"Hangings and Lynchings in Dallas County, Texas: 1853 to 1920" documents all of the known hangings in Dallas County including . . . Jane Elkins, a slave, hanged for the ax murder of Andrew C. Wisdom and the first female to be legally hanged in Texas . . . Four young men, two of whom were brothers, accused of being horse thieves and cattle rustlers were lynched by vigilantes . . . Reuben "Rube" Johnson, lynched by three men for refusing to give false testimony in an upcoming theft trial . . . Henry Miller, hanged after being tried and convicted for the 1892 murder of Dallas Police Officer C. O. Brewer . . . Fred Douglas, the last person to be legally hanged in Dallas County. The author, Terry Baker spent a lifetime in law enforcement, retiring with the rank of assistant chief deputy after thirty-nine years with the Dallas County Sheriff's Department. He served as captain and commander of the "Old Jail" in downtown Dallas where the last five Dallas County hangings were held.

Oak Cliff and the Missing Pieces is the first book written about the area's history in over three decades. It not only captures the beginnings of the early settlement, it takes the reader beyond a century and a half of growth and tracks how the community has evolved. The book is unique in that it captures the history of West Dallas in conjunction with its Oak Cliff neighbor and how the two transformed together over time into what we see today. The collection of historical accounts and hundreds of photos identify individuals and places of prominence finally memorialized in one anthology. The narrative also takes readers through facts and stories that have been ignored or concealed, revealing an authentic depiction of how the community was, at times, abused and neglected. Readers will enjoy this introspective examination of the area south and west of the Trinity and will once and for all put together the missing pieces of the storied land that has long been misunderstood. All proceeds from the sale of Oak Cliff and the Missing Pieces will go to benefit non-profit organizations in Oak Cliff and West Dallas.

Explores the history of lynching and hangings in East Texas from 1850 to 1940.

Award-winning author Bob Alexander presents a biography of 20th-century Ranger Captain Jack Dean, who holds the distinction of being one of only five men to serve in both the Officer’s Corps of the Rangers and also as a President-appointed United States Marshal. Jack Dean’s service in Texas Ranger history occurred at a time when the institution was undergoing a philosophical revamping and restructuring, all hastened by America’s Civil Rights Movement, landmark decisions handed down by the United States Supreme Court, zooming advances in forensic technology, and focused efforts designed to diversify and professionalize the Rangers. His job choice caused him to circulate in the duplicitous underworld of dishonesty and criminality where twisted self-interest overrode compliance with societal norms. His biography is packed with true-crime calamities: double murders, single murders, negligent homicides, suicides, jailbreaks, manhunts, armed robberies and home invasions, kidnappings, public corruption, sexual assaults, illicit gambling, car-theft rings, dope smuggling, and arms trafficking.

Annotation. In 1916, seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington, a retarded black boy, was publicly tortured, lynched, and burned on the town square of Waco, Texas, Drawing on extensive research in the national files of the NAACP, local newspapers and archives, and interviews with the descendants of participants in the events of that day, Patricia Bernstein has reconstructed the details of not only the crime but also how it influenced the NAACP's antilynching campaign.

Winner, 2022 Ottis Lock Endowment “Best Book” Award from the East Texas Historical Association In Lynching and Leisure, Terry Anne Scott examines how white Texans transformed lynching from a largely clandestine strategy of extralegal punishment into a form of racialized recreation in which crowd involvement was integral to the mode and methods of the violence. Scott powerfully documents how lynchings came to function not only as tools for debasing the status of Black people but also as highly anticipated occasions for entertainment, making memories with friends and neighbors, and reifying whiteness. In focusing on the sense of pleasure and normality that prevailed among the white spectatorship, this comprehensive study of Texas lynchings sheds new light on the practice understood as one of the chief strategies of racial domination in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South.

In late July 1910, a shocking number of African Americans in Texas were slaughtered by white mobs in the Slocum area of Anderson County and the Percilla-Augusta region of neighboring Houston County. The number of dead surpassed the casualties of the Rosewood Massacre in Florida and rivaled those of the Tulsa Riots in Oklahoma, but the incident--one of the largest mass murders of blacks in American history--is now largely forgotten. Investigate the facts behind this harrowing act of genocide in E.R. Bills's compelling inquiry into the Slocum Massacre.

This “must-read for anyone interested in understanding American history” reframes how we think about slavery, reparations, 19th-century medical education—and the value of life and death (Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton). “A brilliant resurrection of the forgotten people who gave their lives to build our country.” —Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating “ghost values” or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools. This book is the culmination of more than 10 years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, 19th-century medical education, and the value of life and death.