UNT and JFK: Dallas site where Lee Harvey Oswald was shot has new exhibit

You can go one of two ways with history. You can wipe it away. Pretend it never happened. Or you can embrace it, preserve it, try to understand it. It’s a dilemma the city of Dallas has faced before. When the Texas School Book Depository lay dormant for years, some of the city’s more prominent citizens — Cowboys Coach Tom Landry and cosmetics queen Mary Kay Ash among them — spoke out loud for the former. Both called for the building’s demolition. One of its sixth-floor windows had, after all, served as a sniper’s nest for the man who fired the shots that killed President John F. Kennedy on Elm Street in 1963. In the end, the opposing side won out, and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza opened in 1989. Not long ago, the UNT Dallas College of Law faced the same predicament. Established in 2014, the law school moved in 2019 to 106 S. Harwood St. — to the building known as Old City Hall — after a $71 million restoration. Part of that restoration deals exclusively with the thorniest history of a building that opened the same year that World War I began. It is a moving permanent exhibition titled “November 22, 1963: The Aftermath,” a 2,500-square-foot, $2.5 million undertaking whose design was carefully thought out and executed by a blue-chip committee of local citizens and stamped with approval by the Texas Historical Commission.

It is not yet open to the public, but the school wants to change that this year. Among other chapters of the 72-hour nightmare, it documents the worst thing that ever happened in the building, which once housed a 24-year-old man accused of assassinating an American president but who never saw his day in court because he was murdered in the basement. Before the project could be completed — or even begun — questions had to be answered. The lingering drama forced UNT Dallas to confront the question that has shadowed the city for almost 60 years: How do we handle the assassination? How do we deal with the fact that what used to be known as City Hall served as the location in 1963 for both the city’s police department and the spartan cell where suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was incarcerated from Nov. 22 to Nov. 24? Oswald’s grim fate became part of the tangled history that has hovered over the building. Two days after President Kennedy was assassinated, Oswald was gunned down in the basement by strip club operator Jack Ruby. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright, who was sitting in a class at Woodrow Wilson High School on the day Kennedy was assassinated, has long maintained that Ruby killing Oswald scarred Dallas’ image more than the assassination itself.