DALLAS — William Allen Taylor was a 25-year-old Black man whose life ended along the banks of the Trinity River.
Now, 139 years later, with his name and his story engraved in bronze, historians and activists hope his story, his spirit and the resolve to never repeat the past will live on.
An effort by the Dallas County Justice Initiative, Remembering Black Dallas, and The City of Dallas, led to the unveiling of a historical marker at Trinity Overlook on the west side of the Trinity River along Commerce Street. It is near the site where Taylor's life ended on Sept. 12, 1884.
Accused of assaulting a white woman, he was moved to a jail in Waxahachie as word spread of a potential growing mob. Recorded accounts say that nine masked men grabbed him during a police transport. A mob of an estimated 400 gathered as he was lynched, hung from a tree along the Trinity.
"Boss, you're hanging an innocent man," were his last recorded words. "I don't know anything about it and won't tell a lie by saying I do."
No one was ever arrested for his death.
Dallas city leaders unveiled the new historic marker on Saturday morning.
"Because we're today consecrating what is holy ground," said Ed Gray of the Dallas County Justice Initiative. "To make it possible to move Dallas forward. Not as a way to revise history, but as a way to tell history."
Because it is difficult history that Dallas knows all too well.
Of the more than 338 documented lynchings of Black people in Texas between 1865 and 1910, the Equal Justice Initiative says at least seven are known to have taken place in Dallas County.
The death of Allen Brooks on March 3, 1910 among the most notorious.
Accused of assaulting a white employee's daughter, he was taken from police custody during a pre-trial hearing at what is now the Old Red Court House. The mob put a rope around his neck and threw him from a second floor window. An historic marker now stands outside the courthouse.
Another marker, installed in 2021, stands at the intersection of Main and Akard, where Brooks was finally hung from a telegraph pole. Images of the gruesome scene, including the thousands of people who gathered to watch it, were even printed on postcards.
"We need to reach back in history to make sure that we don't repeat it," Gray said in 2021.
But as they dedicated this latest marker along the Trinity River Saturday morning, they also made note of progress. Now, in 2023, multiple Dallas City leaders, from the mayor to the city manager to the Dallas County District Attorney, are Black Americans.
Times are not perfect. But times have changed.
"We are not commemorating a lynching," Gray said at the unveiling of the marker in honor of William Taylor. "We are commemorating a spirit. And that spirit lives in all of us and all of Dallas."
The Saturday morning event was held in partnership with the Equal Justice Initiative Community Remembrance Project.