March 4, 1910: As a judge watches, a mob seizes accused child molester Allen Brooks, an African American, and throws him from a second-story courtroom, then drags his body 10 blocks before hanging his body from an arch in the Dallas business district.

On the jump: “Although Brooks' skull was crushed and his neck broken when he was thrown from the courthouse window and most of the mob knew it, in response to the insistent cries of women in the crowd it was decided to suspend his body in plain view as a warning to other Negroes. Negroes seized the long rope with white men and the procession along Main Street was begun with thousands following.”

All of the old lynching stories are gruesome but this one is especially disturbing. I’ve noted lately, in this story and the ones from Cairo, Ill., the role women played in lynchings.