The Lynching of Allen Brooks Marker

On March 3, 1910 Allen Brooks, a Black man accused of attempted rape, was seized by a mob during his trial at the courthouse and thrown from a window into the street. The mob then dragged Brooks up Main Street to the intersection of Main and Akard Streets, where he was hung under the Elks Arch. A historical marker was dedicated here on November 20, 2021.

Allen Brooks was a Black resident of Dallas, reported to be 57-65 years old, who worked as a laborer for several families in the city. On February 27, 1910, Mary Ethel Beuvens, the toddler daughter of one of the families Brooks worked for, went missing. After a few hours, the child was found in the barn on the family’s property with Brooks. Both Brooks and Mary Beuvens were examined by a doctor who declared that Brooks had attempted to rape the child. Immediately, mobs gathered near the county jail where Brooks was taken and, while no violence erupted that night, after the indictment the following day the county sheriff moved Brooks frequently to different jails to keep the man safe.

The trial was held March 3, 1910 at the Dallas County Courthouse (now the Old Red Museum) and the sheriff, Arthur Ledbetter, escorted Brooks to the trial. Anticipating violence, there were 150 law enforcement officers at the courthouse to protect the trial. When the growing crowd outside the courthouse heard that a short recess had been called, the mob rushed the courtroom, broke past the extra security, and found Allen Brooks hidden in a locked jury room. The mob tied a rope around Brooks’ neck, threw the other end to people in the streets outside, and pulled Brooks out of a second-story window. It is unknown whether that fall killed him or knocked him unconscious, but the crowd then dragged Brooks down Main Street about a half mile to the Elks Arch at Main and Akard Streets. A crowd of 2000-5000 people watched as Brooks was dragged along the street and then hung from a telephone pole under the Elks Arch. Witnesses took pieces of Brooks’ clothing as souvenirs and a photograph of his body hanging under the arch was turned into a printed postcard.

Lynching in the Jim Crow South

The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has documented 4084 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950 (this number excludes “hanging and mob violence that followed some criminal trial process”). In the “Characteristics of the Lynching Era” section of the EJI report, they state:

“African Americans were lynched under varied pretenses. Today, lynching is most commonly remembered as a punishment exacted by white mobs upon Black men accused of sexually assaulting white women. During the lynching era, whites’ hypervigilant enforcement of racial hierarchy and social separation, coupled with widespread stereotypes of Black men as dangerous, violent, and uncontrollable sexual aggressors, fueled a pervasive fear of Black men raping white women. Of the 4084 African American lynching victims EJI documented, nearly 25 percent were accused of sexual assault and nearly 30 percent were accused of murder.

Hundreds more Black people were lynched based on accusations of far less serious crimes like arson, robbery, non-sexual assault, and vagrancy, many of which were not punishable by death if convicted in a court of law. In addition, African Americans frequently were lynched for non-criminal violations of social customs of racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect or formality than observers believed was due.

Finally, many African Americans were lynched not because they committed a crime or social infraction, and not even because they were accused of doing so, but simply because they were Black and present when the preferred party could not be located….

The thousands of African Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950 differed in many respects, but in most cases, the circumstances of their murders can be categorized as one or more of the following: (1) lynchings that resulted from a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; (2) lynchings in response to casual social transgressions; (3) lynchings based on allegations of serious violent crime; (4) public spectacle lynchings; (5) lynchings that escalated into large-scale violence targeting the entire African American community; and (6) lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and community leaders who resisted mistreatment, which were most common between 1915 and 1940.”

Scholarship has shown that lynching in the Jim Crow era had a ritualist and even religious tone in southern society. As Donald G. Mathews writes in his article, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice: Lynching in the American South,” for those perpetrating the lynching “the twisted, burned, or slashed body signified elemental justice, a necessary, even moral, act in a drama of punishment and pain that portrayed good and evil in a way that could sacralize white supremacy at least for the moment” (32). The surrounding African American community understood the threats to themselves and their loved ones in the act of lynching, just as white onlookers understood the ritual to uphold their understanding of social order. The practice of lynching, as well as photographing the lynched men and women and circulating those images, was a tool used by white southern society to maintain racial control, enforce Jim Crow laws and segregation, and overall intimidate and terrorize the entire African American community.

The rape, or attempted rape, of white women was commonly at the center of lynchings. Prior to the Civil War, the perceived threat of Black slaves against white women was sometimes the spark of retaliations against slaves accused of plotting rebellion. During Reconstruction and afterwards, as white southerners sought to challenge and limit the new freedoms and rights of freed African Americans, white men constructed the “Black rapist” as a key figure to continue exerting power over the Black community. White southerners depicted rape as a crime that Black men committed against white women, usually portrayed as pure, defenseless white women who needed protection by white southern men. As Crystal Nicole Feimster writes in the introduction of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, “The portrayal of Black men as beastly and unable to control their sexual desire served to justify the practice of lynching, segregation laws, and disfranchisement of Black men” (5). While not all Black men, or women, who were lynched were accused of rape, the image of a Black rapist of white women was central to the history of lynching in the south. Anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells wrote in her autobiography (posthumously published in 1970), “I found that in order to justify these horrible atrocities [lynchings] to the world, the Negro was being branded as a race of rapists, who were especially mad after white women” (Feimster, 37). In her study of lynchings and her anti-lynching campaign, Wells challenged the rape narrative that white southerners used to perpetrate lynchings against Black men and women and pointed out that this image of the “Black rapist” was being used to keep the Black community in subjugation.

The Elks Arch

In 1908, Dallas hosted the National Convention of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. Hosting this event was a big chance for Dallas to bring in tourism revenue, since the city was much smaller than previous National Convention locations. The Dallas Elks pushed Dallas residents and business owners to improve the looks of their houses and businesses to impress the incoming travelers. For downtown, the Elks designed an arch that spanned the intersection of Main and Akard Streets. The Arch was a steel frame designed in white, purple, and blue, lit with 150,000 light bulbs, and decorated with an elk statue and antlers.

Dallas hosted the Elks Convention of around 40,000 visitors with a massive barbeque on June 14, 1908. After a procession under the Elks Arch to the fairgrounds, the guests feasted on almost 20,000 pounds of barbequed meat with all the sides and drinks to accompany it. Once the Convention was over, the Elks Arch remained standing as a symbol of Dallas’ success in hosting the event. Not everyone in Dallas liked the arch’s appearance, but the city still used it for special occasions and changed the “Welcome Elkdom” to “Welcome Visitors” making it a popular site to photograph.

Calls for the Elks Arch to come down became louder in the summer of 1910, although plans to remove the structure were already in progress prior to the lynching of Allen Brooks. White residents called for the arch’s removal as part of efforts of the City Plan and Improvement League to modernize the city streets and in June 1910 the Southwestern Life Insurance Company requested the arch removed so that it could make improvements to the sewer system in its new building. Although the lynching was not part of the official reasons for the arch’s removal, many in the Dallas community connected the Arch as a symbol of Brooks’ lynching. The Dallas Elks protested the removal of the arch, but by the end of 1911 the steel frame had been moved to the state fairgrounds where it was repurposed as a pavilion to display naval ships. The Arch was dismantled permanently as the State Fairgrounds turned into a Naval airfield during World War I. 

Equal Justice Initiative. “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.” January 1, 2017. Accessed December 10, 2021. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/.

Feimster, Crystal Nicole. Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

“The Lynching of Allen Brooks and the Disappearance of the Elks Arch.” Dallas Untold: Lynching and Memory in Dallas, Texas. 2015. Accessed December 7, 2021. https://blog.smu.edu/untolddallas/dallas1910/.

Mathews, Donald G. “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice: Lynching in the American South.” The Mississippi Quarterly 61, 1/2 (Special Issue on Lynching and American Culture) (Winter-Spring 2008): 27-70.

Vaughn, Daniel. “From Triumph to Tragedy: Looking Back on the Elks Arch in Downtown Dallas.” Texas Monthly. December 30, 2018. Accessed December 7, 2021. https://www.texasmonthly.com/bbq/looking-back-elks-arch-downtown-dallas/.