11/7/2022 0 Comments Eugene yang family secret![]() “I don’t ever understand what could be done,” she told the Longview News-Journal in 2009, when she was in her late 60s. So Nelson-Crockett kept the memories buried and tried to stay busy farming her land. ![]() By the time she reached middle age, she worried that if she spoke about his murder, her granddaughter, whom she was raising, might look at their neighbors differently or feel unsafe at school some of the shooters’ relatives likely still lived in the area. The family lost all its photos of him during fires that destroyed her house and her grandmother’s house. In the decades following the shooting, Nelson-Crockett didn’t talk much about Reese to relatives. The county listed Reese’s death as an accident, despite plenty of evidence, including the killers’ confessions, that he’d died in a racist murder. The county government didn’t seem to care about the way his life had been cut short: Its records listed Reese’s death as an accident, despite plenty of evidence, including the killers’ confessions, that he’d died in a racist murder. “I guess I will until I’m dead.” She’d been close with her cousin, who had lived down the street from her and walked with her to catch the bus, often making her laugh when she was having a bad day. Still do,” Nelson-Crockett told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1989. But the gunmen never spent a day in prison. Nelson-Crockett later learned that two white men shot through the cafe windows from their car because they were angry that local politicians had agreed to spend money on a school for Black kids. Her 15-year-old sister also took a bullet in the shoulder. She felt warm liquid running down her arm and saw that she’d been struck, too, in her wrist. “I looked and saw his brain coming out of his head,” she later told a reporter. ![]() Nelson-Crockett thought it was fireworks at first, until she heard a thud on the floor and noticed Reese lying there. All of a sudden, a sharp crack interrupted the music. The boy had come home to the nearby town of Mayflower earlier that day after a summer away picking cotton, and he held Nelson-Crockett’s hand as he spun her around the room. Joyce Faye Nelson-Crockett was 13 years old in 1955, dancing to a jukebox in the Hughes Cafe on a Saturday night in East Texas with her sister and her 16-year-old cousin, John Earl Reese. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter. ![]()
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