Exactly 100 years ago this Halloween, Texas A&M senior Cadet Lt. Charles Milo Sessums took his very last breath lying supine in a Waco sanatorium. The Aggie student had been bashed over the head with a broken piece of debris from the stands of Waco’s Cotton Palace stadium, where Baylor and A&M had been playing football the day before. During halftime of the heated matchup, hundreds of students from the schools’ fanbases had met in bloody battle as a riot ensued, and Sessums was the only casualty.
Sessums was beaten to death by whom many suspect was a Baylor fan, and quite possibly family to Waco’s mayor at the time. Thousands were witness to the incident near the 50 yard line, yet no arrests were ever made. Neither Baylor nor Texas A&M took full responsibility for the manslaughter, and to this day, no one has definitively solved the mystery of who killed Sessums.
But, in the early 2000s, Baylor alumnus Tim G. Webb (class of ‘97, now serving as Baylor’s manager of professional development) had an odd encounter at Floyd Casey Stadium, where a student was passing out football programs.
“He made just an offhand comment about how he hoped that we would kill an Aggie like we had before,” Webb said, noting his own bewilderment at the time.
No one Webb talked to knew the full story of the Aggie that had been killed at a Baylor game, so Webb took it upon himself to investigate the Aggie’s death. In 2018, with Texas A&M’s University Press, he published Battle of the Brazos: A Texas Football Rivalry, a Riot, and a Murder. This book is arguably the most comprehensive and detailed account of the crime, according to a review by former Baylor football coach Grant Teaff.
“I think it’s historically important that Charlie deserved to have his story told, that it happened in a town that I love, that I’ve now spent, as of now, 15 years of my life here in Waco,” Webb told The Baylor Line. “It happened at a school that I love. I attended here and care deeply for Baylor. And when I learned of the story, I felt like Baylor owed an apology. And the best apology is not to say ‘I’m sorry’ on behalf of Baylor. I can’t speak for that. My apology could be, though, ‘I’m going to tell your story.’”
This is that story.
Oct. 30-31, 1926: A breakdown of that fateful football weekend
It was Baylor’s homecoming game, October 30 at Waco’s Cotton Palace. Baylor and Texas A&M were meeting after years of heated animosity, Webb wrote. In the 1920s several fan riots were “narrowly averted” prior to the 1926 homecoming game. Pranks and jokes were often made by each school at football matches to degrade the other. In 1924, Baylor students entertained their audience by riding out onto the gridiron on a ‘bucking Ford’ vehicle. The Ford was painted in Aggie colors, and it was meant to show the Bears riding the Aggies to victory.
The day of Sessums’ death, following a display of physical comedy mocking Texas A&M, that Ford made another appearance, though some have argued it was not decorated or bucking as it had been in 1924, Webb wrote. Female Baylor students rode atop the back of the car, waving placards with the Baylor winning scores from past games, to the applause from Baylor’s fans. Once the car (which had some symbolic meaning in mocking A&M) reached the Aggie cheering section, however, two cadets, W. L. Lee and G. L. Hart, jumped from the stands to the field. One dove into the cab of the Ford and grabbed at the steering wheel, while the second student held fast to a back tire.
“Conduct of the A. and M. Cadets was all that marred an otherwise perfect day their disgraceful action leading to a severance of athletic relations between the two institutions.”
A female student was tossed from the car, striking her head on the ground. Seeing female students potentially under threat ignited a communal rage in male Baylor supporters, Webb wrote. Hundreds of Baylor fans flooded the field. Initially most of the 400 attending Aggie cadets remained in their seats, but upon realizing the sheer size of Baylor’s ranks, a portion of that group left their seats to respond.
Webb noted that while Texas A&M students used their bare hands in the ensuing battle, Baylor freshmen football players broke apart the wooden chairs they had been sitting in and used those pieces as clubs. Other Baylor fans used random blunt objects like bottles and boards. Baylor, Texas A&M, and Waco leadership, including the Waco mayor, rushed to the field to stop the fight, along with the local police, but their presence alone could not quell the chaos.
There are numerous conflicting stories about what happened to Sessums. Sessums’ friend E.A. Vance, who had been seated with him, later confirmed to A&M leadership that he and Sessums went down from their seats onto the field to defend their fellow Aggies and join in the fight, Webb said.
Cadet John Hume said that a man tried to hit Sessums with a club as Sessums was helping Vance over the fence. Once over the fence, Sessums chased after the man with the club. Another witness, Waco Judge Drummond Webster Bartlett, said he saw an Aggie (potentially Sessums) chasing a man who had a broken chair piece. The man with the makeshift club was shouting back at the Aggie to stop following him. The Aggie moved quickly toward him, and the man with the club swung and hit the Aggie on the head, Bartlett had relayed. Yet another witness, L.F. Weber, said the club-wielding man in a blue suit was the one to approach Sessums first before being followed by the cadet. Weber said the man in the blue suit hit Sessums’ arms twice before striking his head.
Nearly all witnesses interviewed at the time of the incident describe the club-wielding man as being much shorter than Sessums and wearing a blue serge suit. Sessums didn’t stagger and fall — he just dropped, like full dead weight, Webb wrote. Multiple witnesses said that when Sessums crumpled, the killer dashed off into the crowd after dropping his club.
The Aggie band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which quelled the riot that had lasted approximately 10 minutes. Lisa Kalmus, curator of Texas A&M’s Sam Houston Sanders Corps of Cadets Center, told The Baylor Line that this was an expected Aggie response.
“They had the band, and when they struck up, you know, they went to attention, because that’s almost like second nature,” she said. “‘Oh, the national anthem, oh, OK.’ — straight up at attention. They were more manageable in that they had this level of training already, so that if they needed to call them to come to attention, they were going to come to attention.”
Head Aggie Yell Leader Cadet J.D. Langford shouted an apology to the Baylor crowd, though people booed him. He then instructed that his cadets pledge to remain in their seats until the game was over. After the game (which Baylor won), Webb noted that both sides seemed to be in decent spirits.
As a parade of happy Baylor supporters and students walked through downtown Waco, Charles Sessums was dying. At the hospital in Waco that night, Sessums vomited blood, and doctors determined he had suffered a skull fracture, for which there was little medical treatment at the time. Sessums suffered a blood clot resulting from the injury, and at 9 a.m. on October 31, the student died. The student’s parents had been rushing from their Dallas-area home to be at his side, but a train could not take them to Waco fast enough to say goodbye.
“(The riot) was totally disproportionate,” Webb told The Baylor Line. “It went from what is kind of a reckless-but-innocent incident, in that no one meant to hurt one of the women on the car . . . The Baylor students went in with the intent — I mean, murderous intent. I mean, when you’re swinging a club at someone’s head, it may not be premeditated murder, but in the heat of passion, you’re intending to inflict serious harm, or else you wouldn’t be doing that.”
Brooks and Walton begin damage control
Immediately following Sessums’ killing, Texas A&M President Thomas Walton and Baylor President Samuel Palmer Brooks began urgent correspondence, meeting in person and writing back and forth. Brooks, who had been out of town for homecoming, met Sessums’ family at the train station when they arrived in Waco the day after the game. They knew at that time that their son had been seriously injured, but it was Brooks who told them that Charlie had died that morning.
Brooks and Walton agreed to host a conference between the two schools’ leadership in College Station the week following the fateful game. Brooks and Walton compromised in a joint statement, reporting that the schools equally shared the blame.
Letters housed in The Texas Collection’s large repository of Brooks’ correspondence reveal Brooks made efforts to distance Baylor from claims of culpability.
“Baylor does not under any condition admit having started the fight that resulted as it did last Saturday,” Brooks wrote in a Nov. 8, 1926, letter to a friend. “The consequences of last Saturday’s fight must be laid to the man or men who jumped the fence and onto the car loaded with Baylor girls.”
In another letter to a different individual, Brooks relayed the event as it was told to him. He described two cadets coming out of the sky “with the fury of a demon” and tackling the car, injuring several female students and hospitalizing one for days.
“That was enough,” he wrote. “You know the result. Baylor boys and friends went at once to the rescue of the girls. They fought, of course. Every decent man would have fought under like circumstances.”
And in a November 9 letter to Howard Payne University President Edgar Godbold, Brooks denounced local media for not publishing all facts of the incident.
“Wherever the facts are fully known, not a semblance of original blame rests on Baylor,” he wrote.
Texas A&M did open its own inquiry into Sessums’ death, interviewing several riot participants and witnesses, even naming a suspect. Baylor’s own investigation into the death consisted of 25 conversations with different students who provided no useful information, Webb wrote. Brooks did not take down notes or names from the students.
“My impression of it is that the reaction of Waco was shameful. That there was no sense of, ‘He was our age, that could have been me, that could have been a friend,’ that this was a son, or something,” Webb told The Baylor Line. “… there was no balance of perspective in Waco that it didn’t justify anybody dying.”
The Pinkerton Files
Webb explained that his book could have never been completed without the help of living Sessums family members and a journalist of the Dallas Morning News, all who helped connect him with a rare copy of the Pinkerton Files.
Shortly after the fateful game, several Waco Aggies with Texas A&M’s Association of Former Students hired a private detective to investigate Sessums’ death, as they did not harbor confidence that anyone in Waco was trying to solve the mystery. They turned to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Dallas, who sent them detective Ila Floyd Benedict.
Benedict’s case file details the results of several interviews in Waco. Benedict first looked into claims that Sam Coates, a Baylor football player, had killed Sessums, but he was quickly able to rule Coates out, as Coates was confirmed to be beating a different Aggie student in the head with a club.
One name kept popping up over and over again in the Pinkerton files: that of Waco’s mayor, Herschel Frank Connally. The short-term mayor of Waco at the time and a medical doctor, Connally seemed to know more about the killing than most people, Webb wrote. He reported to have witnessed the manslaughter.
Mayor Connally said he had rushed into the melee and saw a tall cadet chase a smaller man, and that Connally tried to stop the cadet, who ignored him. The tall cadet then punched and dove at the small man, which caused the small man to swing a club at the cadet’s head, knocking him to the ground. Connally then walked over to the cadet and said “Aren’t you ashamed?” When the cadet didn’t respond, Connally signaled someone to summon a doctor. This seemed odd to Benedict, Webb noted in his book, because the mayor himself was a very prominent medical doctor.
Two of the four main suspects were Connally family members: Hubert Connally, a Baylor student and the mayor’s third cousin (the named suspect in Texas A&M’s report), and Ed Connally, also a Baylor student and the mayor’s nephew. The fourth suspect was a Baylor student named Clyde T. Johnson.
Unfortunately, Benedict’s investigation was closed by his agency before he could ever reach a conclusion. Webb wrote that the people of Waco didn’t care to find the identity of the killer because they thought it would be too difficult, and Benedict was suspicious that Waco’s police had been instructed by the city government not to investigate the case.
Both area’s newspapers, especially the student newspapers, took jabs at each other, urging their respective leadership to cancel the football rivalry. Ultimately, Walton and Brooks acquiesced, and on December 8, cancelled any and all future games between the universities until relations were healed. Of course, Baylor-Texas A&M football games would resume just five seasons later.
“And so it went quickly from the violent, to the petty, and then this shroud of silence,” Webb said. “And in the shroud of silence, that’s where you start (getting) the myths.”
Charlie Sessums: myth, memory, legacy
A&M’s Lisa Kalmus said Sessums has been remembered in Aggie legend not for his own deeds, but for the cadets’ resulting thirst for vengeance in 1926. The legend goes that cadets planned to take a Corps cannon to Waco by train and attack Baylor’s campus with it. Charles Sessums’ younger brother Harry was in the Corps’ field artillery unit at the time and would have had access to a cannon, she said.
Of course, Baylor was never attacked by cannon. Charles “Charlie” M. Sessums faded from the public memory, even in College Station, where he was loved as a friend and student. Kalmus noted that Texas A&M had lost 70 students just a few years earlier fighting in World War I, and were about to lose approximately 1,000 in World War II.
“At a time when you just finished up with the Spanish flu and all of this, maybe it’s a little more callous sort of an outlook, but the number of people on campus and students who die, it’s not necessarily something that isn’t normal,” she said.
But Sessums is remembered on Texas A&M’s campus today. Webb has made an effort to unite living relatives of the cadet, such as great-nephews and distant cousins. One relative, Sharon Sessums, maintained possession of the cadet’s uniform cap, which she ultimately donated in 2021 to the Sanders Center at Texas A&M. Now, the museum has a small display with the hat (still bloodstained under the rim, according to Kalmus) and a copy of Webb’s book. Another living relative, PJ Sessums, dedicated a brick at Texas A&M to his deceased distant cousin.
And while the world largely forgot Charles Sessums, people who loved him didn’t. Glenn Sessums is great-nephew to Charles, as Glenn’s grandfather Joe was an older brother to Charles. Glenn and his wife Joann live north of Dallas, and have heard small comments about Charles over the years, but never received the full story on what happened to him. Charles’ older sister Grace Sessums had told Glenn and Joann that someone at Baylor killed her brother with a beer bottle.
“She just blamed it on Baylor,” Glenn said. “… I mean, you know, it was a tender subject with her, and we really didn’t talk a great deal about that.”
But Grace’s anger toward Baylor softened enough over the years for her to make a donation to the Armstrong Browning Library, Joann noted, possibly some time in the 1980s or 90s.
“She was fairly wealthy because she sold real estate and she didn’t have anybody to spend it on, but she made some contribution to that library,” Joann said. “And so I remember her going down (to Waco). In fact, I think I went with her, it seems like. Several family members went down there when she did, because she wanted to see the library that she had made a contribution to.”
As of today, several members of Charles Sessums’ extended family have attended both Baylor and Texas A&M. Glenn and Joann’s oldest grandchild is entering her freshman year at Texas A&M’s Mays Business School. The couple also plan to purchase Webb’s book and read more about Charles.
Tim Webb noted his complex feelings that came with writing Battle of the Brazos, as telling the most accurate account of history left a black eye on the image of Baylor’s famous president Brooks, whom Webb respects and admires. But he wanted to share Sessums’ story with a clinical level of factual reporting — Charlie deserved it.
“And I love that, in a way, that I was the one that got to write the story, because I almost felt like Baylor owed that to A&M, maybe to heal that wound. That it is told from the other side, but not from the other side’s perspective,” Webb said. “In fact, I read the book again last year just to refresh my mind on some things, and one of the things that stood out to me was still that it doesn’t read as an apology for Baylor at all.”
