1910 Lynching of Allen Brooks

Allen Brooks was born in Maryland, probably enslaved, and in 1878 married Milly Lawson in Dallas County. They raised nine children in Freedmantown, and he worked as a cook, carpenter, janitor and furnace tender. After his arrest for allegedly assaulting a three-year-old girl, officials moved him between Fort Worth, Denton, Denison, Sherman and McKinney, and two appointed lawyers asked to be excused. After the lynching a grand jury reviewing the mob violence pursued none of its cases. No relative claimed his body; he was buried in a pauper's grave at Oakland Cemetery.

What the plaque says

1910 Lynching of Allen Brooks After Reconstruction, white southerners began adopting laws and codes, known as Jim Crow laws or black codes, that affected everyday life for African Americans. One instrument of enforcement was the threat of violence as well as actual violence, including lynching. Although more often associated with rural areas, lynchings did occur in towns and cities. In Dallas County between 1853 and 1920, five white males and six African American males were lynched by mobs. The lynching of Allen Brooks on March 3, 1910, was an example of strategic Jim Crow violence. As recorded in major newspapers, court records and personal testimonies, Allen Brooks was a 60-year-old African American domestic laborer accused of assaulting a girl in the home of his long-time employer. Local law enforcement attempted to keep the time and location of the pretrial hearings secret, but a local newspaper published the information and a mob subsequently convened at the county courthouse. Measures were taken to secure the building, but the crowd which had gathered shoved past and into the building and pulled Brooks to the second-floor window. The mob placed a rope around his neck and threw him from the window. They then dragged Brooks a half a mile down Main Street where he was finally hung from a telephone pole near the prominent Elks Arch at Main and Akard Streets. Following this horrific event, witnessed by an estimated 5,000 people, many citizens called for a state special grand jury to investigate the lynching, but no court convened and no one was held accountable. Although no other lynchings were documented in the city of Dallas after 1910, other forms of racial discrimination and oppression persisted. (2020)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — steps away
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 0.7 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 1.2 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 2.5 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Women's Suffrage in Dallas County — steps away
• First Juries to Sit Women in Dallas County — steps away
• Alexander Cockrell_Sarah Horton Cockrell — steps away
• Site of First Ferry and Bridge — steps away