The Lynching of Allen Brooks

Marker Text: On March 3, 1910, a 59-year-old Black handyman named Allen Brooks was lynched by a white mob. Mr. Brooks was accused—without evidence—of assaulting his white employer’s daughter. During a pretrial hearing for Mr. Brooks at the Dallas County Courthouse (now the Old Red Courthouse), a mob of at least 3,000 white men gathered and demanded that Mr. Brooks be lynched. Members of the mob broke into the courtroom, seized Mr. Brooks from law enforcement officers, tied a rope around his neck, and threw him from the second-floor window of the courthouse, fracturing his skull upon impact. A separate faction of the mob surrounded Mr. Brooks, kicking and beating him before dragging him several blocks to the intersection of Main and Akard streets. The brutal, lawless violence continued near the Elks Arch, where Mr. Brooks was hanged from a telegraph pole in front of 5,000 onlookers. Photographs of Mr. Brooks’s lynched body were widely circulated, and attendees took pieces of his clothing as souvenirs. Though several members of the mob gave newspaper interviews, no one was ever held responsible for the lynching of Allen Brooks.