Dallas is closer to confronting another ugly moment in its history of racial violence, this one dating back more than 138 years.
That September night, the mob of vigilantes became more emboldened, its clamor for revenge at a fever pitch against the young Black man accused of assaulting a white woman at her Ross Avenue home.
Sheriff William Smith knew young William Allen Taylor wouldn’t live to get a fair shot at justice if he remained in Dallas.
Smith hustled 25-year-old Taylor from the local jail to one south, in Waxahachie. When the mob pursued them, the next stop was a cell in Waco. Again the lynching party showed up.
The frantic shuffling among jailhouses ended near Midlothian, where masked men kidnapped Taylor and, seizing the sheriff and his deputy as well, headed back to Dallas and the Trinity River.
Along its western bank, an angry mob of about 50 men lynched Taylor on the night of Sept. 12, 1884. The headline read, “Swung to a limb. Bill Taylor’s dreadful death.”
The newspaper account recorded his last words: “Boss, you are hanging an innocent man. I don’t know anything about it, and I won’t tell a lie by saying I do.”
With a rope around his neck, Taylor was pushed from a bridge and hanged from the limb of a nearby tree, the sickening account continued. “He died hard, finally strangled to his death 12 minutes later.”
We know of no gravesite for Taylor, who had arrived in Dallas two years earlier from East Texas. No relatives or descendants have ever been found.
His legacy, like that of other Black men and women who called Dallas home, is as a too-long-anonymous victim of local citizenry’s willingness to carry out torture and murder to repress and terrorize people of color.
The Dallas County Justice Initiative is intent on memorializing Taylor, as it did for Allen Brooks, murdered downtown in 1910, and plans to do for others.
The volunteer coalition worked for years to meet the requirements to secure the markers for Brooks and Taylor from the Equal Justice Initiative, whose National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., is a shrine to the victims of lynching.
Brooks’ marker was placed in downtown’s Pegasus Plaza, at the corner of Main and Akard streets, during a November 2021 ceremony.
At that time, organizers believed Taylor’s commemoration would follow in September 2022. Their proposed site was equally high profile — Trinity Overlook Park, alongside the Commerce Street bridge and not far from the shadows of today’s county jail.
September came and went with no such ceremony. I repeatedly checked in with the volunteers only to find red tape and bureaucracy have continued to clog any progress to get the city’s signoff on the Trinity location.
When we talked a week ago, leader Ed Gray acknowledged frustration over the ongoing logjam. Despite his best attempts to find which city department has jurisdiction, he still lacked the necessary letter the Equal Justice Initiative requires for the memorial’s placement.
“Whenever we’ve reached out, we just can’t get an answer,” he said. “There just are too many entities involved.”
Whatever the reason for the holdup, as soon as I began making calls late last week, the path cleared.
Deputy City Manager Kim Tolbert told me she and City Manager T.C. Broadnax will make sure the right people at City Hall walk alongside Gray to get the Taylor marker across the finish line.
“It’s great progress,” Gray told me. “We can get this marker in its rightful place.”
Gray has persevered for years to bring recognition to historic Black achievements and tragedies, often alongside George Keaton Jr., the founder of Remembering Black Dallas. Since Keaton’s death last year, Gray is working double-time.
He’s become the point person for the city on reviving Martyrs Park on the western edge of downtown and installing a long-promised memorial to victims of racial violence there.
He also oversees the effort to commemorate the life of Reuben Johnson, who was lynched Dec. 27, 1874 — according to some accounts merely for witnessing a murder — near what is today Mountain Creek Lake.
“We believe it’s necessary in these days and times to push these efforts,” Gray said. “The current atmosphere in this country is to relegate African American history to the bottom of this country’s history.”
Gray tries to keep a light heart, but his devotion to this horrific history chews at his spirit.
“This is the time in my life I should be enjoying something,” he said. “Instead I’m researching other people’s demise. And it does weigh heavily on my soul.”
Gray fights on because “it’s a way of me getting back.” Getting back at the atrocities that happened in Dallas and all across Texas. Getting back at what enslavers did to Gray’s own forefamily.
The past two years, on the Sept. 12 anniversary of Taylor’s killing, Gray and other volunteers have conducted a libation ceremony to honor his life and spirit near the place of his death along the Trinity. Marking the connection between past and present, water taken from the river was sprinkled across the site as the group sang and chanted.
Gray hopes this year the ceremony will happen alongside the dedication of the Equal Justice Initiative marker recognizing Taylor.
“Being able to get the historic marker in place is very important as we make sure Dallas recognizes its history and gives it its rightful place in the kind of future it wants to have,” Gray said.
For a city that too often pretends the shameful episodes in its history simply didn’t happen, each commemoration is a significant moment in Dallas’ reckoning with the violence wrought by racism.
Broadnax must make sure his staff doesn’t lose sight of his promise to get this work done. These memorials are long, long overdue.
