Client

Overview

Shadow Lines interlaces the elements of shadow, light, time, and memory. Featuring a semicircular wall of weathering steel on a circular concrete plaza, creating a serene place for personal reflection, intergenerational conversation, and public commemoration. We took our primary inspiration from the words of Dr. George Keaton’s that that this memorial “will be a reverent reminder that lynchings happened on the ground we walk on every day.”

The memorial evokes a sundial, but instead of marking hours of the day, it marks the dates and names of each victim of racially motivated lynchings and hangings from the time of slavery to the Jim Crow era in Dallas. Where the longest shadow of each of these dates falls on the memorial wall is where the names are located. As if the shadow itself cut into the steel, indelibly etching the memory of each victim forever in the heart of the city. This becomes a powerful visual metaphor for the continuity of lives cut short by racial violence.

The wall features the poem, Here, by renowned poet Tim Seibles on the transformation of Dallas’ collective memory in the context of this difficult chapter in the city’s history and the ongoing racial violence of today. The poem interweaves a sense of renewal, resiliency, and optimism for current a

Goals

In 1860, three enslaved Black men—Patrick Jenkins, Cato Miller and the Rev. Samuel Smith—were lynched in downtown Dallas. They were hanged after specious accusations concerning their part in setting a downtown fire, and their deaths became part of an infamous reign of terror led by White businessmen during which enslaved individuals were rounded up and tortured. This memorial, entitled Shadow Lines honors these three men and all other local victims of lynching and racial violence between 1853 and 1920. Dr. George Keaton, community leader and historian who founded the organization Remembering Black Dallas, made this memorial possible. We took our primary inspiration from the words of Dr. Keaton, that this memorial “will be a reverent reminder that lynchings happened on the ground we walk on every day.”