Plaque unveiled to memorialize lynching site along Dallas's Trinity River

In a place once tainted by tragedy, a small crowd gathered Saturday morning to look back.

“On September 12, 1884, a mob of at least 400 young and old white men and women lynched a 25-year-old black man named William Allen Taylor at this very same site,” said Ed Gray at a podium.

At the Trinity Overlook Park, just west of downtown Dallas, city leaders were on hand as the Dallas County Justice Initiative unveiled a plaque retelling one of Dallas’s darkest chapters.

In 1884, hundreds hung Taylor after he was accused of assaulting a white woman, even as he declared his innocence.

Saturday’s ceremony was just the latest part of an effort to install public markers memorializing Black members of the Dallas community, like Taylor, whose stories otherwise fade with time.

“It shouldn’t have taken this long, but it’s here now. It’s a good education, a good showing that we do understand history, and we don’t want this to happen again,” said Dallas Mayor Pro Tem Tennell Atkins.

Earlier this year, the Dallas County Justice Initiative, led by Ed Gray, was also responsible for unveiling a marker at the Old Red Courthouse, the site where Allen Brooks was awaiting trial in 1910, when he was thrown from a courthouse window and five thousand people gathered to see him lynched.

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“We are not revising history, we’re teaching history, the history of Dallas as it is. We must learn to move and go forward by learning from the past,” said Gray.

Next, he said they’re working on plans for Martyrs Park, where four others were lynched, continuing to highlight a troubled past with the hope of a better future.