It Could Happen Here Weekly 167

3893.937 - 3916.755 Steven Monticelli

In 1860, construction workers carelessly tossed matches into a pile of wood in Dallas during a hot, drought-ridden summer. The blaze that resulted destroyed much of what was then only a village. Immediately suspecting that enslaved arsonists had set the fire as part of a planned revolution, whites in Dallas tortured and whipped almost every enslaved person in the county in search of scapegoats.