The Bryan-College Station community, and especially its school children, deserved a much better interpretation of local history than was provided by the Eagle's article entitled "Reconstruction turmoil sparked Brazos County confrontations" (Bryan-College Station Eagle, February 7, 1999). The Eagle Editorial Board's decision to ignore the wealth of recent historical scholarship on Brazos County was unconscionable. Shame on the Eagle for reprinting the factual errors and outdated assumptions which appeared nearly a decade ago in a special "Eagle Centennial" edition. Indeed, to rely on such a discredited version of events (see " 'Centennial' article was inaccurate," in Letters to the Editor, Bryan-College Station Eagle, May 22, 1989) was an insult to the intelligence of this community. In effect, the Eagle Editorial Board demonstrated a complete lack of regard for historical accuracy. Specifically, the failure to edit out embarrassing perpetuation of misconceptions about the period of Reconstruction was singularly insensitive to the history of African-Americans in Texas generally, and Brazos County blacks in particular.

What occurred here in our county immediately after the Civil War, including the 1868 July massacre of the country's black leaders, deserved to be presented truthfully. Scholars associated with any present-day reputable university or college in Texas overwhelmingly agree with the basic narrative of events written by Professor A. Barry Crouch in his chapter on "Reconstructing Brazos County" in The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Texans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). To Brazos County blacks, the new Reconstruction government possessed a greater claim to their respect than any in Texas history. What is remarkable about Reconstruction is that for a brief moment, Brazos County blacks actually received some semblance of justice and fair treatment under the law. The suggestion that the former slaves were "untrained and ill-equipped for freedom, democracy and fair play" is a patronizing, if not racist, assumption. Moreover, how can the legal history of our county during this era be discussed honestly without mentioning the founding of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas? Certainly, the creation and location in 1871 of A. and M. College was a positive accomplishment made by both white and black members of the Republican party during this period. It shaped the entire future of Brazos County.

The insinuation that former slaves murdered their own leaders is as preposterous as it is mean-spirited. The Ku Klux Klan killings of the county's black leaders received broad attention at the time because ex-slaves actually tried to defend themselves against hooded Klansmen. Indignant and angry over the passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and fearing further erosion of white supremacy, whites rode into the black community on the edge of Millican and lynched and murdered the community's black leaders, including the leader of the Republican party "Union League." When a popular local black Methodist minister and federal voter registrar, George Brooks, tried to arrest Klan leaders, hysterical whites gathered in force to confront the blacks. The two groups fought for three days until federal troops arrived to restore order. Once the soldiers departed, whites tracked down the blacks and dealt with them ruthlessly. Brooks was captured and lynched.

The murder of Brooks, along with the deaths and disappearances of other Millican blacks in this lopsided confrontation or so-called "riot," severely damaged the leadership ranks of the Brazos County Republican party organization during Reconstruction and provided abundant evidence to state and national Republican leaders that the Democrats, through the use of paramilitary and secret groups, were using terrorist tactics to end black independence and assertiveness, destroy black political participation, and thus ultimately terminate Republican-dominated county governments that Congressional Reconstruction had brought to power. The bloody Millican incident also dramatized the fact that although blacks often had the raw numerical strength to pick up electoral majorities, the other side had brute force, along with the conviction that any granting of full civic and political equality to blacks was a tragic mistake. Crouch writes that the situation in Millican "suggests the almost insurmountable obstacles the [Freedmen's] Bureau and local blacks had to overcome in a constant struggle to survive in an atmosphere poisoned by racism, the loss of the [Civil] war, economic changes, and new black assertiveness" (p. 127). Unfortunately, the ongoing problem of white terror in Brazos County was addressed by simply letting the lawless have their own way.

Although the Millican episode represented one of the worse cases of Ku Klux Klan brutality, it was actually just one of many incidences of recurring violence which military and local authorities were powerless to prevent or punish. But it should never be allowed to obscure a lasting accomplishment brought about by white and black cooperation. Republican carpetbaggers, scalawags, and blacks in the Twelfth Texas Legislature passed the necessary legislation in April of 1871 to accept the Morrill Land Grant College Act. This controversial and "Yankee-inspired" program set aside several million acres of federal land for the support of agricultural and industrial higher education. The Republican-sponsored bill to establish the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas obligated the creation, if state officials chose to segregate white students from black, of another federally supported land-grant college for blacks, which subsequently became Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College. Passage of the enabling legislation for the A. and M. College and its location in 1871 in Brazos County destroys the enduring misconception that the legal and political history of Brazos County during Reconstruction was marked only by "turmoil" or racial "confrontations."