Introduction OUR TOWN

THE WEEKEND OF JULY 10, 1 860, MARKED A RACE RELAtions milestone for Dallas.

The community had just been destroyed in a fire, and three black men-two slaves and a freeman-were accused of setting the blaze. The town fathers gathered at a spot near where President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated a century later and decided on a course of action.

“They chose to hang the three black men,’’ says black historian Donald Payton. “and ran two white abolitionist ministers out of town. Then a committee of 51 white men rode to every farm and whipped every black man, woman, and child. They beat them to dissuade them from any future abolitionist thinking. That set the tone for race relations in Dallas.”

“Many blacks whose families go back a long way have kept a low profile in Dallas ever since,” says State Rep. Helen Giddings. “But Dallas has changed a whole lot.”

Some say race relations haven’t improved much since then, which is understandable. For years, race has been a dominant issue on the city’s political and civic agenda,

Board of Education meetings are characterized by African-Americans criticizing the majority of white and Hispanic trustees; the Dallas Police Department is mired in a half-dozen discrimination or reverse-discrimination lawsuits; the business community is criticized for the slow pace of development in South Dallas; and County Commissioner John Wiley Price regularly excoriates what he perceives to be racist practices throughout government.

But the perception is wrong.

Not only is race not an intractable issue in Dallas, it is partly because of the city’s racial climate-professional and personal- that Dallas has become one of the most attractive major cities in the country for black professional families.

African-Americans are moving here because: ‧ The government is accessible. Dallas is one of the few places where individuals feel they can influence those parts of gov ernment that affect their quality of life-from City Hall to the Board of Education.

Transplants from New York and Chicago are surprised to learn that if their garbage is not picked up on schedule, a phone call to the city sanitation department will bring a truck the next day. “You couldn’t do that in New York or Chicago or Miami or any other major city I know of,” says KXAS-TV Channel 5″s Clif Caldwell, whose last port of call was Miami.

Influencing government in Dallas means persuading an elected or appointed individual, rather than taking on a political party, union, or other long-entrenched organizational structure.

‧ Dallas is less segregated than many older cities. For exam ple, there are whole sections of Boston that are virtually off-lim its to blacks. And, in March 1997, a 13-year-old black boy was beaten into a coma and left for dead by three white teenagers when he walked into the predominantly white Bridgeport section of Chicago.

In Boston, the Housing Authority agreed to drop its policy of reserving homes in its preferred housing complexes for whites– in July 1997. Those stories are all too common in northern newspapers and notable by their absence here.

‧ There are racial problems here. But the constant hostility and occasional eruptions into violence between blacks and various groups in Northern cities-Italians and Hasidic Jews in New York, Irish in Boston, Poles in Detroit-are notably absent in Dal las despite the jockeying for power between blacks and Hispanics.

Major racial clashes in Dallas are marked by picketing, name-calling, and rudeness-not death.

‧ There are protests in Dallas because they can be effective. In New York, protests against mayoral policies are confined to areas designated by the police out of sight and sound of the mayor. Here, protests can occur at the mayor’s home.

John Wiley Price-who has led protests at Mayor Kirk’s home, as well as at Parkland Hospital, the Dallas Police Department, Townview Magnet School, and Belo Corp.-readily acknowledges that Dallas is receptive, rather than merely accommodating, to the politics of protesting.

“Can you think of any other city where people picket day in and day out?” Price asks. “What makes this city different is the conscious, sustained efforts of organizations who are bent on breaking the back of racism.

“Every place has its problems, but Dallas is as good as any.”

‧ There is less antagonism between the police and the minorities. The August 1997 atrocity in New York, in which a sworn Haitian immigrant was allegedly tortured in a police station by white officers, was seen as emblematic of relations between the whites in blue and the blacks and browns they are supposed to protect.

But that type of systemic antipathy has not characterized the DPD in the years since its last old-line police chief, Billy Prince, was removed by a black city manager, Richard Knight.

“The history of policing in this country, and particularly in parts of this country, is not good,” says DPD Chief Ben Click. “One of the problems in your older cities is that you had long-established ethnic enclaves in which the residents fiercely protected what they perceived as their turf. And to the extent that police departments reflected those communities rather than the broad-er population. racist practices were not stopped and were not perceived as a law enforcement problem.

“Most police departments have changed fairly dramatically- some of them voluntarily and some forced-because of the realization that past practices were just wrong.”



THERE HAVE LONG BEEN RACIAL PROBLEMS IN DALLAS,” says Kirk, “but to say we didn’t make progress is to ignore [former city manager) Richard Knight, [former DISD CFO] Matt Harden, [former DART executive] Shirley Delibero. and all the rest.

“African-Americans are just less than 30 percent of the population of Dal las. There aren’t many cities which don’t have majority black populations which had two African-American city managers, an African-American superintendent of schools, an African-American director of the second largest airport in the world, an African-American woman CEO of the transit authority, and the list goes on and on.

“Does that in itself make Dallas the best place for black professionals? 1 don’t know. But it is indicative of the fact that for people of color with talent and desire there is an incredible amount of opportunity in Dallas. Dallas is not an old Southern city. Dallas is a new American city.”

In 1985,1 moved here from Atlanta to join the editorial board of the Dallas Times Herald. 1 had previously worked in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Spain. On my second day in Dallas, Helen Giddings, then at the Chamber of Commerce, invited me to lunch. Two days later, she invited me to her Oak Cliff home to meet a few people.

The group turned out to be about 40 African-Americans active in Dallas’ civic and social life: artists, educators, attorneys, doctors, and businessmen. Over the next weeks, these individuals invited me to lunch or dinner with their peers, introducing me to the issues and trends in Dallas. It was a unique civic education that my counterparts at papers around the country openly envied.

That experience contrasted sharply with my introduction to Atlanta. My first day there, the president of the local Urban League informed me that since no one knew my lineage, they would not meet with me until people determined where I fit into the social scheme of the city.

One could argue, of course, that blacks in Dallas were simply receptive to meeting and professionally utilizing or influencing a black editorial writer in the city-except for the fact that my reception was not atypical for other black professionals looking to start a life here.

Take Kerney Laday. A soft-spoken Louisiana native who recently retired from his post as an executive at Xerox, Laday lived in several cities while climbing the corporate ladder. But only one tugged at him-Dallas, where he resided from 1972 to 1976 and again from 1980 to 1982.

“In I969,”hesays, “when I bought my first house in Louisiana, blacks moving into previously all-white or mostly white neighborhoods were either in a neighborhood in transition-in three or four years all the whites were gone-or else they bumed your house down.

“But color didn’t matter in the Dallas housing market. If you had money, you could move. The people in the community 1 moved into were there because they wanted to be. and they were not going to leave because I came. And my kids could leave at 9 in the morning and go out and play and come back at 5 for dinner, and I would not worry about what happened to them.”



AARON FRANKLIN OPENED HIS MAIL LAST JULY AND GOT real excited, real fast. He’d been invited to join the Friends of Ron Kirk Committee and would get a chance to work on the mayor’s coming re-election campaign. Not bad fora guy from Danbury, Conn., who had been in town just three months.

’This is the most comfortable city, from an African-American perspective, that I have lived in,” says Franklin, an account executive at Pitney Bowes Capital Services. “I seem to run into black professionals everywhere I go, and that makes me feel very comfortable. Even the news here is different: African-Americans are portrayed in a more positive light. 1 see fewer brothers in handcuffs on the Dallas news than I did when I was on the East Coast or in California.

“In the cities in the Northeast and West Coast, the environment was not as open and, sometimes, even a little hostile to African-Americans. And it’s easier to network here than in other cities. Dallas is No. I on my list of cities.”

LAST SLIMMER, ALVA BAKER WAS DRIVING HOME, REFLECTing on the day’s news about City Attorney Sam Lindsay being pushed for the open federal judgeship in North Texas by Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson and Mayor Kirk. Lindsay, whose nomination was con-firmed by the U.S. Senate in March of this year, replaced Cheryl Wattley as a candidate for the federal bench.

His nomination had caused a stir in black political circles in Dallas because many influential African-Americans were supporting Kevin Wiggins, a former state appellate court judge.

“And as I thought about it,” says Baker, who grew up in New York City. ” it dawned on me that I know all those folks. I count them as my friends. Cheryl Wattley and Kevin Wiggins are church members being seriously considered to be federal judges. And before Cheryl, there was Eric Moye.

“1 know them. 1 know the mayor. In New York, I wouldn’t know any of them. There’s a real sense of community here.”

Baker, a product of the New York City public schools, majored in mathematics at Boston University and received her master’s in finance at the University of Southern California. But only in Dallas is she comfortable. She and her children live in a stately, 4,500-square-foot home on South Boulevard, a four-block historic district that was home to upper-class Jews at the beginning of the century.

’i moved from Far North Dallas to South Dallas because of the sense of community. Here you know your neighbors and, contrary to what a lot of people say, you fee! safe,” she says.

“I walk my kids to school down the street, and the kids say ’Hi Miss Baker’ and the entire class gives me hugs. Like so many other black professionals who moved here from the East Coast, I found I had an ability to participate in life here without the hurdles you find in other cities. You don’t have to have the pedigree which is true for older cities like New York, Chicago, Atlanta, or L.A. You don’t have to have serious roots and introductions to make it here. There is no other place like this.”



BLACKS HAVEN’T ALWAYS BEEN WELCOME HERE EN NONsubservient roles.

“We had spurts of black professionals,” says Donald Payton. “In the 1890s, there was a rise of black professionals-men and women-who had gone to black colleges elsewhere and came back to Dallas as doctors, teachers, dentists, and businessmen. They earned the respect of blacks and whites because they survived through a segregated system.”

Among these was Dr. Ben Bluitt, who was one of the first doctors in the Southwest to have an X-ray machine, as well as Dr. John W. Anderson, a general practitioner.

“During the 1920s, there was an outbreak of malaria,” says Payton, “and a white woman asked her doctor if it would be all right if she visited this black Dr. Anderson. And the white doctor said. ’Well I’ll tell you this, his patients are living and my patients are dying, so it’s up to you.’ And she went to him.”

At that point, blacks like Silas Cofield and Pops Strickland made fortunes selling insurance policies to blacks. Other black entrepreneurs started the Penny Savings Bank. The Rev. A.R. Griggs started what became New Hope Baptist Church. The churches developed funeral homes and other businesses and provided a foundation for the black middle class of the time.

But the middle class never grew strong in Dallas. “One of the things that cost Dallas a strong rise in the black middle class was the racism here,” said Payton. “A lot of men went off to study and married women who had grown up in the North, and they refused to bring their wives back to a segregated environment.”

But what kept Dallas viable, says Payton, was the racism elsewhere. “Dallas was open compared to the cities that were controlled by the Eastern Europeans, like Cleveland, Detroit, New York, and others that were established by the 1800s. It was hard to crack that established shell for blacks.

“The ones who went up in the great migrations had to take what was left by the Europeans who had come into those cities in the industrial revolution. They never had a chance to establish real black communities. They had to move into what was left.”

The Dallas experience was far different.

At the end of World War II, the city found itself in the peculiar position of needing black labor. At the same time, however, violent elements of the white community tried forcefully to repress the new assertiveness of blacks returned from helping to win WWII. Throughout the 1950s, as Dallas” white business leaders considered ways of fostering a work force of skilled blacks, white night riders bombed black homes and businesses in various black enclaves-particularly in South Dallas.

Karl Hoblitzelle, who operated a segregated movie chain, and bankers R.L. Thornton and Fred Florence got together and decided to create a black middle-class enclave on the outskirts of Dallas at Hamilton Park, where anew company called Texas Instruments was starting up. TI was to become one of the first companies in the area to hire blacks on the assembly line, and it needed a nearby black community to provide both skilled professionals and manual workers to lend the homes and yards of white TI executives. The cigar-smoking Thornton was reportedly a banker for Dallas Chapter 66 of the Ku Klux Klan, but that affiliation, says Payton, did not interfere with developing business needs.

“So they put together the land and their banks provided the mortgages, and it became one of America’s first experiments in black suburbia,” says Payton. “We had teachers and doctors and attorneys, and it gave rise to a middle class that wasn’t tied to the grease industries-mechanics, cooking, and hair.

“On Sundays, there would be lines of people who would ride through just to look at blacks who lived in brand-new houses and owned them. It was a real show.”

It would take another generation before the welcome wagon would venture out to blacks.

Charles English, CEO of the Southern Dallas Development Corp., was a young exec at Mercantile Bank in 1975 when the change began. A lawsuit charging the city’s banking institutions with discrimination resulted in a consent decree in which they agreed to actively recruit, train, and promote blacks.

“Over the next five years,” says English, “there were more blacks entering commercial lending than at any time in (hose banks’ history. That started a trend across the board.”

The wholesale takeover of Dallas banks by northern corporations in the ’80s, an influx of corporate relocations, and the federal Community Reinvestment Act that required banks to invest in the minority communities from which they drew deposits, all spurred economic opportunities and an influx of black professionals from outside Dallas.

“As more corporations relocated from the Northeast to here.” says English, “you ended up getting a larger and larger transplant population. As a result, the tendency of wanting to keep things pretty exclusive [for whites] just dissipated as a function of the population boom and demographic changes.”

Dallas, says Payton, “is quietly progressive. People didn’t come from South Dallas to work at TI. They came from other places into Dallas. They saw that the city was clean, the city was new, it was still open for new ideas, new projects.

“Look at Mayor Kirk. He wasn’t born and bred here and still had the ability to rise to the top politically. In Atlanta, anybody who gels elected has to have deep roots in the political and educational and social infrastructure. It would be impossible to move to Atlanta and be mayor in 10 years.”



EDUCATION WAS IMPORTANT TO CHARLES AND SHERRIL English. So was cultural identity. They were able to find both for their children-Brent, 11, and Brittany, 9 Brent started in a Christian school in Mesquite, says Charles, “but we became very concerned that he was not going to get grounded in an African-American culture. The only way that was going to happen was by combining his education along with the African-American Cultural School at church.”

Sherril and a few other mothers had started an African-American history and cultural school at St. Luke Community United Methodist Church in South Dallas.

“We moved Brent after first grade to St. Phillips, a predominantly African-American school in South Dallas,” Charles says. “We wanted Brent and Brittany to get that knowledge about who they were, their history prior to slavery, and embrace their culture and their race and be able to, at the same time, understand that they had to be able to compete at a high level and. in some case, higher levels than their white counterparts.

“1 wanted my kids to feel that there is a safety net of an African-American-based culture to catch them when they fall. So we gave them an environment in which they could leam their culture, be embraced by their black instructors and by their friends.

“And we did not compromise on the quality of their education in the process. And when they leave St. Phillips (which stops after fourth grade), they go into an environment which realistically they will have to compete in for the rest of their lives.” Brent is now at St. John’s, a predominantly white private school where he is an A student and was elected class leader.

THERE ARE OTHER DIFFERENCES WHICH STRIKE THE dallas immigrant. The skylines of the central business districts of Dallas and Atlanta were built about the same time-early 70s to mid-’80s. But there, the similarity stops. Atlanta’s structures are monuments to stone masonry- primarily brick-and glass. The image, says the city, is staid, predictable, growing in ways that surprise no one.

The Dallas skyline, by contrast, suggests independence, a soaring welcome to anyone willing to push an idea into a money-making proposition. There’s the lnfomart,acomputer center masquerading as a 19th-century bawdy house for European royalty; the sky-piercing yet feet-soothing Fountain Place; City Hall, which instead of being topped by an imperial dome, arches over and into the city; the Crescent, designed to show that one can have fun and make money at the same time; and Momentum Place, the marvel that laughs as the wind roars through (he hole in its head.

Dallas’ won’t fit anyone’s mold.

The challenge now, as Charles English sees it, lies in expanding from the black middle class working for predominantly white businesses to developing black economic institutions in Dallas, particularly in minority areas such as South and West Dallas.

Lori Moon, a 38-year-old mother of two and CEO of the Dallas Housing Authority, worked as the chief of staff to her predecessor, Alphonso Jackson, in her native St. Louis and Washington, D.C., before moving to Dallas eight years ago. She has presided over the dismantling of mammoth, dilapidated housing projects in West Dallas and the controversial development of scatter site subsidized housing in North Dallas.

“I get to see a side of Dallas that many black professionals don’t see,” says Moon. “I’m dealing with the political side, the community at large, and a cross section of the community in terms of very low income and the much more affluent communities.

“I don’t minimize the problems in Dallas, but they are not different from those in other major cities. But I think the city is listening, and you can effectuate change in those communities.

“Take West Dallas. When people see West Dallas they see public housing and crime. But it has the lowest crime statistics in the city. We have all types of substations and police walking the beat. In West Dallas we are able to serve as a catalyst for growth because we are mandated by the federal court to stimulate development.”

Moon acknowledged the DHA faces opposition when attempting to place low-income homes in white areas. “But 1 would face that opposition in any city in the country.

“The approach here is you have civic leaders and public officials saying. ’Let’s make this work,” instead of mounting constant opposition. I know of larger cities like Baltimore and St. Louis, where there is more opposition to expanding affordable housing than there is here.”

The difference, says Moon, is that “Dallas is a city with a conscience. When Dallas gets a lot of negative publicity about something, you have a lot of people coming out trying to resolve it. I don’t have any complaints about Dallas.”