Healing Requires Truth

A modern civil rights project seeks to reexamine hundreds of Jim Crow–era murders, and help families move forward.

- By Samantha Michaels

JOYCE FAYE NELSON-CROCKETT was 13 years old in 1955, dancing to a jukebox in the Hughes Cafe on a Saturday night in East Texas with her sister and her 16-year-old cousin, John Earl Reese. The boy had come home to the nearby town of Mayflower earlier that day after a summer away picking cotton, and he held Nelson-Crockett's hand as he spun her around the room. All of a sudden, a sharp crack interrupted the music. Nelson-Crockett thought it was fireworks at first, until she heard a thud on the floor and noticed Reese lying there. “I looked and saw his brain coming out of his head, she later told a reporter. She felt warm liquid running down her arm and saw that she'd been struck, too, in her wrist. Her 15-year-old sister also took a bullet in the shoulder. Nelson-Crockett later learned that two white men shot through the cafe windows from their car because they were angry that local politicians had agreed to spend money on a school for Black kids.

Reese died from his wounds. But the gunmen never spent a day in prison. “I felt terrible then. Still do,” Nelson-Crockett told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1989. “I guess I will until I’m dead.” She’d been close with her cousin, who had lived down the street from her and walked with her to catch the bus, often making her laugh when she was having a bad day. The county government didn’t seem to care about the way his life had been cut short: Its records listed Reese’s death as an accident, despite plenty of evidence, including the killers’ confessions, that he’d died in a racist murder.