July 8, 1932; 11 PM. East Austin. Sixty-year-old African-American Charles Johnson is driving home from Bible study when a car full of white youths swerves in front of him. A brief altercation ensues. Convinced that his life is threatened, Johnson fires his pistol at the car and drives away. Johnson’s shot kills the unarmed eighteen-year-old son of Albert Allison, a prominent Corsicana cotton landlord, influential in politics, and an advocate for racial justice. Although devastated, Allison intervenes to thwart a lynch mob and then insists that Austin’s courts treat Johnson fairly. Nonetheless, Allison expects the system to execute his son’s killer. Johnson himself fully expects to be lynched, either by the mob or by the court. To Defy the Monster shows how Allison’s conscience, the Depression, Allison’s political enemies, East Austin’s social dynamics, and the impact of Roosevelt’s election converge to influence Austin’s legal establishment. It explains the surprising verdict and why Allison orders his family never to speak of the incident, leaving future generations to ascertain what happened and what it meant.

Al Allison’s uncle was 18-years-old when he was killed in Austin. For most of Al’s life, that’s all he knew. Nobody in his family would talk about it, not his father, nor any of his aunts and uncles. They are all dead now, and it looked as if the mystery of their brother’s death would die with them. But in 1986, at a family reunion, his father’s cousin, also now deceased, said off-handedly, “You know I was in the car that night the black man shot your uncle.” Al was dumbfounded. Here was an eyewitness. The cousin proved to be a very reluctant storyteller. All he would say was that he, our uncle, and a few other boys had been out joyriding; and that our uncle was killed when a car pulled up beside theirs, and a black man pointed a pistol and fired. He assumed the black man had either been lynched or executed. As it turned out, that wasn’t true. Charles Johnson no doubt expected to be lynched or executed—after all, he was a black man who had killed a white boy in Jim Crow Texas. But, in fact, as Al soon discovered, he was given only a three-year sentence. The sentence was almost as tantalizing as the act itself. There was no doubt that Charles Johnson had committed the murder. What would cause an all-white jury to be so lenient? Al’s father’s younger brother, also now deceased, contributed one more detail to our scant knowledge, and it was equally tantalizing. He remembered being told at the breakfast table one morning that Al’s grandfather had driven to Austin in the middle of the night “to stop a lynching.” Then an older cousin said she remembered that my grandfather had blamed “politics” for the lenient sentence. Al knew enough about his grandfather, a cotton landlord and merchant who died in 1943, to know he abhorred mob rule. We could easily imagine him—all of five foot six of him, but with a booming voice—intervening to save a life, even of the man who had killed his son. But why later would he later say that his son’s murderer had escaped execution because of “politics?” Why would no one ever say anything more? The more Al learned, the more mystified he became. But he is not the sort to let questions go unanswered, so he decided to scour the historical record—rummaging through newspaper archives, searching court records, even interviewing older black residents of East Austin—and he found a treasure trove. The result is To Defy The Monster, a story that transcends a family tragedy, and in the taut language of a murder mystery, brings to light the political intrigue, corruption, and racial hatreds of an era when modern Texas was just beginning, awkwardly and fitfully, to take shape. It is not only a good read—it’s how we got to be who we are today.

A A Allison is a fifth generation Texan with a degree in International Relations from Harvard College and a Masters in Philosophy from The University of Texas. Following Naval service in Viet Nam, Allison worked in business and politics in Europe and the United States before returning to Texas to be near his children and grandchildren. He and his wife Meg reside in Austin, Texas.