The lynching of Dee Watkins occurred in Nacogdoches County, Texas on June 11, 1898, a result of whitecapping. Prior to the lynching, Watkins had pitched a tent on a plot of vacant land near the town of Libby (14 miles northeast of Nacogdoches City) with the intention of preempting it according to homesteading laws. He then received an anonymous letter telling him to leave. Watkins disregarded the letter, which prompted a band of masked men to attack him at his camp and give him a final warning. Watkins did plan to leave but not before reporting the attack to local authorities. The men he identified in the attack were tried but, as often was the case with whitecapping and other episodes of racial violence, none convicted. Shortly thereafter, on June 11, 1898, a band of masked men returned to Watkins’s home and shot him to death in his bed. No one was ever brought to justice for this crime.
The issue of whitecapping must be explained to fully understand the lynching of Dee Watkins. Whitecappers, whitecapping, and white cap are terms with varied meanings. Most broadly they are terms that came into use by the 1880s and especially by the 1890s to describe mobs of white night riders who attacked victims by beating them, destroying property, and even murdering them. Whether or not they truly or always wore a disguise or uniform notwithstanding, whitecappers traced their origins to several secret extralegal, violent organizations often formed by white farmers in the nation’s rural countryside, including the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, as was the case in media concerning Nacogdoches, it was not uncommon to use the term whitecap or whitecapping interchangeably with the Ku Klux Klan.[1]
Whitecapping and whitecappers also referred to the excessive use of intimidation and/or violence to force property owners or tenants off their land and out of their homes. Particularly active in the years between the end of Reconstruction and World War I, these years also featured a depressed agricultural economy, low prices, rising indebtedness, and increased crowding on land. While both whites and African Americans suffered these conditions, whites could act out their frustrations with little fear of consequence while African Americans could not (though there are some examples of so-called Black whitecapping).[2] The problem of whitecapping had become so widespread that by the turn of the century, however, several state courts finally decided to formally criminalize it (in Texas, Article 314a of the Penal Code; update by the Twenty-Sixth Legislature in 1899).[3]
With little to no social or legal aid, African Americans were easy targets for whitecappers who feared no repercussions for their actions. Watkins’s lynching, in fact, was only one in a series of episodes in which white Nacogdocheans ran African Americans off their land through intimidation and threats of violence. Indeed, by 1903, whitecapping occurred again in Nacogdoches as two African American men, Jim Pleasant and Jesse Robertson, went missing after being run off their land. It is reported that Robertson filed complaints but after his disappearance nothing came of such. Media also reported that, at the same time, eight other unnamed African Americans were “whipped and forced to leave” the town of Libby.[4] In the end, nothing was ever done and no one went to jail.
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