In 1896, the first African-American police officer in Dallas, Officer William McDuff, was killed, only weeks after taking office. Dallas has now memorialized him with a street topper near the site of his sad death, after 128 years.
Dr. W. Marvin Dulaney is a historian who researches Black police officers throughout American history and documents McDuff’s triumphs and tragedies.
He explained that Dallas had tried to hire a Black officer since 1888, but there had been resistance.
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“Finally, in 1896, the police department or the city decides to respond and they hire William McDuff,” Dulaney told NBCDFW.
1896 saw numerous historical firsts. In that year, the first modern Olympic Games were conducted in Athens, Greece; the Dow Jones was established; the first Ford automobile was completed; and the first Fort Worth Stock Show took place on the shores of Marine Creek.
“So, in 1896, there were indeed some sympathetic white council members who not only appoint the police officer, but they do something in terms of supporting Black education in the city,” Dulaney stated. “So, it’s a progressive period in the history of Dallas.”
Nevertheless, in that same year, the “separate but equal” doctrine was used by the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold racial segregation.
“In reality, in the rest of the country, redemption is taking place. Redemption is where, particularly in the South, they decide to force all the African Americans out of public offices, where they stop them from voting across the South,” Dulaney said.
“It’s a period of violence. They overturn city government offices where African Americans serve. So, it’s a terrible period in American history.”
McDuff was named as the neighborhood’s “special officer,” which is quite different from a regular police officer.
“As we know with McDuff and Black police officers in most of the southern cities, they could not arrest whites,” Dulaney explained.
On Christmas Day, shortly after cementing his place in history as the first Black officer, disaster struck.
“He’s in office approximately two months before he’s confronted by these two young men who don’t like the fact there’s a ‘N’ police officer and calls him out of his house and shoots him down in front of it,” Dulaney recounted.
According to a newspaper article from 1896, a neighbor witnessed everything and described a flash and the crack of a handgun. Other police officers arrived to discover McDuff “stone dead.”
According to the newspaper, he was shot straight in the forehead between the eyes, and his death must have been swift. The two men that killed him were both members of the community and Black.
The city didn’t see another Black cop until 1947.
McDuff’s life is still mostly unknown, and it’s still unclear where he was buried, despite his historical significance.
Dulaney remarked, “It’s sort of sad in a way that we don’t know where they actually buried William McDuff, and it’s sort of a characteristic of one of the problems that we confront in African American history that we lose these stories, and we lose them to such an extent that we don’t even know what happened to persons after they died.”
