FrontBurner

Editor’s Note: This is a companion piece to our November cover story, “The Fair Park Lie.”  While the piece below stands alone, it is intended to expand on the themes within the larger story. Read it here.

---

The city of Dallas has a long history of taking land from Black communities. Here are just a few examples.

Between 1947 and 1956, the construction of Central Expressway eradicated somewhere around 500 houses and businesses in four Black communities: North Dallas, also known as Short North Dallas (now Uptown); Deep Ellum; Stringtown, a thin neighborhood connecting the previous two areas; and Bonton. (Later, in 1973, I-345 would be built through parts of the same area.)

Beginning in 1950, using federal flood-control money, the city annexed West Dallas and seized Black-owned homes along the Trinity River bottoms.

Between 1953 and 1955, the expansion of Love Field took over a portion of Elm Thicket containing more than 300 Black-owned houses and businesses.

Just a few months later, in December 1955, work began on the South R.L. Thornton Freeway, clearing another 175 Black-owned houses and more businesses in the Tenth Street neighborhood in Oak Cliff. In January 1956, the city took its first bite from the area around Fair Park.

Construction began on the Woodall Rodgers Freeway in 1958. It wouldn’t open until 1983, because of various design and financing issues, but the damage had long since been done: another 200 homes taken in North Dallas, many of them shotgun houses rented by poor Black families.

Then Bonton was hit again, too. The C.F. Hawn Freeway—connecting Dallas and Kaufman—broke ground in 1960, after hundreds of Black-owned houses had been cleared.

Displacing people of color was such an inevitability that even private developers were able to use it to their advantage. In 1962, the 200 residents of Little Egypt, a former freedmen’s town in what is now Lake Highlands, sold their land simultaneously and moved away en masse. Why fight it? The 30-acre community, formed almost 100 years earlier around Egypt Chapel Baptist Church, vanished as soon as they did.

By June 23, 1970, when the State Fair Musicals kicked off its season with a touring production of Mame, the fight for the homes on the edge of Fair Park—somewhere between a mile and a world away—was all but over.

In the audience that night was a young Black man wearing an Army uniform. He had been recently discharged after 10 months of service, he said, because he had suffered a brain hemorrhage. He was still getting used to his new life as a math major at UTA.

He didn’t say why he wore his old uniform to the Music Hall at Fair Park that evening. Maybe he felt like a young Black man would get more respect if he showed up looking like the soldier he had been instead of the 22-year-old student he now was. Maybe that’s why the woman outside had bought him a ticket, seeing him there in his dress greens under the Spanish tile and casted domes.

Maybe he just didn’t have another suit for the theater. The young Black man had not planned on any of this, after all. He wasn’t sure why he was there. It wasn’t because he was a fan of Mame—made famous on Broadway a few years earlier by Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur—or the star that night, the dancer and actress Juliet Prowse.

He had come from Arlington to visit his parents, who lived in the neighborhood that snuggled up to the southeast side of the fairgrounds, near where Fair Park had originally been founded in 1886, an area filled mostly of wood-frame houses owned by Black families. They were situated close together on narrow lots shaded by tall pecans and red oaks and small groves of mimosas and crape myrtles. Or they had been. He had likely noticed, on his walk to the Music Hall, how many of those houses had been razed by then.

The city of Dallas had been taking homes from Black people since before he was born, going back to at least the early 1940s, hustling them off the land at cut-rate prices and calling it progress. Two years earlier, the city had come for the homes of his parents and their neighbors, offering 65 cents per square foot, maybe 75, in many cases not just less than market rate but less than they had paid a decade earlier. His parents were supposed to consider themselves among the lucky ones, since they had been offered $1 per square foot, even while a nearby property belonging to a White city councilman had gone for more than $4.

Some people had taken the deals, thinking they couldn’t fight the city. But his parents had stayed, along with other holdouts, mostly older folks who had worked their entire lives to own their homes. The Joiners, of course, Fred and Dorothy, over on Winifred Street. Giddings Johnson, 67 and recently remarried, was still on Fair Street, his creamy green house with its manicured bushes hard to miss. Down the street from him was Katherine Orr, a widow, and around the corner, on Lawhon Street, was Willie Wess and his wife, Irene. Two dozen or so others were scattered here and there.

But soon enough, they’d all be gone, too, just like the rest. Almost 300 houses scraped off the face of the earth, right down to the topsoil. The city bragged it could tear down and clear a frame house in less than three hours.

And for what? People from the city kept trying to dress it up, saying they weren’t building just a parking lot or that it wouldn’t always be a parking lot. But that is what it would be. Hundreds of lives traded for 4,000 parking spaces that would be used maybe a few times a year. The Cowboys were moving from the nearby Cotton Bowl to Irving. There wasn’t as much need anymore. Not that any of this was ever really about parking. That was just the excuse.

In his bottle-green seat, the young Black man felt like there wasn’t much of a place in this world, in this city, in this neighborhood, for people like him. He felt like there wasn’t much of anything he could own that couldn’t one day be taken away from him. Like nothing had really changed in a hundred years. Like nothing ever would.

As the young Black man sat there in his uniform, looking at the spectacle onstage, Prowse’s Mame Dennis arrived at a Georgia plantation, of all places. It was finally too much. He stood up and started screaming, no longer able to contain himself. He threw a book because that’s all he had with him to throw. And then he kept screaming, about his parents’ house, about his neighborhood, about his world, until he was escorted out by a sheriff’s deputy.

That was all he could do. It was just about all that was left to do.

“Dallas always had these little pockets of Black folks that could walk to work in the White neighborhoods,” says Donald Payton, who has spent almost 40 years researching family histories in Dallas. He has been called “the unofficial historian of Black Dallas” and, in an official capacity, worked with the Dallas Historical Society and the Dallas County Historical Commission and served as president of the African American Genealogy Interest Group.

I reached out to Payton as part of an attempt to locate the Fair Park families who had scattered like dandelion seeds 50 years ago. Along with help from the Dallas Public Library, Paul Quinn College, and the nonprofit Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation, I was trying to find homeowners or their descendants. Even with Payton’s help, it proved difficult, full of literal dead ends, names in obituaries only leading to other obituaries.

Along the way, though, we pieced together their story. Most of it happened in City Council and Park Board meetings, out in the open and duly reported by the Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Times Herald, and the Dallas Express; much of what follows is taken from those accounts. It is somewhat shocking, looking back, that no one from the city or the State Fair felt as though they had anything to hide.

But that’s with hindsight, with the ability to read a decade’s worth of articles in one sitting, to see the threads connecting them. At the time, Payton says, it was a well-kept secret what was happening to the Fair Park homeowners. Maybe because those newspaper stories, like the people taking the land, usually focused more on the property than the people on it.

“The Fair Park people, as Whites moved out, that was a chance to live over near Fair Park,” Payton continues. “Blacks were moving into South Dallas, but coming into those little pockets.”

There was Wheatley Place, where civil rights pioneer Juanita Craft lived, and a section off Oakland Avenue (now Malcolm X Boulevard) called Queen City. A little farther south there was Lincoln Manor and Bonton. There was a Ford Motor plant where Dawson Road and Hatcher Street met, but most of the people who lived in these pockets were doing domestic work at the time, cutting yards, working as maids. “The city hadn’t really started to open up yet,” Payton says.

In 1952, Black families started moving into the houses on the southeast side of Fair Park—an area previously inhabited only by Whites since development of the area began in the late 1800s. (See “A Brief History of Racism at Fair Park” for more.) It was a concession made after a series of bombings had targeted Black-owned homes around Exline Park in South Dallas, a couple of miles away. But almost as soon as the new residents arrived, the city of Dallas and State Fair of Texas began trying to move them out.

Their presence in the neighborhood, to begin with, had been like treating a heart attack with a Tylenol, temporarily relieving a tiny bit of pain but doing little to fix the underlying issue. There was a Black housing shortage that had been deemed “acute and critical” by a five-man committee appointed by the Dallas Chamber of Commerce in 1950.

Between 1940 and 1950, 60,368 single-family houses were built in Dallas; of those, just 1,000 were available to Black families. Housing proposals that sought to remedy the problem—new Black-focused developments in Cockrell Hill, near White Rock Lake, and elsewhere—were opposed and obstructed. Roads were closed. City services steered away. Attempts by more affluent Black families to move into traditionally White neighborhoods were met with violence. In addition to 11 bombings that took place from February 1950 to the summer of 1951, there had been 20 bombings of Black-owned homes in 1940 and 1941. I recommend you read Jim Schutze’s recently reissued book, The Accommodation, for a fuller recounting of those bombings.

Meanwhile, in 1943, the city began to claim land for a slate of big-picture projects that weaponized the government’s power of eminent domain, provided for in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. (The last two words of the final clause, which states “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation,” have proven to have an extremely elastic definition over the years.) All of the land needed for this program of road building and other civic expansion came from Black communities. It was blight as far as the people doing the taking were concerned. This “achieved two goals at once—the bolstering of Dallas’ image and the clearing of slum areas,” Cynthia Lewis, a master’s candidate at TWU, writes in her 2019 thesis, Under Asphalt and Concrete: Postwar Urban Redevelopment in Dallas and Its Impact on Black Communities, 1943–1983.

Beyond depleting the housing stock, these projects devastated Black enclaves in and around Deep Ellum and Stringtown in East Dallas; Elm Thicket, near Love Field; Tenth Street in Oak Cliff; Bonton and Ideal in South Dallas; the Trinity River bottoms in West Dallas; and North Dallas (now Uptown).

At the time, along with the pockets in South Dallas, these were among a handful of places where Black residents were allowed to live in Dallas, their boundaries strictly enforced. They were in different parts of the city but all connected—drop a pebble in one and it caused a ripple in each of the others. Taking a home from one neighborhood meant families would have to double—and sometimes triple—up in a home in another, so it would have been incredibly destabilizing to these communities if eminent domain had been used in just one.

It happened in almost all of them at some point. Some people were forced out of one neighborhood, were able to resettle at a financial loss in another, and then were forced out of that one, too.

It was supposed to be different in Fair Park. The neighborhood had been transitioning, and more houses were opening up. “All in there’s where poorer White people saw us coming in and most of them started moving into Mesquite,” says 87-year-old Willie Mae Coleman, who lived not far away. Still does, actually. People there call Willie Mae “the mayor of South Dallas,” and she is still active, regularly attending meetings at the Zan Wesley Holmes Jr. Community Outreach Center, where she is on the board and where she spoke to me via Zoom a couple of days after her birthday in August.

But it wasn’t different. In April 1956, the city bought a two-block strip of land off Pennsylvania Avenue, bordered by the fairgrounds, a 10.1-acre area that contained 93 lots and more than 50 Black-owned homes. The property was cleared and turned into a parking lot, ready for use by the State Fair the following October.

That kind of efficiency was possible back then. The City Council was elected at large, a voting method—now found to be unconstitutional—used in Dallas and elsewhere to neutralize minority voters. Candidates ran from a district, but they had to get elected citywide. If Black people represented 15 percent of the population here, it was impossible for them to elect their own representatives. At any rate, the real decisions were made by the Dallas Citizens Council, a group of White business leaders that had its roots in the consortium that strong-armed the Texas Legislature and brought the Texas Centennial Exposition to Dallas and Fair Park in 1936. The Black families in South Dallas and elsewhere weren’t part of this process. They had no real representation, no real political power, and no real means by which to achieve either.

Planners urged returning to the location to take more land for parking in a document titled “Parks and Open Spaces Plan of 1959.” The city and the State Fair held off then, but the idea was in the air. The seemingly inevitable condemnation and clearance of the neighborhood served to keep property values low until they had a reason to return with their checkbooks.

Seven years later, they got it.

In the spring of 1966, the State Fair of Texas hired Economics Research Associates, a consulting firm out of Los Angeles, to prepare a report that would be issued under the anodyne title “A Redevelopment Program for the State Fair of Texas.” The fair had been commissioning similar reports for the better part of a decade, trying to come up with a way to make the fairgrounds a more profitable concern. The Economics Research Associates proposal was delivered on November 1 of that year.

The bulk of the findings in it came from two in-depth group interviews—on June 10 in Dallas and the following day in Paris, Texas, almost two hours away—conducted by Facts Consolidated, a subsidiary of ERA. The two locations, the report says, “were selected for the greatest possible urban-rural contrast.” The panels were chosen at random, with participants recruited by telephone, the only qualification being attendance at the State Fair within the previous five years. The report does not offer a racial breakdown of the two groups of interview subjects, but given the year and the responses, it is safe to assume that they were predominantly (if not uniformly) White. Especially considering that Paris was, as Texas Monthly put it in 2020, “the town that invented the spectacle lynching.”

Regarding the location of the fair, the report says that “the area surrounding Fair Park generates intense emotional discomfort in middle-class white residents of Dallas,” because they either “do not want to admit that Dallas has slums”; want to “avoid facing an undesirable, unpleasant aspect of life existing side by side with their new-found physical comforts”; or are just plainly afraid. “You do not feel safe around Fair Park,” one of the interviewees said.

To alleviate these concerns, the report suggests essentially surrounding Fair Park with a concrete moat—20,000 parking spaces. The reasoning for the fix is as straightforward and emotionless as you might expect from a firm named Economics Research Associates.

“The solution for all these conflicts, at least in terms of the Fair Park location, is simple. All that is required is to eliminate the problem from sight. If the poor Negroes in their shacks cannot be seen, all the guilt feelings revealed above will disappear, or at least be removed from consideration. This question was posed:

“ ‘If all the land around Fair Park were bought up and turned into a paved, lighted, fenced parking lot, would that solve the problem?’

“The citizens of Dallas answered with a resounding ‘Yes.’ ”

The natural follow-up question was apparently not posed to either group, in Dallas or in Paris, and not satisfactorily answered by the city or its citizens for years to come: “What about the people who live there now?”

Looking back, it doesn’t make any sense that the city didn’t attempt to answer that question by applying for federal aid. Participating in an urban renewal program, for example, would have made available Department of Housing and Urban Development funds to pay for moving expenses as well as any losses incurred by the homeowners. Sales would proceed on a competitive basis. It wasn’t perfect—they’d still lose their homes—but it would have given the owners a better chance to start over.

Urban renewal programs require HUD approval, as well as a city referendum, and meant the city would, among other conditions, have to prepare a plan for the use of the area in question as well as a suitable plan to relocate families. (Both of which should have been on the books regardless of who was paying for what.)

It would have been more complicated on the part of the city, but that would have been a negligible price, based on the potential return. And it wasn’t that the city overlooked the possibility. In March 1967, State Fair president Robert B. Cullum confirmed that fair directors were investigating various federal aid programs, but it seems the effort went no further than that. Why? It is difficult to come to a different conclusion than this: everyone involved cared more about the property than the people on it.

Instead, in June, it was announced that funds to enhance Fair Park would be included in the city’s 14-item, $175 million bond package ($1.43 billion in 2021 dollars), a huge capital-improvements program tied to Mayor Erik Jonsson’s “Goals for Dallas” project. Jonsson, a co-founder of Texas Instruments, was drafted to become mayor in early 1964, not long after the JFK assassination, charged with rescuing the city’s reputation. “Goals for Dallas” was his moonshot, a big swing at bringing Dallas not just back to respectability but also to prominence, via a series of ambitious development plans. The bond was the first step and was headlined by $44.3 million for street repairs and $23.9 million for a new City Hall building. They called it “Dallas at the Crossroads.”

(The city, apparently, had been at the crossroads since 1961, when the Dallas Citizens Council produced a 21-minute film with that same title, narrated by newsman Walter Cronkite, encouraging peaceful cooperation as the city desegregated its school system.)

Fair Park was set to get $12.6 million (more than $103 million today), based on an out-of-date master plan formulated before the State Fair had even commissioned the ERA study. The money would go to renovate the Cotton Bowl and Music Hall, add air conditioning to the Coliseum, and, as a July 23 story in the Dallas Times Herald added, almost as an afterthought, “the city bond program will also provide funds to buy land for additional parking and to remodel the grounds on the existing park.”

It was not mentioned that the “land for additional parking” was currently occupied mostly by Black homeowners, perhaps because the city and the State Fair had not formally stated where they planned to buy this land. Cullum spent more time as carnival barker—it’s not difficult to imagine him dressing in a Big Tex costume for work every day, talking up the idea of the fairgrounds as a year-round attraction on the order of Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens. All of this was hopes and dreams, with very little on paper.

The Crossroads bond package would be sent to voters on August 8. In late July, the Dallas Negro Chamber of Commerce unanimously endorsed the program, mostly on the strength of an $18 million proposal (including federal money) that promised to bring properties in Park South, a 1.6-square-mile area of South Dallas, up to minimum city code standards.

An ad ran in the July 29, 1967, edition of the Dallas Express, then a Black-owned newspaper:

“You cannot afford to feel ‘let the other person vote.’ Your vote will determine the success of this election … Vote for bonds. We have been asking for better housing … Better streets … Better zoning for neighborhoods … Better jobs … Now is your time to act … Your future is at stake … Vote for bonds.

“Nobodys property will be taken away from owner. This bond election is to help you have a better neighborhood … Make your property more valuable … More livable … This is not urban removal … This is community development.”

It was signed by almost 80 people, among them the reverends Zan Holmes Jr., I.B. Loud, and S.M. Wright; longtime civil rights leader A. Maceo Smith; Dallas Morning News columnist Julia Scott Reed; and business owner Leo V. Chaney.

The election brought a record 83,000 voters to the polls, and all 14 measures on the ballot easily passed. The narrowest margin came with Proposition 9—the one concerning Fair Park. Voters approved it 49,457 to 32,254. (To compare: Proposition 1, $1 million for new fire stations, passed 60,818 to 22,896.) Proposition 9 was the only one to receive fewer than 50,000 votes in favor.

Almost a full year later, on July 29, 1968, the Park Board and City Council approved using $2.8 million in Crossroads bond funds to acquire 42 acres southeast of the fairgrounds, an area bordered by Pennsylvania and Fitzhugh (to the north and south) and Gaisford and Second Avenue (to the east and west). Pennsylvania and the cross streets would be closed, adding another 9 acres.

The next day, the city began negotiating sales. Longtime Parks Department director L.B. Houston, who took the job in 1939 and wouldn’t retire until 1972, hoped to have all 51 acres acquired by March 1. “I don’t think it will be ready for this Fair,” Houston said, “but you can park on a great amount of it for the 1969 Fair.”

Over the next weeks, Houston would add new features to the parking lot whenever the subject came up, until what he was describing sounded more like a park. The trees would be preserved, as many as possible, and landscaped areas where families could have a picnic would be added, and a lighted playground, and maybe basketball courts, and there might be enough room for a baseball diamond. It would be a place the neighborhood could enjoy, and sure, it would also have some parking spaces, too. He also hinted they might need to acquire more land in the future.

By the end of August, the city had set up a special office on the fairgrounds to facilitate land purchases, so residents wouldn’t have to go downtown.

Shortly after, in early September, it was announced that funding for the Park South program had already been slashed by $5 million.

The city of Dallas made a series of assumptions, all of which proved to be misguided. The first was that they could purchase the land quickly and easily, for a price they had decided was fair. Maybe, in their minds, more than fair, since they were the only buyers. The long-running threat of condemnation, a sword of Damocles dangling over the neighborhood since the first 10 acres had been cleared in 1956, had mostly seen to that. Devolving conditions, exacerbated by vanishing city services and building permits (according to the homeowners), had taken care of the rest.

There was good reason for the city to believe it could do this. It always had. By 1968, there was at least a quarter century of evidence that the city knew exactly what it was doing in this regard and exactly how to do it.

The owners knew what kind of machine they were up against. They had seen it plow through communities all over Dallas. (For a detailed breakdown, read “In the Name of Progress” here.) A few days after the city announced it would start purchasing properties, 56-year-old Clarence King, who lived at 4139 Tella, told a reporter from the Dallas Times Herald that “it don’t make much difference now how I feel. I can’t buck against the city if they want it. There’s nothing I can do.”

The city made another incorrect assumption, this one a bit harder to justify. It assumed, when the first bulldozers arrived in the area in January 1969, that they would be greeted as liberators, freeing the residents from the oppression of living in what they saw as a slum. “We had hoped that when demolition teams moved into the area the residents would be more ready to move,” said Bruce Hunter, the city’s right-of-way-supervisor, in February, in an interview with the Dallas Morning News’ Marlyn Schwartz. A former Air Force lieutenant and SMU grad, Hunter was the man in charge of negotiating the sales. He had also helped secure the land for Love Field’s expansion.

While there were undoubtedly some renters who didn’t mind leaving and didn’t have much sympathy for their landlords, there were plenty of people like Giddings Johnson, proud owners who knew exactly what they had and what they stood to lose. “I want my house and I don’t see giving it to the city,” he told Dallas Morning News columnist Julia Scott Reed, “but if I am forced to sell it must be for a price that I can relocate without going into debt, because my time has run out for purchasing a house.”

Giddings and his wife were the first Black family to move into the neighborhood, in 1952. He was already almost 50 by then. He and his wife had been living in rented rooms and working as domestics since moving to Dallas in 1923, up from Bryan.

He had joined the Army when the age limit was raised to 45 during World War II, and when he was discharged after four years, he received $300 in mustering-out pay. When Giddings returned home, his wife told him she had managed to save $200 while he was away. They used that $500 to put a down payment on a five-room frame cottage on a 60-by-150-foot lot on the corner of Fair and Lawhon streets. The total price was $8,000.

The Johnsons planned to grow old here, scrimping to buy it, sacrificing to improve it. He painted the house avocado green and put in a flagstone patio and barbecue pit in the back. Along with the shrubbery and flowers he enjoyed tending to, Giddings figured he invested maybe $4,000 on the backyard alone. “It does me good to see things grow,” he told Reed. “I’ve always wanted them and now I have them.”

It wasn’t easy paying off the mortgage, especially not after his wife died in 1958, but he had done it, earning $160 a month at the VA hospital. When the city came for his house, he was 66 years old and semiretired, working as a crossing guard at the intersection of Second and Pennsylvania as well as a part-time waiter and butler. In four more years, when he would be 70, he planned to be fully retired. That wasn’t going to happen with what the city had offered: $8,700, right around $1 per square foot for the land, barely more than he had paid for it. He didn’t want to end up like some of his neighbors.

“Most of the people didn’t want to sell their homes, but they didn’t know what to do. Some of the older people who sold their homes are in a bind now. They were told that their homes would be condemned and they went ahead and sold.”

He told Reed that the empty houses the city had purchased but hadn’t torn down were becoming magnets for thieves and assorted hoodlums, vice of various stripes. There were rats. It was becoming the slum the city had believed it to be from the start. “City service is at a standstill, such as garbage collection,” he said. “Sometimes, we have to call in several times before it is picked up.”

But Giddings Johnson wasn’t backing down, and he wasn’t alone. The city made one other false assumption: that the homeowners couldn’t or wouldn’t organize. But by the end of 1968, a few months after the city began buying property, a group of them had banded together. In December, they signed an agreement with members of the University Park United Methodist Church to form the Fair Park Block Partnership. The partnership paired 30 homeowners with 11 members of the church, including Miriam Schult. With her cat-eye glasses, string of pearls, and short, swept-back hair the color of steel wool, the middle-aged housewife looked like the only neighborhood dispute she would get involved with would be over the condition of a nearby house’s hydrangeas. But the plainspoken and calm Schult would become one of the organization’s leaders.

“They have helped us and kept us together,” Giddings said. The block partnership would later start holding its meetings at the home he had worked so hard on. “At least we haven’t been pushed out of our homes.”

The city had no one to blame but itself for the block partnership.

The idea was sponsored by the Greater Dallas Council of Churches and had been helped along by Mayor Erik Jonsson. He explained the setup in a letter to the University Park Methodist Church in October 1968, writing that the program, “which it was my privilege to call to the attention of the Council of Churches, provides a means by which less fortunate citizens have the privilege of helping themselves but with assistance of their more fortunate fellow citizens in doing so.”

On February 3, 1969, the newly formed Fair Park Block Partnership held a meeting at the Garden Center in Fair Park. The consensus of the church members was that the best way to help their less fortunate partners was opening a line of communication with the city. Attended by a group of city officials that included city attorney Alex Bickley and right-of-way supervisor Bruce Hunter, this meeting was meant to be the start of that process.

John Bailey Jackson Jr., known as J.B. and a couple of weeks shy of his 40th birthday, spoke on behalf of the families. Jackson’s role model was the statesman, author, and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and he even resembled him a bit, his hair seeming to float away from his head. (In later life, as his hair began to turn white, the resemblance would grow more profound.) His life motto was a quote from Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” At the Garden Center, he was ready to make a few. He owned a house in the area, as well as rental property. He worked as a real estate broker and had been on the debate team at Morehouse College with Martin Luther King Jr. (“He knew him when he was Michael,” Donald Payton says.) Jackson knew what he was talking about and knew how to talk about it.

He said the prices being offered were “unfair, unsatisfactory, and are too low even to be considered,” and noted that the property belonging to Councilman Abe Meyer was appraised at $4.17 per square foot, while on the same block, maybe 30 yards away, land belonging to Black homeowners had been appraised at 75 cents. “Just what is the difference,” he said, “between poor people’s land and land belonging to a city official?”

Jackson brought up an elderly widow who had lived in Elm Thicket when the city expanded Love Field and condemned her property. “She received about half the actual value of her home and moved to the Fair Park area where she once again had to start paying house notes. She finally got the house paid for and same thing is happening again, with the same unfair price being offered.”

Bickley—tall, with thinning gray hair, an aquiline nose, and a West Texas accent, the platonic ideal of a Dallas city attorney—admitted that relocation for the elderly people in the neighborhood wouldn’t be easy, but, unfortunately, the city couldn’t base its prices on age or sex or marital status. He left out race.

A few days before the meeting, the Dallas Cowboys had officially broken ground on their new home in Irving, Texas Stadium. If that gave the homeowners hope that the city might reconsider purchasing their land, since there would be less need for another parking lot with the Cowboys gone, it was dashed in March when Joseph B. Rucker, executive vice president of the State Fair, issued a “management report on master plan studies” for Fair Park. President Robert B. Cullum referred to the document by the more fanciful “grand scheme.”

Rucker’s report said the need for additional parking, even with the Cowboys’ exit, was “hardly debatable.” It also said that even if there wasn’t a need for more spaces, continuing to acquire land was necessary to move toward the eventual goal of a 700-acre central park, expanding out from its current 190-acre core.

The Garden Center meeting was successful in clarifying the homeowners’ position, but if it had been meant to open communication with the city, it had soundly backfired. Bickley said he wouldn’t meet with the group again, saying that he thought more could be accomplished if each homeowner came to City Hall individually to lodge his or her complaint.

Bickley clearly did not want any kind of organized resistance. True to his word, no one from the city would meet with the block partners for months, save for Councilman George Allen, the only Black member of the Council. The problem was, Allen didn’t have much power to help them.

Over the next weeks and months, Allen made a motion to reevaluate the land acquisition program, asked city staff to explore potential sources of state and federal aid, pushed for the city to pay relocation expenses, and tried to get the city’s appraisers to change the formula it was using to come up with its offers, factoring in future use. But he was routinely ignored or placated, and nothing he had put forth had much of an effect. By June, Allen had succeeded only in getting the city to boost its price-per-square-foot offer to $1, up from 75 cents.

He brought the offer with him to a Fair Park Block Partnership meeting, where it was immediately rejected as “still grossly unfair.” Members accused him of “carrying water for the city.”

“What is legal is not always moral,” he told the group. “I have tried and tried for months to come up with the right answer for this situation. Give me credit for this.”

He was asked if he thought the city’s offer was fair. The councilman said that he was not qualified as a real estate appraiser, but he sympathized. “I have a home in this area myself.”

Would you sell your home for the prices they’re offering?

“No, I don’t think I would,” he admitted.

Jackson said that the landowners would accept Allen’s offer to come speak at City Hall. “Now you ask the City Council if they won’t return the favor and come here next week to hear us.”

Schult, the leader of the University Park United Methodist Church side, had another ask for Allen. “Please give them this invitation, too,” she said. “Ask them to please step down from the White race for awhile and join the human race.”

Mayor Jonsson didn’t respond to Schult’s invitation, and he was dismissive of Jackson’s.

“What you can’t get into every time somebody has something to talk about is having a council meeting in their living room,” the mayor said the next day. “I can’t imagine the council going out to any group, as a group.” He said the dispute “is an administrative matter. It’s something for [City Manager] Scott McDonald and his people to settle.”

He was done with the matter. Or so he thought.

In July 1969, park director L.B. Houston continued to insist the area between Pennsylvania and Fitzhugh, and Gaisford and Second Avenue, would be developed both for parking and recreation. “We believe there is a way to treat it where we could have grass through proper selection of base material,” he said. “We’re hoping to get away from concrete.”

But it was always going to be a parking lot, no matter what amenities Houston seemed to invent as he went along. When J.B. Jackson went before the City Council in July to tell them a large industrial company wanted to build a 12- to 20-story building on Second Avenue, from Fitzhugh to Pennsylvania, paying $3.75 per square foot for the privilege, he was told that they couldn’t allow the sale because voters had approved the idea of creating a parking lot.

Meanwhile, the city was buying houses in the area but not clearing them. There was a rash of fires. The vacant houses turned into “hideouts and hangouts for all kinds of winos and vandals,” Dorothy Joiner said. “A lot of us are afraid to leave our homes because vandals hiding in the vacant houses are just waiting for a chance to steal everything we have.”

Another homeowner, Willie Mae King, said that “men in city cars” were telling renters to leave because the property is being sold. Lienholders were pressuring owners to sell. The Cliff Food Store, on Second and Birmingham, the only grocery store within walking distance, closed when Councilman Abe Meyer sold the property early on, creating a food desert for many of the elderly residents without transportation.

“The city is trying to sweat us out,” Jackson said.

The homeowners were holding firm, but nothing would slow down the process. By the end of September, only five pieces of property remained without a purchase agreement or condemnation action. And though Jackson had said that they wanted to take their chances with the county commissioners in condemnation court, that wasn’t turning out to be an appealing alternative. In October, G.C. Crenshaw, an 85-year-old retiree, was granted the first award from the three-member condemnation panel. He received $2,101.65, less than the $2,400 he had paid for the property.

They were running out of options, not that there had been many to begin with. And then, in late November, Peter Johnson came to town.

The city had no one to blame but itself for Peter Johnson’s continued presence in Dallas.

Johnson was sent to Dallas by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization founded in 1957. Just 24 at the time, he was meant to stay for about three months, negotiating with cities in the Southwest to bring to theaters a documentary about the recently assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., to raise money for King’s wife, Coretta. The SCLC had reached out to 800 cities around the world; 799 agreed to screen the film.

“There was only one city on earth who’d say, ‘We’re not going to show that nigger’s movie,’ ” Johnson says today, in his Oak Cliff office. “You live in that city.”

He’s grayer now but still has the same serious, searching eyes that scan whatever room he’s in. He still says wonderfully profane things in the same swampy Louisiana drawl that makes “hands” come out “haynds.”

Johnson wasn’t officially in Dallas, just using it as a base because of the convenience of Love Field, staying at a downtown hotel owned by the World Council of Churches. Johnson was warned by SCLC leadership to stick to his mission, and at first he did. The Fair Park homeowners learned of his presence and had asked him a number of times to come to one of their meetings, just to listen. “I bullshitted them and came up with reasons why I couldn’t, because I wasn’t supposed to get involved in local stuff,” Johnson says.

One night, a group including J.B. Jackson, Giddings Johnson, and block partnership director Al Lipscomb came by his hotel room, and he couldn’t bullshit his way out of meeting with them any longer. He sat and listened. As they explained their plight, Giddings Johnson began crying, telling the SCLC representative that, “If Dr. King was alive, he’d help us.” He was already angry at the White power structure he had encountered in the city, so that was enough.

“If the King movie had not been fought here, once that night was over, I would’ve been on a plane back to Atlanta,” he says. “I had no intentions of ever moving in the Black community.”

Once he started moving, though, he didn’t go slow. He began operating out of the basement at Mt. Olive Lutheran Church on Forest, whose congregation was presided over by the Rev. Mark Herbener. (The White Herbener “was the most active militant religious leader in the Black community,” Johnson says.) The red-brick sanctuary was one of the few places that had welcomed King when he visited Dallas in the 1960s, and the basement was where the church had been founded, when it belonged to another Lutheran church and had sent two Black women to the basement, refusing them communion solely for the color of their skin. They formed Mt. Olive as a result and later came back and bought the building.

By early December, Johnson had already organized an economic boycott of downtown Dallas. “I didn’t come to Texas to tell jokes,” he said at the time.

By the end of the month, he had forced a meeting with Mayor Jonsson, something the homeowners hadn’t managed in a year of battling the city.

Jonsson had kept himself out of the dispute, deferring to the city manager and other staff, reacting petulantly to demands made on his time but otherwise not getting involved. But he couldn’t stay away any longer. Peter Johnson represented a threat to the fragile peace Dallas had brokered throughout the civil rights movement, mostly via conservative Black ministers who understood how things were done in Dallas.

Peter Johnson understood how things were done everywhere else.

Two days before the annual Cotton Bowl Parade was to take place, Johnson sent the mayor a telegram. The message said the mayor had until midnight on December 31 to meet with the Fair Park homeowners’ leadership or else several hundred people would disrupt the event, which was to be nationally televised on CBS. Demonstrations were planned before and after the game, featuring the University of Texas and Notre Dame, as well.

On New Year’s Eve, in the cramped basement at Mt. Olive Lutheran, Johnson huddled with 500 others, White, Black, young, old. Some were veterans of the antiwar movement, trained activists who were accustomed to being beaten and bloodied, ready for anything. Many were not. But they stayed.

Bomb threats were called in. Johnson said, “Bomb the goddamn church when we’re in it.” Direct threats against Johnson’s life were made, too, but he was used to that. Frank Dyson, the chief of police, showed up around 10 pm with a riot squad ready to clear the building. No one was leaving.

The mayor offered to send a limousine for Johnson, to bring him straight to the mayor’s residence. “I don’t want to meet with you,” Johnson said. “I don’t have no house y’all are taking. What the hell do I need to talk to you for?” He said the mayor needed to meet with the homeowners. Face them.

As the midnight deadline neared, Johnson sent home the women and children, fearing there would be a bloodbath outside the church when it was time to step outside the basement and head to the parade route, which would run down Forest to the gates of Fair Park, as he had promised. He explained to everyone who remained that they might end up in jail with him.

Finally, the mayor blinked, saying he would come to his office and meet with whomever Johnson wanted him to meet with. Peter Johnson told the homeowners he would go with them, but that they needed to speak for themselves.

“You need to stand up, straighten up your back, look him in the goddamn eyes,” he said. “Don’t smile. Don’t giggle. Don’t look at your shoes. Look him in his eyes and tell him about your home, that this is where you raised your children. Tell him that this is your home—this little wood-frame regular house that he thinks is a house is a home to you.”

When they arrived at the mayor’s office, he had one other condition that they needed to tell the mayor about. The Cotton Bowl Parade had always been segregated. “That’s over,” Johnson said. “Tell him if it’s not integrated, we can still block it.”

The meeting at the mayor’s office was brief, mostly a sign of good faith that there would be a more productive meeting later on, not in the middle of the night. Johnson went back to Mt. Olive Lutheran and sent everyone home. It was after 2 in the morning when he called SCLC leaders in Atlanta. They told him to get the hell out of Dallas. They were taking the threats on his life seriously. Hang up, go to Shreveport, and call when you get there.

He called A.J. Hoffman, his personal cab driver better known to all as Popeye, and left town immediately. By the time they got to a Holiday Inn in Shreveport later that morning, CBS’ coverage of the Cotton Bowl Parade was underway. He saw the mayor’s convertible Cadillac making its way along the parade route and heard the announcer say, “And I have no idea who the Negro man is sitting next to Mayor Jonsson.”

Peter Johnson laughed. There, next to the mayor, sat J.B. Jackson.

If this were a movie, the screen would freeze on an image of J.B. Jackson next to Mayor Erik Jonsson and then a block of text would explain how this pivotal moment led to an eventual victory by the Fair Park homeowners.

Another block of text might talk about how the battle to save the Fair Park houses led to a new generation of Black political leaders. Al Lipscomb and others involved in the fight, like Elsie Faye Heggins (who counted Jackson among her close advisers), would eventually serve on the City Council. The at-large council system was abandoned. That all started here.

A final block of text would mention the park that will be built there soon, five decades later, the kind of place that will, at long last, resemble what L.B. Houston swore this land would be used for. Maybe the shot of Jackson and Mayor Jonsson would dissolve into kids playing on emerald-green grass. Maybe their dad is nearby. Maybe he’s a young Black man in an Army uniform.

But you know already that this story does not have a happy ending. The rest happened, but Jackson’s ceremonial ride was the last real victory the holdouts in Fair Park were able to celebrate.

“They have something on their side of the question,” the mayor had said at the beginning of January, for the first time agreeing to give the matter his personal attention. “I want to check it out and understand what the problems are to achieve equities in acquiring properties.”

But by May, Jonsson decided he had heard enough, even though the meeting he had promised the homeowners had never quite materialized. He insisted that “we’re not putting people out of their homes for a parking lot. The plans for the area are diverse and will be of benefit to the people living in that area. The people voted for these improvements.”

He also complained that he had suffered personal slights, “little things that show a lack of respect for the mayor’s office.”

Later, in June, he said that he was “anxious for the people of Dallas to have all the facts concerning the Fair Park matter and will at the time which seems most appropriate make an official, complete report.” Earlier that week, he had promised a press conference to “tell the whole story.” Neither ever happened.

Instead, after a six-month moratorium, condemnation hearings began again. City appraisers were now using earlier sales figures—the below-market prices their right-of-way agents had forced upon other homeowners—as comps to justify the low assessments they had come up with. The result was awards lower than the city’s final offers.

On July 27, the city initiated action on the final piece it needed, the last of 277 parcels, a 6,000-square-foot property with a frame house at 4248 Fair St. owned by Elvis L. Hayes. The final offer was for $8,700.

Thirty landowners—including Giddings Johnson and J.B. Jackson, and led by Fred and Dorothy Joiner—filed a federal class action lawsuit against the city of Dallas on November 25, claiming they had been deprived of rights under the Fifth, 13th, and 14th Amendments. It would bounce around various courts before dying in 1974, the same year Giddings Johnson did. He spent the last years of his life as a plaintiff instead of happily retired in his backyard, surrounded by his bushes and flowers.

On December 7, it was announced that a new master plan for Fair Park would not be ready until at least January.

On December 18, the last of the 51 condemnation hearings took place. It was for a home owned by J.B. Jackson that he leased to Curtis Gaines, who used it to host Black Panther meetings. The city appraiser had set a value of $12,500. Surprisingly, the condemnation court awarded Jackson $30,000. Perhaps they just wanted it all to be over. (If so, the joke was on them: Jackson appealed and held up the sale for a decade.)

Assistant city attorney Kenneth Dippel said that even though 49 property owners were appealing the results of their condemnation proceedings and were awaiting jury trials, the city had the right to take possession of all of the land, since the courts could only increase the amount of the cash award, not halt condemnation proceedings.

But everyone didn’t leave right away. A handful of homeowners, including Willie Wess and his wife, Irene, managed to stay in their houses until 1978. The State Fair acted like it was doing them a favor. “Basically, these people have lived there free, and pay no taxes,” State Fair association general manager Wayne Gallagher said in March 1978, when they asked the city to finally clear the land.

“It’s a lousy deal,” Wess said at the time. He was given $8,000 for his home.

Wess died in 2012. He spent the last years of his life parking cars at a trio of lots he bought on the other side of Fitzhugh, once a simple road cutting through a tight-knit neighborhood, now a concrete monstrosity with a giant median running down its spine, putting the remaining houses as far out of sight as possible without building a wall.

His grandson, Patrick Williams, runs the parking lots now. He says the city regularly hassles him over permits, and the State Fair tries to steer people away from his lots, directing traffic toward city-owned property. He’s angry, exasperated, but not surprised.

You can forgive him for this. It’s been 50 years, and Dallas and the fair still won’t leave his family alone.

---

Research aided by Elizabeth Johnston.

This story originally appeared in the November issue of D Magazine. Write to zac.crain@dmagazine.com.

Editor’s Note: This is a companion piece to our November cover story, “The Fair Park Lie.”  While the piece below stands alone, it is intended to expand on the themes within the larger story. Read it here. 

---

To get to Music Hall for the performance of Mame that evening in 1970, many patrons would have passed the site where the Hall of Negro Life once stood. It was just 500 feet away. By then, it was a parking lot.

The Hall of Negro Life was built for the Texas Centennial Exposition in 1936, along with the art deco buildings that still line the esplanade. Like them, the hall was designed by famed Dallas architect George L. Dahl. Though the exhibition wasn’t included in the original plans—it was funded by the federal government and practically willed into existence by A. Maceo Smith, the president of the Dallas Negro Chamber of Commerce—the Hall of Negro Life proved to be one of the most popular attractions of the Texas Centennial. It drew more than 400,000 visitors during its run, at least 275,000 of whom were White, as general manager Jesse O. Thomas (of the National Urban League) noted in his 1938 book, Negro Participation in the Texas Centennial Exposition.

“Many of the white people came in expecting to see on display some agricultural products, some canned goods, and ‘Black Mammy’ pictures, as many of them suggested,” Thomas wrote. Instead, guests were greeted by four murals by Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas and given a copy of W.E.B. DuBois’ pamphlet “What the Negro Has Done for the United States and Texas.” Then they were shown exactly what that meant, with displays celebrating advancements by Black Americans in science and medicine, education, literature, and music.

“They were so shocked with what they saw,” Thomas wrote, “many of them expressed doubt as to the Negroes’ ability to produce the things there on exhibit. All of them went away with a higher appreciation of the Negroes’ contribution to American culture and with a more tolerant attitude toward the Negroes’ effort.”

Despite this, or maybe because of it, the Hall of Negro Life was demolished almost immediately, gone in less than a year, the only one of Dahl’s buildings to suffer that fate. It was replaced by a swimming pool for Whites only; when segregation ended, instead of opening to Black swimmers, it was filled in and became a parking lot, which it remained until the African American Museum opened there in 1993.

Given Fair Park’s tortured history with race, the only surprise is the continued presence of the African American Museum. Fair Park has mostly taken from Black people; it rarely gives back. It has operated that way since the beginning.

The Dallas State Fair & Exposition was chartered in 1886, on 80 acres of what some called “the worst kind of hog wallow,” according to Willis Winters’ 2010 book, Fair Park. Organizers paid $200 per acre for the land, just on the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue, on what would become the back part of the fairgrounds.

The first designated day for Black people to attend the fair came in 1889, dubbed Colored People’s Day. There were speakers—Booker T. Washington was brought in to make an address in 1900—and special events and exhibits. By all accounts, it was a success, at least for what it was. But it was discontinued in 1910.

In the meantime, another group was welcomed: the State Fair of Texas officially designated October 23, 1923, as Ku Klux Klan Day. Dallas Klan No. 66, established in late 1920, had risen to become the largest chapter in the world, according to its members, which eventually numbered 13,000 in a city of scarcely more than 150,000; one in three White men of eligible age was a Klansman. Ku Klux Klan Day brought in 160,000 visitors (one of its highest weekday totals). Twenty-five thousand of them gathered at the football field that night to watch the largest Klan initiation ceremony ever: 5,631 men were added to the ranks, with 800 women joining the auxiliary.

It was the high point for the Klan in Dallas; its membership began to dwindle, along with its local political influence, which was vast in the 1920s. Still, historian Darwin Payne notes that the Klan was able to keep a full-time office near Fair Park as late as 1929.

With the Klan mostly gone again, a day set aside for Black people to attend the fair returned in 1936, now called Negro Achievement Day. It was set up like an entire run of the fair stuffed into one day, with a parade, a pageant to name a queen, an awards ceremony honoring the Most Distinguished Negro Citizen, and football games (high school in the afternoon, college at night).

That didn’t make up for not being able to participate in the fair all those other days. It didn’t make up for what happened at the fair all those other days.

“You had African Americans humiliated routinely at Fair Park,” the historian and author Michael Phillips (White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841–2001) told a group at a town hall meeting in 2016. “There was a dunking booth where an African American would be sat in a chair. You hit the target and he would be dumped to the water. And this is actually the slogan on the sides: ‘Hit the trigger, dump the Negro.’ ”

The NAACP Youth Council, under the leadership of Juanita Craft, staged a boycott of Negro Achievement Day in 1955, picketing with signs like “Don’t sell your pride for a segregated ride!” By lunchtime, the protest had drawn attention from media across the country.

“Why would I come here for this day and give every penny that I have to this concern who won’t let me come back tomorrow?” Craft said later.

By 1957, the event had become known simply as Achievement Day; by 1961, it was removed from the schedule entirely. As a policy, segregation at the fair had ended. Officially, at any rate. By 1970, Fair Park had only been fully integrated for about three years, and, in fact, many said discrimination lingered around a couple of Midway rides until just the year before.

Years ago, as their kids tore up the yard on dirt bikes, Rick Fairless and his buddies would flip on the stereo, pull cold ones out of an icebox, and hash out their motorcycle nirvana: a custom shop with a bar where they could drink alongside their choppers instead of leaving them out front to be tampered with by passersby. Fairless had put in 20 years selling paint for Glidden before he decided to make a couple of calls, just to get the stupid idea out of his system. He opened his shop a year later, in 1996.

Strokers Dallas encompasses 2.5 acres off Harry Hines, offering everything necessary to get into the motorhead subculture. In the retail store, you’ll find the whacked-out Rick Fairless custom bikes on glorious display, plus plenty of gear and get-ups. Grab a pair of chaps, but don’t forget to cover your ass: Strokers is a licensed Allstate agent.

Strokers mechanics service American-​made bikes and produce five to 10 custom builds each year. A Rick Fairless design doesn’t come cheap. His kaleidoscopic Woodstock bike would set you back about $100,000. If you have a classic auto that’s been collecting dust, Punch Wally Garage will get it car-show ready. Taz’s Detail makes your hog sparkle, and outdoor vendors will accessorize you with silver skull rings and custom-designed patches.

Behind Strokers Ice House, the asphalt courtyard fills with everything from Big Dog V-twins to Stella scooters and, of course, a hell of a lot of Harleys. The clientele isn’t discriminatory. You’ll find old-timers and infants, Southwest Airlines’ white-collar staffers who cross the street for after-work drinks, babes as hot as the decal on a mudflap, tattooed outlaws, and fresh-faced tourists who may have caught one of Strokers’ reality shows, Texas Hardtails and Ma’s Roadhouse (the latter spotlighted Fairless’ salty-mouthed mother, rest in peace). If you’re looking to witness a barstool-shattering brawl, however, ride elsewhere. “A lot of bike clubs come here, but we’re all cool,” one full-patched 1-percenter told us. “This is neutral ground.”

We spent a recent Sunday at Strokers to knock back a few beers, eat the Herschel Walker-raised chicken (the football great is their most loyal custom bike client), and experience the Rick Fairless pipe dream in full-color high definition. It turns 25 years old on October 1, and Stroker’s is celebrating with a weekend full of events, headlined by Warrant.

Tonight history will be made (and talked about) in Deep Ellum. For the rerelease of The Accommodation, the most dangerous book in Dallas, Deep Vellum Books and the Communities Foundation of Texas are staging what they are calling “a cause-minded conversation with Jim Schutze and John Wiley Price” on the book. Noelle LeVeaux will moderate. The event will take place in a ballroom at the historic Pittman Hotel, formerly the Knights of Pythias Building. In short, this will be a big deal.

If you don’t have tickets, you’re out of luck — mostly. The gig has sold out. You can watch a livestream that starts at 7 p.m. BUT!! Your buddy Tim has two tickets to give away right here on FrontBurner. So how should we do this? First person to send me a selfie taken in front of the Juanita Craft House? First person to give me the full text of the inaugural post on FrontBurner? I’ve got it!

Call the front desk at D Magazine. 214-939-3636. If a human answers, that will be Jacob. Ask to be transferred to my voicemail. Or do the keypad thing if Jacob is busy. Either way, get to my voicemail. Then record a few bars of your favorite Dallas-related song. The artist might be from Dallas. The lyrics might include the word Dallas. Whatever. Your call. Just sing it. Best singer wins the two tickets. Be sure to leave a name and email address at the end of your song. Contest ends at 1 p.m.

Hope to see you tonight.

As many people reunite with family this summer, I’ve been thinking about how important parents are. Every interaction between parent and child influences how those children grow up. You can argue that history is shaped with each parent-child interaction.

The photographs in the gallery linked above are historical images of Dallas history that depict parents and children. They are part the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History and Archives Collection and many are available through the library’s online catalog. They include images of everyday life at swimming pools, family gatherings, running errands, and more. They include photos of infamous outlaws Clyde Barrow and Ray Hamilton with their mothers.

Travel back to 1951 to see a mother and son waiting to swim at a local pool. There is the family of Dallas resident Kenneth Smith’s mother, taken in the 1940s at the home of Hallie Atkins. Another image depicts a West Dallas mother and her son in 1993 showing battery chips and slag on their family property. A few members of this family were impacted by the high lead levels in the air caused by lead contamination in the area.

A June 1951 image shows the proud grown children of Mrs. Cacy Ann Cole as they adjust their mother’s graduation cap. In 1952, Charles Hayes is shown being comforted by his mother, Faye Wallace, at Parkland Hospital after suffering a broken thumb in an accident where he slid between the wheels of a moving locomotive tender and out the other side. The same year, Sandra Anderson was depicted in a Parkland Hospital bed after jumping from a second story burning garage apartment in her mother’s arms and taken to safety. A circa 1962 photograph depicts Mrs. Callie Butts, mother of Marion Butts Sr.

Her son was an African American commercial photographer and editor of the Dallas Express newspaper, who recorded events and community life from the last half of the twentieth century in Dallas. His work chronicled civil rights, segregation, religious and social life, education, entertainers, and more.

Last week, developer and incremental growth enthusiast Nathaniel Barrett posted a couple old newspaper clippings to Twitter. They are both reports on Deep Ellum, one from 1966 and another from 1971, and they are about the same thing: the death of the neighborhood.

The timing of the articles is curious. In between 1966 and 1971, much of Deep Ellum was leveled to make way for what one of the stories describes as a “10-lane freeway leg,” which we know today as I-345—or that little stretch of concrete that separates Deep Ellum from downtown about which we have made such a fuss over the years. These two old news stories help explain the fuss.

In fact, taken together, the articles offer a unique and valuable historical document. They don’t merely capture the look and feel of the neighborhood during this pivotal – and fateful – stretch of its history, they also reflect some of the attitudes and mentalities that surrounded the tumultuous construction of the highway. Reading them, one thing stands out: this city’s almost immediate obliviousness toward the violence and devastation wreaked upon its historic neighborhoods by highway construction.

92. The legend of James “Jimmy” Skilaski was intertwined with the stories he told his lunch guests at his popular spot on Lemmon Avenue. A favorite of culinary philistines like Blackie Sherrod and John Anders, his popular dish of layered rice, butter, onions, cheese, and chili served in a tub kept him in business for four decades. He used the slogan “Chili Rice is very nice.” Skilaski died in 1990, but his chili rice remains a hot topic on Dallas history forums.

93. In the 1960s, Pepsi bought up the popular Dallas soft drink Woosie, which was launched by the Glazer family in 1909. Using the nickname of one of their grandchildren, the Glazer family produced the Woosie soft drink where the Federal Reserve Bank sits in (what is now) Uptown. After Prohibition, most of the Glazer family went into the alcohol wholesale business.

94. Dallas’ oldest food chain isn’t Pizza Hut or Bob’s or Campisi’s. It’s El Fenix, a pioneer of Tex-Mex that opened September 15, 1918. Miguel “Mike” Martinez, who immigrated to Dallas in 1911 amid the Mexico Revolution, debuted his Martinez Cafe, a small restaurant on McKinney Avenue, in an area once known as Little Mexico. After a couple of years of running his modest cafe, it was reborn as what we now know as El Fenix.

95. Highland Park High School’s Tom Faulkner played in popular Dallas bands such as The Oracle and the Coconuts and Flyer in the 1970s and 1980s. But you more likely know Faulkner from the jingles he was responsible for writing while working at the Richards Group: Motel 6’s violin and guitar instrumental and Chili’s “I want my baby back ribs” earworm. (Barbecue sauce.)

96. All of these chains are based in the Dallas area: Twisted Root Burger, TGI Friday’s, Pizza Hut, Bubba’s Cook’s Country, Dave & Buster’s, Chuck E. Cheese, Chili’s, Wingstop, and Maggiano’s.

97. David Wade (1924–2001), known as the “Rembrandt of the Kitchen,” was a Dallas “food demonstrator” (instead of chef) with a nationally syndicated cooking show. He also did all of the following: host a television show called Canine Comments; set a world record for preparing a gourmet meal while flying in a hot air balloon over Dallas; wrote nine cookbooks; and ran for mayor, which he lost in 1971 to Wes Wise.

98. Revolver Taco Lounge is run by James Beard-nominated owner-chef Regino “Gino” Rojas. The restaurant gets its name because Rojas’ father is a gun engraver, and the family owned a gun shop in Fort Worth before they opened the taqueria. Rojas’ father is known for his floral designs and scrollwork.

99. Highland Park Cafeteria was known for its Wall of Presidents. Opened by Sallie Goodman, it operated for 95 years in various locations. The final site, in Casa Linda Plaza, closed permanently in March 2020.

100. The Blue Front was a small, family-run German deli that was a mainstay in downtown Dallas. It was 115 years old when it closed in 1992. (That is still a longevity record.) The Blue Front started in 1877 as a saloon and was eventually purchased by the Schliepake family, who converted it to a bakery and deli and expanded into multiple locations. The original deli was located where Reunion Tower now sits. Dallas Mayor Robert Folsom declared October 22, 1977, Blue Front Day.

101. Luna’s Tortilla Factory is one of the most enduring holdouts from Dallas’ Little Mexico community. It is known today as Luna’s Tortillas, and was founded by the eponymous Maria Luna in 1924. It first opened at 2209 Caroline St., in Dallas’ bygone Little Mexico neighborhood, where she’d eventually hire 25 women to pat out 500 dozen tortillas each day. Luna made door-to-door deliveries in her 1925 Ford Model T. The Luna family still runs the business, which now churns out 600 corn tortillas per hour.

61. In 1978, director Ron Howard directed and filmed a made-for-TV movie at Lake Highlands High School and Town East Mall. Called Cotton Candy, the movie featured Howard’s American Graffiti co-star Charles Martin Smith.

62. Erica Abi Wright is better known to music fans as Erykah Badu. Her original stage name was Apples, one half of the hip-hop duo the Def Ones, while attending Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

63. The Old 97’s make an appearance (and serve as a fairly major plot point, in the 2006 film The Break-Up. Producer and star Vince Vaughn is a noted longtime fan of the 97’s. Their “Timebomb” was used in his 1998 movie Clay Pigeons.

64. KNON was the first radio station to play hip-hop in Dallas. The Funky Fresh Friday Show, hosted by Nippy Jones on KNON, was the first program centered on DJs and rappers in Dallas-Fort Worth. That’s why, according to longtime KNON DJ EZ Eddie D, Jones is the godfather of the city’s hip-hop scene.

65. Big D has been Dallas’ nickname for generations. It started with a Paul Crume column in the Dallas Morning News in the early ’50s titled “Big D,” and it really caught on after the 1956 musical The Most Happy Fella included a song titled “Big D,” which Bing Crosby recorded.

66. Before The D.O.C. became a star in Los Angeles working with Dr. Dre and N.W.A., Tracy Curry rapped in Dallas as Doc-T. He was a member of the Fila Fresh Crew alongside Dr. Rock and Fresh K.

67. In 1996, Walker, Texas Ranger featured the local band Baboon in the Season 3 finale, “Hall of Fame.” The band performed at Trees. The plot: a serial killer was posing as a photographer at one of their concerts.

68. In 1980, at the end of Dallas’ legendary run, international gambling houses offered 6-to-4 odds that Dusty Farlow had shot J.R. Ewing in the episode “A House Divided.” Kristin Shepard turned out to be the shooter, but Dusty Farlow, Sue Ellen’s former lover, was the odds-on favorite. Vegas oddsmakers also gave Tom Landry 500-to-1 odds and Roger Staubach 1,000-to-1 odds.

69. On January 8, 1991, a sophomore named Jeremy Wade Delle walked into his English class and killed himself in front of his teacher and classmates. News coverage of the incident spread around the country and captured the attention of Eddie Vedder, who was working on Pearl Jam’s debut album at the time. The incident became “Jeremy,” one of Pearl Jam’s most well-known songs.

70. In 2005, Sony, Def Jam, Priority Records, and Universal Motown Republic Group attempted to sign George Lopez’s rap label, T-Town Music. Universal Motown Republic Group eventually won the bidding war. The six-album deal was valued at $7.4 million, one of the biggest record contracts in Texas music history.

71. The Dallas-based children’s television series Wishbone aired for two seasons and was set in the fictional Texas town of Oakdale. The show was filmed throughout North Texas, at Lyrick Studios in Allen and a soundstage in Plano.

72. On January 10, 1978, the Sex Pistols famously played the Longhorn Ballroom. The openers were the local punk band the Nervebreakers. During their set, frontman Barry Kooda took a bite out of a dead fish someone threw onstage. A photo of him doing so ran in Rolling Stone.

73. The famous artist Julian Schnabel worked at The Grape before his career launched. Two years after the 1972 opening of The Grape, Schnabel showed up looking for work. He cooked in The Grape’s kitchen, painting on the side and storing his work in owner Charlotte Parker’s garage. After about six months, Schnabel decamped to New York City.

74. In 1983, DJ Ushy—according to DJ Snake of Nemesis, the first Dallas DJ to mix music live on the air—released the city’s first hip-hop song through Eron Records. Frequently heard at Twilight Skating Rink, “Neck Work” was a local hit that emerged into a regional classic.

75. The Starck Club was known for patrons popping ecstasy before it was made illegal, in part because DJ Kerry Jaggers had brought the drug with him from New York to Dallas. He was drawn here by Grace Jones, who performed at the Starck’s May 1984 opening.

76. Glory Window, the stained-glass spiral in the ceiling of the Philip Johnson-designed Chapel of Thanksgiving in downtown, briefly appears in the 2011 Terrence Malick film The Tree of Life.

77. Oliver Stone filmed these four movies in and around Dallas: Talk Radio (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991), and Any Given Sunday (1999). In the latter, Stone used Texas Stadium as the home of the fictional Dallas Knights.

78. Willie Nelson once recorded a video at the Round-Up Saloon, for “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other.” Nelson’s longtime tour manager, David Anderson, chose the location for the shoot after coming out to Nelson. Anderson’s partner, Darrin Davis, directed the video, in which Burt Reynolds appears.

79. Brian Baumgartner, who played Kevin Malone on the American version of The Office, is a graduate of Southern Methodist University.

80. The iconic local hip-hop group Dirty South Rydaz, T-Town Music’s signature group, started with 19 members. Over time, the roster narrowed down to Big Tuck, Tum Tum, Double T, Fat B, Lil’ Ronnie, and Addiction.

81. Demi Lovato’s mother, Dianna De La Garza, was a Cowboys Cheerleader during the 1982–83 season. De La Garza named her oldest daughter Dallas.

82. Lil Jon’s “Put Yo Hood Up” shouts out Oak Cliff among dozens of other locales across the country. The Atlanta rapper reached out to DJ Snake to produce “Who U Wit” and “Put Yo Hood Up” on his third studio album. The first ’hood mentioned in the title track is Oak Cliff, a reference to DJ Snake’s neighborhood and his group Nemesis’ 1987 single.

83. The 2003 made-for-NBC movie Saving Jessica Lynch transformed a block in the Cedars into an Iraqi city. When production wrapped, it was left that way, and the area was called Little Baghdad for about a decade.

84. In 2009, Jessica Simpson says Tony Romo accused her of seeing John Mayer behind his back, leading to the breakup of their two-year relationship.

85. The orgy scene in the 1976 film Logan’s Run was filmed in an 11-level club and restaurant called Oz, which was located in northeast Dallas.

86. The Dead Kennedys headlined the Rock Against Reagan protest concert outside the Dallas Memorial Coliseum during the 1984 Republican National Convention. Also on the bill? Reagan Youth and Cause for Alarm.

87. Following a successful career on Broadway, Margo Jones moved to Dallas and opened Theatre ’47 at the Magnolia Lounge in Fair Park. It was the first professional theater in the round and hosted the world premiere of Inherit the Wind, which went on to become a Broadway hit and an Oscar-nominated film. Sadly, the “Texas Tornado” died in 1955 at just 43 years old. After accidentally spilling red paint on her carpet during a party, Jones hired professional cleaners to repair the damage. The dry cleaning chemicals they used seeped into the carpet and later evaporated, filling her home with dangerous fumes. She inhaled them while sleeping, causing kidney failure, and died seven days later.

88. Bugs Bunny creator Tex Avery first heard the mischievous rabbit’s popular “What’s up, doc?” catchphrase in the halls while attending North Dallas High School in 1926. The school has several Looney Tunes murals in its hallways now.

89. Singer Phil Anselmo was the first member of Pantera to die. Though guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott was shot and killed onstage in 2004, and his drummer brother Vinnie Paul died from a heart condition in 2018, Anselmo was technically the first. He was pronounced dead for several minutes after a heroin overdose following a show at Coca-Cola Starplex on July 13, 1996. Paramedics were able to revive him.

90. Kumar Pallana, who appeared in four Wes Anderson films and one Deathray Davies music video, was the former owner of the home that became the Cosmic Café. Pallana had a yoga studio upstairs at the house on Oak Lawn, and his son Dipak opened what was originally called Cosmic Cup on the first floor in 1992. Anderson and Owen Wilson were frequent customers and eventually cast Kumar in their debut film, Bottle Rocket.

91. In 1982, David Crosby was arrested in Dallas for “freebasing in plain view” and possession of a semiautomatic handgun, which he said he carried for protection after the murder of John Lennon. He was arrested at the defunct nightclub Cardi’s, which Texas Monthly once described as “a down and dirty rock ’n’ roller’s paradise.”

15. Richardson’s Bette Nesmith Graham (1924-1980) had a claim to fame well before her son, Michael Nesmith, became a member of The Monkees. She was the inventor of Liquid Paper. She was a single mother working as a typist at Texas Bank & Trust when she invented the correction fluid, which she originally named Mistake Out. By 1979, she sold her company to the Gillette Corporation for $47.5 million and died of a stroke six months later, leaving $25 million to her famous son.

16. Before 7-Eleven became 7-Eleven, it was a small chain of 60 ice stores known as Tote’m Stores. They were small corner shops where one could pick up a few supplies and a block of ice wrapped in paper. After World War II, the company realized refrigeration was going to make its business obsolete and changed its purpose and its name, advertising the stores’ extended hours instead.

17. The original neon Mobile Oil flying horse, aka the Pegasus, stood atop the Magnolia Building from 1934 to 1999. Suffering structural issues, it was taken down and later replaced. The original went missing for 15 years and was eventually discovered in a shed by White Rock Lake. There was something unusual about it: It had bullet holes in it.

18. In 1951, Neiman Marcus opened its first suburban store. It was intended to be a “town and country store,” focused on moms and kids, with a basement playland complete with a bottomless orangeade dispenser. Today, the location of that suburb is better known as Preston Road, across from what is now Preston Center.

19. When Oak Cliff voted to go dry in 1958, it perhaps should not have come as a surprise. The area bragged about having more churches than any other neighborhood of Dallas (215) and more churches on a single block (there were 10 on 10^th Street) than any other place in the world. Before the booze vote, Oak Cliff was jumping with nightclubs, with many featuring strippers, that lined what was then called the Fort Worth cutoff.

20. Lower Greenville’s Granada Theater is one of only a few remaining classic-era cinemas still operating in Dallas. The Granada is a concert and events venue now. But the owners left the murals from its 1946 heyday, which were designed by the same artists responsible for the work in Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. But they misspelled one word: “Documentery.”

21. Samuel B. Pryor was elected the first mayor of Dallas in 1856, after the city incorporated as a form of government run by six aldermen. Pryor was atop the governance structure, which also included a treasurer and a constable. His term lasted until 1857; he was voted mayor by a vote of 58 to 34. According to the Texas State Historical Association, Civil War records show that Pryor served as a first lieutenant in the Confederate Army in 1861 under John Jay Good, who would become mayor himself in 1880.

22. In 1897, Dallas, with its 300 saloons, became home to the Anti-Saloon League. The group paired with the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement and the Dallas Pastors Association. “The Saloons Must Go” banners were posted through the city, until their efforts were successful in 1917. The national ban wasn’t passed until 1919. Statewide, the city was known as Dripping Dry Dallas.

23. At Christmastime, the Galleria Dallas is home to the world’s tallest indoor Christmas tree. The star at the top is 10 feet tall.

24. R.L. Thornton (1880-1964), the four-term Dallas mayor and founder of the Citizens Council really did say all of these things:

• “If it’s a do meetin’, I’m goin’. If it’s a don’t meetin’, I’m stayin’ home.”
• “Ain’t nobody built anything big enough in Dallas. As soon as it’s built, it’s outgrowed.”
• “All these people complainin’ about traffic downtown. Hell, it’s easy. You got big business, you got traffic. You got traffic, you got a problem. If you don’t want a problem, you go to Forney, Texas. In Forney, Texas, they got no problem, no traffic, and no business.”

25. All of these things were created in North Texas: Topsy Tail, laser tag, the automated teller machine, the frozen margarita, Barney the dinosaur, the integrated circuit, the shopping center, the drive-in restaurant, voicemail, German chocolate cake, and Doritos.

26. In 1971, Al Lipscomb became the first Black candidate for Dallas mayor. He finished in third. Lipscomb was the plaintiff in a lawsuit that established Dallas’ current single-member council districts, arguing that the citywide election process disenfranchised Black and Hispanic residents. He was elected to the City Council in 1984 and served seven terms. He resigned from the City Council in 2000 after a federal bribery conviction, which was later overturned. Many Black elected officials credited his leadership as opening the door for them to run in the city. A street now bears his name in South Dallas.

27. Big Texas was born in Kerens, Texas, about 70 miles southeast of Dallas. The future Big Tex started as a 49-foot-tall Santa Claus looming above Colket Avenue, meant to encourage holiday sales. After two years, the statue was bought in 1951 by State Fair president R.L. Thornton for $750.

28. Former Mayor Erik Jonsson and his city manager, George Schrader, noticed a problem when the Texas Department of Transportation began working on Woodall Rodgers. It would sever downtown from the rest of the city. It was too late to stop construction, but the two men hatched a plan to at least halt it until it could be redesigned below grade: they shut off the water. More than half a century later, we got Klyde Warren Park over that below-ground highway.

29. Paul Quinn College was originally in Waco. In 1990, the powerful Black businessman and philanthropist Comer Cottrell purchased the bankrupt campus and facilities of Bishop College, another historically Black institution. Cottrell offered the site to Paul Quinn College, the oldest HBCU west of the Mississippi, which had experienced financial difficulties in the mid to late 1980s at its central Texas home.

30. Across the Dallas skyline you can find the work of legendary architects Santiago Calatrava, Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, and Renzo Piano. Three of those—Johnson, Pei, and Piano—won the Pritzker Prize during their careers. Although Santiago Calatrava is responsible for the bone-white bridge that spans the Trinity River, he has never won a Pritzker Prize or designed a Dallas building, as Philip Johnson (Thanks-Giving Square, Comerica Bank, The Crescent, Cathedral of Hope), I.M. Pei (Fountain Place, Meyerson Symphony Center, Dallas City Hall), and Renzo Piano (Nasher Sculpture Center) have.

31. Dr. Robert E. Stoltz, onetime chairman of SMU’s psychology department, wrote the following as part of his commentary on the assassination of JFK:

“Dallas has tended to define ‘goodness’ in physical terms, such as the size and number of churches, length, breadth and height of buildings and expressways … . It ignores other statistics of ‘goodness’ which are available but less flattering—homicide rates, vehicular deaths, poverty, medical care for some types of patients, quality of education, evidences of real culture, etc.”

Stoltz wrote his lengthy professional explanation shortly after the murder, but it was kept under wraps until it was published in Warren Leslie’s 1964 book, Dallas Public and Private.

32. The first passenger train arrived in Dallas on July 16, 1872. The city celebrated by throwing a free picnic, which was attended by thousands of people. According to the Dallas Historical Society, the Houston and Texas Central Railway—which preceded the Union Pacific Railroad—was the first time the city saw its population balloon. The line eventually went up to Denison, where it connected with the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad, which shuttled passengers from Houston to St. Louis.

33. The Big Red Courthouse was constructed in 1892. But only after five other courthouses burned down. The first courthouse, a single-story log building constructed on land donated by John Neely Bryan, burned in 1846. Its replacement was built of brick but burned in the famous fire of 1862. When fire destroyed the third courthouse, in the early 1880s, it was rebuilt, only to burn down a year later. City leaders invested in a “fireproof” courthouse designed by architect James Flanders, but that building also burned, in 1890. Architect M.A. Orlopp finally designed Big Red using steel and stone materials similar to those used to rebuild Chicago after its Great Fire of 1871.

34. The entrepreneur Sarah Cockrell built the first bridge over the Trinity River. After her husband, Alexander, died in 1858, she took over the family’s businesses, including running a construction business, sawmill, and gristmill and developing a hotel. In 1860, she received a charter from the Texas Legislature to build an iron suspension bridge over the Trinity River. The bridge was not completed until after the Civil War, in 1872.

35. After the deadly 1908 flood, the only way Dallasites were able to cross the Trinity River was by boarding the Nellie Maurine, a pleasure boat owned by E.L. Gale that was named after his two daughters. Gale was a believer that shipyards and a wharf could be established in Dallas.

36. The Houston Street viaduct opened in 1912. Its claim to fame was that it was the longest concrete bridge in the world. After the flood of 1908 swept away most of the bridges connecting Oak Cliff to downtown, the 6,562-foot reinforced concrete viaduct was built at a cost of $570,000. Aside from a concrete handrail that was added in the early 1930s and the addition of stairs down to the Reunion Arena parking lot, little has been changed.

37. In 1944, Dallas had a prison camp that housed captured officers from Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps. at Winfrey Point at White Rock Lake.

38. John Armstrong and Thomas Marsalis established the town of Oak Cliff after helping to construct a commuter railway line across the Trinity River from downtown Dallas. In 1906, Armstrong split with Marsalis and purchased land north of Dallas to repeat the experiment. After establishing Highland Park, Armstrong died two years later, in 1908.

39. In 1899, Edward Howland Robinson “Ned” Green, the peg-legged millionaire heir to the Texas Midland Railroad, had a Phaeton delivered from St. Louis on his own railroad. Green was later behind the first 100-mile car race at Fair Park, in 1905. That Phaeton was the first car to ever be brought to Dallas.

40. People line up in Lexuses and horse-drawn carriages to see the Christmas lights in Highland Park every winter. But, beginning in the 1950s, the large number of azaleas caused people to make the annual pilgrimage each spring. First brought over by the La Reunion settlers, the flowering shrubs thrived in Lakewood and were popularized in Highland Park. Interest peaked in the ’60s and ’70s, with postcards showcasing the fuchsia-colored blooms.

41. As the civil rights movement gained momentum in Texas during the 1960s, the department store H.L. Green, once located in downtown’s Wilson Building, was the first store in the city to desegregate its lunch counter.

42. In 1937, a State Fair sensation caused an international uproar. A virgin sacrifice was planned to be part of the Greater Texas and Pan-American Exposition. Ultimately, the damsel slated to reenact an Aztec human sacrifice ritual was replaced by the more historically accurate male warrior, per the request of the Mexican consul general, but the whole thing sparked fierce debate: sex and ticket sales vs. historical accuracy.

43. All of the following can be found at downtown’s J. Erik Jonsson Central Library:

• One of 25 extant broadside copies of the Declaration of Independence that were printed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776
• A “first folio” of William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies, which was printed in 1623, shortly after the playwright’s death
• A handcrafted scale model of a Viking Drakkar longship that pays tribute to Jonsson’s Scandinavian heritage

44. WET Design, a Los Angeles-based firm founded by former Disney Imagineers, is responsible for such choreographed liquid marvels as the Fountains of Bellagio in Las Vegas; the Olympic Cauldron for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, Utah; and The Dubai Fountain. You may already know that the company’s first major project, Fountain Place, was completed in Dallas in 1986. Dixieland jazz clarinetist Pete Fountain headlined the grand opening of the prism-shaped skyscraper and its revolutionary dancing fountain.

45. In Oak Cliff, an Ohio whiskey baron once turned Lake Cliff Park into “The Southwest’s Greatest Playground.” There was a mile-long roller coaster, a Japanese village, a 2,000-seat theater, and the world’s largest skating rink. Liquor distributor and Oak Cliff developer Charles Mangold bought 50 acres at the southeast corner of Zang and Colorado boulevards, where he built and opened an amusement park in 1906. After a fire destroyed a number of the attractions, he sold the property at a loss to the city of Dallas in 1914.

46. In 1925, Ginger Rogers won the statewide Charleston dance contest at the Baker Hotel in downtown Dallas. Ginger Rogers’ mother was a theater critic for the Fort Worth Record. Rogers said that waiting in the wings at the Majestic Theatre inspired her showbiz career.

47. In 1944, Juanita Craft became the first Black woman to vote in a Dallas County public election. The vote came after the Supreme Court decision in the case Smith v. Allwright, which overturned a Texas state law that authorized parties to set their own voting rules. The Democratic Party in Texas had used this rule to hold all-White primary elections, and since the party dominated state politics, the primary was essentially the general election. Craft later served as a Democratic precinct chair for 20 years and served on the Dallas City Council.

48. In the late 1980s, highway engineers tasked with expanding Central Expressway anticipated moving about a dozen graves that had been paved over when the road was originally built in the ‘40s. They found many, many more. A team of archaeologists in collaboration with the Black Dallas Remembered Inc. historical society exhumed more than 1,500 bodies from their graves under Lemmon Avenue. Historian and Black Dallas Remembered founder Dr. Mamie McKnight advocated to relocate these graves, remnants from a freedman’s town established by former enslaved Dallasites, which became the largest cemetery excavation project in the country.

49. The well-to-do residents of Swiss Avenue, Dallas’ first designated historic district, had a trolley line that ran behind its houses, down what’s now an alleyway between Swiss and Gaston. The especially well-off owned private cars. It is long gone.

50. One Dallas mayor has been murdered. The Swiss-born Benjamin Long (formerly Lang) came to Dallas as part of the La Reunion Colony. During the Civil War, he supported the Union and moved to Mexico. After the war, he was appointed mayor by the Reconstruction government and helped acquire land for the expansion of the Texas and Pacific Railroad. On June 23, 1877, following a dispute at a saloon with a patron who had not paid his tab, Long was shot and killed near the corner of Austin and Wood streets, near the present-day Omni Hotel.

51. Technically illegal, gambling was quite popular in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. Eddie Zimmerman, Benny Binion, and Warren Diamond all owned gambling houses here. Belle Starr did not. Starr was notorious for horse stealing and other crimes, and was known to play a hand of poker or two, but she never operated a gambling operation. Eddie Zimmerman owned the Cipango Club, Warren Diamond operated out of the St. George Hotel, and Benny Binion hosted a dice game at the Southland Hotel, all under the blind eye of Sheriff “Smoot” Schmid (who ran the posse that gunned down Bonnie and Clyde).

52. Oak Lawn was once home to the first gay bar in the state, Club Reno, which opened in 1947. It is still home to Texas’ oldest Lesbian bar: Sue Ellen’s opened in 1989.

53. Built in 1917, the Palace Blacksmith Shop in the Carson Warehouse Building on Main Street is thought to be the last of its kind in Dallas.

54. Swimming has been banned at White Rock Lake since September 1, 1952, when the city needed to use the reservoir as a water source following a drought. The city stopped drawing water from the lake in 1964, but the ordinance remained. Today, the lake is rich in nutrients for fish, but contaminants from the bacteria would likely make us humans sick.

55. According to the state of Texas, Oak Lawn by way of Cedar Springs is home to the earliest known historic site in Dallas County. Cedar Springs was a town settled in 1843, after Col. G.W. Cooke established it to build a military road from North Texas to Austin. The area was renamed Oak Lawn toward the end of the 19^th century and was annexed by the city of Dallas between 1920 and 1940. An historic marker lives in Craddock Park, at Lemmon Avenue and the Dallas North Tollway.

56. The Dallas Museum of Art, originally known as the Dallas Art Association, had its first exhibition in the Adolphus Hotel in 1915. The museum’s first catalog of its permanent collection would be published the next year.

57. The Supreme Court of the United States issued a landmark First Amendment ruling after an American flag was burned during protests at the Republican National Convention in 1984. A group of protesters removed an American flag from the Mercantile Bank Building and handed it to Gregory Lee Johnson. He put it under his shirt, walked to City Hall, poured lighter fluid on the flag, and sparked it with a lighter. He was among 100 arrested during the act but the only one charged. The Supreme Court ruled it was protected speech in a 5-4 opinion.

58. In 1913, the city of Dallas refused to annex the suburb of Highland Park. Its 500 residents voted to incorporate in 1913, after the city of Dallas refused to annex it. Dallas tried to walk back its decision in 1919, but Highland Park held strong.

59. Little Egypt was a freedman’s town near White Rock Lake that was all but forgotten until a Richland College professor led an architectural dig. Little Egypt was settled by freed slaves in 1880. The neighborhood was at the corner of modern-day Thurgood Lane and Shoreview Road, in Lake Highlands.

60. According to Houston attorney Brian White, who conducted a study in 2016 to analyze 2 million traffic accident records in the state of Texas, LBJ Freeway at Skillman Street is the most dangerous intersection in Dallas, which was the site of more than 130 wrecks and 100 injuries over three years.

1. “Dandy Don” Meredith was the first Dallas Cowboy, signed out of SMU in 1959 by Clint Murchison to a professional services contract before the team even had a nickname. The Cowboys shared the Cotton Bowl with the Dallas Texans, now the Kansas City Chiefs. The Cowboys went the entire 1960 season without a win, gaining their first victory in 1961 in the opener against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

2. On January 24, 1994, listeners were introduced to a new form of radio in 1310 The Ticket. But the first words spoken weren’t from Mike Rhyner or Greg Williams or George Dunham. Skip Bayless made the introduction to a radio format that has been copied across the country, part sports and part guy talk.

3. In 2014, UNT graduate and bobsledder Johnny Quinn gained worldwide fame at the 2014 Winter Olympics for punching through his bathroom door in the poorly constructed Olympic Village after the door became stuck.

4. In 1964, the Dallas Cowboys drafted gold-medal-winning sprinter “Bullet” Bob Hayes. The wide receiver went on to be enshrined in the Cowboys Ring of Honor (2001) and the Pro Football Hall of Fame (2009). Twenty years later, the team tried to re-create the magic by drafting Carl Lewis, who won four golds at the 1984 Summer Olympics. Lewis didn’t play football in college, but the Cowboys selected him with a 12^th-round pick anyway. He never played for the Cowboys. (Lewis also never played for the Chicago Bulls, who drafted him that year as well.)

5. On October 19, 1925, the Wiley College Wildcats squared off against the Langston University Lions, a game that ended in a scoreless tie. It was the very first year of the State Fair Classic, the annual HBCU football rivalry game held at the Cotton Bowl. In the beginning, the State Fair Classic was held on “Negro Day,” a segregated event where Fair Park opened its grounds to Black visitors, and was played on Monday nights through the 1960s. Today, Grambling State plays Prairie View every year at the Cotton Bowl, though this year’s version was moved to AT&T Stadium due to the pandemic.

6. In 1940, Oak Cliff got its own home for minor league ball in the form of Burnett Field. The Dallas Rebels played on Rebel Field, which burned to the ground and was replaced with Burnett Field. The team was replaced with the Dallas Eagles. Dallas native Ernie Banks played in-town for the Dallas Black Giants in 1949 before leaving for the Kansas City Monarchs and then the Chicago Cubs.

7. Dirk Nowitzki was actually the third German player drafted by the Dallas Mavericks. The first two were Detlef Schrempf and Uwe Blab, who were both selected in the first round of the 1985 draft, along with Canadian center Bill Wennington.

8. Of all the legends to don a Dallas Cowboys jersey, none of their numbers have been retired. Tex Schramm came up with the idea to have a Ring of Honor instead of retiring numbers. At least officially. Nos. 8, 12, 22, and 74 have not been in circulation since being worn by Troy Aikman, Roger Staubach, Emmitt Smith, and Bob Lilly, respectively.

9. The night before Jerry Jones bought the Dallas Cowboys and replaced Tom Landry with Miami Hurricanes coach Jimmy Johnson, the two were photographed eating with their wives at Mia’s, on Lemmon Avenue, by a 24-year-old Dallas Morning News intern named J. Mark Kegans. The picture remains on the wall in the restaurant’s new location just down the street.

10. Neal Broten, a member of the “Miracle on Ice” team, put the Stars on the board for the first time in a 6-4 win over the Detroit Red Wings on October 5, 1993.

11. The Dallas Chaparrals, the first professional team in the city, were a charter member of the American Basketball Association and began playing in the 1967–68 season. They were coached by Hall of Famer Cliff Hagan, who also played forward. The team moved to San Antonio before the 1973–74 season, where it eventually became known as the Spurs and joined the NBA after the 1976 merger.

12. In 1965, four years after he got the first public tennis center built in the city, Dallas Tennis Association president Jack Turbin swooped in when a Mexico City operation that was supposed to host the Davis Cup didn’t have the funds. Turbin brought the tournament to Dallas, where Arthur Ashe won on the courts at the Samuell Grand Tennis Center.

13. The first draft pick in Dallas Mavericks history was Kiki Vandeweghe. He was taken with the No. 11 pick in the 1980 draft. He never signed with the team and was traded to the Denver Nuggets for a 1981 first-round pick (which became Rolando Blackman). He was booed thunderously and continuously every time he returned to play at Reunion Arena. Vandeweghe is currently the executive vice president for basketball operations at the NBA’s league office.

14. According to Forbes magazine, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones in 2020 passed banker and numbers theorist Andy Beal to become the richest man in Dallas. While Jones is valued at $8.4 billion to Beal’s $7.9 billion, Beal is also known for winning one of the largest single hands in poker history: $11.7 million in 2004 at the Bellagio Las Vegas.