Veronica Unfiltered

By Veronica

My mama always said her uncle was murdered for dating a white woman. Her voice would change when she told it—stern, certain, full of generational rage. She said the police looked the other way. That he was killed because white folks didn’t want him messing with one of theirs. It was one of the reasons she didn’t trust white people. Not the only reason—she had her own scars—but this was one she carried like proof.

His name was Clinton Lockett. Her uncle. My great-uncle.

She told me he’d been dating a white girl and someone—maybe her family, maybe the police—took him out for it. And for a long time, I carried that version like a family heirloom.

But years later, while going through old newspaper archives, I found the real story. It wasn’t the one Mama had passed down. I texted her a photo of the article.

She laughed loud—almost like she was trying to keep from crying.

“All these years,” she said. “I had the story wrong.”

She didn’t sound embarrassed—just stunned. Like a page in her internal history book had been rewritten while she wasn’t looking.

Clinton was just 22 when he was killed. According to the paper, he had been arrested back in 1949 for trying to date a white girl in the Queensborough section of Shreveport. They charged him with what they called a “dangerous and suspicious act”—a catchall used to criminalize Black folks when no real crime had occurred. He was sentenced to a $100 fine or 100 days in jail, plus an added 60 days.

He escaped later that year and fled to Mississippi, where he was convicted of burglary and grand larceny and sentenced to five years in the state penitentiary. The police didn’t know he had returned to Shreveport—until he turned up dead.

The night Clinton was killed, he was reportedly prowling around a home on Ziegler Street. A 51-year-old Black woman named Lillie Mae Lewis said she heard someone outside and fired a .32 caliber pistol through her window, aiming at the sound. Her son came outside and found Clinton’s body at the foot of their steps. The bullet struck his shoulder, severed a major artery, and passed through both lungs. He died from internal bleeding.

No one was charged. The woman said she was afraid.

Mama didn’t know any of this. Neither did I—until I read it in black and white.

She’d grown up believing her uncle died at the hands of white people for being with a white woman. And I don’t think it was just a story she was told—I think it helped her make sense of everything else. Her mistrust wasn’t just about Clinton. It was about the things that had happened to her. About being raped by a white foster father. About the way her grandmother, Minnie, wouldn’t talk about her son after he died. About the silence she learned to live with.

She told me that Minnie’s parents had been enslaved. That matters, too. The things they didn’t say lived alongside the things they couldn’t forget.

When Mama said she didn’t trust white people, it wasn’t always about the individual. It was about memory. About history. About what it meant to survive.

Clinton Lockett’s death wasn’t the story my mama thought it was.

But it was still a tragedy.

And even though it didn’t happen the way she believed, her version told the truth about the world she lived in.