The Dynamite Bombings of African-American Homes in mid-20th Century Dallas: Anarchistic Perspectives and Resurrecting the Memory of Domestic Terrorism

Summary

A series of dynamite bombings of black residences rocked the communities of Dallas in the 1940s and early 1950s.  Although acknowledged by the local and national press while the attacks were ongoing, these events are not a part of the popular or normative history of the city.  Current state and federal antiquities laws would almost certainly not perceive these properties as culturally or historically significant, and their materiality could remain unacknowledged and invisible.  While the act of dynamite bombing seems anarchistic, their underlying motivation was to enforce, through threat of bodily harm to the point of death, the status quo of Dallas’s segregationist residential policies.  Acknowledging these events, documenting the residents and their residences, and infilling these landscapes, could be viewed as a form of anarchistic insurgency to challenge the status quo of Dallas’s history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017   •
• Anarchism and Historical Archaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 460