Join the Friends of SMU Libraries and DeGolyer Library for a lecture and book signing event for Our Stories: Black Families in Early Dallas, featuring editors George Keaton Jr. and Judith Garrett Segura.

Our Stories: Black Families in Early Dallas combines carefully chosen excerpts from two publications by the late Dr. Mamie McKnight’s organization, Black Dallas Remembered. 

Through the excerpts chosen by editors George Keaton Jr. and Judith Garrett Segura, Our Stories brings together the original memoirs from many of Dallas’s earliest Black families, as handed down over the generations to their twentieth-century descendants. The period covered begins in the 1850s and goes through the 1930s. 
The stories reveal hardships endured and struggles overcome, but the storytellers focus on the triumphs over adversity and the successes achieved against the odds. The histories include the founding of churches, schools, newspapers, hospitals, grocery stores, businesses, and other institutions established to nourish and enrich the lives of the earliest Black families in Dallas.

GEORGE KEATON JR. retired from Dallas Independent School District after thirty-one years as a teacher and counselor. In 2015 he founded and continues to lead Remembering Black Dallas, dedicated to preserving and sharing the experiences of the African American families of Dallas County.

JUDITH GARRETT SEGURA is the author of BELO: From Newspapers to New Media, a history of DallasNews Corporation, Texas’s oldest business institution, which dates from 1842.