It’s an audacious goal: To make human rights a part of everyday conversation in Dallas, to make it as much a water-cooler topic as sports or reality TV.

The team building the Human Rights Dallas map wants nothing less. The SMU-based researchers hope their online tool, unveiled this week, will give everyone a better understanding of both the good and ugly of our city’s history.

Visit humanrightsdallasmaps.com and you'll find a dozen stories pinned to a digital map of locations across Dallas County. Even if you've heard these narratives of injustice before, it's urgently important that we think about them anew, given what's gone on in our city of late.

Perhaps these history lessons will give us a bit more understanding of the pain and anger our fellow citizens feel in 2018. These are just a few of those stories:

Close-up view of a postcard that depicts a public lynching in Dallas of Allen Brooks in 1910. (Dallas Public Library)

Allen Brooks, a black man lynched in 1910 by a vigilante mob in downtown before his trial on attempted rape charges could even begin.

Human trafficking survivor Tonya Stafford, who was only 13 when her own mother sold her to a man in exchange for drug money in the late 1980s.

Jimmy Lee Dean, a bisexual man pistol-whipped in 2008 by two robbers as they yelled anti-gay epithets at him between Throckmorton and Reagan streets.

Twelve-year-old Santos Rodriguez, shot and killed Russian roulette-style by a Dallas police officer in the back of a cop car in 1973.

Jordan Edwards, shot last year by Balch Springs police officer Roy Oliver, who was convicted just last month in the 15-year-old African-American's murder.

The Human Rights Dallas map has much, much more work ahead as it seeks to record injustices of the past and present. As it grows, it will provide a less sanitized portrait of Dallas, a clearer picture of the not-so-distant history that often informs the reactions to today’s injustices.

“It’s a chance to come to grips with what has happened in this city and to help all of us who are working to make Dallas the best city it can be,” Rick Halperin, of SMU’s Embrey Human Rights Program, said this week.

Jennifer McNabb, Ed Gray and Rick Halperin discuss the Human Rights Dallas Maps project at the SMU campus this week. (Jason Janik/Special Contributor)

The map is part of the larger Human Rights Dallas project, which also is trying to persuade City Council members to declare Dallas a Human Rights City committed to the defense, protection and advocacy of all people’s rights.

Halperin hopes to get that resolution approved by Human Rights Day, Dec. 10. Austin, Tulsa, Washington, Pittsburgh and Eugene, Ore., already have passed such designations. The SMU group previously worked with Dallas County to help it become the first Human Rights County in the state.

The map project is being led by two individuals with deep SMU roots, Jennifer McNabb, a doctoral student in its liberal studies program, and SMU alum Ed Gray, a civil rights leader and radio personality.

Gray, who has been in the local human rights struggle since the 1970s, says the documenting of these victories and defeats is a reminder “that the original civil rights marches may have passed us, but the human rights evolution is still ongoing.”

Like everyone involved in the project, Gray stressed that the mapping work has only begun. He said that documenting those narratives of decades ago is easier than writing about contemporary ones.

“The Jordan Edwards murder is something that is developing still to this day. We have a conviction of Roy Oliver, but the aftereffects of that are still being felt. And now the Botham Jean killing. That will need to be added.”

Jean was killed Sept. 6 by an off-duty Dallas police officer who says she mistook him for an intruder in his own home. Gray said the death of Jean, an immigrant from St. Lucia, takes the issue of police shootings to the international stage. “This isn’t just a civil rights march, this is part of an international human rights march.”

“This is about dignity and struggle, about mapping that struggle,” said Gray, who would like to see the Human Rights Dallas Map exist as part of a permanent exhibit, for instance at the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

McNabb says the next round of articles likely will be about the often-overlooked local Native American communities, further work on Confederate statues, and the history of the KKK in Dallas.

A core group of about 15 individuals — undergrad and graduate students, faculty members and community members — has done most of the work.

Amid the documented tragedies, a few victories dot the Human Rights Map website:

The work of Nona "Nonie" Mahoney, a Dallas trailblazer who was instrumental in the women's suffrage movement in 1918.

African-American Sam Tasby's long and victorious legal effort to get the Dallas school board to finally end — in 1983 — its fight against court-ordered desegregation.

Gray recognizes that the boulevards of SMU don’t intersect with many of those who live with the pain of Dallas’ human rights history.

“We need to build a bridge from SMU to all parts of the community and have all of us come together to talk not just about these human rights stories,” Gray said. “Aware of the past, we can bring forth a sense of true unity. That’s what I’d like to see this Human Rights Map project provide.”

An audacious goal for sure. But in these difficult days since the killing of Botham Jean, these are history lessons each of us would be wise to commit to memory.