- Isabella Volmert, Aria Jones and Lana Ferguson, Dallas Morning News

The founder of Remembering Black Dallas was known for his work preserving the city’s Black history and culture.

 

Dr. George Keaton Jr., a fourth-generation Dallasite who dedicated his life to preserving Black history and culture in the city he called home, died overnight Tuesday.

Keaton was best known as a community organizer and passionate local historian who founded and served as executive director of Remembering Black Dallas Inc. He was 66.

Remembering Black Dallas shared the news of Keaton’s death after a “very brief battle with cancer” in a social media post Wednesday.

“He voiced yesterday that he thought that he would have more time because he still had so much to do,” the group said.

Keaton established Remembering Black Dallas in 2015 “with a mission to preserve and promote the African American life, history, artifacts, and culture” of the Dallas area, according to the organization’s website. The organization participates in educational talks, community preservation, genealogical and historical research, and local and national tours.

Keaton stayed busy with numerous projects throughout Dallas.

Recent work

Keaton was part of the citizens group created by the city of Dallas in 2018 to take on tasks such as a recommendation for a memorial to victims of racial violence, including one of Dallas’ most heinous offenses, the lynching of Allen Brooks.

Brooks, a 65-year-old Black laborer awaiting his day in court after accusations he molested a child, was dragged from the Old Red Courthouse and lynched from a telephone pole in front of a huge crowd near what’s now Pegasus Plaza in March 1910.

The citizens group led the research, studied additional lynchings and recommended that the memorial’s vision expand to include multiple victims.

The other memorials included a marker honoring Anderson Bonner — once one of Dallas’ biggest land owners — and Martyrs Park, an obscure green space west of Dealey Plaza.

On Wednesday in North Dallas, Keaton was honored with a moment of silence during a ceremony celebrating the installation of a historical marker for Dr. Marcellus Cooper, the first Black dentist in Texas. Communities Foundation of Texas chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer Reo Pruiett said Keaton was an adviser on the project and an organizer of the event.

”He will be just truly missed,” she said.

Community involvement

Among the many hats he wore, Keaton was a board member for Preservation Dallas and the African American Museum. He was inducted into the African American Education Archives and History Program’s Hall of Fame in 2019.

Keaton also founded the Dallas County Justice Initiative, the local chapter of the Equal Justice Initiative, in 2020. The group works to honor victims of lynchings and racial terror in Dallas County with the Community Remembrance Historical Marker Project.

Keaton also took education seriously. After graduating from North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), he got a master’s degree in clinical counseling and a degree in guidance counseling, according to Dallas Doing Good. He then returned to the classroom, teaching in Dallas public elementary and middle schools for more than three decades.

Historian ‘forced Dallas not to forget’

Judith Garrett Segura, a writer and researcher who has worked with Keaton over the lastfive years, said he had a “very big brain, a big heart and a great compassion for human beings” that he devoted to telling stories about Black Texans who have made “enormous contributions” throughout history that may not have been recorded.

Just three days ago, Segura said on Wednesday, Keaton sent her a draft of a grant proposal to fund completion of the last six of 25 state historical markers relating to Black Dallasites.

They also co-edited a book called Our Stories: Black Families in Early Dallaspublished in September, which creates a permanent record of memoirs passed down from the city’s earliest Black families, she said.

Segura said she believed Keaton’s training as a counselor and experience teaching gave him a demeanor of the “very best psychotherapist you ever had,” someone who would listen and then make interesting and helpful comments.

“I had a lot to learn when I met him, and he was so kind to me,” Segura said. “I had some cultural learning that I really had never had the opportunity to get myself, and he was my teacher. He was just a lovely man.”

Longtime friend and historical activist Edward Gray said Keaton rarely slept. Gray said he would see tweets and emails from Keaton about their work sometimes at 3 a.m.

Gray would send Keaton a message asking why he was up. Keaton would reply, “I knew you were going to be up at the same time.”

“That’s the type of person Dr. Keaton was,” Gray said. “We are restless people because when it comes to history, we realize that every day, history is being made.”

Gray, who now leads the Dallas County Justice Initiative, described historical activism as studying and remembering history accompanied by progressive political action. He said Keaton’s work — like the Allen Brooks memorial — has brought the lives and legacies of Black Americans to the center of a major metropolitan area.

“That is not just Black history, that is not just Dallas history. That history is the world’s history,” he said.

Gray said he hopes Keaton’s legacy of education and advocacy for people of all ages will continue.

“I would like Dr. Keaton to be remembered as a historian that forced Dallas to not forget,” he said.

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