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This is my last post.

After 12 years with D Magazine, I am leaving the publication for a new opportunity (more on that in a second). Over the years, when I imagined leaving D, I thought the last thing I would write would be a sweeping review that summed up everything I had learned during my years here—thoughts and reflections on the state of the city, where it is today and how much it has changed and stayed the same.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written a few versions of that post. None of them felt right.

What I really want to write about in this last post is Julien Reverchon, the 19th-century French botanist who has a street and a park named after him. During the early days of the pandemic lockdown, as we all huddled in our homes experimenting with new hobbies, I began to research Reverchon’s life and work. I had recently moved into a house a stone’s throw from where Reverchon’s farm once stood, near the corner of Davis Street and Plymouth Road in Oak Cliff.

A creek runs along the back edge of my property. As I took my quarantine walks each morning, I imagined that Reverchon must have wandered up and down it, perhaps even stopping under the 150-year-old burr oak in my backyard to stare at the babbling creek and wonder how his life’s journey had landed him in Dallas.

To commemorate its 150th anniversary, Paul Quinn College, the oldest historically Black university in the state, wanted to do something on a similarly momentous scale. The school has endured generations of anti-Black public policies, particularly during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, and, more recently, its leadership has watched as state and local policy makers seek to limit how that history is taught and recognized.

Looking back at these years, Paul Quinn President Dr. Michael Sorrell wanted to find a way to highlight this story, to remind people that it wasn’t that long ago that Black Americans were not welcome in downtown Dallas.

Sorrell found a perfect canvas: the school’s basketball court in its new gym.

No matter your stance on abortion, you likely don’t know this about Roe v. Wade: in the spring of 1969, Jane Roe, aka Norma McCorvey, was a 21-year-old lesbian who worked at the White Carriage, a gay bar in Dallas. That’s where she met a married World War II vet, twice her age, with whom she played pool and collected bets, despite the fact that he was short one finger. They’d get drunk and stoned together and occasionally have unprotected sex. By September, McCorvey found herself pregnant for the third time.

Her mother was already caring for her first daughter; Dallas attorney Henry McCluskey had helped her get the second adopted by a kind anesthesiologist and his wife in Richardson. The third child, by a third man, was also unwanted by McCorvey. This time she decided an abortion was her best option, so she again sought the counsel of McCluskey to see if there was any way she could obtain one. He advised her it was still against the law. But he had an idea.

McCluskey, a 24-year-old gay man who practiced in a state where his consensual sexual activity could land him in jail for up to 15 years, had recently filed a suit to overturn Texas’ sodomy law with the help of Linda Coffee, another young gay attorney in town. Coffee had been looking for an opportunity to challenge a different portion of the Texas Penal Code—the one that criminalized abortion—but she didn’t have a plaintiff. When McCluskey told Coffee he had a pregnant client who wanted an abortion, all that changed.

The rest of the landmark case’s history, which is revealed in Joshua Prager’s exhaustively researched new book, The Family Roe: An American Story, is equally dramatic. Prager, a long-standing journalist who has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair, first became curious when, in 2010, he read an article that noted that Roe v. Wade was decided too late for McCorvey to have an abortion. Prager wondered, What happened to the baby?

His journey started in Dallas with Connie Gonzales, McCorvey’s long-term significant other. Gonzales told Prager that many of the stories McCorvey had told the press over the years (about being raped, about a daughter being kidnapped, about becoming antiabortion) simply weren’t true. What was true: she was a woman whose pseudonym had eclipsed her complex life. The groundbreaking attorneys who represented her would face tragic loss. Her three daughters would eventually meet and try to find a way forward. And the nation-dividing case she set in motion would continue to ignite even after her death.

It’s a stunning read. The excerpt from our January issue is online today.

Linda Nellene Coffee was born in Houston on Christmas Day in 1942. After a younger sister was born, the family of four moved to Dallas. There, every Sunday, they prayed at the large Southern Baptist church on Gaston Avenue, where Linda’s grandfather was a deacon.

The church was a hearth, home to more than prayer. It was where little Linda went for Sunday school and softball and choir, an alto in a dress.

Coffee liked the organ; in time, Bach would give her goosebumps. But after watching the band at Stonewall Jackson Elementary march into the school auditorium, she chose at age 9 to play the clarinet.

The second-grader’s first choice had been drums. “Something real physical and fun,” says Coffee. Dad had said no. But he said yes to softball; he coached the team. And so, his firstborn played shortstop and then catcher, crouching in mask and Jerry Coleman glove, writing her address in black marker on the back of its pocket: 5711 Anita.

Home on her lawny lane in suburban Dallas, Mary Coffee was too nervous and displeased to watch her daughter play; a girl ought not to squat. The housewife had long envisaged a daughter more like her—neat and conservative and feminine. Mary prettied her house and was at the beauty parlor every week. But her daughter hated housework almost as much as the bonnets her mom had once made her wear. The girl was not girly.

Blame Jerrie Marcus Smith. If D Magazine has published anything lately that has ruffled your feathers, if, in this very issue, we didn’t name your favorite restaurant as one of the best of the year, it’s Jerrie’s fault. She not only named the magazine, but she also kept it from going under.

The late Wick Allison, as publisher, and Jim Atkinson, as editor, founded the magazine in 1974. But before they got the presses rolling, they needed a name. Dallas Magazine was already taken. They found themselves one morning at Jerrie’s house, as she’d already committed her support to the endeavor, pondering alternate possibilities. Knowing Jim and having worked for Wick, I’ll say this was the only meeting the two ever had, at least in the ’70s, that was less than 80 proof.

“It was at my house because they didn’t have houses to go to,” Jerrie says. She’s 85 now and was their elder then. “They were college kids practically, just out of the University of Texas. Women’s Wear Daily had just put out a magazine called W. The boys weren’t reading that, but I was. I thought, Well, you know, why not D?”

The name grew to become one of the most recognized brands in North Texas. That almost didn’t happen. D came out of the gate with some audacious journalism—critical dining coverage, a first for the city; an exposé on the mayor, for which he sued—and advertisers weren’t quite sure what to make of it. Longevity was not, to understate, a given. Fortunately, Jerrie had done something that proved auspicious. She’d taken Wick and Jim to meet her father, Stanley Marcus, who’d agreed to send a note to his customers, along with their Neiman’s bills, encouraging them to subscribe to the new city magazine of Dallas. The cash infusion from those first subscribers kept the ink flowing until the magazine found its footing.

Until recently, I held the notion that Mr. Stanley deserved the credit for making Neiman Marcus what it is. He certainly gets a share. But I was delighted to read a new book by Jerrie and learn that it’s really her great-aunt Carrie Marcus Neiman whose vision led to the icon we know today. I was even more delighted when Jerrie said we could excerpt her book, which is online today. She’s still helping the magazine; we’re now even deeper in her debt.

One more thing: as we went to press in late October, I learned that an exhibition of some of the wonderful photographs from Jerrie’s book will be held at SMU’s DeGolyer Library. “An Eye for Elegance: Carrie Marcus Neiman” opens December 2 and runs through January. Read about it here, then go check it out.

Aven Stewart and Bailey Turfitt remember a lot from their youthful trips to the Science Place at Fair Park. The solar system art on the floor. Movies at the IMAX theater. The Electric Theater, with its Tesla coils and Faraday cages and lightning displays. Stewart even attended the Science Place School, a private school for kids in kindergarten and first grade.

The buildings that housed the Science Place—along with the Dallas Museum of Natural History and the Dallas Children’s Museum, all three of which merged in 2006—have sat unused for years. The Perot Museum of Nature and Science near Victory Park now carries the torch for science programming in Dallas.

But there was something special about the Science Place. Stewart credits the old museum for pushing him toward a career in software engineering. Turfitt says it helped nurture her interest in biology, which she studied at the University of North Texas. The two twentysomethings have spent much of the last two years working on a new project that is more than nostalgia. They have started the Science Place Foundation, a nonprofit that is assembling a vast archive of Science Place artifacts, recordings, and ephemera. Their goal is to honor the museum’s original mission, to “inspire innovation,” Stewart says.

“I wouldn’t say bring it back from the dead, because we don’t have any intention of creating a science museum,” he says. “But we want to create a museum for the Science Place. The goal is to help people remember it, and get people to remember what the message was. Then pass the message on by helping other children’s science museums and educational institutions deliver that message.”

The foundation is working with groups including the Dallas Municipal Archives, the Dallas Historical Society, and the Texas State Historical Association to help catalogue and preserve its growing collection. It includes videos, photos, old postcards, architectural plans, and pressed pennies. 

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the oil-rich elite of a rapidly growing Dallas whispered their secrets to a dark-haired woman in the dressing rooms of Neiman Marcus. Elegantly dressed in all black, with a simple double strand of pearls and chunky French gold link bracelets, Carrie Marcus Neiman was quiet and reserved, but wealthy women from far and wide would come to shop the styles chosen by the city’s most influential fashion pioneer.

The daughter of Jewish German immigrants, Carrie, along with her brother Herbert Marcus and her husband, Al Neiman, founded Neiman Marcus, the high-end department store that revolutionized the ready-to-wear fashion industry, in 1907. The men handled the finances, and Carrie chose the merchandise, traveling to New York and Europe to find the fabrics and styles that put Dallas fashion on the map.

Although Carrie’s story has long been forgotten, “she was the real creative force behind the birth of high-end retail,” her great-great niece Allison Smith says.

Carrie’s story is finally being told in a new exhibit at Southern Methodist University. “An Eye for Elegance: Carrie Marcus Neiman and the Women Who Shaped Neiman Marcus” will be on display through January 28, 2022, in Fondren Library’s Hillcrest Exhibit Hall.

It is important to remember that this area of North Texas was once populated by several Indigenous peoples: the Wichita, Comanche, Caddo, and Cherokee all called this home.

November is Native American Heritage Month and an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the history and culture of the people Native to this land. It’s also a good time to educate the public on the past and current challenges facing Native Americans. According to 2019 U. S. Census Bureau estimates, about 4,000 Dallasites identify as American Indian.

I looked in the Dallas Public Library archive to find historical images of Dallas history that depict Native Americans, both residents of Dallas and those who spent time in this area.  The photographs attached to this gallery are part the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History and Archives Collection. They include portraiture of Native Americans in the 1960s-1970s including a couple of images depicting Murray Rhoads and his family. Rhoads was a full-blood Southern Cheyenne, the first Native American to join the Dallas Police Department, and, after a 25-year career, became the first Native American to retire from the Dallas Police Department.

On March 3, 1910, Allen Brooks, a Dallas handyman falsely accused of raping a young girl, was overwhelmed by a mob of 3,000 people while awaiting trial at the Dallas County Courthouse. The mob infiltrated the courtroom, grabbed Brooks, tied a rope around his neck, and threw him through the second story window of the courthouse.

Brooks fractured his skull upon impact with the ground below. His body was dragged to the intersection of Main and Akard, where the mob hanged him from a telephone pole near the three-story tall Elks Arch. The crowd swelled to over 5,000 people from Texas, Oklahoma, and surrounding southern communities. He had not yet been tried.

George Keaton Jr., the executive director of Remembering Black Dallas, says Brooks’ lynching was among the most recorded lynchings in the Jim Crow south. “On the back of a postcard, someone had written the account of what happened that day, and that they also planned to go back and take charge of another African American man who was waiting for trial,” he says.

Remembering Black Dallas, Keaton’s nonprofit, aims to “preserve and promote the African American life, history, artifacts, and culture of Dallas and its surrounding cities.” He has spent years pursuing an official marker of the lynching, which culminated with a ceremony and march on Saturday afternoon. Now, 111 years later, a marker tells Brooks’ story.

In December 2018, the nonprofit approached the city of Dallas to apply for the marker through the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Historical Marker Project. The EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened in Birmingham, Ala. in 2018, a museum that chronicled the history of slavery and segregation in America. One of the museum’s goals was to expand its mission to cities across the country, to get them to reckon with the history of racist violence like the lynching of Allen Brooks.

Remembering Black Dallas spent about nine months planning and discussing with the city before electing to independently apply in November 2019. It helped launch a subsidiary for the effort, which it called the Dallas County Justice Initiative.

The historical marker project requires groups like Remembering Black Dallas to create a community engagement program in their cities to educate residents about racial violence and the historical trauma of the events. The goal is to continue the conversation, to keep acknowledging and considering what happened.

Remembering Black Dallas plans to host a essay program for local high school students to analyze the event’s history and how it echoes in the present-day.

The organization has already awarded five $5,000 scholarships to students who wrote about Dallas’ history of lynchings, racial violence, segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement.

The Equal Justice Initiative covered scholarships for the first, second, and third prize winners. (The remaining two scholarships were covered by Remembering Black Dallas.)

Keaton plans on hosting a second scholarship program to raise awareness about Allen Brooks, but worries about a new state law aimed at banning the teaching of “critical race theory,” an academic term for the study of how racism has affected American public policy. The law signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in the last legislative session requires teachers to provide information on current events that must “give deference to both sides.”

“I’m really concerned that because of the new law, the critical race theory in our history can’t be talked about in the schools,” Keaton says. “We now will have to start looking in other places to gather students to do the project in order to get and get the essay done.”

Keaton isn’t done. He plans to construct a marker for William Allen Taylor, a Black man who was lynched on September 12, 1884 at the Trinity Outlook. He too was seized and killed by an angry mob and two sheriffs as he was on the way to Waco. The memorial is scheduled to be held on September 12, 2022 with a scholarship program to start in January of that year.

“We are more or less living in those same types of situations, over 100 years later. I want to make sure people understand how real it was and that it could happen to anyone today,” Keaton says.

Because there aren’t complete records of everyone who lost their homes because of eminent domain, not to mention where they went after they were forced to leave, we don’t have many first-hand accounts of the experience. More than that, we don’t have a fully realized portrait of these neighborhoods and the people who lived there. We hope to change that, but we need your help. If your family was one of those affected by displacement, here is where you can let your voice be heard.

Over the past five decades, D Magazine has covered many chapters of Dallas’ history. In our November issue, we published a story that begins in 1959, when State Fair officials first floated their intentions to eliminate the homes of some 300 Black families so that a parking lot could be built for visitors attending the State Fair of Texas. Three weeks out of the year.

Of course, it was more complicated than that.

We began working on this story about a year ago, in anticipation of the new Community Park that Fair Park First aims to build on top of that parking lot. Fair Park First, mindful of the history of the displaced Fair Park families, has involved residents of South Dallas neighborhoods to create a space that embodies the community’s highest and best dreams. But before the ribbon is cut, we wanted to document how the Fair Park families who came before them were mercilessly chased off their land. So we could learn. And so the individuals who came to their aid—such as Rev. Peter Johnson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the late Miriam Schult of the University Park United Methodist Church, and the late Rev. Mark Herbener of Mt. Olive Lutheran Church—will be remembered for their audacity and courage at a pivotal time in our city’s history.

Cities are like families. We tend to bury the bad stuff. No one heals with that approach, and this story is an offering toward that crucial end. This month’s cover story, “The Fair Park Lie,” is online today. It is a microcosm of what happened to Black families in cities all over the United States during the 1960s. It’s a story that needed to be told. May the new Community Park at Fair Park reflect the imagination and remarkable determination that define our city. May it truly and powerfully serve the South Dallas community. And may the descendants of the Fair Park families find peace and equanimity wherever they are.

Thanks for reading—and for helping to make Dallas an even better place to live.