The Forgotten Millican Massacre (June 9, 2026)

by Scott Sosebee

During the last week of May I attended the second annual meeting of the Alliance for Texas History in Fort Worth, an outstanding gathering of affiliated historians, independent scholars, and interested amateur historians (for more information on this organization see their website at alliancefortexashistory.org). Among the outstanding sessions at the conference were two that particularly grabbed my attention. One concerned how Texas has never really, in a broad sense, come to grips with their experiences during Reconstruction, and another on interracial violence, a topic that quite often encompasses Reconstruction. One of the presentations at the latter session was by Dr. Amy Earhart from Texas A&M University and her digital project that documents and sheds light on an East Texas incident that, as many incidents like it in Texas, has largely gone underreported, at best, but almost wholly forgotten is probably more accurate. Dr. Earhart’s project (which you can access at https://dhrace.net/millican/) spurred my memory on Millican, a small southeastern Brazos County town that was the site of one of the most violent attacks on African Americans during Reconstruction, an era in which such assaults were not uncommon.

When the Civil War ended in 1865 and with it the end of the institution of slavery, Texas and the other southern states faced a dilemma. In order to protect their system of enslaving human beings, a system that certainly had an economic component but had then willfully chosen to involuntarily place people in bondage according to their race, the American South had constructed a bi-racial society that was held together by the concept of White superiority. Slavery had made such a system fairly easy to maintain; it was not difficult to unify the majority of White southerners around the concept of racial superiority if practically every almost every person of African descent was enslaved. However, the end of slavery complicated such a concept, and when formerly enslaved people—now known as “Freedmen”—began to exercise their constitutionally granted rights to property and to vote, the majority of Southern Whites resisted that movement. It was such a conflict that led to the massacre in Millican.

Millican was founded in 1820, but by 1868 the town had a large percentage African Americans living in and around it, many who had come to the area to search for relatives when slavery ended (many “refugee slaves” were sent to Texas during the war to escape abolition when Union troops took control of plantations and regions). The presence of a large number of formerly enslaved people in an area that had also contained a number of plantations and was also dealing with the fall out of the Confederate defeat during the Civil War naturally led to tensions. One month prior to the incident, the Ku Klux Klan held a march in Millican. During the Klan’s rally, they disrupted an African American prayer meeting, firing shots at the prayers and dispersing those who had gathered.

The friction and strain engulfing Millican in that summer of 1868 came to a crescendo in July of that year. As the racial animus in Millican began to rise, George Brooks, a Methodist minister and also a former Union soldier, began to organize local Blacks into a militia. Brooks was very clear that his actions were not offensive in nature but purely defensive. They held drills and stationed armed men at checkpoints throughout the town to deter potential mob violence. Brooks—a strong supporter of African American citizenship rights—had also initiated campaigns to register Freedmen to vote and to also encourage Millican’s Black citizens to run for office—something that the town’s White residents could not fathom.

The rising conflicts came to a head on July 15. A rumor began to spread that a man named Miles Brown had been lynched by the White sons of a former enslaver. A competing rumor also began that the African Americans in Millican—specifically those members of Brooks’ militia—were planning to march on the Whites in the town and to seek out and also lynch the men who had supposedly lynched Brown. The rumors cast a pall of violence over the town, and that led to two incidents. Realizing the potential for violence, George Brooks left Millican to travel to Austin to obtain help from Republican Texas Governor Edmund J. Davis and the State Police. At the same time, Millican’s mayor and thirty armed White men (including a deputy sheriff) met with members of Brooks’ militia, perhaps in an attempt to curb potential violence, but perhaps also in a show of resistance. During the meeting a gun was fired—by whom has never been established—and that set off the massacre. The result—depending on whose sources you believe—was that between three and three-hundred African American residents of Millican were killed. Were there three hundred killed? Likely not as that was near the entire Black population of the town. However, it was certainly more than three. What has been documented is that at least three hundred Black residents of Millican left the city. Other reports have said that the violence against the Black residents of Millican continued for several days. If that is accurate, certainly more than three were killed. And what about George Brooks? He not only never reached Austin, but he was never heard from again. The best guess is that a group of armed White men chased him down and murdered him, then hid his body.

The aftermath of Millican became not much more than a footnote in the violent story of Reconstruction Texas, a story that should include the extreme violence that African Americans experienced from mobs angered because they had tried to exercise the rights guaranteed to every American. Those “footnotes” have even disappeared from the record during the contemporary era. Amy Earhart and others are trying to document and bring light to the story, primarily because—as she said in Fort Worth—“we can only begin to heal when we acknowledge what happened in the past.” I could not agree more.

The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee the Executive Director of the Association and can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.