The history of Dallas is incomplete without the images, stories, and original artifacts that document the lives of African Americans in Dallas. In these final days of Black History Month, take note of an important figure in African-American life in Dallas: the late Lee Marion Butts, Sr., who lived from 1924 to 2002. Butts was a commercial photographer and editor of the Dallas Express newspaper, who recorded events and community life in Dallas during a career that spanned the last half of the twentieth century.

The Dallas Express was a weekly African-American newspaper founded by W.E. King. It was published from 1893 to 1970, and provided coverage not often found in the Dallas Times Herald or Dallas Morning News of the time.

The Marion Butts Photograph Collection is part of the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History & Archives Division.  The collection includes a number of historic photographs, some of which are available to view in the library’s online catalog.  For those interested in reading issues of the Dallas Express, the Archives Division has the newspaper on microfilm with dates ranging from 1919 to 1928, 1934 to 1963, and 1965 to 1970.

Butts’ body of work documents not only segregation and civil rights, but also business, civic, religious, educational, and social life, as well as visits by famous leaders and celebrity entertainers.

Two years and two task forces later, the city of Dallas has edged a little closer to removing a 65-foot Confederate War Memorial that sits next to the convention center in Founders Park downtown. At a briefing today, the Dallas City Council signaled to the city manager that they would like an item placed on their next meeting agenda that would allow them to vote to dissemble, remove, and store the monument.

That doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen. What the council will technically be voting on is a referendum that says the Confederate War Monument is a non-contributing feature of the Founders Park historic overlay, and so it should be removed. If it passes, that will send the item to the Landmark Commission, which must vote within 65 days on whether it agrees that the 124-year-old monument is a non-contributing hunk of junk in an otherwise historic park. If the commission rejects the council’s motion, the city will automatically appeal the decision to the city plan commission. That body will have another 65 days to vote on the item. If they also reject the council’s push for removal, the city will sue, and the whole thing will end up in court.

Then again, if the Landmark Commission backs the council there will likely be suits seeking to keep the monument—just as before. In other words, this thing isn’t done yet.

Last summer I received an email from a woman named Harriet Gross that began: “We don’t know each other, but I’ve been freelancing in Dallas for a long, long time and in the distant past did some feature stories for D and for the late-lamented DMN Sunday magazine.”

A check of our archive brought me a story Harriet had written for D in 1992, the year I graduated from college and basically took to loitering at D’s office, hoping for work (I’d interned the previous year and knew most of the staff). And that DMN Sunday magazine? The first story of any real length that I wrote for money was published in 1993 in that magazine by the great Bill Minutaglio, who was then its editor. Harriet and I had a few connections, it seemed. I was surprised our paths had never crossed and was happy they finally had, because she had a great story idea.

Her 91-year-old friend Max Glauben, she told me, was going to subject himself to some high-tech wizardry that would make it possible for people to interact with his image and voice in perpetuity, asking him questions about how he survived the Holocaust. This 3-D holographic version of Glauben will be an installation, if you can call it that, at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, which will open later this year. Glauben’s story is fascinating. Shepherding it into print, especially with Harriet’s long connection to the magazine, was a real honor.

We posted it online today. 

The news is said to be our first crack at writing history, but generations without the internet could hardly make use of it while working on subsequent drafts. Enter Jeremy Spracklen and Scott Martin, who, over the last year and a half, have been turning a large, cold warehouse filled with old local news reels into usable, digital footage, providing us glimpses of the goods along the way.

The archivists, who work at the G. William Jones Film & Video Collection at SMU, started with the collection’s WFAA stash. It contained a wealth of big-haired, mustache-y video footage from the 1960s and 1970s. Their days are filled with loading up the 16mm films in a machine that would’ve cost about $1 million new in the 1990s, watching hours of old news clips while tweaking coloration and condensing blank air.

The best stuff gets put on Twitter and YouTube, some of it eventually bouncing around the internet and ending up on blogs like FrontBurner. Spracklen recalls how an unbelievably 1970s interview with English rock band Uriah Heep spiked traffic in Eastern Europe.

Whereas past Jones curators have focused solely on SMU’s old movie footage, Spracklen, who has worked in theatre and film but is educated in history, took an immediate interest in the news reels. Most of it hasn’t been viewed since it aired some 40 or 50 or more years ago. “This is one of a kind,” he says. “There’s no other collection. No other copies of this stuff exists.”

According to Dr. Harry Robinson, president and CEO of the African American Museum in Fair Park, the exhibit “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty” will be extended due to popular demand through January 21. The exhibit has traveled west of the Mississippi for the first time, to the only African-American history museum in the Southwest.

“It’s a lot of new information,” Robinson says. “The exhibition is a story that is being told from a different perspective. Usually when you see an exhibition on slavery it is about the plantation and the slave master, whereas with this exhibition the story is told from the slave’s point of view. It centers on the lives of the lives of the slaves of Monticello, of the six Jefferson families that were there on the plantation.”

The exhibit displays more than 300 objects, including works of art, documents, and artifacts from Thomas Jefferson’s former plantation outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. There is a special feature on Sally Hemings, a young woman who was enslaved at the age of 16 and negotiated freedom for her children, at least six of whom were fathered by Jefferson.

Robinson hopes the popularity of the exhibit will help to extend the reach of the museum, which he helped to found in 1993. “We’ve got to find resources to do a better job of marketing the museum, given the number of people coming to Dallas and the 7 million in population in the Metroplex,” Robinson says. “We run into people that have never heard of the museum, and we want to eliminate that problem. It’s a treasure. It’s one of a kind in this region.”

While there, Robinson suggests exploring the decorative arts collection, one of his favorites. “We have furniture and items that go back to the 1800s,” he says. “Slave desks that were done in East Texas in 1830. A coverlet that was made by a 16-year-old slave girl and she embroidered her name on it. Five pieces of furniture by Thomas Day, a famous furniture maker from North Carolina. He practiced in Milton from 1820 to 1861. He was a free man of color. Matter of fact, he had 13 slaves working for him and 8 white apprentices. The only other museum that we know of that has more pieces from him is the North Carolina Museum of History.”

The museum also has a permanent exhibit, “Facing the Rising Sun,” about the history of Freeman’s Town in Dallas. “It is an exhibition on what used to be Short North Dallas, which is now Uptown Dallas,” Robinson says. “It captures the history of the Dallas black community up until the 1970s, when people began to move out. It is an exhibition that we planned to run for a year until 2001, but because it became so popular, we had to keep it.”

The holiday season is often a time to reflect on the past year as we prepare to embrace the year ahead. It’s also a great time to consider holiday seasons in past decades of Dallas history. And while we’re now just over a week past Christmas, it’s still cold enough outside that we can revisit what our city looked like around this time in decades past.

Through the years, Dallas streets and businesses have been decorated many ways to celebrate the holidays. The photograph above this post, titled Main Street decorated for Christmas, is one of several images taken on January 2, 1959 that depict street view decorations in downtown Dallas. The photo is part of the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce Collection.

These photographs are part of the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History and Archives Division holdings. The various collections within the Archives Division include a number of historic photographs, some of which are available to view in the library’s online catalog. A 1951 photograph from the Interstate Theater Collection of Christmas on Elm Street looking west at the Harwood Street intersection depicts a bustling street scene during the holidays. (Usage rights prevent me from posting it here, but you can see it through that link.)