CENTER, Texas — As Delbert Jackson turned right onto the clean, sandy-paved stretch of Martin Luther King Drive, his chin lifted with quiet pride. The road’s upkeep is due in large part to Jackson, who leads regular community cleanups in the city.
On this humid and sunny morning in early June, something felt a bit off. As he stepped out of his SUV and onto the corner of Daniels Street in Center, Texas, he became tense. The spot, once an empty patch beside Hicks Mortuary, is now home to a historic marker honoring two Black men lynched by white mobs: 16-year-old Lige Daniels in 1920 and Eolis “Buddy” Evans in 1928. Both were killed without consequences — and for decades, their stories were passed quietly through families, excluded from the city’s official record.
Jackson pointed out that a beige metal structure had been added to the memorial site — crowding the space despite plenty of room elsewhere from the corner to the parking lot of the Black-owned funeral home to its main building.
“An eyesore,” he said, peering over his glasses.
Jackson has launched a campaign to relocate the marker and add a second — honoring his distant cousin Leonard McCowin, a 21-year-old Black veteran who witnesses say was killed by a Center city marshal in 1947. A grand jury declined to file state charges. The FBI declined to investigate McCowin’s death in 1947. And in April 1948, the NAACP filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of his father, Ezekiel McCowin, against the marshal, Bryan McCallum, bail bondsman Winkie Warr, and the city of Center. The suit was dismissed that November due to a misspelling — “Brian McCollum” — in the court filing, according to Shelby County court records.
McCowin’s descendants have no legal recourse beyond Jackson’s push for a historical marker at the site.
As Black history faces growing erasure from textbooks, the current federal administration has continued to release the details of other unresolved Civil Rights Era cold cases like McCowin’s. Records related to his killing were released in December 2024 by the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board, which was created by Congress in 2018 to examine unresolved cases from 1940 to 1979. Bipartisan legislation introduced in April seeks to extend the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board through 2031.
As of June 12, the board has released 24 cases.
“The main focus of the Board is to release as many records as possible, to give a fuller picture of that era — for families and the public alike,” board spokesman Steve Fennessy said in an email to Capital B.
But Jackson’s campaign to honor his ancestors started long before the files of the McCowin case were released.
Gazing at the navy-and-gold plaque, his finger landed on the sixth line: “white supremacy.” He pauses and then recalls 2017 when he began petitioning Shelby County, Texas, officials to install the marker.
It was a yearslong battle that ended with a partial win, he said. His employer, Tyson Foods, donated money and the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project helped with its placement in December 2018. The marker, he says, belongs 2 miles away in Center’s town square — the site of the original hanging tree, once rooted on the southeast corner of the old Shelby County Courthouse.
Jackson has faced resistance from Shelby County’s Commissioner’s Court, which controls the county’s historic grounds — once part of a region known as “No Man’s Land” after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. He says the court is more concerned with the proposed language for McCowin’s plaque, just as they were during debates over the EJI marker.
“They didn’t like the words used on the EJI marker … the truth,” he said.
Capital B has reached out via email to the Commissioner’s Court and Shelby County Chamber of Commerce for comment. As of this publication, the Chamber of Commerce hasn’t responded.
The county historical commission claimed in 2019 that the square could not honor “a single person.” Capital B confirmed that at least three existing monuments are dedicated to do just that. One, installed just months before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, honors 37 Confederate descendants who fought in a battle that didn’t occur in Center.
Allison Harbison, the county judge who presides over Commissioner’s Court meetings, told Capital B in an email that while she doesn’t speak for other members, she believes “the present WWII monument honors Mr. McCowin’s service, as well as all the other WWII veterans from Shelby County.”
Regarding the relocation of the current lynching marker, Harbison said she has “suggested that a simple plaque be placed to mark the spot where the tree stood, but, that idea has not been embraced by the Leonard McCowin family.”
A family reunion and a sister’s memories
In 1947, Reather Washington was 12 when her brother’s body was brought home by one of at least three witnesses to the killing.
“My brother was a very lovely person,” the 90-year-old told Capital B in May. “He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
By early June, she had her 64-year-old son drive her 187 miles to memorialize her big brother during a four-day Christian conference in Center.
Just steps from the city’s historic lynching marker, family members gathered at Triumph The Church and Kingdom of God in Christ. She’s used to delivering sermons at her home church in Dallas, but June 6 felt different. A mix of pride and melancholy.
From the pulpit, this sermon felt even more personal. Washington was given 15 minutes to speak, but she asked the congregation — made up mostly of family — for more time to express her disbelief and joy that, after 77 years, their family’s injustice was finally being acknowledged beyond her former ZIP code.
A few tambourines shook, and an 18-year-old drummer tapped out a quick beat as the crowd responded in unison: “Take your time,” their voices echoing throughout the more than a dozen navy cushioned pews.
“When you think God done forgot about you,” she said, prompting a bellow of amens and a chord from the organ. Then she added, “God will put you on somebody’s mind.”
McCowin, the fourth of eight siblings, was the breadwinner in a family with aging parents after he came back from WWII. He worked as a dishwasher at a café near the courthouse and often hunted squirrels or rabbits to help feed the family.
Many descendants of Leonard McCowin, gathered in Center in June for the conference, said they had learned about his death through their grandparents — and now they’re the elders.
Washington and her 93-year-old brother, S.A. McCowin traveled from Dallas to attend the conference, and reunited with Jackson, their cousin, after Sunday services in June.
Brenda Allen, 63, whose father was a McCowin, was also in attendance. Refreshments were served after each session in the parish hall adjacent to the church offices, separating the nave. At the head of a long table sat Washington with her daughter-in-law Delores Washington seated to her left and across from Allen to her right.
“It angered me first of all because it happened, and then it happened to a relative,” Allen said after placing her fork down and swallowing the last bite on her plate. “What angers me more is that people, especially Black people, I’ll be honest, just don’t want to talk about it and say, ‘That’s in the past.’”
“But it’s still happening, things like that,” she said as she leaned in closer. “You may not see as many being lynched from a tree, but they’re being lynched in other ways.”
– Brenda Allen
After Leonard McCowin’s death, the immediate family fled to Smith County, nearly 100 miles north, amid continued threats. Now, they only return for church events. Other extended relatives remained.
On the day he was killed, according to Washington and a witness’s affidavit, McCowin encountered McCallum, who asked to see his .22 rifle. McCowin handed it over. After confirming it wasn’t loaded, McCallum used the butt of the gun to strike McCowin in the neck, killing him on the spot.
“He just throwed the gun down and walked away. Looked around at the people and just walked off, like, ‘Y’all see what I did,’” she said as the pace of her voice picked up with each word during a March phone conversation with Capital B. She slowed down, saying: “That was a sad day.”
What the public records from the cold case review board didn’t reveal was Washington’s memories of her brother, who had planned to marry in June 1948.
“I often reflect on my brother,” she wrote in a February 2025 letter to county officials, “and wonder what kind of husband and, possibly, what kind of father he would have become if he had been blessed with children. Unfortunately, his life was cut short before he could experience these moments.”
Washington, Allen, and other relatives believe his killing stemmed from mistaken identity. Earlier that year, her second-oldest brother, Caldonia, had survived a confrontation with a white mob — an incident she believes put the family in danger. Caldonia passed away on June 12; he was 103.
Capital B visited the Center City Police Department for comment about McCowin’s case on June 5. A spokesman for the department, Lt. Andrew Williams, was not aware of it to comment on behalf of the department. He said it was his first time hearing about the case and the historic markers around town.
Finding roots and nurturing a family tree
Center has a population of more than 5,200 and is located in East Texas, about 55 miles from Shreveport, Louisiana, and nearly 200 miles away from Dallas.
Jackson grew up in Center, but settled in Houston before he returned in 2013.
For years, he was curious about his family’s history. In 2003, at 43, he was still living in Houston when he came across James Allen’s book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America and was struck by its cover image. Inside was a collection of photographs and postcards of Black people of all ages hanging from trees during the Jim Crow era. He also recognized a building behind the original Shelby County courthouse.
“It didn’t sit well with me,” Jackson, now 64, reflected as he looked at a building behind the courthouse on this early June morning. He had passed that square countless times as a child, yet had never heard of Daniels or Evans, the two men lynched in 1920s, in school. A pair of feet dangling on the cover were Daniels’.
What once seemed like an ordinary square now felt like a curated shrine to the Confederacy — lined with plaques honoring Confederate soldiers and hosting annual parades, including the Doo-Dah parade, reminders to some of its racist legacy. Nearly 40% of the town’s residents are white and 33.1% are Black.
When Jackson returned in 2013, he brought with him not just a new perspective, but a growing desire to know the town’s deeper history. Several years later, after his mother passed away, he wanted to know even more about his ancestors in Center. He still didn’t realize that McCowin was a relative, but through his efforts to honor the men who were lynched, he would soon find out.
After the Shelby County Commissioners’ Court denied Jackson’s request to place a lynching marker at the site of Daniels and Evans’ deaths, he turned to Hicks Mortuary, owned by Daniels’ descendants, who agreed to install it on their property.
The Equal Justice Initiative’s campaign aims to memorialize lynching victims through soil collections, historical markers, and the development of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which acknowledges the horrors of racial injustice. Since 2015, more than 80 historical markers have been installed within 20 states where recorded racial terrors occurred.
Jackson’s fight for the first historic marker began in 2017, and for years he stood alone at meetings arguing for them.
Finally, at a hearing last year, Jackson received support from the county historical commission president to pursue a marker for McCowin, Shelby County Today reported.
Richard Lundi, a Houston transplant turned Shelby County activist, was at that 2024 hearing.
He told Capital B he shares Jackson’s urge to challenge the county’s historical narrative. During Jackson’s speech, Lundi didn’t hesitate to assist, holding up what he described as an inaccurate depiction of Shelby County’s history. Over time, it became impossible to ignore the need to correct a record shaped by complacency and inaccuracies, Lundi said.
Jackson has continued pushing for change, even running for mayor in 2023 and city council member-at-large the year before. Though unsuccessful, he, along with Lundi, is petitioning to establish Shelby County’s first NAACP chapter to assist with organizing as a community, and is advocating for a marker recognizing the historic community of Africa in the county.
The Commissioner’s Court, the Texas Historical Commission, and the Texas Historical Commission in Austin must approve any proposals for anything requested to be placed on the courtyard, Harbison, the county judge, said in the email to Capital B.
Lundi, a lifetime NAACP member out of North Carolina and Texas, has backed Jackson’s efforts by sponsoring 100 memberships and rallying local churches. Gaining support from leaders across church denominations has been key, but slow moving, to secure buy-in from their congregations.
“Just last month we got 100 signatures,” he said. Starting in March, Lundi said, “I didn’t think it would take this long.”
A year before the marker was successfully planted in December 2018, Jackson was introduced to the story of Leonard McCowin by a Northeastern University student. It was too late to add McCowin’s name to the Equal Justice Initiative marker, but the name sparked something in Jackson.
“When I looked at my family’s tree, I saw his name on the tree,” Jackson told Capital B that early June morning under a replanted tree at the site of the original hanging tree.
With a touch of excitement, he pulled out his cellphone. On the screen was a Facebook memorial page Jackson had created to preserve everything he’d uncovered about the McCowin family — his family. His face lit up as he scrolled to a scanned text of the family tree. He pointed near the bottom, his finger resting gently on the names: Leonard and Reather.