The Mar. 3, 1910, trial of Allen Brooks, a black man in his sixties charged with molesting a three-year-old white girl, was interrupted by a Dallas lynch mob hellbent on dispensing its own barbaric brand of justice.
According to the “Handbook of Texas,” the last word on all things Texan, there were 492 lynchings in Texas between 1862 and 1930. Most were carried out in the dead of night far from prying eyes, but more than a few illegal “executions” took place in broad daylight before thousands of spectators.
On the day of the trial, Sheriff Arthur Ledbetter secretly brought Allen Brooks back to Dallas from McKinney, where he had been sent for safekeeping. With everyone in law enforcement expecting trouble, the police commissioner put the entire force at Ledbetter’s disposal. But the sheriff, confident his 150 deputies were a match for any mob, asked only for a couple dozen officers.
Moments after the judge gaveled the proceedings to order, “200 white men and one conspicuous negro fought their way past 50 armed deputies and 20 policemen” reported The Morning News. Under strict orders not to resort to firearms or nightsticks, a small group of deputies retreated with Brooks to a jury room to make their last stand.
The homicidal horde swiftly overpowered the outnumbered lawmen, seized the ex-slave and tied a length of rope around his neck. To the cheers of accomplices waiting on the street below, they shoved the terrified captive out a second-story window.
Brooks landed head-first on the pavement. Mercifully he either died on impact or was knocked unconscious by the fall.
“Then the maddened crowd dragged the negro’s body up Main Street to the Elks’ Arch. One of the mob took the (other) end of the rope and climbed up a telephone pole.” He threw it “across one of the iron spikes used as ladders by linemen, and Brooks’ body was pulled up until it dangled about four feet above the ground.”
The gruesome spectacle seen by a streetful of Dallasites of all ages lasted only ten minutes. An unidentified white man risked his own life to cut down the body, which the fast-acting police chief removed from the scene before the mob could set fire to it.
Shocking as it was, the Dallas lynching received scant coverage in newspapers at the time. Such would not be the case six years later with the infamous “Waco Horror” that sickened an entire nation.
A jury took only four minutes on May 15, 1916, to find an illiterate black teenager named Jesse Washington guilty in the hammer slaying of the middle-aged wife of his white employer. The judge no sooner sentenced him to die for the crime than a swarm of white spectators took Washington from the bailiffs and hustled him out of the courtroom.
The abductors delivered their prize to a mob of 400 waiting in the alley. A heavy chain was wrapped around Washington’s neck, and he was pulled kicking and screaming to city hall where other vigilantes had prepared a bonfire.
The helpless human sacrifice was stripped naked, castrated and his fingers and toes cut off before being soaked in coal oil. With a tree limb serving as a stand-in gallows, he was hoisted over the raging fire and slowly roasted alive.
The ghastly show could not have drawn a bigger crowd if the perpetrators had sent out invitations. Ten thousand came from miles around to watch the fiendish festivities, and many brought along their children for what must have been a life-changing “civics lesson.”
Also in attendance was a who’s-who of elected officials from the mayor on down. The McLennan County sheriff, who had not even bothered to take the puny precautions of his Dallas counterpart, instructed his deputies to stand down and not to make any arrests.
When the fire was finally put out after two hellish hours, souvenir-hunting ghouls picked the scene clean of keepsakes. Among the mementos were Washington’s bones and teeth and links of the chain.
The lynching of Jesse Washington might not have attracted all that much attention had it not been for the historic photos of Fred Gildersleeve. At the mayor’s request, or so the story goes, the local photographer snapped pictures of the real-life nightmare from start to finish. He later made a few bucks by turning several into postcards, which some residents mailed to friends and relatives in Texas and around the country.
The photographic evidence of the shameful episode, especially the smiling faces of onlookers, made the bonfire lynching impossible to deny or ignore. Waco could attribute the editorial condemnation of the New York Times and other northern papers to Yankee prejudice but had no answer for similar expressions of revulsion and outrage from the Houston Chronicle and Austin American as well as an unprecedented number of publications throughout the Deep South.
The “Waco Horror” would haunt the Central Texas town for the rest of the twentieth century. Dallas, on the other hand, escaped widespread censure for a Main Street lynching that by all rights should have incurred the same wrath.
Order Bartee’s books “Murder Most Texan” and “Texas Depression-Era Desperadoes” from the “General Store” at barteehaile.com or by mailing a check for $26.65 for each copy to Bartee Haile, P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549.
