The Racist Dallas Newspaper
Someone once asked me how could slave owners hate Black people and still be Christians? The answer is quite simple: Black slaves were viewed as animals without rights and animal stereotypes were used to describe blacks as inhuman. In the 1860s, slave owners in Texas were particularly nervous having been in wars with Mexico over the issue of slavery, and fighting these wars to maintain the institution of slavery. The Texas war of independence and the battles fought, including the Battle of the Alamo, was about slavery more than anything else and not about “freedom and independence” as claimed by racialized history tellers. In 1860, the editor of the Dallas Herald, Charles Pryor, wrote letters to editors and owners of pro-slavery newspapers, falsely asserting that the blazes in and around Dallas were started by abolitionists and their Black allies for the purpose of liberating slaves and perhaps establishing free territory in Texas. He even circulated articles claiming that blacks were trying to poison the water supply. He didn’t believe Blacks had the brains to do this themselves and made the ludicrous argument that white abolitionists put it in their minds. Well, we wonder who put this idea into the mind of Charles Pryor?
Supposedly, according to the racist rebel yells of Charles Pryor, anti-slavery religious ministers, from up North, had enlisted the help of Dallas area slaves to set the fires and supposedly murder white men. Of course, in order to make whites really mad his newspapers claimed that Blacks would also be engaged in “raping white women, white wives, and white daughters in the Dallas area,” and that these actions might spread outside of the Dallas area. These sick scandalous claims set off an unparalleled terror across Texas and the rest of the South. A book called “Texas Terror” by Donald E. Reynolds provides solid evidence that Charles Pryor helped to spread these lies so that southern states would rally and leave the Union and start the Civil War. In part, this is where the ridiculous lie was invented that the South was really waging a war against “Northern tyranny.”
In 1860, Charles Pryor was the white supremacist of that day, as lies were invented that eventually caused southern states to leave the Union. This fictionalized scheme, invented by the extremist rebel flag waving sons of bigots of that day, determined the direction of southern secession efforts before the Civil War. Charles Pryor was in part, the racist scoundrel that put Texas in the Civil War on the side of the slave owners. Terrorist vigilantes, brainwashed by white supremacy, rode the dirt roads of Texas and harassed everybody with contrived accusations that they might be involved in the concocted plot to free the slaves. Following the lead of Charles Pryor, many pro-slavery newspapers reprinted the false stories of Pryor as truth throughout the South. This is the ancestral propaganda of the Sons of Confederate Veterans whose aim it seems is to promote false and bigoted history.
The claim that the fires were started by slaves and abolitionists was a plot to create an atmosphere that would frighten whites who were already filled with hatred that their grandfathers taught them. Pryor and others used these lies as a way to incite rebellion in the southern states in order to cause war and secession. After Lincoln was elected they turned into a crazed mob of white supremacist southern rebels. There were many whites in the South that opposed slavery, but this was an act of intimidation to silence them as well.
