Banished

PIERCE CITY — “I’m sick of talking about this,” Willie Parks told me politely but firmly during a recent telephone interview.

Parks is among a handful of blacks who live in the southwest Missouri town of Pierce City, one of several communities across the nation that violently expelled black residents around the beginning of the 20th century.

For the past half-hour, he had answered my questions about the town’s racial past and its effect on race relations.

The city’s first black councilman and firefighter, Parks insisted that Pierce City’s past was just that — its past.

I learned about Pierce City’s troubling history after previewing “Banished,” a documentary that will be shown Saturday as part of Columbia’s True/False Film Festival. The film chronicles the racial “cleansing” of three towns: Forsyth County, Ga., Harrison, Ark., and Pierce City. It then explores the present-day struggles of both blacks and whites to redress — or not — these injustices.

After watching the film, I wanted to know whether blacks could return to, and live in, Pierce City. I wanted to know whether I, as a reporter and an outsider, had typecast Parks before I interviewed him: a mere pawn in a story I’d already written in my mind.

More than 100 years later, I wanted to know if Pierce City had really changed.

Missourian photographer Liana Cecil and I drove the nearly four hours from Columbia to Pierce City, a railroad town of almost 1,400 nestled between Joplin and Springfield. A 2003 tornado devastated much of the town, and the repair and recovery has been slow. Once-majestic trees now are bowed, their branches broken by the wind. Abandoned houses stand eerily silent, some with roofs blown off.

Most people you meet there are eager to tell you how Pierce City looked before the tornado hit. There were four grocery stores, two hardware stores and a hotel, recalled Gene Kluck, the 84-year-old owner of Friendly Supply Co., the sole hardware store in town. He has operated the store for 60 years and rebuilt it after the 2003 tornado.

His brown eyes lit up as we talked about the rebuilding, but when the topic moved beyond tornado recovery to the rebuilding of race relations, his answers grew shorter. I asked him if he had heard about the 1901 lynching of three black men — Will Godley, French Godley and Pete Hampton — and the forced exodus of an estimated 200 blacks that followed within a few days. Some were driven out at gunpoint, others by intimidation. Homes were burned to the ground.

“I heard that the colored people would be afraid to come here after dark,” said Kluck, who is white. He said his relatives used to tell him that the black railroad workers were afraid to come to Pierce City.

The lynchings were prompted by the murder of Gisela Wild, a 23-year-old white woman whose throat was slashed from ear to ear. She was found near a railroad culvert. Accounts from newspapers including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Joplin Globe said that what began as an organized law enforcement effort to look for a suspect had, by the end of the next day, developed into a mob of at least 1,000 people. They hanged Will Godley and went looking for Hampton, who was found at the home of his stepfather, French Godley.

Murray Bishoff, editor of the Monett Times in nearby Monett, said Hampton fired a “declaration of defiance” shot from inside the house at the crowd, which was armed with Springfield rifles taken from the National Guard armory. Shots fired by the mob killed both men.

Teresa Heeter, who is 71 and has lived in Pierce City for 50 years, said she’d always heard that “it” — the investigation of Gisela Wild’s murder — wasn’t done right.

“I will be truthful for you,” Heeter said, choosing her words carefully. “There hasn’t been many colored, black people since.

“Am I saying the right thing — colored?” she asked me, grabbing my hands. “That was the next thing after the bad word.”

I asked whether black people can truly be welcome in Pierce City.

Yes, she said, without skipping a beat.

“Those days are over,” Heeter said firmly. “Those days are gone.”

For Pierce City Mayor Carol Hirsch, who is white, the town’s economic woes make it hard to attract anyone to the town, let alone blacks. Right now, the mayor said there are four black families. She included Parks, who is married to a white woman.

Over lunch at a diner, Freda Mae’s, Hirsch and I talked briefly about the town. The tornado recovery is being funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and a Community Development Block Grant. The restaurant was rebuilt from tornado rubble, Hirsch said proudly.

“People ask why there are not black people here,” she said, weaving her fork through her chicken alfredo. “I say, anyone can live here. But there are no jobs.”

Many of the townspeople travel six miles east to Monett, a town of 7,396 that is home to Tyson Foods Inc. and Hydro Aluminum North America.

Pierce City’s biggest employer is its school district, Hirsch said. It has an elementary school, middle school and a high school — home of the Pierce City Eagles — and employs 116 people full time.

“This part of the country, frankly, hasn’t changed a lot,” said Bishoff, the Monett editor, as he slowed his car to point out several well-kept, Victorian-style houses.

Bishoff, who is white, has extensively researched and written about the racial expulsions in Pierce City. His work includes a series that ran on the lynching’s 90th anniversary in 1991. His exhibit at the Pierce City Museum painstakingly details the events of Aug. 19, 1901. He has written a historical novel on the subject, titled “Cries of Thunder”.

To Bishoff, the violence of Pierce City plays a pivotal role in a larger regional story.

After an 1894 lynching in Monett, seven years before the triple lynching in Pierce City, Monett had banished all of its black residents. Bishoff maintains that some residents of Pierce City felt they could compete better economically with Monett, a relatively new town, if they, too, became all-white.

In fact, after blacks were driven out of Pierce City, Robertus Love of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote, “She (Pierce City) has become thoroughly Monettized.”

During a visit to the Pierce City Cemetery, Bishoff led me to a memorial he dedicated to Hampton and the Godleys. Within sight are the headstones for Will Godley’s mother — and for Gisela Wild.

As we walked the half-mile to the railroad culvert near where Wild’s body was found, I asked Bishoff what would happen if more than a handful of black people moved to Pierce City.

Bishoff answered that 50 years ago, yes, it would have still been hard to be a black person in Pierce City. But the people who live there now aren’t hostile toward blacks.

“Pierce City is trying to be a nice little town to its people,” Bishoff said later.

Mayor Hirsch believes the town’s new Clark Mental Health Center, still under construction, “is going to save this town.” She said that it will bring 50 jobs, and that the people who work there will patronize businesses downtown and help rebuild the historic district.

I asked the mayor to describe the spirit of Pierce City.

“I think you’ve seen it,” she said. “We’re salt of the earth. We’re just everyday people trying to make a living.”

Has Pierce City really changed? It’s a question I’ve asked several times, of several people.

“It was horrible,” Hirsch said, speaking of the lynching. “But did we do it? No, we didn’t. That’s history. That’s how they did things back then. And you know what? It’s not going to happen again.”

She said she felt “betrayed” by a request for reparation money made by descendants of a relative who was buried in Pierce City in 1899. The Brown family believes that because Pierce City was a bad place for blacks, the town should pay for the disinterment and re-burial of their great-grandfather. That story is the focus of the Pierce City saga explored in “Banished.”

As we drove back to Columbia, I thought about the candlelight vigil Murray Bishoff holds every Aug. 19 at the site of the lynching. It’s something he’s been doing since 1995. Throughout the years, he said, usually just him and wife Julie have attended.

I think about the memorial stone at Pierce Cemetery; the $1,300 cost was paid mostly by Bishoff.

I think about Bishoff’s exhibit, which is in a semi-circle in the back of the museum’s main room. He said it’s set up that way “in case people don’t want to be disturbed by the subject.”

Banished from sight.

I think about Chelsea Vermont, a 15-year-old girl who, on the day I visited, was burning brush to prepare the lawn for warmer months. She said she didn’t know anything about the lynchings or her town’s racial history. She didn’t know what a lynching was.

Banished from mind.

I think about the Brown family, who didn’t want their ancestor left in Pierce City soil and sought $2,600 in reparations.

On June 3, 2005, then–Mayor Mark Peters published an apology in the Monett Times, in which he said the “exodus of nearly 300 African Americans ... created a wound which is not healed yet, despite the passing away of the persons who gave in to human weaknesses of fear and hate.” He set aside June 5 for a day of remembrance.

I think about Willie Parks’ wife, Alta Parks, who is white. She and Willie say they are probably not going to discuss the city’s racial past with their biracial children.

Alta Parks’s 2-year-old grand-niece Lakeishia, who is biracial, played happily on the porch as we talked. “Honestly speaking,” Alta Parks said, turning to face me on the couch where she’d been showing us her husband’s public service awards, “did anybody here give you any problems?”

I shook my head.

She seemed to expect that answer. “It doesn’t happen now,” she said. “It happened many years ago — they shouldn’t be bringing up the past.”

People like me, I guess she meant.

My sense is that it’s easier, much easier, to talk about rebuilding and renewal after a tornado than to talk about a lynching and a banishment. But no one seems to know where the discussion should begin or end.

“I don’t know,” said Hirsch, the city’s mayor, her voice catching in her throat. “Is money going to fix things? How? How do you make it right?”