This exhibit is under construction

Lynching, a term used to describe the most notorious acts of racial terrorism, transformed as murderous mobs refined their tactics over time. This exhibit traces lynching in Denton County from an enslaved teenager in 1860 through to the only officially acknowledged lynching of two Black teenagers in Pilot Point on December 14, 1922.

On October 14, 1895, the people of Denton gathered to watch, what would become, the last officially acknowledged hanging in county history. Denton County Law Enforcement, headed by Sheriff Sam Hawkins, executed John Quincy Adams Crews "as privately as [Sheriff Hawkins] could conveniently find, to wit: by erecting a gallows on the north side of the jail." Yet, outside the newly-constructed Denton County jail, the curious gaze of 10,000 people fixated upon John Quincy Adams Crews as he was killed. 

On December 14, 1922, the morning after two Black men were lynched in Denton County, the editor of the Denton Record-Chronicle, Will C. Edwards, wrote "there has never been a case of mob violence [in Denton County]."  Until recently, many Denton County citizens believed the claims of Mr. Edwards. that racial violence and specifically lynching did not occur in their small rural community. Stories of terrorism against Black citizens and spectacle lynchings were from Paris, Waco, Dallas, and East Texas -- areas formerly of high-density slavery. In a county where under ten percent of the population identifies as Black, it seemed possible that the prevailing narrative about Denton County was true and the county was unique in its lack of racial violence. However, between 1860 and 1880, Denton County lynched at least seventeen men (is this still accurate or is it more?) and one boy in eight separate lynching events. Some accounts of the era refer to many others who were extralegally hanged for similar offenses, but their names and alleged crimes are unknown. This boom of extralegal violence during the secessionist period was followed by a period of forty years without a publicly recorded lynching. With the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Denton County, lynching returned in the 1920s. During this period, in less than fourteen months, four Black men were arrested by law enforcement for crimes with which they were never charged, taken from jail, and lynched. These are not the actions of a county free of racial violence. Through a careful study of the remaining records of these acts of violence, both the methodology and essential partnerships of the Ku Klux Klan in Denton County, are visible and can be organized into a ritualized pattern to identify other obscured acts of violence in Denton County.