REAL B / HISTORIC GEMS · NEW

THE HANGING TREE

Bennie Mitchell Jr. was 16. Ernest Collins was 15.

There is a tree in Columbus, Texas, that carries a history most people would never know by looking at it.

It is an old live oak.

But on November 12, 1935, that tree became the site of the lynching of two Black teenagers: Bennie Mitchell Jr. and Ernest Collins.

Ninety-one years later, their names remain connected to that tree.

And I think we need to talk about why.

Not just because of how they died, but because of how quickly an accusation can become a verdict when race, fear, power and a mob are allowed to replace the law.

A 2022 CONVERSATION

In 2022, I had a conversation with Lisa Jackson about Bennie Mitchell Jr. and Ernest Collins.

Lisa told me that Bennie and Ernest were her cousins.

That changes the distance of this story.

Lisa was not speaking to me as a stranger looking backward at an old newspaper story. She was speaking about members of her own family—two young Black boys whose names had been carried forward through generations.

That matters because history can become very flat when all we have left are headlines, dates and photographs. A family connection reminds us that these were not simply two names in a case file. They belonged to people. They had family. They had a place in somebody’s story before a mob made their deaths the story everyone remembered.

I am not going to put words in Lisa’s mouth that she did not say to me, and I am not going to invent a more specific family branch than the one she gave me. What I can say is simple: Lisa identified Bennie Mitchell Jr. and Ernest Collins to me as her cousins.

That is one reason I wanted to return to this history.

Not to retell the story as a spectacle.

Not to center the people who came after them.

But to remember the two young Black boys at the center of it—and to ask how their lives became entangled in an accusation that ended with a mob deciding they did not deserve a courtroom.

HOW BENNIE AND ERNEST BECAME SUSPECTS

This is the part of the story that deserves more care.

Bennie and Ernest did not simply appear in the case after Geraldine Kollman died. Contemporary accounts place the boys in the area of her family’s property before the investigation turned toward them. One surviving account reported that Geraldine encountered the boys in her father’s pasture and accused them of stealing pecans.

That detail comes from contemporary reporting, and the surviving accounts are not perfectly consistent. It should be treated as a reported account of the encounter—not as a complete, independently verified reconstruction of everything that happened between them.

Geraldine was later found in a creek on her father’s property. The death was initially treated as a drowning. An undertaker reportedly found no water in her lungs and observed bruising, which changed the direction of the investigation.

Investigators then focused on Bennie and Ernest.

They were arrested and accused of rape and murder.

Some 1935 newspaper reports said the boys gave statements admitting to the crime. Other historical records repeat those claims. But there is a fact that should never be buried underneath those old headlines:

There was no trial.

There was no jury weighing the evidence.

There was no courtroom where those statements could be challenged, examined or tested.

Whatever people in 1935 believed they knew, the legal process never reached a conclusion.

THE BOYS WERE TAKEN TO HOUSTON

Authorities knew there was a danger that Bennie and Ernest would be taken from them.

So the teenagers were moved to Houston for safekeeping.

Think about that for a moment.

They were suspects in a case.

They were in police custody.

And the authorities responsible for holding them were worried enough about mob violence to remove them from Columbus.

That alone tells us something about the atmosphere surrounding the case.

These were not two boys walking freely through town while a trial played out.

They were young prisoners being moved for their own protection because officials understood that a mob might come for them.

And eventually, they had to bring them back.

NOVEMBER 12, 1935

The sheriff and a deputy were returning Bennie and Ernest from Houston toward Columbus for a court proceeding.

They did not make it to court.

Near the Colorado River bridge at Altair, an armed group stopped the officers’ vehicle. Contemporary accounts reported that the mob forced its way to the boys, took them from custody and drove them toward Columbus.

Hundreds of people gathered.

Rev. E. B. Marmion, an Episcopal priest, pleaded with the crowd to let the law take its course.

It did not.

Bennie and Ernest were taken to the live oak that would become known as the Hanging Tree.

And they were lynched.

They never stood before the court that was supposed to hear their case.

WHEN A MOB CALLS IT JUSTICE

What makes this history even harder to sit with is what some officials said afterward.

County Attorney O. P. Moore described the lynching as “an expression of the will of the people.”

But a crowd does not become a court because it is large.

Anger does not become evidence because it is shared.

And an accusation does not become a conviction because people decide they believe it.

The entire purpose of a legal process is to put distance between accusation and punishment.

Bennie and Ernest were denied that distance.

They were denied the opportunity to have the case decided in court.

THE AGE OF THE BOYS

Their ages matter—but I don’t want their ages repeated so often that they become statistics.

Bennie was 16.

Ernest was 15.

That is enough to understand something fundamental: these were young boys caught inside a criminal case that became bigger, faster and more violent than their ability to protect themselves from it.

Historical accounts also note that because of their ages, even a conviction would not have resulted in the death penalty under Texas law.

The mob bypassed the law entirely.

Whatever punishment the legal system might have imposed, it was not the mob’s decision to make.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS

Then there are the photographs.

Images of the lynching entered the historical record, including a photograph reportedly circulated as a postcard bearing the words “Colorado County Protects ‘Womanhood.’”

There is also a documented press photograph of Sheriff Frank Hoegemeyer and Deputy Berry Townsend with one of the ropes used in the lynching.

Those images matter because they show how public the violence was.

This was not an accident hidden in the dark.

It was a public act of racial terror.

And the fact that photographs could be turned into souvenirs tells us something about the culture that surrounded lynching—not just about the moment itself.

THE TREE

The tree remained.

People left.

The crowd disappeared.

The newspapers became archives.

But the tree stayed.

That is one of the strange things about history: sometimes the physical world remembers longer than people do.

The live oak associated with the 1935 lynching became known as the Hanging Tree.

Look at it today and there is nothing about the tree itself that explains what happened there.

It does not look violent.

It does not look like a place where two young Black boys were killed.

It simply stands.

And maybe that is exactly why it needs to be remembered.

BENNIE MITCHELL JR. AND ERNEST COLLINS

Historical records can reduce a person to a date.

A name.

An accusation.

A newspaper headline.

A photograph.

But Bennie and Ernest were more than the circumstances surrounding their deaths.

And Lisa Jackson’s family connection makes that impossible to treat as an abstract point.

When she told me they were her cousins, the story stopped being only an archival record. It became a reminder that the people inside these records had living family ties and people who carried their names forward.

They had people who knew them before they became names in a criminal investigation.

They had ordinary lives that were interrupted by an extraordinary act of violence.

We may never recover every detail of who they were or everything they hoped to become.

But we can refuse to let the way they died become the only thing we remember.

They were young.

They were Black.

They were accused.

And before the law could decide what was true, a mob decided it had the right to decide their fate.

WHEN THEIR DEATHS BECAME PART OF THE ANTI-LYNCHING FIGHT

There is another piece of this history that deserves to be remembered.

The federal anti-lynching fight was already underway when Bennie and Ernest were killed. Senators Edward Costigan and Robert F. Wagner had introduced the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill, which sought federal consequences for lynch mobs and for public officials who failed to protect people in their custody.

That detail matters when we look at what happened to Bennie and Ernest.

They were not simply attacked somewhere outside the reach of law enforcement. They were taken from law-enforcement custody while officers were transporting them for court.

That is exactly the kind of failure of protection that the proposed federal legislation was designed to confront.

The NAACP and other anti-lynching advocates were fighting over a basic question: what happens when local justice cannot—or will not—protect someone from a mob?

Bennie and Ernest became part of that larger historical record.

And there is an especially important piece of evidence: Rev. Charles Gresham Marmion, the Episcopal minister who tried to stop the mob, later gave a statement describing the case. He testified that the boys had been taken to Houston for safekeeping and were being brought back to Columbus for an examining trial when the lynching occurred. His testimony preserved the sequence in which two boys were placed in official custody for protection and then taken from that custody by a mob. citeturn990490search36

The Costigan-Wagner proposal was not created because of Bennie and Ernest—the bill predates their deaths. And I have not found evidence that allows me to say they were specifically used as the case that inspired or drafted the bill.

But their lynching happened in the middle of that national fight, and their story illustrated the exact problem anti-lynching legislation was trying to address: local authorities could have custody of a Black person and still fail to protect that person from a mob.

The NAACP’s own historical record describes Costigan-Wagner as legislation aimed at prosecuting lynch-mob participants as well as public officials who failed to protect victims in their custody. The bill ultimately died without a Senate vote after Southern opposition and a filibuster. citeturn990490search0turn990490search2

So when we remember Bennie Mitchell Jr. and Ernest Collins, we should remember more than the tree.

Their deaths became part of the evidence of why federal anti-lynching protections were being demanded.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN JUSTICE IS REPLACED BY CERTAINTY?

That is the question I keep coming back to.

Because this story is not only about 1935.

It is about what happens whenever an accusation is treated as a conclusion before the evidence has been tested.

It is about what happens when fear becomes permission.

It is about what happens when a crowd decides that its judgment is enough.

And it is about what happens when the people responsible for protecting the legal process cannot—or will not—stop the violence.

Bennie and Ernest were arrested.

They were placed in protective custody.

They were being returned for court.

And they were taken from the officers who were transporting them.

They never got their day in court.

NINETY-ONE YEARS LATER

In 2026, ninety-one years have passed since Bennie Mitchell Jr. and Ernest Collins were taken to that tree.

The photographs remain.

The newspapers remain.

The archival records remain.

The tree remains.

And their names remain.

So does the family memory.

That matters.

Because remembering history is not about making the past comfortable.

Sometimes it means refusing to clean up the language, soften the violence or let an accusation become the final word on someone’s life.

Sometimes it means saying the names again.

Bennie Mitchell Jr.

Ernest Collins.

Two young boys.

Accused.

Never tried.

Taken from custody.

Lynched.

Remembered.

REAL B MOMENT

There are stories we study because they happened a long time ago.

And then there are stories that make you stop and ask:

How did people allow this to happen?

Maybe the harder question is:

What would it take for people to recognize injustice while it is happening—not ninety-one years later?

Because that tree is not just a tree.

It is part of the record.

And Bennie Mitchell Jr. and Ernest Collins are not just names in it.

They were here.

They had family.

They deserve to be remembered as more than the way they died.

Remember their names.

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SOURCE NOTE

This REAL B piece was informed by a 2022 conversation with Lisa Jackson, who identified Bennie Mitchell Jr. and Ernest Collins to me as her cousins, along with contemporary newspaper reporting from 1935 and historical records concerning the Columbus lynching. The historical record includes conflicting or incomplete accounts of the underlying accusation; this article distinguishes reported claims from what is firmly established about the boys’ arrest, protective custody, return toward Columbus and lynching. The specific family lineage connecting Lisa to Bennie and Ernest is not stated here beyond Lisa’s own identification of them as her cousins because a more specific relationship has not been independently documented in the sources available to me.

Additional historical reference: Texas State Historical Association — Columbus, Texas, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History collection on the 1935 lynching, the NAACP history of the Costigan-Wagner bill, and the Library of Congress NAACP exhibition.

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REAL B / HISTORIC GEMS • OCTOBER 31, 2026

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