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By D Magazine |

New York City-bom ROGER WITHERSPOON-“Our Town” and “Power Players”-began his career in journalism in 1966 as a radio reporter in Michigan and later became a foreign correspondent. In 1985, Witherspoon came to Dallas to write editorials on business and foreign affairs for the Dallas Times Herald.

Witherspoon has since published a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Last year, he completed an engineering text for college freshmen. He is at work on a history of blacks in engineering.

Witherspoon and his wife, Franchesca, are raising their three daughters, who, he says, “are the most important part of my life.”



BOB RAY SANDERS-“The Right Mayor at the Right Time”- is a veteran journalist with 25 years of experience in both print and electronic media. His special interest is politics. At present, he is associate editor and a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“Ron Kirk,” says Sanders, “is part of the new breed of black politician. In Dallas, it used to be that the loudest voices were elected, that the white establishment looked to black preachers to produce both the black vote and black candidates, and the black politicians treated their offices as jobs for life. No more.”

DONALD PAYTON-“A Concise History”-formerly served as a Dallas County Historical Commissioner. A Dallas native descended from slaves, Payton lists among his proudest endeavors his role in the preservation of the Freedman’s Cemetery and organization of the annual reunion of the Miller family, among Dallas’s first black families, of which he is a member.

Payton says researching the African-American history of Dallas was a “fascinating” assignment. “Reading black newspapers and other sources, 1 learned so much about subjects that really mattered to blacks,” he says, “things like the bombings of the 1940s and ’50s and efforts by blacks to improve their condition. These stories just weren’t covered in the mainstream publications.”

RAMONA AUSTIN-“Prayer for Libation”-arrived from Chicago four years ago to become associate curator of African art at the Dallas Museum of Art. Besides her academic career and poetry, Austin is also an actor, director, and performance artist. She has presented her one-woman show, “A New Seed,” on stages across the United States.

“Dallas,” says Austin, “is a place where things happen. Because the city is young, people don’t necessarily have preconceptions of who you are and what you have to be. I’m free to explore here.”

Photographer JESSE HORNBUCKLE has been taking pictures since his junior high school days in Dallas. Although Horn-buckle had previously photographed several of our 50 leaders, he says he had never before seen the whole group brought together for a single purpose.

“It was pretty amazing,” he says. “Kind of like family, They all visited with one another as they waited for me to get ready. ’How are the kids? How’s business?’ You really felt a community closeness.”

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