Map and Further Resources

 

 

The map above traces the route of the lynch mob and identifies other important sites of difficult memory in Dallas. The following embedded document consists of the entire record of Allen Brooks’s trial records on March 3, 1910. Other selected primary sources, secondary sources, and relevant online stories or databases follow.

 

 

Select Online Primary Sources:

“A City Plan for Dallas,” 1920. Known as “The Kessler Plan” after its principal author, St. Louis architect George Kessler. From the City of Dallas Municipal Archives, made available online by Dallas Morning News reporter Robert Wilonsky.

Dallas mob hangs negro from pole at Elks’ Arch – fights way into court room and takes Allen Brooks from armed officers. Dallas Morning News, March 4, 1910. Original story uploaded to DMN website as part of Jerome Sims, “Today in Dallas Today in Dallas photo history – 1910: Allen Brooks lynched in downtown Dallas by angry mob.” http://photographyblog.dallasnews.com/2013/03/today-in-dallas-photo-history-1910-allen-brooks-lynched-in-downtown-dallas-by-angry-mob.html/

SMU Digital Collections/De Golyer Library, George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection

WPA Guide to Dallas History at the UNT Digital Library

 

Other Select Online Sources, Databases, and Projects 

African-American Museum of Dallas

African-American Newspapers Digitized by the Library of Congress

Dallas Historical Society

Dallas Historical Parks Project

Dallas Public Library, Texas/Dallas History and Archives Division

Duluth Lynchings Online Resource (Minnesota Historical Society)

Lynching in America: Confronting the History of Racial Terror (Equal Justice Initiative Report)

Portal to Texas History at the UNT Digital Library

Project HAL: Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project

Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America

 

Select Primary Sources:

 “A Brute’s Crime, A Mob’s Vengeance.” Dallas Daily Times Herald. March 3, 1910, Evening edition, sec. A.

“Dallas Mob Hangs Negro from Pole at Elks’ Arch.” Dallas Morning News, March 4, 1910.

Dallas City Council. “Minute Books, Vol. 4,” March 9, 1910. Slide 1912. Office of City Secretary, Dallas, Texas.

Dallas City Council. “Minute Books, Vol. 5,” December 1, 1910. Slide 1964. Office of City Secretary, Dallas, Texas.

“Elks’ Arch Re-Erected at Fair Grounds.” Dallas Morning News, July 30, 1911.

“Some Good Results of City Planning.” Dallas Morning News, February 19, 1911.

“Better Use for Arch.” Dallas Daily Times Herald, March 15, 1910.

“Calm After the Storm.” Dallas Daily Times Herald, March 4, 1910.

 

Select Secondary Sources:

Apel, Dora. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Barton, Julia. “Troubled Times.” The Texas Observer, August 10, 2010. http://www.texasobserver.org/troubled-times/.

Dowdy, Christopher J. “Allen Brooks and the Elks Arch: Lynching Memory and Public Forgetting in the Dallas Landscape.” Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas 44 (November 2013): 5–21.

Graff, Harvey J. The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Payne, Darwin. Big D: Triumphs and Troubles of an American Supercity in the 20th Century. Dallas, Tex: Three Forks Press, 1994.

Payne, Darwin. “Dallas on the Eve of SMU’s Founding.” SMU Magazine, June 1, 2011. http://blog.smu.edu/smumagazine/2011/06/dallas-on-the-eve-of-smu’s-founding/.

Phillips, Michael. White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.

Prior, Marsha, and Robert V. Kemper. “From Freedman’s Town To Uptown: Community Transformation And Gentrifícation In Dallas, Texas.” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 34, no. 2/3 (July 1, 2005): 177–216.

Tolnay, Stewart Emory, and E. M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Wilson, William H. “Adapting to Growth: Dallas, Texas, and the Kessler Plan, 1908-1933.” Arizona & the West 25, no. 3 (September 1983): 245–60.

Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. Durham, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.