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…
On December 11, 1921, Mr. Fred Rouse, a Black citizen, husband, father, and non-union butcher at Swift & Co. meatpacking, was lynched at this site by a white mob. Five days prior, he was beaten on Exchange Avenue in the Stockyards by a mob of meatpackers from a whites-only union…
On September 12, 1884, a mob of at least 400 young white men lynched a 25-year-old Black man named William Allen Taylor near this location beside the Trinity River. Weeks before the lynching, Mr. Taylor was arrested after being accused of robbing and assaulting a white woman. During this era…
Racial terror lynching plagued Texas and devastated African American communities for decades. On August 14, 1894, Travis County was the site of a triple lynching when a white mob seized a black woman and two black men from a small jail about thirty miles from Austin. According to news reports,…
The Davidson County Jail stood near here, on what was called Water Street or Front Street, throughout most of the 19th century. Despite the duty of law enforcement to provide custodial protection, the jail was a repeated site of lynchings and violence that devastated the African American community. On March…
Between 1877 and 1950, there were at least 237 lynchings in the state of Tennessee. These were acts of terrorism against the African American community. In Madison County on August 16, 1886, Eliza Woods, a black domestic worker, was accused of poisoning her white employer. That night, a mob stormed…