A Life Constructed. Delon Hampton
of Joliet and Gary, Indiana, and into the plains of the Heart of Illinois, where corn and soybean farms filled the big windows of our train car. I remember the car being filled with people of all different types and colors, and being able to go wherever I wanted down the aisles of the train that led to the dining and other cars.
That changed when the train stopped in St. Louis. The conductor told us we had to move to a special car, near the front of the train where the noise was the loudest and the smoke from the engine was the worst. When we sat down in our new seats, I noticed that everyone in the car now looked like me and my mother. The car was filled with the smell of fried chicken, cornbread, and other home-cooked foods. Like my mother, most passengers in this car had packed their own food, because there was no longer any other choice if they wanted something to eat.
St. Louis, it seems, was at the edge of the Mason-Dixon Line. As a result, just like every other black person who traveled by rail in America between 1849 and 1954, when segregation in public transportation was finally ruled illegal, we were forced to move to a segregated car. As a boy growing up in urban Chicago, this was my first experience with segregation and racism, but it would certainly not be my last.
Jefferson, Texas, is a tiny speck of a town in the northeast corner of the state, near the borders of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. You wouldn’t know it by visiting today, but there was a time when Jefferson was one of the biggest and most important gateways to the Southwest. Nestled along the Big Cypress River, it was once the busiest port in Texas—second only to mighty Galveston. The riverboats and barges that once filled the waters between Jefferson and the Port of New Orleans, like tractor-trailers that fill the interstate highways today, connected the American West to the rest of the country and the rest of the world.
In a state now dominated by the modern-day megalopolises of Dallas–Fort Worth and Houston, it’s not surprising that little Jefferson tends to treasure its past. Almost every building and home in downtown Jefferson has a historical marker out front, from the Old Post Office to The Grove, a clapboard home built in 1861 that is now considered one of the most haunted houses in America.
One of the most haunting historical events that ever occurred in Jefferson, however, is less well celebrated. In 1868, with the wounds of the Civil War still deep and divisive, Jefferson erupted in racial violence that had to be quelled by army troops and martial law. Known as the Stockade Case, the incident began after George Webster Smith and four black men came to town in October of that year. Smith, a former Union officer and well-known Marion County resident, apparently got into an argument with a local former Confederate Colonel named R. P. Crump that led to gunfire. Smith and the black men were put in jail under the auspices that it was for their own protection. But on the night of October 4, 1868, a lynch mob of nearly a hundred hooded men who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan’s Knights of the Rising Sun roared into town with torches and guns and took over the jail. According to accounts from the time, the Klansmen shot Smith through the bars of his jail cell window. They then dragged the black men to the nearby woods, lynching two of them while the other two escaped. After the US Army finally arrived in Jefferson to quell the violence, more than thirty suspected Klansmen were arrested and later put on trial before a military commission. Three of them were found guilty of murder; most of the rest went free.
My family owned a lot of contiguous land in Jefferson and in surrounding Marion County, Texas, and even to this day many of the streets and neighborhoods of Jefferson bear the name of my family—not Hampton, but Douglas. There is Douglas Street through the middle of town, Douglas Bottom out in the country, and the town of Douglas Chapel about ten miles to the east.
During my inaugural visit there in the 1940s, most of my time was spent with one member of the family or the other. When we weren’t visiting, I was helping out on the farm or was out fishing, hunting, or otherwise spending time with my cousin Bubba and other relatives. Since we were out in the country and surrounded by family, we were not exposed to racism or segregation unless we went into town. I was, however, exposed to something else I had never seen in Chicago: homes without indoor plumbing. For the first time I used an outhouse, and I took baths in a big washtub filled with hand-pumped water instead of a shower connected to the city water supply.
All of this made for a great adventure for a kid from inner-city Chicago—so much so that a few years later I asked to go back to Texas during my summer vacation from school. It was another trip that would reveal more secrets of my past.
By then, I knew that I had been born Charles Douglas Jr. What I didn’t know until that second trip to Texas was that I was the second son of Alzadie Lewis Douglas and Charles Douglas Sr.
What I remember most about that first time I met Clarence was simply how elated I was to know that for the first time I had a brother. I was a teenaged boy who had been essentially raised by a single mother and two other females in our home in inner-city Chicago. Now, here I was in rural Texas again, surrounded by men who hunted, fished, and made their living off the land—including, I now realized, my own brother.
Throughout his life and from the moment I met him, my brother Clarence was a strong and vibrant individual. He was a hardworking leader who people gladly followed—including me. When I met him for the first time, he was already on his way to becoming a successful doctor. During the summer I met him, he was home from college and working in the men’s locker room at a country club. I would go to work with him, helping him shine members’ golf shoes.
At the time Clarence lived not in Jefferson but in Shreveport, Louisiana, about fifty miles away. One day he drove over to pick me up, not to go to the country club, but to go back to Shreveport. The reason: to meet the father I had never met before.
Charles Douglas Sr. was a baker who lived in Shreveport with his wife and with Clarence. During my second visit to Texas I would spend some time living with them too, although during the whole time my contact with my natural father was limited. I remember only one thing about that visit. One day my father took me to work with him. I had free reign of the bakery and all its operations, from the giant mixing machines and ovens to the wheeled racks and cases. What I remember most about that day was lunching on hot bread, fresh out of the oven, and drinking chocolate milk. During the weeks of my visit to Shreveport, I never had a conversation or interaction of any significant length or substance with my father. Except for the trip with him to his workplace, he ignored me.
Like me, Clarence did not get much from our father either. It was our uncle, Dr. Raymond D. Douglas (R. D.) and his wife Willie Mae (Aunt Bill), who were principally responsible for rearing and educating Clarence and leading him into the medical profession. R. D. Douglas was active in his community and in Texas state politics. He built, owned, and operated the local hospital in Jefferson, Texas. He also traveled extensively. To his credit, whenever he visited a city in which I resided, he would always call and take me out to dinner. He never gave me advice or counsel, however. I guess he decided taking care of one of his nephews was enough.
Clarence was R. D.’s hope and joy. He helped Clarence through college and medical school. He anticipated that Clarence would return to Jefferson, take over his medical practice, and run the hospital he had established. Clarence had other plans.
During his sophomore year at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, Clarence married his college sweetheart, Meriel LaBrame. Upon graduation he began an internship at Mercy Hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He did well at Mercy Hospital. So well, in fact, that he attracted the attention of a physician who convinced him to establish his practice in the nearby town of Belle Plaine, Iowa. Clarence decided it was a good idea and he and Meriel moved there, built a prosperous practice, and had two children. Clarence became an active and influential member of the community and for many years served as chairman of the Belle Plaine School Board. He also was the coroner for Benton County, Iowa.
Clarence and Meriel’s marriage ended in divorce. Meriel took their children, Everett and Leslie, and moved to her hometown, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she raised them while teaching history as a professor on the faculty of Southern University. Leslie went on to become a very successful physician like her father, and she and her husband, Dr. Keith Churchwell, produced a talented daughter,