The Lynching of Allen Brooks: A Dark Chapter in Dallas History (ca. 1852–1910)

Allen Brooks, a Black handyman working in Dallas, was lynched on March 3, 1910, by a mob over allegations of assaulting a young child. Despite attracting a crowd of several thousand and the presence of police, none of the participants in the lynching were ever prosecuted.

Little is known about Brooks’s early life. He was a native of Maryland and was probably born into slavery around 1852. He married Milly Lawson on August 5, 1878, in Dallas County. Allen and Milly Brooks raised a family of nine children in the Freedmantown area of North Dallas. An 1880 U.S. census record shows that Brooks was detained at the Dallas County Poor Farm for theft. During the following decades, he worked in several capacities, including as a laborer, cook, house cleaner, carpenter, and janitor. By 1910 he was working as a handyman and furnace tender. Among the houses at which he worked was that of the Buvens, located at Pearl Street and Ross Avenue.

As reported by the Dallas Morning News, around 3:00 P.M. on February 23, 1910, Marie Buvens realized that Mary Ethel, her three-year-old daughter, was missing and initiated a search for her. Within about thirty minutes, Flora Daingerfield (or Dangerfield), a Black woman employed by the Buvens family, discovered Brooks and the child in the family’s barn. She swiftly took the child and hurried back to the house. The newspaper reported obliquely that the child had sustained “painful,” though not serious, injuries. Following the incident, Brooks absconded and sought refuge in the boiler room of a nearby residence (other reports stated that it was actually the basement of a nearby music conservatory). Arriving quickly on the scene, police officers Theodore Harrison, William Dennis, and George Eimicke arrested Brooks and transported him to the city jail to face charges. Eimicke noted that Brooks surrendered without resistance but refused to make a statement.

Dr. W. W. Brandau provided medical attention to the child, who he reported had suffered “brutal treatment,” before examining Brooks in the city jail, where he confirmed his judgment that Brooks had assaulted the child. In an effort to prevent a mob from seizing Brooks, city commissioners William Doran and Harry L. Seay recommended transferring him first to the Dallas County jail and then to the Tarrant County jail in Fort Worth. However, Sheriff Arthur L. Ledbetter stipulated that Brooks was to stay at the county jail, accompanied by a substantial guard to safeguard his life. Deputy sheriffs were dispatched to the city, and the police were put on alert to respond to any potential emergencies. Nevertheless, Brooks was secretly removed to Fort Worth the day after his arrest. Black civic leaders moved quickly to denounce Brooks. On March 1 the Colored Ministers’ Alliance of Dallas adopted resolutions condemning Brooks and decrying “the criminal element of the negro race” while requesting that the trial be allowed to run its course. It was also reported that a delegation of Blacks from Rockwall County had requested that Sheriff Ledbetter turn Brooks over to them for punishment.

On February 24 the grand jury met and indicted Brooks. Judge Robert B. Seay set the trial for March 7, which he believed to be the earliest date allowed by law. News and rumors of the assault spread across Dallas and the state throughout the day. After midnight a mob of some 200 surrounded the Dallas County jail and demanded that Brooks be surrendered to them. They were armed with a thirty-foot steel rail, taken from a nearby railway track, for use as a battering ram. Police quickly mobilized a large force of officers to the scene. Sheriff Ledbetter negotiated with mob leaders to allow a committee of twelve access to the jail to confirm that Brooks was not being held there. The group, led by Henry J. Buvens, the father of the alleged victim, reported that he was not found there. However, a second search of the jail was required to convince the mob, which dispersed after 2:00 A.M. On the following day, February 25, Judge Seay, having learned that an earlier trial was possible due to a Code of Criminal Procedure article concerning the expediting of rape cases, moved the trial date up to March 3.

Despite the efforts of officials and newspaper editors to discourage mob actions and promises that justice would be administered promptly through due process, public discontent remained elevated. Burrell Oates, a Black man convicted of murdering a White man in Dallas, was then undergoing a series of retrials after being sentenced to death in 1904. The repeated delays in his execution had aroused considerable White resentment. An anonymous letter, delivered to Ledbetter and published in the Dallas Times-Herald and the Fort Worth Record and Register, menaced Ledbetter and threatened with death any lawyer who defended Brooks and threatened the same for Oates’s lawyer, Albert S. Baskett, should Oates escape hanging. The letter intimated that mob violence would ensure that the "white race [was] treated as it should be."

Judge Seay had a difficult time securing counsel for Brooks. Wilson T. Pace and J. E. Thomas were initially appointed to represent Brooks. Seay granted their request to be excused on February 28. Thomas claimed that, were he not already engaged as a lawyer in another case set to start on March 3, he would have fulfilled his appointment despite the threats made against him. Pace stated that he preferred to serve time in jail if needed to avoid the mandate. Seay then appointed T. F. Lewis, R. H. Capers, and F. D. Cosby as counsel. Ahead of the trial, Cosby claimed to be ill, and George Clifton Edwards replaced him.

While he was awaiting trial, Brooks’s whereabouts remained undisclosed. Following the action on the county jail, he was rumored to be hidden in either Fort Worth or Waco. In reality, Brooks was initially taken from the Dallas County jail on February 24 to Fort Worth and then Denton. He was later relocated to Denison, then Sherman, and finally to McKinney on March 2.

On March 3, 1910, Brooks was brought to Dallas in the early hours of the morning on a 5 A.M. interurban car, and Ledbetter and former sheriff Ben E. Cabell hurried him to the courthouse. Ahead of Brooks’s trial, a large crowd of several hundred assembled outside the courthouse. Despite the presence of numerous police, deputy sheriffs, and local militia members, the mob quickly overcame security measures and stormed the building. The mob occupied the second floor, where the trial was to take place, but retreated following the exhortation of Judge Eugene B. Muse that the law be allowed to take its course. The trial commenced as scheduled at 9 A.M. Robert B. Allen served as special prosecutor. Brooks’s court-appointed attorneys had yet to confer with their client and secured a thirty-minute recess to consult with him. Judge Seay granted an additional hour for the preparation of a list of witnesses. The trial would have likely been delayed until the following day to allow for the summoning of witnesses. Concurrently, rumors circulated amongst the crowd outside that the defense would request a change of venue for the trial.

About 11 A.M. the enraged mob broke through police defenses and invaded the courthouse. Brooks took refuge under a table in the jury room. The mob entered the room and captured him. The crowd outside, by then numbering more than 1,000, passed a rope up to the second-story window. The rope was placed around Brooks’s neck and used to pull him to the ground below. Brooks was either killed by the fall or lost consciousness upon impact. He was then dragged down Main Street for half a mile by the mob, which expanded to several thousand people, until they reached the Elks Arch at the intersection of Akard and Main streets. There Brooks was hanged from a telephone pole. He was taken down after several minutes and police took charge of his body. Strips of clothing had been cut or torn from Brooks’s body as souvenirs of the lynching. After he was cut down, the crowd fought over the hanging rope and even made cuts of the pole from which Brooks had been hanged.

The mob redirected its attention to the county jail in search of Burrell Oates; Frank “Mud” McCue, a White associate of Oates convicted in the same murder case; and another African American inmate, “Bubber” Robinson, who had also been convicted for the murder of a White man. Governor Thomas Campbell ordered the two Dallas companies of the Texas National Guard to protect the jail. The inmates were discreetly moved from the jail prior to the arrival of the mob, which dispersed after failing to locate them. Dallas Mayor Stephen Hay ordered all saloons closed until the following day, and order was reestablished.

The lynching occurred on the same day that the first aviation exhibition in Dallas took place, but Brooks’s murder attracted a far larger crowd. A photograph of Brooks’s lynching was made into a postcard and widely circulated. Brooks was one of eleven individuals, five White and six Black, lynched in Dallas County between 1853 and 1920. His lynching represented a deliberate demonstration of mob dominance over the judicial system. During the riot, the mob took up the chant “To hell with the courts.” In the investigation of Brooks’s lynching, a Dallas grand jury evaluated 110 felony indictments and 14 misdemeanor indictments, but chose not to pursue any for prosecution, citing a desire not to burden the court’s calendar with potentially baseless or insignificant cases. Reflecting on the lynching, the Dallas Morning News wrote that “something may be said… not in justification, but in extenuation of the conduct of those who resort to lynching. Not every one [sic] who joins the mob is moved by a lust for bloodshed… Many of them are moved by their contempt for the delays, reversals and failures of the courts.” After no relatives claimed Brooks’s remains, he was buried in a pauper’s grave at Oakland Cemetery in Dallas.

In 2021 the Dallas County Justice Initiative, in partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative, erected a historical marker at Pegasus Plaza at the corner of Akard and Main streets to commemorate Brooks. It was Dallas’s first permanent, public recognition of the city’s history of racial violence. In 2023 a Texas historical marker was installed at the former Dallas courthouse.