Page 7 - Microsoft PowerPoint - Hidden History - DFW v2.pptx

The last stop in Freedman’s Town was the Moorland Family YMCA, one of only a few Dallas
establishments listed in The Negro Motorist Green Book, a traveler’s guide for African Americans to
safely navigate Jim Crow America. Many famous black people stayed at this YMCA over the years,
including Thurgood Marshall, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Muhammad Ali. Today, the Dallas Black
Dance Theatre owns the building.

Colored School #2
Next, the tour passed Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, once
known as Colored School #2. There we learned about Dallas’ long and complicated fight for school
integration. For a long time, Booker T. Washington was the only school for black people in Dallas. DISD
did not officially desegregate until the 1970s due to the city’s flagrant resistance to federal
desegregation orders.

School desegregation led to massive white flight to the suburbs. Today, Hispanics make up about 70
percent of DISD’s demographics, African Americans about 22 percent and whites only 5 percent.

Downtown Lynchings
Dallas has a dark history of public lynchings. As we descended down the sloping hill and past the grassy
knoll of Dealey Plaza, “Strange Fruit” by Nina Simone softly spilled out of the van’s speakers. While
Dealey Plaza is almost exclusively known for being the site of the JFK assassination, it was once a
popular site for public lynchings.

In 1860, one year before the Civil War, there was a huge fire in Dallas that consumed downtown. The
white citizenry, fearful of a John Brown‐style uprising, spread rumors about a supposed slave plot
instigated by outside abolitionist agitators. For a solid two weeks, dozens of white men went on a

rampage and intimidated black citizens in what is often called the “Texas Troubles.” At least 30
slaves, maybe closer to 100, were murdered by white vigilantes that summer.

Three slaves — Patrick Jennings, Samuel Smith and “Cato” Miller — were accused of being the fire
plot’s ringleaders and were lynched on the banks of the Trinity River, just a few blocks away from where
Kennedy was assassinated. The public hanging was a huge event, attended by every man, woman and
child, regardless of race.

The book Hangings and Lynchings in Dallas County, Texas 1853‐1920 documents 28 lynchings or
hangings in this time period, including the Allen Brooks lynching at the corner of Main and Akard on
March 3, 1910. The first person ever to be executed in the state of Texas was Jane Elkins, who was
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found guilty of murdering her white master while he attempted to rape her. She was hung outside of
the Dallas County courthouse on May 27, 1853.