Grover C. Everett was a black man staying in a black-only hotel in Abilene while working in town on a contract job.
On the night of September 9th, 1922 masked men entered the hotel, tracked down Everett and shot him. Nearly 100-years after Everett was murdered, students and community leaders began working to commemorate Everett and establish a memorial.
The community gathered on the Saturday morning of June 20th, 2026 on Ash Street at the former site of the Joe Davis Hotel for the unveiling of the plaque.
Amy Boone, a key member of the research done on Everett, and getting the plaque put up, opened the ceremony.
“At the beginning of 2025 I became increasingly concerned about the widespread erasure of history happening across the country," Boone told the gathering. "In cooperation with Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance project and a coalition of Abilene citizens this marker is now a reality.”
Grover C. Everett is part of a list of more than 700 documented lynchings in Texas. Not all of the victims are commemorated by plaques. But the community worked with the Equal Justice Initiative to establish a memorial for Everett on the site of his murder.
The ceremony included performances by Johnny Woodfaulk and Susan Petty who sang songs from the 60s about change.
Jane Anne Carroll read from the inscription on the marker:
“Lynching in America. Between eighteen sixty five and nineteen fifty, six thousand five hundred black women, men and children were victims of racial terror lynchings across the United States. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan regularly sought to silence and intimidate black people through acts of terror that were meant to uphold white control.”
Malcolm Scott, chairman of ICAN, shared details from the plaque about Grover C. Everett, “Mr. Everett, who was around thirty six years old, was the husband of Beulah Clay and had two sons, Willie Bill James and Lawrence.”
Amy Boone invited those gathered to join in a responsive reading in remembrance of Grover Everett, before Pastor Andrew Penns closed the ceremony with a prayer.
Afterwards, Terrence Penn, invited the community to continue memorializing Grover Everett at a reception at the Curtis House. Terrence is the curator of the Curtis House Cultural Center, and connected with Amy Boone while leading the Black History Tour Bus last year. This meeting reignited the fire that had been lit in 2019 to commemorate Everett with a historical plaque, but the initial efforts were interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“I did learn about it when they first started the initiative back in 2019 when they started putting things together. And I think that was the first time anybody had ever found out about Grover C. Everett and the Klan activity here in Abilene. And obviously people knew about the Klan activity in Abilene. Just that particular moment didn’t really stick out as much. But once they kind of did some digging and found everything out, like you said, then it came to light.”
Pastor Andrew L. Penns, a docent and researcher at the Curtis House Cultural Center, worked with a committee from ACU and McMurry to research Everett’s history and the story of his lynching.
“We began to do some research, had to do some studies from the newspapers, speaking with various some of the elderly that I knew they knew of the hotel, but didn’t know much about the the killing that had taken place, that's how we started getting to get familiar with Grover C. Everett.”
Although the historical marker is now in place, Pastor Penns’ research on Everett and his family is still continuing.
“I definitely will be researching and trying to find some of his family members and see if we can get them to come to Abilene and we can do a little bit another celebration and let them know that the marker is there. I believe putting it out on social media and speaking about his life and what happened in Abilene, Texas, will probably spark an interest, and family members will pick it up and say, that was my granddad or my father or whatever, and maybe we can go from there,” Penns said.
The possibility of understanding the whole story behind Grover C. Everett’s lynching is unlikely, and the historical marker may receive backlash as others have before.
Pastor Penns reiterated the key points of the prayer he shared at the dedication in describing his desire for the plaque's impact, “I’m hoping and praying for a positive, for a more positive response," Pastor Penns said. "There will be some negative. We just have to be prepared for it. That’s where we live in. But I’m praying that the positive will outweigh the negative, and that the mark itself would not be a symbol of racial hatred. I’m praying that it’ll be something that would be a part of history.”
Pastor Penns acknowledges that Abilene’s checkered past is rough. But no matter how difficult history is, it needs to be, it must be shared, and presented in the way that it happened. And for Abilene this plaque, remembering Grover C. Everett, won’t change the past, but it is a step forward in creating a better future.