counsel in capital cases until 1961. And critics contend that despite improvements in pay and quality of representation, appointed attorneys are often overworked, underpaid and lack the necessary trial experience to handle a capital case.
The sentence: Bruce would not be eligible for the death penalty today because rape has not been a capital crime since 1977. Legislators in several states in recent years have proposed reinstating the death penalty for the rape of a child.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Reporter Diane Jennings became curious about Isaac Bruce’s story while researching a contemporary death penalty issue in newspaper archives. With the help of the Texas State Library, the Sims Library in Waxahachie, the Texas Prison Museum and genealogist Patricia Kemper of Family Detectives, Jennings and reporter Selwyn Crawford pieced together Isaac Bruce’s tale through old newspaper accounts, crumbling court filings, scrawled letters and other century-old documents.
Bruce’s prison record was located, and a librarian at the state library found the original documents from Bruce’s trial and its aftermath rolled up in the bottom of a box in a warehouse. Researchers at the library dehumidified them, unrolled them and sent copies to the newspaper. Kemper identified Bruce and his descendants through census records, death certificates, and marriage and birth records. News researcher Darlean Spangenberger tracked them down. Photo editor Michael Hamtil unearthed archival images of some of the people and places connected to Bruce’s life and coordinated visual and multimedia presentation for these stories.