Frank Pinkard stood before six legislators from the Texas Penitentiary Investigating Committee at the Clemens State Prison Farm in Brazoria County, revealing scars left from 39 lashes. Even after a year and a half, the braided rivulets ran over his thighs and buttocks, rising a centimeter above his skin.
It wasn’t the first time Pinkard had been punished for refusing to work since being convicted 13 years before at age 25. The Black farm laborer from Livingston had been shipped from Huntsville to a railroad camp, then to Rusk and two other prison farms before landing at Clemens, located on former plantation land about 60 miles south of Houston. State prison records show he received a total of at least 82 lashes for infractions like “laziness” and “mutiny.”
On a frigid February morning in 1908, Pinkard, along with eleven others, refused to continue digging a ditch after being forced to wade for days through icy water and mud in the same wet clothes. The warden himself administered the whipping.
