The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza announced today that it will receive a two‑year Museums for America grant of over $200,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The funding will support the preservation and digitization of the Bob Jackson Collection, a trove of more than 20,000 photographs, negatives, slides, prints and related materials that document Dallas life from 1960 to 1978.
Why the collection matters
Bob Jackson, a former Dallas Times Herald photographer, captured some of the most iconic images of the era, including his Pulitzer‑Prize‑winning photograph of Jack Ruby shooting alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald inside the Dallas Police Headquarters basement on Nov. 24, 1963. The museum now holds the original camera negative and the 35 mm Nikon camera Jackson used for that historic shot.
Beyond the Kennedy assassination weekend, Jackson’s work records everyday Dallas scenes: school integration, political visits, local personalities, celebrity events, and charitable gatherings such as the Neiman Marcus Fortnight and the Crystal Charity Ball. The collection offers a visual record of the city’s cultural, social and political evolution during the 1960s and 1970s.
Grant details and project plan
The Museums for America grant will fund two full‑time cataloging and photographic preservation specialists. Their tasks include creating a comprehensive inventory, conducting contextual and copyright research, mapping detailed metadata, placing items in archival housing, and digitizing the photographs for online access. Museum CEO Nicola Longford said the project will “broaden access, protect the original material, and create important new access for researchers and scholars—a central part of our mission and responsibility as stewards of history and culture.”
Longford added that the grant reflects the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ commitment to “access and learning accessibility across the United States to better serve regional communities.” The digitized images will be made available through the museum’s website, allowing both local patrons and a national and international audience to explore Dallas’s pivotal moments.
Current exhibition and future plans
Several photographs from the Jackson Collection are already on display in the museum’s special exhibition, “On Assignment: Dallas Times Herald 1963,” which runs through March 28, 2027. The show follows the experiences of Dallas Times Herald journalists Keith Shelton, Darwin Payne, Vivian Castleberry and Jim Lehrer, as well as photojournalists Eamon Kennedy and Bob Jackson, during the weekend of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
The Sixth Floor Museum, located in the former Texas School Book Depository at 411 Elm St. in downtown Dallas, continues to serve as a focal point for education about one of America’s most notable historical events while also highlighting the broader story of Dallas’s mid‑century growth.
Original reporting: Dallas TX News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
