Great news for anyone who loves Dallas history: more than 20,000 photographs that capture the city between 1960 and 1978 will be preserved, cataloged and shared online, thanks to a major federal grant announced on September 29, 2026.
The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza has received a Museums for America grant of more than $200,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the nation’s leading source of federal funding for museums and libraries. The two-year award will fund the Bob Jackson Collection Preservation and Access Project, the museum’s most significant photography donation to date.
Donated by Dallas Times Herald photographer Robert “Bob” Jackson, the collection includes negatives, slides, prints, publications, equipment and keepsakes — including his Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, its original camera negative and the 35 mm Nikon camera he used. Two full-time cataloging and photographic preservation specialists will build a complete inventory, research context and copyright, map detailed metadata, rehouse the materials in archival storage and digitize the images for public learning and research.
The photographs go far beyond one famous weekend in 1963. They also show everyday Dallas life in the 1960s and 1970s: school integration, local personalities, charity celebrations such as the Neiman Marcus Fortnight and the Crystal Charity Ball, political visits and celebrities passing through town. Several images are already on view in the special exhibition On Assignment: Dallas Times Herald 1963, open through March 28, 2027.
The museum, at 411 Elm Street in downtown Dallas, is open Wednesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. As CEO Nicola Longford put it, digitizing the collection broadens access, protects the original material and creates new opportunities for researchers and scholars — good news that will keep Dallas stories within everyone’s reach.
Photo: JoyD Smiths PTMr8 / Wikimedia Commons
