As the sun set across from Dallas Police Department headquarters on a Sunday evening in August, siblings Donna Woods, Tamara Durham and Cedric Jones addressed a crowd of about 40 others, tears in their eyes. Their two brothers should be standing with them, activist Ulises Ramos said to the protesters gathered.
“Black boys should live to be old men,” activist Olinka Green said at the protest. “Black boys matter.”
On Aug. 25, 1974, 50 years to the day that protesters gathered in their honor, George and Johnny Johnson were shot at Zip’s Sizzlin’ Steaks in Oak Cliff in what police described as an attempted robbery. George was 14 years old, in ninth grade at T.W. Browne Junior High School. Johnny was 13, and in eighth grade at the same school on Sprague Drive in Oak Cliff.
Woods remembers the Johnson brothers and was 13 when they were killed. She and Johnny were born the same day, records show. She, Jones and Durham share a father with the boys.
“I was a little girl, and I didn’t know they were my brothers, but we used to play together,” Woods said.
The protesters called for Dallas police to acknowledge that the brothers, children at the time, were killed unfairly. Along with that acknowledgement, they called for accountability for the brothers’ deaths.
“We’re here doing what the Dallas PD refuses to do, to acknowledge these boys,” Justin Bent said to the crowd. Bent is a member of the Dallas chapter of the National Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression, a group that helped organize the protest.
Green, a lifelong activist and organizer in Dallas, found out about the boys’ deaths through a display at the Dallas Public Library and began researching the details.
“I would like for [Dallas police Chief Eddie] García to acknowledge that the Dallas Police Department has a history of killing Black and brown children,” Green said. “Dallas police [have] a history of hiring and retaining police officers that kill children. I just want him to acknowledge that.”
Protesters cited the 1973 murder of 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez by a Dallas police officer just a year before the Johnson brothers’ deaths as another example.
“Here we are, 50 years later, and we’re still seeing such senseless killings,” said Durham, who was 6 years old when the brothers were killed.
From January 2003, the earliest year data is published online, to January 2023, 89 people have been killed in officer-involved shootings, according to the Dallas Police Department. Nearly 33% of the 272 people in officer-involved shootings in that time period have died.
Around 42% of people in officer-involved shootings from 2003 to 2023 were Black and nearly 90% were male, according to the department’s data. The Dallas Morning News has requested data on officer-involved shootings since 1974.
Different accounts
The brothers’ family, Black religious leaders and student organizers disputed police accounts of what happened that night in 1974.
Dallas police said according to case documents, on August 25, 1974, six male teenagers were suspected of committing an aggravated robbery at a steakhouse in Oak Cliff.
Case documents stated that the suspects entered the restaurant and appeared to have weapons. After Dallas police officer Robert Ross identified himself as an officer and after George and Johnny pointed what appeared to be weapons at him, he shot both brothers, according to case documents.
George and Johnny died at the hospital the next day, and the four other suspects, who had fled the scene, were arrested, according to case documents.
Newspaper accounts from the time are inconsistent.
The original article describing the incident in The News described the teenagers as men, but later articles stated George was 14 and Johnny was 13.
The News reported that a group of six people entered Zip’s Sizzlin’ Steaks at the Golden Triangle Shopping Center on Pentagon Parkway and Marvin D. Love Freeway, where officers Ross and Fred Sexaur were eating dinner while on a plainclothes burglary patrol.
Police said Ross believed an attempted robbery was underway when the group of boys split up in the restaurant, appeared to have weapons and one called out, “All right, everybody,” newspapers reported.
The officers said they mistook 18-inch chrome-plated pieces of pipe, under the shirt of one of the brothers, for a sawed-off shotgun.
Newspapers reported a customer told police one person in the group had a gun, and police said one person in the group was pointing what was later determined to be the piece of pipe at a group of restaurant employees.
Officer Ross shot the brothers. The News reported that autopsies showed Johnny was shot once in the neck and George was shot multiple times in his head, shoulder and upper back.
Others have a different account of what happened. A 16-year-old in the group of boys told the Dallas Times Herald that the six boys had been playing basketball and went into the restaurant for some water. He said they picked up the pipes from a trash pile to beat rhythms on a rail.
The boys were reportedly called a slur and turned away, but when they turned to leave, Ross opened fire and George and Johnny were shot, according to news reports at the time.
The teenager, who was not named, told the Times Herald that Johnny and George put the pipes in their shirts so no one would think they were trying to start trouble. He said a woman by the water fountain said the boys would have to order something if they wanted to have water but they ignored her. He said George was putting his hands up to surrender when he was shot in the head, according to the teen’s account in the paper.
Ross, 27 at the time, had joined the police department a year earlier, according to The News. Newspapers reported the officers arrested two others in the group, and the other two escaped. Police believed one of the escaped teenagers had a gun, according to newspaper reports at the time.
The brothers were taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital and died early the next morning, an hour apart and six or seven hours after they were shot Sunday night, The News reported.
Calls for investigation
The Dallas police chief at the time, Don Byrd, called the fatal shooting “defensible,” according to news reports. Police said case documents show the case was unfounded as a murder and reclassified a “justifiable homicide.” A Dallas County grand jury no-billed the case, a police spokesperson told The News.
The boys’ father, Rev. George Johnson, raised concerns about their deaths. He and other members of the West Dallas Ministerial Alliance called for an investigation into the fatal shooting.
The coalition of Black ministers disputed police accounts and said reporting by the news media was flawed.
A Black student group also spoke out, calling for a school boycott in Dallas if officials did not meet their demands, The News reported. They called for further investigation into the shooting and an immediate suspension of the officers. The planned school boycott was eventually canceled, according to news reports.
Community remembers raised money for the boys’ funeral, the Times Herald reported. Around 1,400 people attended, and the brothers were buried in Lincoln Memorial Park.
Many prominent clergymen spoke at the funeral, according to news reports, as well as George Allen, the city’s first Black mayor pro tem.
Officer Robert Ross went on to serve two terms as sheriff of Navarro County, according to his obituary, and founded BRG, a correctional management company, as well as BRG Music, a gospel music label. He died in 2018 at 71, according to his obituary.
Dallas Police Department staff and the city’s archives department told The News they have been unable to locate any documentation regarding an administrative investigation related to the case.
“We cannot speak to how the investigation was conducted at that time, as currently, no one at the department was part of the investigation,” department spokesperson Kristin Lowman wrote in a statement.
50 years later
Half a century after the boys’ deaths, the family and activists are still searching for answers.
“These boys’ lives were cut short,” Green said at the protest last month. “Dallas Police Department … let these officers go and they went on and lived their lives. For 50 years, this story has been hidden right in front of us.”
Dick Reavis, a retired journalist and author, has been investigating the case for over a year. He said he has not been given documents he requested from Dallas police about the boys’ deaths, including their juvenile arrest records.
“The government ought to give me information about this suspicious murder,” Reavis said. “I want explanations, and they’re not giving me any.”
The News reported in 1974 that both Johnson brothers had previous offenses, and one had a lengthy juvenile record. Others said this was not true and that the boys were well-behaved.
“They had already discredited the boys characters by saying that they had been to juvenile [detention] 14 and 15 times,” Woods said. “They were not those types of boys. That was not true.”
The News has requested records regarding the brothers’ juvenile detention history. The Dallas Police Department and the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center did not find records relating to the brothers’ history of juvenile detention or criminal activity.
Woods said she’s been searching for more information about their death for years.
“I had all of these questions, but nobody had much information,” Durham said. “We could never find anything.”
Green said the family of the two brothers hadn’t known where they were buried until this year. Their graves are in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, unmarked. A GoFundMe is now aiming to raise $10,000 for headstones to honor the brothers.
Protesters in front of Dallas police headquarters prayed and demanded Dallas police acknowledge the Johnson brothers. People carried signs, shed tears and announced their outrage.
“Our purpose here today is, in part, to pay tribute to the lives of these boys that were taken by Dallas PD,” Bent said to the crowd. “It’s an acknowledgment of their lives and their humanity which is more than what the Dallas PD has been willing to give to them and their families.”
