As a historian and director of the Lynching in Texas project, which has documented more than 600 racial terror lynchings, I receive regular emails from journalists, scholars and activists who want to discuss the history of racial violence.
The conversations I had with reporters and historians didn't prepare me for the email I received last winter. A Chicago dealer offered to mail me a photo album with a picture from a lynching.
I would like to review the album and help identify the victim.
I opened the envelope a week later and found five photos, a small cartoon and a key labeled Teddie's pictures.
The photographs were numbered.
The first image was of something burning wood. It was hard to decipher. The description made it clear that matters.
There was a burning of negro in front of old City Hall.
I set out to identify the victim and discover the story behind Teddie's pictures.
I realized that what I was doing would be controversial, if not illegal, had I been a K-12 teacher in Texas.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Republican legislators in Texas want to ban public schools.
Senate Bill 3 was enacted by the Texas Republicans in order to prohibit K-12 teachers from teaching that slavery and racism are deviations from the authentic founding principles of the United States.
In other words, the official state interpretation holds that lynching did not serve as a systemic force that shaped Texas history, but was instead an isolated incident that did not have any fundamental meaning for Texans.
Teddie's photo album included pictures of her and her husband riding donkeys and going to wedding anniversary dinners, which presented a challenge to this interpretation.
Mary Teddie Kemp, a white woman from Pennsylvania, moved with her husband Gene Kemp to Texas in 1922.
The victim in Teddie's photo album could not be Jesse Washington, the mentally handicapped young man who was lynched in the notorious "Waco Horror".
Washington was lynched in the town square of Waco, before an audience of 10 million screaming, cheering spectators.
The dates on the other photos in Teddie's album made it likely that this picture showed the burning of Jesse Thomas.
Thomas was wrongly accused of attacking Margaret Hays and murdering W.
Sam Harris shot and killed Thomas when Hays identified him as her likely attacker.
A crowd of several thousand people watched as a white mob dragged his body to City Hall and burned it.
There were more questions after the identification of Jesse Thomas as the victim in Teddie's photo album.
A picture of a lynching victim is included in a photo album of an educated white woman.
The lynching picture is the first photo in the album, why would she take her photos out of chronological sequence?
The answers to the questions reveal a lot about Texas.
The album exposes the priority that Anglo Texans place on white supremacy and Black subjugation.
Teddie probably pasted the picture of Jesse Thomas burning body at the beginning of her album because it featured an exciting event that showed the nature of her new Texas home.
Historian William Carrigan has shown that white supremacy and racial violence were core elements of the state's identity.
They established the written and unwritten rules governing the social order, who could vote, who could marry whom, who could attend events, and the ultimate punishment for violating the rules.
Lynchings, like the one depicted in Teddie's photo album, present a direct challenge to the whitewashed view of Texas history that Abbott and his Republican colleagues prefer.
The most extreme and violent embodiment of white supremacy in the state during the Jim Crow period was Lynchings, which occurred 16 times in 1922 alone.
When Black and Hispanic Texans dared to challenge white authority or to claim for themselves the rights of U.S. citizens, they faced violence on a scale rarely seen in other parts of the country.
In May 1922, white Texans carried out at least 10 lynchings in a single month, more lynchings than in any other state.
Most people today associate the Dark Ages with the torture of eight Texas victims who were burned at the stake in 1922.
These horrible acts happened a few generations ago in Texas. White people took pictures of the events and put them in their family albums.
The lynching of Black men and women in Texas one hundred years ago was not an exception. The rule was proved by it. You could say white supremacy rule.
The Conversation is a news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by Jeffrey L. Littlejohn.
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