2011 August Oak Cliff

The desegregaT ion of dallas schools

In the words of neighbors who were there 40 years ago, this is how it all played out.

White students from the Sunset High School zone are bused to mostly black Pinkston High School in this Sept. 7, 1971 Dallas Times Herald photo. PHOTO BYMADELINE STEVENS

Hair-raising secrets

The complicated relationship between a man and his mane

I was in an elevator the other day when a guy with a buzz cut complimented me that I could get my hair to “stand up”.

“I wish I could get my hair to do that,” he said.

Not wanting to say my secret wasn’t my hair’s personal integrity but instead a $15 bottle of “product”, I thanked him and thought to myself: “I wish I had the guts to have a buzz cut so I wouldn’t constantly be terrorized by my hair’s insatiable demand for ever-more-expensive ‘product’ and attention.”

I spend more time worrying about my hair than any other portion of my body. That’s partly because I can’t do much in five minutes to “improve” the rest of me: Barring expensive surgery or months of hard work, I have to live with the hand I was dealt there.

I ask of it. But then, just as quickly and often after it has gobbled up enough product to prevent a return, it turns on me again.

I hate to admit this about one of my own, but there are days when I know that if my hair could form a finger, it wouldn’t be indicating “I’m No. 1”.

thoughtfulness.

But my hair offers a deceptively quick opportunity to be a better person. If I’m nice to it, and if I lovingly shampoo it and brush it and comb it, my hair might take the rest of my body’s plight into consideration and help say something positive about me to the rest of the world.

Then again, it might not. I keep telling myself my hair doesn’t have a mind of its own, but just a glance in the mirror tells me whether my hair is taking my pleas to heart, or if it’s simply blowing me off and doing its own thing.

It’s annoying, and sometimes downright mean, when my hair won’t cooperate, when it decides to force a little corner to stick straight up while coercing the rest of its pals to bend the other direction. And even when I bribe it with the best, most nourishing and most expensive “product”, my hair doesn’t always appreciate my thoughtfulness. At first, it may seem placated; sometimes it even does what

This kind of back-talk makes me insecure, and I find myself not paying attention to people talking with me. Instead, I’m preoccupied with my hair, which is trying to distract them and grab all of the attention for itself. Those days, even cutting it all off — just to show it — doesn’t seem like punishment enough.

Yet when I look at other peoples’ hair, it always looks the same every day, even when they complain they’re having a “bad hair” day. Why is their hair so cooperative?

So I ask myself: “Why do I care so much about what my hair thinks and does if no one else spends much time noticing it? Why can’t I just quit worrying about it?”

But I can’t. It just won’t let me. It’s flapping in the breeze at me right now.

And even when I brgibe it with the best, most nourishing and mostg expensive “product”,g my hair doesn’t always appreciate my

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EMILY TOMAN

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RACHELSTONE

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Advocate, © 2011, is published monthly by East Dallas –Lakewood People Inc. Contents of this magazine may not be reproduced. Advertisers and advertising agencies assume liability for the content of all advertisements printed, and therefore assume responsibility for any and all claims against the Advocate. The publisher reserves the right to accept or reject any editorial or advertising material. Opinions set forth in the Advocate are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the publisher’s viewpoint. More than 200,000 people read Advocate publications each month. Advertising rates and guidelines are available upon request. Advocate Publications are available free of charge throughout our neighborhoods, one copy per reader.

4/4/3 LA Dutch Colonial in Kessler Square

HISTORICAL PHOTOS OF RECOGNIZABLE OAK CLIFF PLACES

07.05.11 We recently came across a website for alumni of Bryan Adams High in East Dallas that contained some historical photos of Oak Cliff. The post is over a year old, but since we just found it, we figured most of our readers probably missed it, too. Our favorites include the photo above, taken on the Houston Street Viaduct in 1950. There’s also a picture of an old streetcar on Edgefield Avenue and a photo of the Cabana Hotel, where the Beatles once stayed. It’s now the lovely state jail facility for women on Commerce at Riverfront. —RACHELSTONE

Search: historical photos to see more old Oak Cliff images

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Breastfeeding is good for you and best for your baby. At Kessler Women’s Healthcare, we want to help you realize your personal breastfeeding goals with our medical lactation consulting service. Medical Lactation Consulting educates you and helps you prepare before your baby is born, and then provides care, advice and encouragement every step of the way after the birth of your baby.

Let us help you provide the best possible start for your baby.

lAunCH

AIDS Arms Inc. is an Oak Cliff-based nonprofit that started about 25 years ago to offer services to people infected with HIV and AIDS, as well of those at risk of contracting these viruses. AIDS Arms provides social services, counseling, group therapy, HIV testing and prevention, and medical care. They serve about 7,000 people a year. Earlier this year, the nonprofit moved its offices to Jefferson Towers, and this month, AIDS Arms is expected to open a new clinic to offer healthcare to some 2,500 people. We sat down with AIDS Arms executive director RAElInE nOblES to talk about the $1.9-million clinic and the mission of AIDS Arms.

Your office is really nice.

Yes. Our building that we had before was a building with no windows. So now everyone in our group that’s here has a window. I knew it would improve morale, but I had no idea the impact of a window on people’s outlook and attitude and happiness, including my own.

Where is the new AIDs Arms clinic?

It’s on Sunset, just one block away from here. We have the Peabody Health Center in South Dallas, which will remain open. The new clinic is to expand our capacity, not move it. Peabody sees almost 1,200 patients, and their capacity is 900, so they’ve been over capacity for a while. And we will add another 2,500 patients to our capacity with the new clinic.

Funding to AIDs and HIV services always takes a hit during economic downtimes. Does that affect you?

Oh, yes, definitely. But we’ve planned accordingly. For so long, government contracts and public health grants have been our mainstay. When we planned for the new clinic, we started in 2008, just as the economy was turning. And that meant that our government contracts would be hit eventually. So we’ve got several sustainability measures built into the new clinic.

WHAT ARE THOSE?

We’ll have our own lab, so we can get revenue that way. We’ll have an electronic medical records system, so we’ll be able to bill insurance now. When you don’t have an electronic medical records system, you have to bill everything by hand, and that is very time consuming, so it doesn’t offset the cost of the time. We’ve gotten involved very heavily in HIV research over the past five years. Research is very lucrative, and it will help offset the losses from uninsured patients.

HOW MANY OF YOUR PATIENTS ARE UNINSURED?

Most of them are uninsured. About 30 percent of our total patient census has some kind of insurance, including Medicaid and Medicare. Private insurance is about 8 percent. Seventy percent or more are uninsured. Federal dollars used to pay for all the uninsured, but with the economy the way it is and budget cuts, that’s not the case anymore.

WHAT ELSE CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE NEW CLINIC?

Well, it will open by late summer, the end of August. It will have an onsite pharmacy, a full lab, about 16 exam rooms. And then we’ll have a community resource center where we’ll ask some other nonprofits to come in and help with some other needs like food, transportation, legal services and things like that.

WHAT CAN OUR READERS TO DO HELP THE MISSION OF AIDSARMS?

The most fun way to help us is to come out to Life Walk every year. That’s Oct. 2 this year, and that’s the AIDS walk in Dallas. We get about 8,000 people each year. Life Walk adds the human aspect to our programs. It allows us to do more for our clients than just the minimum. There’s also a school-supply drive. We serve over 800 children under the age of 16 who are either living with HIV or in the home of a guardian who’s living with it. That usually means they live in poverty because of the expense of the disease. We also have a Thanksgiving food drive, a Christmas toy drive. We’re always looking for volunteers just to help us at the office or at events, if people want to get involved that way.

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU THINKWE SHOULD TALK ABOUT?

There are 6,400 people who are not receiving medical care for HIV in this community. We know that good medical care does two things for people. It increases their quality of life, and it reduces the transmission of the disease to others. When you have 6,400 people who cannot access medical care because of certain barriers, those are the ones most likely to spread the virus. There are 1,000 new cases of HIV in the Dallas area every year. We go from month-to-month sometimes, year-to-year. ButAIDSArms is all about those 6,400 people who are not in care. If a clinic is what it takes to get a third of those people into medical care, then we just curbed that disease’s growth.

—RACHEL STONE

FIND MORE information at aidsarms.org

HEALTH RESOURCE R

OPHTHALMOLOGIST

WHAT GIVES?

PULMONARY & CRITICAL CARE

Our

Small

ways that you can make a big difference for neighborhood nonprofits

RECYCLE MAGAZINES

Don’t you hate it when you get to the doctor’s office, and there’s nothing to read? It’s a lot of wasted time staring at the bad décor and hoping you don’t pick up a bug from some coughing child. One Kessler Plaza neighbor had the idea to recycle magazines by bringing them to Methodist hospital to use in their waiting rooms. “I contacted the hospital and found out it was a definite need to replenish magazines in the waiting rooms because they disappear daily,” says Stacey Hilburn. So she and her neighbors decided to collect their old magazines, and Hilburn delivers them to the hospital about once every month or two. “My neighborhood has been very responsive, and we’ve collected over 100 magazines,” she says. “It’s just a little contribution, but most magazines go in the recycle bin anyway, and this way they can continue to be useful and recycled at the same time.” To donate magazines, call Hilburn at 214.331.4414.

KNOW OF WAYS that neighbors can spend time, attend an event, or purchase or donate something to benefit a neighborhood nonprofit? Email your suggestion to launch@ advocatemag.com.

WWW.STRONGEYECARE.NET

4131 N. CENTRAL EXPY, STE 725, DALLAS, TX 75204 214-522-6380

Bradley Strong, M.D. Board Certified by

the American Board of Ophthalmology

Dr. Strong is committed to compassionate, quality eye care. He offers medical and surgical care, including cataracts, glaucoma, diabetic eye disease, macular degeneration, and dry eye syndrome. He also offers routine eye exams and contact lenses. All ages are welcome, from children to seniors. Our office is conveniently located at Central Expressway and Fitzhugh, just one exit south of Knox/Henderson.

3600 GASTON AVE., SUITE 1052 DALLAS, TX 75246 214.824.4412

Dr. Shotwell, MD, PA

clinic focuses on helping patients breathe better. Whether one has asthma, allergies, COPD, or chronic cough, we can investigate the cause and treat as indicated. We attempt to address the whole person, not just symptoms. Therefore we also can help with weight loss and sleep issues.

out&about

in august

08.26.11 B oB SCH nei DeR $22.50 Bob Schneider performs two shows in one night at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at The Kessler Theater. The singer-songwriter has had a busy career performing as a solo artist, releasing hundreds of digital singles and multiple albums, as well as fronting three bands — The Scabs, The Ugly Americans and Texas Bluegrass Massacre. Schneider’s music can be described as a conglomeration of rock, country, folk, funk and soul. This versatility is the reason why his fans have come to “expect the unexpected” from him. Based in Austin, Schneider released his latest album, “A Perfect Day”, this year. He has been on tour for most of 2011. Doors open at 6 p.m. 1230 W. Davis, 214.272.8346, thekessler.org —NicKi Koe TTiNg

THROUGH

09.09

in FlU en Ce

FRee The Oak Cliff Cultural Center presents a threeperson exhibit, Sedrick Huckaby, Carlos Donjuan and Marilyn Jolly — painters who are faculty at the University of Texas at Arlington. 223 W. Jefferson, 214.670.3777, dallasculture.org

THROUGH 09.28 AR gen T ine TA ngo le SS on S $10-15 Tango Canyengue Dallas is offering Argentine Tango classes at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center 7:30–8:45 p.m. Wednesdays. No experience or dance partner is necessary. 223 W. Jefferson, 214.670.3777, dallasculture.org

08.02, 08.09 & 08.19 MAY o R’S SUMM eR R e AD ing PR ogRAM FRee The Mayor’s Summer Reading Program continues this month at the North Oak Cliff Library with movie screenings, storytime and interactive children’s activities. 302 W. 10th, 214.670.7555, dallaslibrary2.org

08.04 & 08.18

BAR eFooT AT TH e B elM on T

$20 The Barefoot at the Belmont concert series continues this month

with Austin’s rising artist Sahara Smith and Louisiana-based singer-songwriter Dylan LeBlanc Aug. 4. James McMurtry and Greg Schroeder perform Aug. 18. Doors open at 7 and the shows start at 8 p.m. 901 Fort Worth Avenue, kxt.org

Delicious

A guide to dining & drinking in our neighborhood

DIVE VIBES

Th E non DES cr IpT W h ITE BuIl DI ng on West Davis may seem a little sketchy, but there’s nothing to fear at Tradewinds Social Club — really, manager Melissa Miller says. “People are afraid to come down here, but our bar is so safe.” If that doesn’t offer some comfort, the dive bar’s gourmet pizza will. The owners make their own sauce on Oak Cliff Pizza crust with several options for toppings. For a bit of playful contrast, perhaps, it’s served on a silver platter. First timers should try Tradewinds’ signature blue shot. It’s a rum-based drink, and that’s about all we know. “If you tell people what’s in it, they won’t drink it,” Miller says. “But once they try it, they love it.” Tradewinds opened in 1968 with a very different vibe. “It used to be an old school honky tonk bar. It wasn’t very lively.” Today, it’s a popular hangout for people from all walks of life. Every week, local bands and DJs perform, and once the owners get the projector working again, they’ll bring back “dinner and a B-movie” nights. But if you’re looking for a quiet night at the bar, stop by on Sunday when happy hour is all day, and no events are scheduled.

—Emily Toman

DaVIS & W EST mor E lan D 214.337.9075

T ra DEWIn DSoakclIff.com

line can get pretty long, so call ahead.

BEcklEy & ElmorE

214.943.5214

h ouse

This no-frills steak house has become a fixture in o ak Cliff, serving what are likely the best baked potatoes in Dallas.

JEffErSon & BIShop

214.942.6806 charcoDallaS.com

3

taC os

it may look a little dingy from the outside, but here you can get some pretty decent tacos on the cheap.

214.330.5409 DaVIS & harTSDalE

Pictured: pepperoni, tomato and basil pizza; beer

2 Char Co Broiler s teak

Cesar’s

Three more dives in oak cliff

The BE ST EAT S in

our neighborhood

PIZZA LOUNGE $$ODFB Voted Dallas best late night restaurant 2010 ! Pizza LOUNGE offers their own unique, made-from-scratch recipes featuring fresh made pizza dough and sauce. Appetizers, salads and desserts are also an option in there eclectic, funky atmosphere as you listen to off beat tunes. Open 11am. 7 days a week till late late night at 841 exposition ave, Dallas. 214.887.6900. Pizzaloungedallas.com and on facebook.

$3.00 frozen $3.50 rocks 11am-7pm/7 days

CUPCAKE RIESLING ($12) WASHINGTON >

Wine drinkers are creatures of habit. Once we find like, it’s almost impossible to get us to try something different. That’s one reason why the wine business spends so much time and money on marketing gimmicks, cute wine labels and the like.They know how difficult it is to overcome our lethargy.

But wine should not be that way. There are, at best guess, more than 15,000 different wines on sale in the UnitedStates, so it’s not like we don’t have a lot of choices. And there is plenty of quality within that quantity. Wine, whether cheap or expensive, sweet or dry, red or white, has never been better.

Nevertheless, how many times have we said, “But like that,” when someone has suggested we try something new. I’m no different in that regard, and it sometimes takes all my professionalism to taste a wine I’m not going to like.

So, this month, try something that you don’t like. What’s the worst thing that can happen? You’ll discover a new wine? Here are a few suggestions:

Barbier Mediterranean Red ($6). This red blend from Spain doesn’t have the bitter tannins and harsh acid of many red wines. In fact, chill this a you’ll wonder why you didn’t try it before.

Too many wine drinkers Texas wine stinks, even if they’ve never tried it. That’s open minded, isn’t it? Becker’s reserve merlot ($18), which won a gold medal at the recent Lone Star International, should change most minds. And this recommendation comes from someone who doesn’t much care for merlot.

Cupcake’s riesling from Washington ($12), another gold medal winner at Lone Star. It’s not sweet like white zinfandel, but the sweetness is a pleasant part of the wine.

—JEFF SIEGEL

JEFF SIEGEL’SWEEKLYWINE

WITH YOUR WINE

Grilled black bean burritos

Another fast-food staple that is easy to make at home and actually tastes better. Not only does it pair with almost any kind of wine, but it’s a great way to use leftover rice or that can of black beans (or pinto beans) that has been sitting in the cupboard. And don’t be afraid to add chopped jalapeños, diced onion or even pitted olives.

Serves 4-6, takes 30 minutes

2 c cooked black beans

2 c cooked rice

1/2 to 1 c best quality green salsa

6 large flour tortillas, warmed

1 c grated cheese

1. Mix all ingredients, except the salsa and tortillas, in a bowl. Add the salsa a bit at a time, until you have a thick mixture that you can spoon onto the tortillas.

2.Spoon 1/6 of the mixture into the center of a tortilla. Wrap the tortilla into a log shape, folding the bottom over the mixture, then tucking in each side, and then folding the top over all.

3. Put a tablespoon of olive oil in a non-stick skillet, and warm over medium heat. Grill the burritos, a couple at a time, in the skillet, foldside down first. Cook on each side for 2 or 3 minutes or until each side is brown.

ask the WINE GUY?

ARE THERE REALLY HEALTH BENEFITS TO DRINKING WINE?

Yes, in moderation — a glass or two a day. Researchers still aren’t quite sure what all the benefits are and what causes them, but they seem to be centered around your heart and come from a compound called reseveratrol. Red wine seems to produce more resveratrol than white wine.

—JEFF SIEGEL

ASK THE WINE GUY taste@advocatemag.com

PAINTING WITH A

Express your inner artist! Instructors lead attendees in creating paintings with a featured piece of art, bring nothing more than your imagination, wine or beverage. Perfect for Private Parties as well.

5202 Lovers Ln. 214.350.9911 paintingwithatwist.com

Carrington Mason, D.O. Allan C. Van Horn, M.D. Michael D. White, P.A.-C Jeffrey C. Toubin, M.D. Siddharth G. Jain, M.D.

A GRAY MATTER

Forty years ago, the Dallas Independent School District forcibly desegregated its schools. Many involved in the painful, frustrating and necessary process, which lasted more than three decades, are still around to share their stories.

NTIL 40 YEARS AGO THIS FALL, black students living in Dallas were relegated to a small portion of the city’s schools. The rest were reserved for white students. Even though the U.S.Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education lawsuit outlawed segregation by race 17 years earlier, Dallas public schools hadn’t fully heard the message.

In 1971, however, after plenty of lip-service but little concrete action from public school administrators, a federal judge forced black and white students to integrate through busing.

It didn’t take long for the fallout to begin. Lives were disrupted. Students and parents threatened each other. Families both black and white fled their neighborhoods for suburban and private schools.

This story isn’t an attempt to analyze that history-altering process. Instead, 40 years after desegregation began, key neighborhood residents involved in the process look back on those years and tell us in their own words what the changes meant to them, our neighborhood and our city.

Ed Cloutman was beginning his career as an attorney in Dallas when Sam Tasby walked into his office in 1970 saying he wanted his two sons to be allowed to attend their neighborhood school. Cloutmanfiled the lawsuit and spent the next 33 years defending the cause of Tasby and all minority families and children in the Dallas school district. Today Cloutman spends most of his time representing labor cases.

CLOUTMAN: I grew up in Louisiana, and I never attended a school with African American children in it until I got to college. It was not a big deal where I grew up, just one of those things that was there. My parents were reasonably progressive for the time. There was lot of boisterous language about the early civil rights activists who would ride the buses or sit at the lunch counter, and mother and daddy would say, ‘Look, this is going to take a while, and there will be a lot of things said you shouldn’t believe wholeheartedly, and it will be a while before our Negro friends are allowed to participate in the things we do, but it’s coming, so you should never talk badly about these friends.’ And there wasn’t any talk in my house for fear of my mother and my daddy. Those were unusual times. Different now, thank god. turn the page to continue

Ed Cloutman

Before the start of the 1971-72 school year, Oak Cliff residents gathered outside the Dallas schools adminstration building to protest the busing plan, shown in this Aug. 5, 1971, Dallas Times Herald photo.

Vicki Cardarella is a third-generation Cliffite who entered Kimball High School the year it opened, in 1958, and graduated in 1964. She later returned to her alma mater as a teacher. Today she lives in Kessler Park with her husband and daughter.

cardarella: I can remember the colored restrooms and colored water fountains when I was a little girl. My dad owned a dress manufacturing company, and a black man worked for my dad, and my dad taught me to treat that man with just as much respect as any other man — because he was a man.

Albert Black graduated from W.W. Samuell High School in 1977. Today he livesin Kessler Park and isan entrepreneur, most notably as the founder, president and CEO of On-Target Supplies & Logistics, which operates out of our neighborhood. He has held many influential positions in Dallas, including the first African American chairman of the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce board.

Black: Myfatherworkedasa doorman at the Baker Hotel, which is now where the Bell Plaza [now At&t Plaza] is on Commerce street. At a very, very young age, not even 6 years old, he’s telling me about the people who are running the City of Dallas. He enjoyed opening doors for the city leaders, the white men who the highways are now named after.

My father read two Dallas newspapers and took a lot of magazines, and ourallowancewasbasedonreadingarticlesthathethoughtwould challenge us. I didn’t have a chance to read the sports page, but I had to read the editorial piece. I wanted to read [African American columnist] Carl Rowan, and he would always give me[conservativecolumnist]William Buckley’s articles. My father understood the nature of being provoked and being educated.

Steve Cumming graduated from Kimball High School in 1974, and he’s president of the Justin F. Kimball High School Alumni Association.

cumming: Dallaswas a very racist city. the Klan was very active until the end of the ’80s or early ’90s and may still be in some form. the blacks lived in their area, and the whites lived in their area, and when the blacks moved in, the whites moved out. I can remember in high school before desegregation started, schools that were black schools, schools that were white schools, schoolsthatwereHispanicschools. that’s the way it had always been.

Black: I don’t think any one individual was waking up in the morning to be that bigoted. I do believe that the coming

Vicki Cardella

together of neighbors believing that they were protecting and somehow guarding institutions — their neighborhoods, their schools, their places of recreation, their women and children — I do believe that because of that misplaced concern, that bigotry was developed.

Jan Sanders is the widow of Barefoot Sanders, the federal judge who assumed the desegregation court case in 1981. Sanders still lives in Dallas and remains active in the community.

SanderS: the thing was that we had Jim Crowlawsthatwerediscriminatory,andfrom those laws we have the heritage — the culture of discrimination that affirmed those laws. People tolerated that this is just the way we live together we have colored water fountains and white water fountains, we have colored waiting rooms and white waiting rooms, we have black schools and white schools. these were the cultures that emerged from the law. the culture might change but the law is static, so that’s what had to change in the courts. some people have said, well, the community finally changed enough to accept this change, but the law part of it was very important. We are a nation of laws. People’s whims and prejudices come and go with the wind. they’re not as established as the law is, and the way our government is set up is to respect the law.

Robert H. Thomas began representing the Dallas school district in the desegregation case in 1980, when the original attorney had to resign due to health issues. Thomas and his wife, Gail — the

president of the Trinity Trust Foundation — live in Dallas, and he is a partner emeritus at Strasburger law firm.

ThomaS: the first case was Brown v. topeka and was handed down in 1954. the supreme Court said segregated public schools are unconstitutional. And nothing happened, actually. It just fell on deaf ears around the country. And then a couple of years later, the supreme Court handed down another decision that said, “We really

Albert Black

Steve Cumming

meanit.You’vegottodesegregatethe schools and do it with all deliberate speed.” Well, speed is in the eye of the beholder.

Bob Johnston is an Adamson High School graduate, class of ’59, and taught at the school from 1962-69. In 1970 he began working in the Dallas ISD communications

department, and was the board secretary for 17 years until 1998 when he became special assistant to the superintendent until his retirement in 2000.

JOHNSTON: We had had a couple of court orders before 1971. One in 1955 — it wasn’t any big thing; it didn’t contain a lot of changes — and then a stair-step order in the late ’60s where we were to desegregate grade by grade beginning with the first grade and doing a grade a year. Then they came back and changed that and we kept the stair-step, but it started in the high schools. Then they filed a new suit, and that brought about the big order in ’71.

CLOUTMAN: Mr. Tasby walked into my office in West Dallas in summer of ’70. It was late summer, and kids had gone back to school. His kids, Eddie Mitchell Tasby and Phillip Wayne Tasby, were then being assigned to Sequoyah Middle School and Pinkston High School, and he thought it was not fair because there were nearer schools to his home, and no buses available — they had to ride the city bus at his expense. He was a working guy. We started talking to other people, and by October, we had filed the lawsuit.

THOMAS: You know the difference between state and federal courts? People elect judges in the state courts, and judges in federal courts are appointed for a lifetime. That’s a major difference. So if a judge wants to get reelected, he’s not going to say, “We’re going to desegregate schools.” They would have been voted out the next election. So it wasn’t too long until the liberal lawyers figured out that the only place to force desegregation was in the federal courts.

CLOUTMAN: We were real sure we were going to win the initial round. The schools were well out of compliance with what the Supreme Court had said at the time. A huge round of cases were decided by the Supreme Court the year of our trial, and they were

Robert H. Thomas

Jan Sanders

sort of the benchmarks: “You’ve got to do this, and you’ve got to do it now. You can’t wait any longer.”

THOMAS: TheTasby case was filed in Judge Mac Taylor’s court, and he didn’t know what to do with it. You won’t believe this, but the school district says, “Well, if we want to have these students go to schoolwitheachother,whydon’twe install televisions in each classroom so schools in South Dallas can hook up with NorthDallasclassroomsandtheycan conduct desegregation that way?” Is that not classy?

CLOUTMAN: It was $25 million just to install the cameras and the screens. Today that’d be closer to a half a billion, given inflation. We got that stopped in about a week.

In the 1960s, Dallasschools were designated for specific races, white or black, withother minoritiestypicallyfalling into the “white” category. South Oak Cliff, for example, was designated a whitehigh school when it was built in 1952. Then black families began moving into the developing neighborhoods around the school, and after

preliminary court orders forced Dallas to open schools to students of all races in 1965, black students began attending South Oak Cliff. Four years later, in 1970, the school had changed from almost 100 percent white to almost 100 percent black. Even newer high schools in the Oak Cliff area were David W. Carter and Justin F. Kimball, both primarily white. When busing began in fall 1971, white teachers and staff members were bused to South Oak Cliff, while black students, teachers and staff members were bused to Carter and Kimball.

CUMMING: The court ordered that the makeup of a school had to be at least 25 percent minority. Kimball, for example, was an Anglo school, probably 99.5 percent, and .5 percent Hispanic, so the district did it by busing all these kids in.

CARDARELLA: I taught in the fall of 1970 and the spring of 1971 at Kimball. Of course, we knew that integration was taking place, but we didn’t know until midsummer what all was going tohappen.Because I was one of the newest teachers in the Kimball English department when integration took place, I was transferred to South Oak Cliff. I went from an all-white high school of 3,000 to an all-black high

Bob Johnston

This Dallas Morning News map from the March 11, 1976, newspaper shows the racial makeup of five areas in Dallas ISD in an article examining the latest busing plan.

school of 3,000. It was a vast change.

CUMMING: For high school kids, what happened was that, primarily, the African American and Hispanic students were being bused into Anglo schools, but Anglos were refusing to go into black schools. A lot of them just moved. We lived a block from a grade school, and my sister was a third-grader and would have been bused from Oak Cliff to South Dallas to attend a primarily black school. So you’re talking about an 8-year-child being bused across town to a minority school, and that’s what led to white flight, because they weren’t going to have that. My parents moved down south to a little town called Ovilla and got out of Dallas completely. It wasn’t the fact that my siblings would go to school with minority students, it’s that an 8-year-old child doesn’t have any business being all the way inSouth Dallas. What if an emergency happened? There were even some dissidents in the black community — we’re sending my child across town with those white folks, and we don’t know anything about that area.

SANDERS: Some of the very respected African American leaders were for busing, and at the end of it, they were against it. Why should these kids ride all the way across town to go to school with kids down the street?

JOHNSTON: When busing started, the superintendent at the time, Nolan Estes, had all of the central office administrators get their school bus driver’s licenses, and the first big school day of the busing order, he drove a school bus himself. Dr. Estes also integrated leadership at the schools. He brought in principals and assistant principals of other ethnicities than all white, so that helped facilitate desegregation, too.

CUMMING: Everybody always blamed it on Dr. Estes. It was all his fault. Well, it was a court order.

JOHNSTON: [Estes] had hired monitors who rode the buses with the kids from South Dallas and then worked at the schools when they got out

WRONG.

33 YEARS — 1970-2003.

there so the kids knew somebody from their neighborhood. One reason we used so many monitors was because there were lots of folks in the black community that didn’t like the idea of their kids being bused out. They wanted integration, but they feared what would happen at the end of that bus ride, or whether or not they would get on the bus and go out to the school only to be put in a separate class. And that happened sometimes until somebody would find out about it and straighten it out.

BLACK: I lived in a community called FrazierCourts,whichisinsoutheast Dallas. It was the seventh-grade that was the youngest class that could be bused, and I was in that seventh-grade class. We went to John B. Hood [Junior High], and immediately the culture clash began to take place. Dallas had been so segregated of a city that none of us in Frazier Courts who were part of the first class of busing had any experience interacting with white students, and none of the white students gave me the impression they had had interaction with black students. The logistics of it all in relation to the busing seemed to be planned, but in relation to expectations and education and how we were going to manage issues, problems, disagreements, those weren’t worked out very well. The consequence was the bus-

Ed Cloutman

A FRIEND OF MINE WAS DOING THIS IN MISSISSIPPI,ANDI WROTE HIM [IN 1970] AND TOLD HIM WE WERE DOING IT, AND HE SAID, “WELL, GREAT. HOW LONG DO YOU THINK IT’S GOING TO TAKE?” I THOUGHT, TRIAL BY SUMMER,ANAPPEAL BY NEXT YEAR, SHOULD BE DONE IN FIVE YEARS.

Ed Cloutman

ing started but the education stopped. As the buses seemed to roll on and on, the education expectations from the school seemed to fall down further and further andfurther. We weremoreinterested inmaintainingorderthanwewerein introducing provocative subject matter for children to learn. I’m sure there are exceptions from my experience, but I didn’t get the quality of education that I had experienced from first- through sixth-grades.

CARDARELLA: Oneofthegentlemen who had been a coach at Kimball was awarded a job as an administrator atSouth Oak Cliff, and his name was MiltonSouth. When I got to South Oak Cliff, there wasn’t anyone who had been involved with the English department very much, and Milton South gave me four classes of junior English and one class with the top 20 seniors of the school. The

junior English classes were an eye-opener because the South Oak Cliff kids had one set of books for four classes. At Kimball, each of my classes had their own individual books, not only literature but also spelling books and other supplementary texts — to take home. My kids at South Oak Cliff had one set of literature to read in the classroom. I had some juniors who could barely say the alphabet. I had one junior female who could not say the alphabet. I had 30 in a class, and we ranged from barely being able to read to reading on an 11th-grade level. They were good kids, but they had not been provided with the texts they needed or the teaching they needed to do as well as the other children.

CUMMING: The whole reason Mr. Tasby was bringing that lawsuit is there was such a disparity in the schools. They had the worst textbooks, they had the worst equipment, worn-out band equipment

THOMAS: We had a bunch of black students in shabby buildings. I mean really crummy buildings. They were colored schools, and they had not been kept up. The roof leaked and it was cold and the campus wasn’t big enough, so the court said to supervise the buildings.

SANDERS: A lot of people in the community simply distilled the integration-segregation issue with students sitting in the classroom, and certainly that was a huge, important part of it, but that wasn’t all of it. A lot of the inequities in the Dallas ISD had to do with staff, facilities, boundaries. They

Patricia Shorten is the lone black student on this page from the 1969 Adamson High School yearbook.

were the vestiges of the Jim Crow laws, and so there were a lot of facets for him as the judge to get right.

BLACK: We didn’t deal with things like no books anymore. We didn’t deal with un-air-conditioned schools. So those were advantages of busing for us. An argument can always be made that you shouldn’t have to be bused for those standards, but the fact of the matter is we were the perfect example of the argument against separate but equal.

CARDARELLA: MiltonSouthhad finagled his way to get me this English class of the top seniors, and I realized these kids were sharper than all get out. I decided my best bet for them was to get a college-bound program in there for them, so I called SMU and I found out what texts they were using, and we ordered them because they couldn’t afford them. It was a big, thick textbook, and they did presentations on any one of the short stories I selected, and they had to get up and teach the class for a period.

BLACK: I remembergoingintomy high school locker room, and the head coach was standing on the outside in the hallway. It was report card day, and he was checking report cards and telling students to bend over if something was out of order, meaning their report cards had bad marks. It seemed to be along racial lines.

Steve Cumming

More paddling was taking place among the black students because they’re the ones whose report cards weren’t sufficient. When I got to the coach in line, I guess the pattern had been set, and I remember him saying, “Bend over, Black, bend over,” calling me by my last name. I went ballistic. My response was total revolt. I don’t believe that I disrespected the coach, but I do believe that I came very close in arguing that he should never put me in a category without checking, and I believe that today.

CUMMING: I was a sophomore in 1971, and at Kimball, from what I can remember, things went pretty smoothly. We had a principal, Dr. W.P. Durrett, he was kind of a legend in Oak Cliff. He really built Kimball. He was the first principal in 1958 when the school opened and helped establish a lot of traditions. That was back in the day when the principals ran the schools. Mr. Durrett was very conservative, a real disciplinarian, and ran the school with an iron fist.

CARDERELLA: W.P. Durrett was something else. You either loved him or hated him, and I happened to love him. He was a fabulous guy. His expectations were very high. We had so many people sent there who couldn’t make it in other schools, and he straightened them all out. They either followed the rules or they left.

CUMMING: The only problem I can remember from desegregation, I guess it was about the second week of school. The black kids decided they didn’t like the way they were being treated, and they were going to riot.

A photo of the 1969 Adamson High School Library Service Club shows the beginnings of school integration, before the 1971 court order mandated busing.

I CAN REMEMBER IN HIGH SCHOOL BEFORE DESEGREGATION STARTED, SCHOOLS THAT WERE BLACK SCHOOLS, SCHOOLS THAT WERE WHITE SCHOOLS, SCHOOLS THAT WERE HISPANIC SCHOOLS. THAT’S THE WAY IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN.

WEWERE NOT ON THE DEBATE TEAM, WE WERE NOT IN SCHOOL PLAYS. THOSE KIND OF INTELLECTUAL EXERCISES SEEMED TO EXEMPT US. LOOKING BACK ON IT, I THINK THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN INSISTENCE OF SORTS FOR THOSE FIELDS TO BE EVERY BIT AS DIVERSE AS THE PLAYING FIELDS AND COURTS WERE. THEREWAS STILL THE SOUTHERN BIAS OF INFERIORITY . THE BLACK STUDENT WAS INFERIOR.

Albert Black

They were going to burn the school down. They were showing this principal they were not going to tolerate being mistreated. I don’t think they actually were, but he was so strict that even the white kids didn’t like it. If you got sent to the principal’s office, you probably got three licks and got sent back to class, and nobody said anything to their parents. If I got in trouble in school, I would have gotten spanked again when I went home.

In that particular era, you’ve gotta remember Vietnam was raging, and that was a hard time to grow up — the hippies, the long hair, the drugs and the sex — and I think Mr. Durrett’s whole thing was, and I had heard him say myself, he was not going to have someone come in and disrupt his school because Kimball High School had always had the finest of everything — football, bands, uniforms, musicals every year with Broadway-quality production. So when he got wind of this, they locked down the school. He called the Dallas Police Department, and they sent the SWAT team. All the students had to go to their classrooms, and he had teachers lock the door. Nobody could come in, and nobody could go out. He had some of the male coaches walking the halls, and had them go down to the woodshop and grab a board. My understanding is he told them, “If anyone causes trouble, beat the hell out of them. Doesn’t matter if they’re white, black, pink, purple or green.” So the police escorted the students who were bused in out of the building in small

The 1965 Adamson High School yearbook is full of witty captions like this one, in this case revealing that student yearbook staff members are cognizant of changes on the horizon.

groups. The police made sure they got on the buses and made sure they were safe. Because white kids had gotten wind, and they were ready to rumble, and it seems like we did have a fight or two in front the school that the police had to break up.

Thenextday, Mr. Durretthadan assembly in the auditorium with all the kids who were bused in, and made a speech to them: “This is Justin F. Kimball HighSchool, the finest high school in Dallas, and by God, if you think you’re going to come in and tear up my school, you’ve got another thing coming.” And afterthatincident,weneverhadany more. All through the year, there would

be a fight or somebody would take a poke at somebody, but that’s all I can remember in my three years at the school.

CARDARELLA: We had a policeman on each level of the school and in certain wings for protection. What made me feel safe was that Milton South, he provided the best protection. He went to the football team and said, “This woman is going to teach a class to help your people, and I want four boys to volunteer to escort her in and out of school.” And I never had a problem.

One day we’d gotten word that the students were all going to boycott the school, so when the time came, I just stepped aside and they all walked out. South Oak Cliff is built in a rectangle, and they all went into the interior of the school, which is outside in the grass, and we just shut the school down. They had a bunch of new, young white teachers that had come into that school, and there were a bunch of people maybe with attitude problems, and they didn’t like the way it was going, so they were fighting back.

BLACK: I rememberverylittle order. I thinktherewerealways fights.

CUMMING: It was a new experience for all of us because it was the first time I had a black teacher and had gone to school with minorities. I didn’t have a problem with it because I had gone to church camp with minorities, and my parents had raised us to be respectful to everyone, but unfortunately, we had kids who hadn’t been raised that way.

BLACK: The salvation of it was there were exceptions. I found exceptions in athletics. I think that the coaches, because of their experience seeingtheSouthwestConference integrate in 1969, they were more apt to adapt because they saw an opportunity to discover greatness with the receipt of these athletes that came to them through the desegregation order, and sure enough, a lot of these schools became great. That helped an awful lot to calm the waters in other scenarios. All of us have a tendency to fall in order when there are leaders that command attention and respect, and the athletic powers did that in many ways. It allowed people to have a reason to root for the other fellow. Therecouldhavebeenthesame experience in choir; I didn’t notice it. I noticed camaraderie built along the cheerleading and drill teams and in the ROTC. I graduated before it could

have taken place in the classroom. We were not on the debate team, we were not in school plays. Those kind of intellectual exercises seemed to exempt us. Looking back on it, I think there should have been an insistence of sorts for those fields to be every bit as diverse as the playing fields and courts were. There was still the Southern bias of inferiority. The black student was inferior. That can sound incredibly disappointing to you and me today.

CARDARELLA: Manyofthose seniors I taught, the majority of them, all received scholarships. Listen, anyone canteachbrightkids.Gettingthose textbooks may have propelled them forward somewhat, but they were going to get it one way or another. It takes a real teacher to teach the slower kids so they can catch up. We need to treat our children, no matter what color they are, like they are important people because they are. They are our future. I can’t say I ever saw a difference between the black 3,000 at South Oak Cliff High School and the white 3,000 at Kimball HighSchool.The ones at South Oak Cliff didn’t demonstrate the same ability because they hadn’t received an equal education. I know that kids were passed on for age, not because they knew what they needed to learn.

BLACK: Thedesegregatedschools were very concerned with a process, but we weren’t concerned as much with the outputs. Career counseling was one of the places that it was most evident. I was never counseled on being anything but a football player, and that is cliché but it is also the truth. I never wore my report card as a badge, and their due diligence on students was so poor that they assumed I didn’t have the grades to do anything but bang heads on a football field. I wanted to hear what they were saying, but that’s not very responsible when you know that the chances of playing in the NFL are about as good as being struck by lightning.

CARDARELLA: The bright kids were much harder to corral and keep in line than the slower kids. They were angry, they were exposed to prejudice. These were high school seniors who were smart enough to realize that they were smart, and they weren’t receiving the education the white kids were receiving. I had one of them stand up in class one day and call me a bitch. And I went straight to Louis McWhorter, who was a black principal, and that student had to come back to the school with his parents and apologize before he was permitted back into class. I told them all the time that they had to study, that learning was the only thing people couldn’t take away from them. And they finally realized this young white teacher wasn’t there to hurt them but to help them, and that I cared for them.

The class officer photos on this page, the opposite page and the following page are from the 1968 South Oak Cliff High School yearbook, and reflect changes the school underwent after it opened enrollment to black students in fall 1966 following an initial federal lawsuit.

CUMMING: In all four years of high school, I had only one bad teacher, and it was a black teacher. She lasted about a year, and then the principal transferred her out. Conversely, one of the best teachers I had in high school was a young black woman who taught algebra. I’ll never forget Mrs. Holcomb. She knew how to relate to the kids, and she knew how to get the message across, and she didn’t care if you were white or black. I never had a black teacher discriminate against me or single me out.

CARDARELLA: I gave a speech one day. All the girls came intotheauditorium,and I toldthem what to do to improve themselves and do better in life, and they sat there and chit chatted. I waited until they were finished, and then I said. “I’m talking to you, and I want you to listen to me.” And they stopped talking, and when I was finished, they gave me a standing ovation.There are some barriers you had to break, and those barriers had been built up for a reason.

CUMMING: As the years progressed, we didn’t think anything about it. We were classmates. We were all in it together. We were in it to get an education and get out so we could go to college. I remember that there was a lot of dissension, and it was not a perfect plan, but the court felt busing was the only way to desegregate fully and fairly. It seemed to me like people made a bigger deal of it than it was. Kids are kids, and kids are flexible.

BLACK: It was about 13, 14 miles from our community to John B. Hood. We were children, so therefore we had neverbeforeseenthegoldenarches, a McDonalds. They didn’t build in our neighborhood. As it relates to the social component,busingwasexcellentfor that. It integrated societies.

CUMMING: We hadseveralblack kids that came over from Madison High School in our ROTC program. One of our battalion sweethearts was a black girl. When I was a senior, she was dating one of the officers who was black, and the cadets elected her to be one of our sweethearts. Friendships were built being in activities together, and the good thing about it was you really learned about other cultures, and I think that helped build good foundations because when I went to college, you were there with everybody — white, black, pink, purple, green — and you just never really thought about it. People are people, and I guess you find out they put their pants on just like you do — one leg at a time.

Undoubtedly, Dallas ISD desegregation had an impact on the racial makeup of Oak Cliff. But the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg — the demographic changes or desegregation — is still being debated today.

CLOUTMAN: Dallas was growing then, and people were basi-

cally being told, “Don’t locate in the Dallas ISD because they have busing.” And it worked. It wasn’t so much we had white flight, but no white in-migration, and as white kids graduated, there was nobody to replace them. People with school-age children were not locating here.

THOMAS: One of the things that made it difficult was that we had such a large African-Americanpopulationsouthof Interstate 30, and none north of Interstate 30, so it made it very difficult to mix bodies or teachers or anything without crossingtheexpressway.That’s a historical

fact and a historical problem we had with desegregation because of the long distance between blacks and whites.

Cumming: Dallas IsD wasdivided into the north zone and the south zone, and the t rinity River separated it. In the south zone, Kimball was always considered one of the flagship schools. Carter was, too. the south side, we always got the bad deal. the north side always called the shots, and it’s always been that way. there was even some disparity between the white schools on the south side and the north side. It wasn’t just white and black. Oak Cliff has always been considered to be the redheaded stepchild of Dallas. If you say, “I’m from Oak Cliff,” people go, “Oh.” they think you live in a slum and you drive a 30-year-old car. It’s just crazy. Oak Cliff is a beautiful place.

Cardarella: My grandparents built a house on North Clinton in 1920. My motherwenttoCliff templeBaptist Church and was baptized there, and I was baptized at Cliff temple in 1954, and I still go to Cliff temple Baptist Church. If you grew up in Oak Cliff, it was like a small town. We all knew each other from the four high schools — Kimball, south Oak Cliff, sunset and Adamson — and of course, I thought Kimball was the best, but I imagine everybody thought theirs was the best. I’m a Cliffie and love everything about it. I like the variety of faces. I like the different colors. Even the stuff I don’t like’s better than North Dallas.

BlaCk: KesslerPark,welooklike Noah’s ark. there’s two of everything on our street. It’s great for us.

Cardarella: We’ve always been the ugly ducking of Dallas or the evil stepsister. Instead of planning and having some thinkers come into our city government that could help guide and move the different races together, it was like, well, just dump that in Oak Cliff. It’s never been about Oak Cliff. It’s been about downtown Dallas and North Dallas. I can’t tell you all of the political things that were done incorrectly, but I know they were done. We ended up with white flight.

Johnston: that’sreallywhenwe saw the first church schools spring up, and a lot of churches started schools or let schools be housed in their facilities. there hadn’t been much of that prior to the time the court order started. the mindset was that the black kids were rough and violent and didn’t behave, and people feared that, even though it basically wasn’t true, but

it’s hard to convince somebody.

BlaCk: the Dallas home real estate landscape looks the way that it does because of white flight. Dallas Christian and all of those schools were founded at the time of the decision. some people can say coincidence, but come on — they weren’t going to one of those schools with those people.

Cardarella: We should have done everything we could to keep kids in school, and we should have done something to prohibit full areas being taken over by one group. the reality is we still have people who are afraid to come over to Oak Cliff, and that’s ridiculous.

Johnston: Nobody targeted Oak Cliff, but you would have a hard time convincing some people who were living there at the time. It had a lot of white flight to Duncanville and Desoto. there’s always been a lot of bitterness; they felt they were put upon by the courts and the school district. It may have happened because of the court order, but it wasn’t intentional. the busing order didn’t have the effect that the demographic change did in Oak Cliff. the neighborhood change, I think, had already begun before the court order, and it accelerated once it happened and once people started talking about it. there was a lot of fear of “block busting” out in Oak Cliff. In the early days of not school desegregation but desegregation, period, the rumor was people would buy a house, move two or three families in, and would lower everybody’s property values. White families wouldn’t like it; they would put up their signs and move away. For instance, Carter High school right off I-20 and I-35 was virtually an all-white area, and one of the orders bused kids across 35 in the south Oak Cliff [High school] attendance zone into Carter. Within four years that area became all black because the people whose kids were being bused over there didn’t want their kids to be bused, so they just moved. so the area changed complexion almost overnight.

Cumming: I remember so well when we played football against schools such as North Dallas High school, which was primarily Hispanic. We played sunset, and at that time it was beginning to shift from an all-Anglo school to a Hispanic school. the area had changed. the demographics at Kimball have shifted from an Anglo school to an African-American school to Hispanic. Blacks have moved out of this area to the south or north, and Hispanics have moved in. I’m president of our alumni association, and we give scholarships to students. You look into that auditorium and see more Hispanic students than black students.

Johnston: I think it would have happened anyway as people aged in the neighborhood, but at the time, nobody realized that. It kind of reminds me of 20 years ago, Dr. Bill Webster, our chief demographer, said in the year 2010, the district would be majority Hispanic. Nobody believed it then, but it happened a lot sooner than that. that’s really been the biggest change in the schools — the rapid growth in the Hispanic population. When I first started in the school administration, I think there was probably a 15-20 percent Hispanic population, and now it’s almost 80 percent. Adamson is a good example of how schools change. I graduated from there, and then I went back there to teach in 1962, and we had no black students at all. We might have had 10-15 percent Hispanic students, but in those days they weren’t Hispanic — someone whose name was Martinez would be MAR t -inez. they were more Anglo than Hispanic. When I left there in ’69, we had had a few black students enroll who lived in the attendance area, then in the ’70s, the black population grew, but now the population over there is about 90 percent Hispanic, so it’s kind of a microcosm of this district.

Years after the initial busing orders, the case continued to drag on in court, first being appealed by the defense attorneys, then finding its way to a new DISD attorney, then landing in the lap of a judge who refused to dismiss it until he felt justice had been done.

Thomas: I started in about 1980. the lawyer [before me] representing the Dallas Public schools, his name was Warren Whitham, and he was a staunch segregationist. He wasn’t going to give up and let the judge tell his district what to do, and he just fought and fought and fought, and he had a heart attack, and his doctor told him, “Warren, you’ve got to get rid of this case. this case is going to kill you.”

I was president of the Dallas Bar Association in 1978, and we bought the Belo Mansion on 2101 Ross Avenue. It was an empty big home that had been a funeral home, but the lawyers of Dallas thought it would be neat to lease it as our headquarters. By 1980 it was finished, and one of my partners said, “Bud, you owe us a lot of time. You’ve had a lot of time off; you’ve really got to get to work on something.” And I said, “Anything you need done, I’m willing.” And about a month later he called me into his office and says, “Warren Whitham has had a heart attack, and they’ve asked our firm if we can furnish a lawyer to handle the case, and I think you’re the right guy for the job.” And I said, “Oh crap.”

I went to see Warren Whitham at his home, and I said, “Warren, I’m Bob thomas, and I’m going to try to take your place in the desegregation case.” And he says, “Alright but let me tell you this: Fight, fight, fight (coughing), fight …” and his wife comes in, and says, “I’m sorry, Mr. thomas, but you’ll have to leave.”

I had just met the superintendent of schools — his name was Linus Wright, the new superintendent from Houston — and I walked out of Warren Whitham’s home and went to the nearest 7-Eleven and used a pay phone to call the superintendent, and said, “I need to come talk to you.” And I told him the story of meeting with Mr. Whitham in his home, and said, “Is that what you want me to do? Do you want me to fight, fight, fight?” And he said, “I’m so glad you asked me this question. No. Desegregation is coming. It’s here. It’s 1980, and we were told in 1954 that it had to be done. We want it done, but we want it done with a degree of sensitivity. We don’t want to alienate our employees, and the constituents and taxpayers of Dallas. We have to do this in an orderly manner where we don’t lose students, we don’t lose teachers, and we build up a fine desegregated school system.”

And so that’s what I did for 23 years.

ClouTman: A friend of mine was doing this in Mississippi, and I wrote him [in 1970] and told him we were doing it, and he said, “Well, great. How long do you think it’s going to take?” I thought, trial by summer, an appeal by next year, should be done in five years. Wrong. 33 years — 1970-2003. Bob thomas and I were friends to the end in this case, mostly because we learned it was easier to get along than fuss at the courthouses.

Thomas: Barefoot sanders came in just a little after I did because Judge taylor was in ill health and he had to retire.

Judgetaylor called a meeting of all the federal judges in his office, and he said, “gentlemen, I want one of you judges to take it over for me. Which one of you wants to do it?” silence.

“OK, tell you what we’re going to do.” He took six slips of paper with the names of the six judges in the room and put them in

his hat and said, “I’m going to pull a name out of the hat, and you’re the new judge in the desegregation case.” And he pulls out the name and says, “Barefootsanders.”

sanders: the truth of it was that none of the judges wanted it. Barefoot was, I can’t say delighted, but I would say eager to take it on. He saw it as an opportunity and went after it. Barefoot was very proud of his role in this case because he was born and raised in Dallas and educated in the public schools and saw the importance of individual rights. He had served in Washington to pass the voting rights act of 1965; he was in the Department of Justice at the time.

JohnsTon: In many cities, they were just body mixing. All of our orders were educational orders. Black kids at that time had poor test scores as it related to the white kids, and the goal in getting them together was to provide a quality education for all and raise the test scores as a result. the feeling we tried to get across to the community was the education element was important and necessary; the body mixing was an effect.

Thomas: It finally dawned on the blacks, “We don’t want to ride the bus, either. Why don’t we just have better schools in our neighborhood? so slowly the idea began to crystallize that maybe it’s better to have good schools than integrated schools. they would rather have more money spent on those black schools and have good teachers than ride the bus to someplace where they were not welcome. so we created something called “learning centers” in 1984, and established three south Dallas learning centers that were approved by the court of appeals, and then established some West Dallas learning centers for the Hispanics. And see, the federal judge had control over the pocketbook. they could catch up education, if you will. they had computers before any of the white kids had computers.

ClouTman: We supported the notion to have busing dismissed when learning centers got created and schools got expanded to offer a choice of desegregating options to kids. the loss of public support in parts of town and the fact it took so damn long nothing that takes that long can not have some wheels falling off the bus, and they did.

Thomas: Busing may have worked in Charlotte, N.C., and it might work in a little town like Mineola, texas, but the problems are so much bigger in bigger cities.

JohnsTon: there were school board members at the time who grew to resent the extra amounts of money being spent in other parts of town, but Nolan Estes and [subsequent superintendent] Linus Wright, both of their attitudes were: “It’s a court order, we don’t have a choice, we’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it right.” Nolan was a positive person — still is to this day — and I never heard him say a negative word about it, and I was with him for 10 years.

sanders: there was built, before [Barefoot] had

the case, the skyline magnet school, and there was not a counterpart in south Dallas. And that was the balance, that a second one should be built making it more equal for all the students to be able to opt into those magnets.

so that was the origin of townview [talented and gifted magnet school], and again the DIsD drug their feet, and he made clear that he wasn’t going to let go of the case until that was accomplished. He kept hoping he could finish the case and make a final ruling, and then the DIsD would do something bad, like the way they would draw their school district lines that were designed to discriminate.

Thomas: If [Barefoot sanders] wanted to talk to the superintendent, he would call me and say, “get the superintendent in my office this afternoon. I read all of these quotes in the Dallas Morning News opposing things I have ordered.” And then the next time I met with my client, he would say, “Will you tell the judge to stop reading the Dallas Morning News?”

sanders: Barefoot was in public life from the time we were married on. He was a state legislator, u.s. attorney. I grew up in my adulthood with the idea that we were subject to some hate calls. I just didn’t let it bother me. People would call the court and say, “Well, you just tell Judge sanders that I’m never going to vote for him again,” not knowing that a federal judge was not elected. [Laughing] He took it as, “they’re going to be disappointed.” He always said, “I’ve got people mad at me on both sides. I guess I must be doing something right.”

Thomas: the lawsuit was filed against the school district and the superintendent and every member of the school board, so all of these individuals were subject to the court jurisdiction, and if you were elected to the school board or hired as the superintendent, you were part of the lawsuit. We brought in anAfrican-AmericansuperintendentfromIllinois, and he was a nice guy, and his name was Marvin Edwards. He lasted about two years, then he said, “I am going back to Illinois. this is the craziest damn city I’ve ever seen.” He was good, but he didn’t like all of this infighting. We had a reception over at the [Fair Park] Hall of state to say goodbye and farewell and thanks for being with us, and I went through the receiving line and said, “thank you, Dr. Edwards. It was a pleasure working with you.” And he said, “Bob, the first thing I want you to do tomorrow is write to the court and tell them it’s no longer tasby vs. Edwards. get my name out of this case.”

When federal judge BarefootSandersdismissed the Tasby case in 2003, Dallas ISD had an entirely different demographic makeup — 6 percent white, 31 percent black and 61 percent Hispanic, compared to the respective 54-36-10 percent makeup in 1971.

Thomas: Did it work? that’s a good question. It complies with the law. the dismissal could have been appealed, but [sanders] was very careful in writing his order of dismissal, and was very well

respected and was a liberal judge, and everybody knew that it had been dismissed by Barefoot sanders and therefore it was going to stay dismissed.

ClouTman: It worked moreso than not. Of that I’m pretty sure. I say that from the perspective of the children that we were representing. I don’t think it hurt any white kids any more than they had to get over the first hurdles, the bumps, and that probably did cause a distraction that was unnecessary, but what it did for black kids and brown kids, it required, in a whole lot of detail, the district to do things that otherwise it wouldn’t have done. We were the first district in the state to have bilingual education — not because the state required it, but the federal court did. [Desegregation] produced the magnet schools, which are some of the best we’ve ever had academicwise and art-wise.

BlaCk: We pretty much all want the same things, and it’s a shame that we spent so many years in our country on race. But if not for champions of the court like Barefoot sanders,texas would still be lagging and Dallas public schools would still have certain children locked in isolated communities, suffering from the lack of prosperity. Just a few months before Judge sanders died, my wife and I decided to give a reception at our home. We didn’t think he was at the end of his life; we thought he was being overlooked for his greatness locally because it’s a conservativefederal benchwiththese spigotsofjudges that were named by Democratic presidents. We invited principals,administrators,teachers, studentsandparents from that era to come and to let him hear how it all came out. He cried and his wife cried, and when it was over, he got up and said, “I’ve heard from you all. Almost every comment has been a lesson. thank you for teaching me. I’ve spent all of these years not knowing the impact from people who were living everyday lives, only from those that were summoned by the court or intervened in the court. thank you for the lesson. thank you for a wonderful life.” And in three or four months, he died.

Thomas: some people say we went too fast, some people say we went too slow, but we got to the destination, and desegregation got to be equal opportunity, equal education. It’s clearly the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever been involved in. to shepherd this thing to where it is today, and it ain’t perfect, but it’s peaceful and it’s quiet.

BlaCk: I’ve never been to a reunion. I’ve been someone who has been very celebrated in our city over the years, and I always have classmates that contact me and ask me to be part of a reunion, but I’ve never been. the pain of returning someplace I didn’t like at all I knew we deserved better. I knew we did. n

It’s never been about oak Cliff. It’s been about downTown dallas and norThdallas.

I can’t tell you all of the polItIcal thIngs that were done inCorreCTly, but I know they were done. we ended up wiTh whiTe flighT.

Vicki Cardarella

Adamson High School alumnae Sue Tucker Roberts, Donna Jones Stice, Suzanne Bass and Deanna Sackette Venable (from left to right) have a few things to teach the current generation of Leopardettes.

PHOTOS BY BENJAMIN HAGER

PASSING THE BATON

Former Adamson drill team members bridge the generation gap

STORY BY MEGHAN RINEY

When former Adamson High School Leopardette Sue Roberts, class of ’61, was asked to dust off her drill team baton for a reunion performance this spring, she never could have predicted the impact that twirling performance would have.

The result was Adamson High School’s drill team director, Kelly Bates, and principal, Evangeline Kircher, asking Roberts and the other self-proclaimed “vintage Leopardettes” to teach the current drill team the art of the twirl, resurrecting a 31-year-old Adamson tradition.

It all started in April when Leopardette alumni Deanna SackettVenable had the idea of reuniting former Leopardettes for a surprise twirling performance at the 11th annual Adamson all-class reunion.

“It was just like riding a bike,” Roberts says. “None of us had ever thought we would twirl again.”

After six weeks of rehearsal, the vintage ’dettes took the stage, brought down the house, and caught the eyes of current Leopardettes.

“During rehearsals in the auditorium, we noticed some members of the drill team would come to watch,” Roberts says. “Each rehearsal would bring more girls.They wanted to know what it was like to be on the team all those years ago; they wanted to hear our stories and know what we did.”

Roberts and the other vintage ’dettes told the girls how the team had twirled batons from 1950–81, how they had led

the Cotton Bowl parade, and how the leaders of the Leopardettes had twirled fire batons.

“We didn’t know the history,” Leopardettes senior captain Jocelyn Sarmiento says. “We didn’t know they twirled, and we were so excited when we found out!”

Once Leopardette director Kelly Bates saw how excited her girls were about twirling, she says she “couldn’t think of any reason not to bring it back.” This summer, the vintage ’dettes will teach the current team the basics of baton twirling for use in their 2011 half-time routines.

“It has really been great for all of us it’s incredible exercise, and all of our doctors are thrilled we’re doing it,” Roberts says.

The vintage ’dettes hope that this opportunity opens the door to a larger mentoring opportunity.

“My Leopardette experience was not just about twirling; it was a lifestyle full of lofty goals, ideals, behavior and grade expectations, and accomplishments,” Roberts says. “The Leopardettes was a safe place where I could learn the skills I needed later in adult life.”

“Being a Leopardette was like being Miss America,” says Roberts. “Now we are reliving the dream. Never in a million years did I think this could happen.”

We offer a 10 week training course.

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“It was just like riding a bike. None of us had ever thought we would twirl again.”

COLLEGIATEMINDS

Principal GayleFergusonSmith , counselor LenoraBrown , facilities supervisor LasandraColeman and office manager BlancaVasquez checked up on construction of Oak Cliff’s newest high school, the Kathlyn Joy Gilliam Collegiate Academy at Beckley and Illinois. The 110,000-square-foot school costs $22 million, from 2008 bond election funds. It will serve 350 students. The program is geared toward kids who would be first-generation college students.

THEPIN SHOW GOESON

After a one-year absence, Oak Cliff entrepreneur JulieMcCullough Kim will return to Dallas to present The Pin Show, a fashion show which spotlights independent designers whose clothes are made locally. BrianEmbry , owner and director of the Ross Akard Gallery, is the show’s new executive director. The event is set for Feb. 23 at the Fairmont Dallas and will award more than $2,000 in grants to designers to use in furthering their fashion businesses. Visit thepinshow.typepad.com for details.

BHEALTH RESOURCEBULLETIN BOARD

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Quigley Heat & Air 214-526-8533

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BO HANDYMAN Kitchens, baths, doors, cabinets, custom carpentry, drywall & painting 214-437-9730

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PREVIEW CONSTRUCTION INC.

HardiPlank 50 Yr. Cement Siding, Energy Star 214-348-3836. See Photo Gallery at: www.previewconstruction.com

RODZ HOME IMPROVEMENT All Home Repairs, Add-Ons, Rehabs. 214-952-8963

CLEANING SERVICES

CINDY’S HOUSE CLEANING 15 yrs exp. Resd/Com. Refs. Dependable. 214-490-0133

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CONFUSED? FRUSTRATED? Let A Seasoned Computer. Hardware & Software Installation, Troubleshooting, Training, $60/hr. 1 Hr. Min. Dan 214-660-3733 Or stykidan@sbcglobal.net

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CAZARES CONCRETE Concrete retaining walls, Patios, Driveways, Removal, Sidewalks. 214-202-8958 Free estimates.

ELECTRICAL SERVICES

ACCURATE ELECTRIC All Jobs.TECL# 27297. Steve. Accurateelectrician.com 214-718-9648

ANNA’S ELECTRIC Your Oak Cliff Electrician Since 1978. tecl25513. 214-943-4890

ANTHONY’S ELECTRIC Master Electrician. TECL24948 anthonyselectricofdallas .com Family Owned/Operated. Insd. 214-328-1333

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TECL20502

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VISA, MASTER CARD, AMERICAN EXPRESS

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Specializing in Wood, New or Repair. Free Estimates. Call Mike 214-507-9322.

alwaysbiltrite.com

469-878-4450. cc’s accptd CREATIVE METAL SOLUTIONS LLC

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Installation, Repair, Refinish, Wax, Hand Scrape. Residential, Commercial. Sports Floors. 25 Yrs. STAINED & SCORED CONCRETE FLOORS New/Remodel. Res/Com. Int/Ext. Refin. 15 Yrs. TheConcreteStudio.com 214-320-2018

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ADVOCATE PUBLISHING does not pre-screen, recommend or investigate the advertisements and/ or Advertisers published in our magazines. As a result, Advocate Publishing is not responsible for your dealings with any Advertiser. Please ask each Advertiser that you contact to show you the necessary licenses and/or permits required to perform the work you are requesting. Advocate Publishing takes comments and/or complaints about Advertisers seriously, and we do not publish advertisements that we know are inaccurate, misleading and/or do not live up to the standards set by our publications. If you have a legitimate complaint or positive comment about an Advertiser, please contact us at 214-560-4203. Advocate Publishing recommends that you ask for and check references from each Advertiser that you contact, and we recommend that you obtain a written statement of work to be completed, and the price to be charged, prior to approving any work or providing an Advertiser with any deposit for work to be completed.

live loC al

Th E LOWDOWN ON Wh AT ’S UP WIT h NEIGh BOR h OOD BUSINESSES

New R e tail: C H elsmati’s wiNe sH op, toRN

C lot HiN g, gR a NNy’s geNeR al s to Re

A shopping center on West Davis at Clinton has three new retail tenants that neighbor Urban Acres market. Chelsmati’s Wine Shop opened July 16, offering mostly imported wine, beer, olive oil and balsamic vinegar, along with gifts, wine openers, glasses and gadgets. Owner Tina Acosta has lived in Oak Cliff for 14 years, and she also makes gift baskets containing beer or wine and other treats. Torn clothing store opened in May, offering trendy fashions for men and women. Owners Jose and Jessica Duran sell street-wear brands such as Ecko, and they offer sizes for men and women from small-3X. Long-time antuiquer Shirley Coleman of Wynnewood North opened Granny’s General Store on July 1. The store offers vintage glassware, clothing, books, furniture and more. Coleman retired from the Dallas Public Library in January, and she decided to do something with all the treasures from her years of dogging estate sales. “I had a garage full of stuff, so I figured it was time to do something with it,” she says. “This is my first love. A job is a job, but now I’m doing what I love.”

• Chelsmati’s Wine Shop, 1307½ W. Davis, 214.923.9814

• Torn, 1307 W. Davis, 214.943.1437

• Granny’s General Store, 1305 W. Davis

o ak Cliff busiN esswoma N ReC eives top a CC ola DeS

La Calle Doce and El Ranchito owner Laura Sanchez recently was honored by Latina Style Inc. as “Entrepreneur of the Year”. Sanchez was selected “based on her lifetime achievements and her visibility as a true role model for our young women,” according to Robert Bard, president and CEO of Latina Style Inc. The company provides support and encouragement to Latina business owners and professional working women through its publication, Latina Style, its business lecture series, The National Latina Symposium of Latina leaders and The Latina Style 50 Report, a comprehensive study of the best companies for Latinas in the United States.

• la Calle Doce, 415 W. 12th, 214.941.4304, lacalledoce-dallas.com

• e l Ranchito, 610 Jefferson, 214.946.4238, elranchito-dallas.com

JaCk’S BaCkyaRD CloSeS, SCouTS neW loCaTion

We were disappointed to learn that Kathy Jack and Susie Buck’s Jack’s Backyard on Pittman and

Commerce has closed. The official statement from Kathy Jack on Facebook states, “With four days’ notice from the property owner, Jack’s Backyard closed for business on Sunday, June 26. I want to tell my friends, family, Jack’s customers and investors that I am truly sorry that this has happened. Jack’s was a BIG place and we opened in a tough economy. I have spent 34 years in the service industry and I have been raised in this community. It means a lot to me that people believe in and trust me. Jack’s was built to be a backyard big enough to hang out with all of your friends. That mission continues.” Jack says she will continue Jack’s Backyard, and temporarily is hosting live music at Dallas Woody’s in Oak Lawn as she scouts locations for a new home.

Business buzz:

“There are few landlords as well positioned to be long-term partners with our retailers.”

Michael Carroll, CEO of Centro Properties Group US, after Blackstone Real Estate Partners’ affiliate BRE Retail Holdings purchased Centro. The group owns Wynnewood Village on Illinois, Stevens Park Village on Fort Worth Avenue and Jeff Davis on Jefferson, and Carroll says that with Blackstone as its new partner, “we are now capitalized to aggressively lease and reposition space and to support our retailers’ growth strategies.”

oDD fello WS expanDS WiT h CoCkTail menu, patio

On a happier note, Oddfellows is still going strong since its opening in December. Manager Bonnie Rodela says the restaurant now has beer, wine, Bloody Marys and mimosas. This month, Oddfellows is launching a specialty cocktail menu, and a new dinner menu also is in the works, one that will also offer lighter fare for the health-conscious crowd. The addition of a patio is still in the works; permits have been gathered and now the focus has shifted to gathering capital for the tables and chairs.

• o ddfellows, 316 W. 7th, 214.944.5958. oddfellowsdallas.com —mEGhan RinEy

Do you knoW of a neiGhBoRhooD BuSine SS renovating, expanding, moving, launching, hosting an event, celebrating an anniversary, offering a special or something else noteworthy? Send the information to livelocal@advocatemag.com or call 214.292.0487.

A SHOT RANG OUT.

After a long day of work, Savannah Carrillo was readying her kids to hit the pool.They were going to a nearby water park for a nice outing to beat the summer heat.They had their swimsuits and beach towels ready.

Then all of a sudden —boom.

“It was about 5:30, and I was talking with my mother in the kitchen and

The Victim: Savannah Carrillo

The Crime: Criminal mischief

Date: Monday, June 6

Time: Between 5:30 p.m. and 6:40 p.m.

Location: 2000 block of Emmett

we heard a gun go off,” Carrillo says. “It sounded really loud.”

They knew that the gunshot had to be close, but had no idea what might have happened. Random gunshots are a normal occurrence in Oak Cliff, Carrillo says. The family finished packing for the swim outing and headed out to the car. As the family was about to pile in and drive off, she noticed a one-centimeter dent in the right rear passenger door. She says the dent was clearly made from a gunshot, but did not pierce the door. It did cause some paint damage, however, that will have to be repaired.

Carillo decided to call police.

“We normally hear gunshots here and the police ask us to report it. If we did, we’d be

on the phone all the time,” Carrillo says.

As she described the events to officers, she heard four or five more gunshots. Officers asked her to call back and make a separate report for that gunfire.

The Carrillos have lived at their Sunset Heights home since 1996, but she says the neighborhood has grown progressively worse. Recently, Carrillo says, drugs have been a problem in the area.

“It makes me feel very unsafe and scared,” she says. “My husband and I are in the process of finding another home.”

Dallas Police Commander Vernon Hale of the Southwest Patrol Division says the area has actually seen a decrease in reported gunfire this year, but residents should continue to call police with as much information as possible. Residents should report the number of shots, direction fired from, any suspect or vehicle descriptions, and if there are shell casings for police to collect as a sample.

“We have had about 1,000 shots fired calls this year, which represents a 21 percent decrease over last year. We continue to make attempts to educate the public on the dangers of firing weapons,” he says. “What goes up must come down by law of physics, and people can get hurt. While Oak Cliff citizens are getting much better each year, we really hope individuals will think about the safety of others before choosing to fire a weapon. —SEAN CHAFFIN

BLOCK OF EAST ILLINOIS WHERE JIN KIM HA WAS FATALLY SHOT IN THE NECK AND DIEDIN HERHUSBAND’SARMS OUTSIDE QUICK CHECK GROCERY OVER FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND

AGE OF THE VICTIM WHO HAD OWNED THE CONVENIENCESTORE WITHHERHUSBAND, JUNG NAM HA, 67, FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS

NUMBER OF SUSPECTS BELIEVED TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MURDER; POLICEARRESTED ONE 24-YEAR-OLD MAN, ROBERT C. ROBERSON JR., WHO CONFESSED TO HIS ROLE IN DRIVING THE GETAWAY VEHICLE

SOURCE: Dallas Police Department

nesting ground

T HE PIon EERInG HoRTon FAMILy ESTABLISHED THE ByGon E E AGLE FoRD CoMMunIT y

In 1844 Enoch Horton moved his family from Missouri to his 640-acre land grant, six miles west of Dallas on the West Fork of the Trinity River. He built a ferry business on the waterway’s shallowest stretch, allowing pioneers to easily ford the river. Shortly, after discovering an eagle’s nest in the area, he named the spot Eagle Ford.

The settlement didn’t develop significantly until the depression of 1873, when the Texas & Pacific Railroad halted construction at Eagle Ford, making it the line’s westernmost terminal. The community built cattle pens, new businesses and homes, and a two-story hotel and railway station, morphing from an insignificant village built around a general store into a burgeoning small town.

After railroad construction resumed in 1876, Eagle Ford’s cattle shipping industry declined, returning the community to its mostly agricultural status. The “Gillespie & Worth Dallas City & County Directory, 1881-82” showed Eagle Ford with one constable, one blacksmith, one merchant, one miller, 28 farmers, and six “tenants”. A similar 1882 directory revealed a grist mill operated by power from the Trinity River, a steam gin, a lumber company, a general store, two schools and “daily mail by rail”. By 1889, the area had three general stores.

Arriving in Texas with his parents as a single man, son James Horton received his 320-acre Peters Colony Land Certificate 489. He and two of his brothers established their individual farms; however, the beckoning California Gold Rush proved too much to resist. James and John Horton returned, after modest success in the gold fields,

but buried brother Robert in California. In 1957, James Horton opened the Eagle Ford Grist Mill — his lifetime’s primary income source — along with his sister, Sarah Horton Cockrell. (Sarah and her husband, Alexander, founded Cockrell Hill.)

Vacating his original log cabin in 1852, James Horton built a large two-story home that remained on the property until it burned in 1956. The new Arcadia Park Elementary School now occupies the spot.

Early on, James Horton designated 11 of his acres for the Horton Cemetery, dividing the plot into three sections: the upper third for Horton friends and neighbors; the middle third for Horton family and allied family members; the lower third established for the African-Americans in the area. Families gained permission to bury their loved ones at no charge from the Horton family. The lane, which ran from the house to the cemetery, was lined with wild roses.

According to Horton descendant Susanna Clark-Smith on the cemeteries-of-texas.com website, some graves are unmarked and others are outside the perimeters, now only four of the original 11 acres. The first burial was James Horton’s sister, Martha, sometime around 1848.

“My Mother, who lived in the old Horton home from 1923-1936, remembers quite clearly the African-American funerals,” Clark-Smith writes. “She and her sister would go to the second floor and watch from the upper porch. The processions would come up from Eagle Ford and pass in front of the house, with the casket on a wagon and the mourners following behind on foot and in other wagons. She said they could hear the singing as they came up the road and that the singing would continue in the cemetery.”

“It was beautiful and really made an impression on her,” Clark-Smith continues.

Because of vandalism, family members have been reluctant to be buried there since 1956 but continue to visit the cemetery when in the area. In June 2001, a Texas Historical Marker was dedicated for the grounds, although some of the marker information is incorrect.

In 1903, capitalists developed the cement industry in the area, along with “villages” to house company employees. Soon known as Cement City, the industry resourced the land’s rich limestone and shale deposits.

Eagle Ford’s most well-known citizens were two notorious law-breakers, who, when living in and later visiting their hometown, used Eagle Ford Road as their escape route into Irving and then out of the county. With petite Bonnie Parker at his side, Clyde Barrow barreled down the thoroughfare, driving the stolen V-8s that enabled him to outrun any sluggish law enforcement vehicles in pursuit.

The Barrow filling station still stands, just off the corner of Singleton and Borger, while Parker’s elementary school remains at 1601 Chalk Hill Road. This community, within the perimeters of Eagle Ford/West Dallas, garnered the nickname “The Devil’s Back Porch”, a term that fugitive duo also used when speaking of the area.

In 1941, the Dallas County Commissioners accepted a petition from business owners along Eagle Ford Road to rename the thoroughfare. Honoring one of its own members, the commissioners re-christened the street Singleton Boulevard — after Commissioner Vernon Singleton. In 1954 Eagle Ford was annexed into the City of Dallas, melting into the larger metropolis and fading into history.

Except in my eyes.

Every time I view my father’s birth certificate from July of 1918, I proudly note his birthplace: Eagle Ford, Texas. To me, it still exists, even if it’s only on paper.

Gayla Brooks Kokel can date her neighborhood heritage back to 1918, when her father was born in what was then called Eagle Ford. she was born at Methodist Hospital and graduated from Kimball High school. Kokel is one of three co-authors of the recently published book, “Images of America: Oak Cliff”, and writes

history

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