William Hamilton

William Hamilton never knew exactly how old he was or where he was born. A slave trader named William Hamilton brought him as a small child to the Buford plantation near Village Creek, Texas, and left him there. He never saw his parents again. His earliest memory was of crying when he was taken away from his mother.

After emancipation he lived through the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. He named men who were whipped, and described how men slept in the woods at night to avoid being caught at home. He remembered a large, strong woman named Jane Bensom who threw hot embers into the faces of Klansmen and got away. He also described a baby killed by a Klan gunshot on the Ditto place, after which Union soldiers camped nearby to protect the Black families there. He recalled that a man named Moses deeded land, about fifty acres each, to fifty families.

He married Effie Coleman in 1897. They had no children. When he was interviewed in the late 1930s he lived on East Weatherford Street in Fort Worth and supported himself on a ten-dollar monthly pension.