African American Studies Minor Remembering Slocum Scholarship
The Texas State University African American Studies Program is pleased to announce a new scholarship fund for students invested in Black history and the African American Studies curriculum.
Award-winning author and Texas State alum E. R. Bills (class of 1990) is donating his past, present and future print and online royalties for the books he’s written about Black history in Texas to the African American Studies Program. This Texas State University African American Studies financial aid fund will be called the Remembering Slocum Scholarship and it will award at least one $729.00 grant per semester—the $729 figure commemorating the month and day a little-known racial pogrom started in southeastern Anderson County—July 29, 1910.
The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas (History Press 2014), Bills’s first book on black history, galvanized efforts to garner a historical marker acknowledging the atrocity and, when it was dedicated on January 16, 2016, it became the first Texas state historical marker to specifically acknowledge racial violence against African Americans in the state.
Bills’s second controversial foray into African American history, Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror (Eakin Press, 2015), was listed in an article titled “Recent Books That May Be of Interest to African American Scholars” in the September 2015 edition of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, and in the October 2019 Texas Monthly cover story, "The Battle to Rewrite Texas History," Bills was mentioned as part of "a new generation of scholars" who are attempting to correct the "historical record" in the Lone Star state.
According to Dwonna Goldstone, the Director of the African American Studies Program at Texas State University, Bills’s donations and royalties will be used to establish “Remembering Slocum” scholarships for students in the African American Studies program and encourage educational opportunities and a general awareness of the 1910 Slocum Massacre in East Texas and Black history, in general, in Texas and the United States.
On July 29, 1910, white mobs marched through the Slocum area of southeastern Anderson County and Northeastern Houston County slaughtering African Americans on sight. Dozens if not hundreds of innocent black Texans lost their lives in the pogrom, and hundreds if not thousands fled.
Bills and Goldstone recently co-wrote a historical marker application as part of an effort to procure a state historical marker acknowledging the lynching of Bragg Williams on the courthouse square of Hill County in Hillsboro, Texas in 1919.
