Fourcast JADE Feb 2018

JADE The Fourcast Magazine

Volume 1, Issue 1 February 2018

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YES, I'M BLACK, BUT I'M BEAUTIFUL. I KNOW I'M BEAUTIFUL. I DON'T NEED ANYONE TO TELL ME THAT. MADISON CAMPER FORM IV

ABOUT JADE

This year, The Fourcast has added a new magazine to its traditional coverage. Named for the stone set in the ring of all graduating seniors, which was designed by Tiffany in 1917, JADE offers an in-depth look at the most pressing issues to the Hockaday community. Ed Long, Dean of Upper School, once remarked that Ela Hockaday chose the jade stone because she considered it to be a symbol of wisdom. In honor of the stone's legacy, JADE hopes to help inform the community and foster knowledgeable conversations about challenging topics.

JADE The Fourcast Magazine Volume 1, Issue 1 February 2018

Magazine Editor: Mary Orsak Assistant Magazine Editor: Eliana Goodman Staff Writers: Amelia Brown, Michelle Chen, Ashlye Dullye, Charlotte Dross, Shea Duffy, Morgan Fisher, Emily Fuller, Shreya Gunukula, Elizabeth Guo, Paige Halverson, Aurelia Han, Cheryl Hao, Ali Hurst, Ponette Kim, Niamh McKinney, Katie O'Meara, Eugene Seong, Kate Woodhouse and Emily Wu Contributing Writers: Kaleigh Beacham and Steve Kramer Staff Photographer: Lauren Puplampu Faculty Adviser: Ana Rosenthal. Editorial Policy: The Fourcast Magazine is written primarily for students of the Hockaday Upper School, its faculty and staff. The Fourcast Magazine has a press run of 600 and is printed by Greater Dallas Press. It is distributed free of charge to the Hockaday community. Businesses who wish to advertise in The Fourcast Magazine should contact Morgan Fisher, Business Manager, at mfisher@ hockaday.org. We reserve the right to refuse any advertising which is deemed inappropriate to the Hockaday community. Opinions are clearly marked and are the expressed opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect that of The Fourcast staff, its adviser or any member of the Hockaday community. Any questions or concerns about should be addressed to Aurelia Han, Editor-in-Chief, at ahan@hockaday.org.

CONTENTS

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ON THE COVER Photography: Lauren Puplampu, Form IV Model: Madison Camper, Form IV Makeup: Avery Harle, Form IV

23

HOCKADAY

Yarbrough Returns to Teach

STEM

Glass Ceiling and Glass Walls: To Be a Black Female in STEM ALUMNAE

Shattering Barriers: A Look into the Lives

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HISTORY

African-American History Course Focuses on an Untold History D-TOWN

Dallas: America's Most Racist City?

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CONFEDERACY

History Department Chair Steve Kramer Looks at Confederate Monuments HOPE

Bonton Neighborhood Struggles

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EQUALITY

Are We in a Post-racial Society?

MUSIC

Diversity Drought in Hollywood

FASHION

Unapologetically Unique

OP-ED

Kaleigh Beacham '18 Describes Being Black in Today's World

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FORTY ONE YEARS AGO, THE FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDENTS GRADUATED FROM HOCKADAY

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Yarbrough Returns to Teach In her first year as a teacher at Hockaday, Valencia Mack Yarbrough ‘77 has already begun leaving her legacy in her teachings, her students and her school.

Cheryl Hao, Web Editor, and Charlotte Dross, Staff Writer

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Valencia Mack Yarbrough’s second grade classroom is nestled in the Ashley H. Priddy Lower School, the door painted a welcoming, warm red. She she stands close to her class of bustling 8-year-olds as she speaks, and they all admirably look up at her, listening closely to her instructions.

“You have to respect the right of the other girls to learn by walking with silent voices,” Yarbrough said as she lead her girls to the art room for their afternoon activities.

In Yarbrough’s classroom, she emphasizes the importance of respect, teaching her students to regard each other in high esteem. She never wants a child to feel out of place, as she sometimes did when she began her Hockaday career 47 years ago.

The year 1970 was Yarbrough’s first year at Hockaday, and racial tensions in the nation were soaring. Yet, Yarbrough found herself at Hockaday surrounded in a sea of white, one of three African-American students in the entire school, and the only African-American student in the sixth grade class.

Growing up in Dallas Yarbrough grew up in Dallas and lived with her mother, father and brother. They resided in the predominantly black neighborhood of Oak Cliff. Her parents labored to provide Yarbrough and her brother with a better childhood than they themselves had experienced. Her father owned a furniture refurbishing company and her mother was an educator.

Prior to entering sixth grade, Yarbrough had attended two different schools—an integrated Catholic school and a predominately black school, Wilson Brown Miller Elementary. Never had she been in a situation in which she was one of the only black students in her school.

Despite this fact, after hearing of an advertisement promoting applications, Yarbrough applied for Hockaday’s entering sixth grade class in the fall of 1970. She later learned that she had been accepted into the school. At this time there was only one other African-American student who attended Hockaday: a second grader named Josette Kirven ‘80. Undeterred by such a disparity and encouraged by the support of her family, Yarbrough made the decision to transfer schools.

“I knew that I was going to this school to prepare myself to have a better future than what my parents had and what hopefully I could get by simply going to the neighborhood school,” Yarbrough said.

Life at Hockaday As Yarbrough looks back on her time spent at Hockaday, she does so with an utmost sense of admiration and respect. She said that the lessons she learned impacted her life and still resonate with her today.

One of the first memories Yarbrough has of Hockaday is from the day that she had her entrance interview. Lou Ann Levering ‘74, a white Upper School student, warmly welcomed Yarbrough that day, an interaction that Yarbrough still remembers.

“I really honestly thought that sixth grade was a wonderful year. I was embraced by not only Louanne Leverane but by the community,” Yarbrough said. “When I came I really felt that the girls were eager to meet me, eager to know about me.

They invited me over to their homes for parties, sleepovers—those sort of normal things that 6th graders do. It was a wonderful experience for me.”

However, Yarbrough did not pass through all seven years at Hockaday without feeling as if she stood out from her white classmates. She felt perhaps the most notable distinguishing factor amongst herself and her classmates was their greatly differing socioeconomic statuses. Yarbrough recollects growing up in an environment that contrasted starkly to her white classmates’ upbringings.

“My eyes were opened to the fact that there were people who lived a lot differently. Other people’s dads picked them up in BMWs and Mercedes Benz and whatever else cars. But we were working.

It was part of his work day, and then [my dad and I] would continue to go work,” Yarbrough said.

Whatever economic division that did stand between Yarbrough and her white classmates, however, generally did not interfere with the way in which they treated her. She believes that the seven years in which she attended Hockaday was a wonderful period of her life and allowed her to form many friendships, some of which she still maintains today.

“I did have some special challenges that affected me, but I really cannot say for the most part that my classmates mistreated me,” Yarbrough said.

African-American senior Lauren Puplampu began her Hockaday journey as a freshman, and she did not find her race a barrier that prohibited her from integrating with other students. However, she does not deny the fact that cultural and racial ignorances still exist within the school’s walls.

“I don’t think anyone here is purposely trying to exclude someone based on their background, but I think sometimes students hold prejudices from their lack of experience with diversity,” Puplampu said.

But Shonn Brown, mother of two African-American students, Ryan Brown ‘24 and Lily Brown ‘26, believes there is a difference between having people of different backgrounds and actually integrating them into the community.

“Numbers don’t mean everything,” Brown said. “I feel like Hockaday does a decent job of integration, but I think we can do better. I think as a whole, Hockaday is a welcoming place. I think where it becomes difficult is more making sure that every family and every student is involved to the

6 maximum that they would like to be so that there is not a feeling of a club or a small niche of people.”

Just as racial divisions still exist within the Hockaday community today, they did for Yarbrough decades ago as well. Yarbrough recalled a particular phone conversation that she had with her grandmother when she was frustrated with her seemingly inevitable tendency to stand out from her classmates.

“I remember calling her when I was crying.

She said, ‘Valencia, we did not send you there to make friends. It’s okay if you make friends, but that is not why we sent you there. We sent you there to get an education. So just stop your crying and get back to studying, because that is what you need to be doing right now. You need to not waste your time worrying about who is your friends, who’s not,’” Yarbrough said.

Yarbrough took her grandmother's advice to heart. After rigorously focusing on her studies for seven years, she was accepted to Stanford University in her senior year, where she majored in Communications in the fall of 1977.. At Stanford, Yarbrough was exposed to classes that she had never come into contact with at Hockaday. In the ‘70s, Hockaday’s English and history curriculum were Eurocentric, with a large emphasis on classics and Western civilization. None of the English classes that Yarbrough took offered any books written by African-American authors or authors of color in general.

“History was always about other people. It didn’t involve anyone that remotely looked like me.

When I went to Stanford and I started studying African-American History, all of a sudden, a world opened up,” Yarbrough said. “I wish I known more about the contributions that African-Americans were making to life in general. I really was not so conscious of that during my Hockaday experience.”

However, a current student at Hockaday does not need to take classes at Stanford to become acquainted with the same African-American figures Yarbrough began to learn about in college.

Currently at Hockaday, there has been an effort to teach all sides of literature and history, including the voices of the underrepresented. For students enrolled in American literature courses, this means reading books by authors like Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros and Chimamanda Adichie, alongside F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The History department even offered a course on African-American History during the 2017-2018 school year.

Senior Paloma Renteria recognizes that it is crucial to have a diverse selection of authors in English class.

“It’s important that our authors come from different backgrounds because books open up our perspective. Literature is the way in which we learn more about the world at large,” Renteria said. “If we’re missing narratives, then we’re misshaping our view of the world. We’re implicitly sending the message that their stories aren’t worth telling.”

A Passion for Education After graduating from Stanford and moving back to Dallas, Yarbrough became involved with the Dallas Independent School District where she eventually became the director of the Chapter I reading program as the Instructional Resource Teacher at Ascher Silberstein in DISD. When working with students, regardless of their economic backgrounds, Yarbrough uses her own personal experiences from her own childhood

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RESPECT IS THE KEY THING, AND IF AN INDIVIDUAL FEELS RESPECTED, IF AN INDIVIDUAL FEELS HER VOICE IS BEING HEARD, THEN I THINK SHE WILL FEEL SAFE." VALENCIA YARBROUGH

to help better relate to their feelings, for she, too, knows what it feels like to stand out from the crowd.

“I loved the fact that I thought I could make a difference in the life of these kids. But I was looking at children who lived in even more economically depressed settings than I was in, and I really thought that I was being an ambassador, that I was opening up the world to those children through books and through reading. I loved it, and I didn't want to leave,” Yarbrough said.

After working for eight years as the director of the reading program, Yarbrough learned about a position teaching first grade at St. Mark’s School of Texas. Yarbrough applied and was offered the job. She went on to teach at St. Mark’s for 19 years.

After getting married, Yarbrough left Dallas and ventured back to California where she continued her career as a school teacher at The Harker School. When she move back to Dallas in 2017, Yarbrough contacted Liza Lee, the Hockaday Head of School at that time, about potential openings at Hockaday. Eventually, she was notified of an opportunity to teach second grade.

Yarbrough’s Legacy Forty-one years after she graduated, Yarbrough finds herself back at Hockaday. Beyond her classroom’s red door, children’s books line the shelves, some collected from one of her overseas trips. Yarbrough is intentional about every book that she makes available and accessible to her students.

For example, “The Trip Back Home” by Janet Wong talks about the narrator going home to Korea with gifts from America. “The Other Side”

by Jacqueline Woodson is about a black girl and white girl separated by a fence. “Teammates” by Peter Golenbock is about Jackie Robinson and his white teammate Pee Wee Reese, and how their friendship defied society’s norms.

Through these books, and through everything that she teaches her students, Yarbrough emphasizes the importance of having compassion, empathy, honesty, perseverance and respect.

“Respect is the key thing, and if an individual feels respected, if an individual feels her voice is being heard, then I think she will feel safe,” Yarbrough said. “That is a hallmark of my classroom, from day one, to the day I stop teaching.”

In 1977, the year Yarbrough graduated, there were 12 African-American students, including herself, at Hockaday. All but one teacher, a dance teacher named Mary Lois Sweat, who came in 1972, were Caucasian.

But things have changed since then. For the 2017-2018 school year, 38 percent of Hockaday students are students of color, including international students. According to Hockaday students’ self-reported data, 21 percent of current students have not identified a racial identity, meaning that they left the question blank or marked “unsure” on admission documents. Fifteen percent of teachers are teachers of color.

“I look around me, and I see the diversity of this school. It’s something that I dreamed about every night before school started. I would dream that I would go back and it would be different. It would be a little more inclusive,” Yarbrough said.

“You can grow buildings. Growth in the heart is hard to come by. I’m happy to have been apart of the beginning of that and I am so happy to be a continuation of that. So I stand just ready to serve.

Whatever I can do to help Hockaday continue to become the school that Miss Hockaday envisioned. I just stand ready.”

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Fifth grade science students raise their hands as they check a quiz together in Jennifer Stimpson's class.

Photo provided by Michelle Chen

Glass Ceiling and Glass Walls Focused, Summer Hamilton navigates through line after line of code on her computer, hunting for the problem that she knew was buried in the language she learned by heart. In the 2000s, working as a systems analyst was as enjoyable as candy to her. She had always loved solving puzzles—and just as she was lost in her work, she heard the dreaded, familiar words.

“Sweetheart, come help me with this,” a man’s voice sounded behind her.

Elizabeth Guo, Managing Editor, and Michelle Chen, Staff Writer

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She had no choice but to turn around. As one of the three women out of 100 employees on her floor, Hamilton was used to being called around by her male colleagues.

According to a 2015 report from the National Science Foundation, women occupied 28.4 percent of professions in science and engineering fields, with black women occupying a mere two percent.

All of these women face the same problem: underrepresentation.

A History of Black Female Scientists In 1961, Russian Yuri Gagarin made history as the first human to enter space when he launched into orbit aboard the Vostok spacecraft. It wasn’t until 31 years later when the first black woman gained the same opportunity. In 1992, American NASA astronaut Mae Carol Jemison became the first African-American female to travel in space aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor.

The Space Race is just one of many examples that demonstrate the years—often decades or even centuries—that black females require to catch up in a field where the odds are stacked against them.

Like Jemison, Middle School science teacher Jennifer Stimpson is a torchbearer of increasing female minority representation in STEM. Stimpson earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Dillard University and moved on to graduate school at the University of Northern Iowa.

"When I got to Iowa, first of all, there’s not many people who look like me. There are very few black people in the state,” Stimpson said.

She became the first African-American female to complete graduate school at UNI. Indeed, Stimpson made history at UNI, but it was no easy feat. The main obstacle in her path?

Skewed perceptions on racial and gender bias.

Bias and Perception Stimpson remembers her time at graduate school as one of professional isolation. She remembers not being invited to give talks, attend confer-

ences or partake in on-campus events.

“When I was there, I actually experienced a little bit of racism because people never thought I needed or deserved help,” Stimpson said. “It wasn’t until after graduate school that I realized how many opportunities I could have had, had I had mentorships.”

Ansley Carlisle ‘14, a Hockaday alumna currently pursuing an environmental engineering degree, believes that one of the most dangerous aspects of the bias against black females is people’s refusal to accept its existence.

After spending three years at Spelman College and earning a degree in chemistry as part of the Dual Degree Engineering Program, Carlisle enrolled at Columbia University where she is now a senior and a member of Columbia’s Girls in STEM Initiative in the School of Professional Studies. According to Carlisle, outside of incidents of blatant bigotry and violence, sexism and racism manifest themselves in “covert and institutionalized ways.”

“I haven't been in a classroom where the professor uses racial slurs and I've never been excused from a business meeting because I'm a woman,” Carlisle said. “But I know that statistically, while women earn about half of the bachelor's degrees in science and engineering, we're far less represented in certain career fields like computer science. And for black women, representation is even lower in these fields.”

An Intersectional Struggle When Hamilton, who now teaches at Hockaday, graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Christian Brothers University, she still faced a long battle ahead. As an undergraduate student, she was the only woman in her computer science class, and Hamilton remembers that she was never taken seriously by her peers.

“If we were doing a project, they would want me to do the writing. I couldn’t get a lot of ‘hands on,’” Hamilton said.

And Hamilton actually fought battles on two fronts, as she also struggled to become valued as an African-American student. Luckily, one of Hamilton’s peers was an African-American male, and he often

8 chose her to work together. According to Hamilton, the oppression continued when she worked as a systems analyst at Affiliated Computer Services in Dallas.

“The guy that I worked with would sometimes just take credit right in front of me, but I was too shy and didn’t have the voice to speak up,” Hamilton said.

As she constantly worked under the pressure of a white-male dominated environment, the intersectionality Hamilton experienced as an African-American female deeply frustrated her.

“It is hard because sometimes you don’t know why you’re being discriminated against. Is it because I’m a woman? Is it because I’m black? Is it because of both?” Hamilton said.

Rise of a Movement The White House website estimates that by 2018, 2.4 million STEM jobs will be open.

African-American women continue to fight for a tangible future in these fields.

These women, though, are increasingly being recognized for their achievements in the STEM fields. The 2016 movie “Hidden Figures” revealed the achievements of black women who worked at NASA during the Space Race. With a Best Picture nomination from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards, the story quickly hit the mainstream.

In February 2017, Stimpson was named a “Hidden Figure of Dallas” for her impactful scientific achievements, one of which includes creating the six-week science camp “Knowledge in Chemistry” for middle school students and launching the camp in Dallas and northern Uganda.

“I’d like to think that I’m leaving a mark for girls who look like me and look up to me,” Stimpson said.

“Getting the award is not the end of the trail; it’s just a midpoint, which means I have many more miles to go.”

And African-American female scientists like Carlisle have begun at the undergraduate level to pursue science as a tool for change. When Carlisle was assigned a project that asked her to devise an engineering solution for an industrial ecology problem, she focused on issues within American prisons.

“During my presentation, I was able to introduce the environmental perils of the prison industrial complex, which overwhelmingly affects people of color,” Carlisle said.

And Beyond As for Hamilton, she eventually left the whitemale dominated corporate environment to work at the Southern Methodist University technology department. Hamilton left SMU after eight years, after she had become associate director of the department.

“That was the first time I really felt like I was running things, and people believed in me.” Hamilton said, “I wore my hair very natural, a big ‘fro, and I never felt any way about it.”

Though Hamilton later developed an interest in English and elected to pursue a career in it, she, along with Carlisle and Stimpson, hopes to see more African-American women represented in STEM leadership positions.

Carlisle hopes to see greater diversity in the health sciences, because “until we see more medical professionals who come from communities affected by health crises, the health issues that minorities face won't be prioritized.”

Meanwhile, Stimpson now mentors young female scientists in the classroom on a daily basis.

Her message to her students is this: “You matter. And when I say you matter, you matter in making a difference in doing what it takes to go to the next level.”

Shattering Barriers

Jade caught up with several African-American alumnae to feature their careers in public policy, law and the entertainment industry.

Angela Roberson

Fallyn Jones

Maggie Parker

Angela Roberson '86 After graduating from law school, Angela Roberson ‘86 interned in the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Civil Rights Department, protecting people’s rights from racial, gender, and other discrimination that may hinder people from receiving equal treatment. Since this internship nearly 23 years ago, Roberson has been actively involved in civil rights advocacy.

Roberson currently works as the Director of Diversity Contract Compliance at the American affiliate of the construction company Ferrovial Agramon. She oversees all diversity initiatives and ensures that all employees have equal opportunities and payment regardless of their race, gender or religion.

In an industry dominated by white men, Roberson noticed the lack of understanding and stereotypical views of African-Americans and women. With confidence, she continues to pave ways for people who are often ignored, showing her endless possibilities despite the labels others put on her.

“We can aspire to be a lot of different things not necessarily what people perceive based on my gender or race I ‘should be’ in that industry,” Roberson said.

Fallyn Jones '01 After graduating from Hockaday in 2001, Fallyn Jones attended the University of Southern California, majoring in Public Policy with an emphasis in Urban Planning and Development.

Jones then worked in commercial real estate until she became the Senior Vice President of Real Estate Compliance at Citigroup.

In her job, Jones ensures that the bank minimizes its risks with the many regulators in the United States and beyond and risks in the community, especially those in the inner-cities.

She sees herself as a security guard-- protecting employees, consumers and Citigroup from violating any laws and regulations.

“In order to be successful in my role, I have to be very strategic in my thinking – being able to anticipate problems, being proactive so that I can help my company prevent problems as opposed to trying to fix problems after they have already occurred,” Jones said.

Maggie Parker ‘07 After graduating from Hockaday in 2007 and majoring in Urban Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Maggie Parker earned master’s degrees in Public Administration and City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. There, she joined an on-campus consulting firm that helped nonprofits and local governments finance their real estate projects.

Staci Williams

Kristin Tucker

Parker brought her finance expertise back to Dallas in June 2015 and now directs The Real Estate Council Community Fund. She finances projects in lower income areas when a typical bank would not take on the loan.

“A lot of my job is around making sure that we provide capital and technical assistance for people to be able to make their vision a reality,” Parker said.

Staci Williams ‘77 In high school, Staci Williams ‘77 had her sights set on attending medical school to follow in her family’s footsteps, but soon after arriving at Smith College she found another passion. Excelling in her government and political science classes, William’s decided to apply to law school and eventually selected Georgetown University to pursue a law degree.

Williams now serves as a the first female judge to preside over the 101 Texas District Court. She listens to claims and controversies over $10,000 in 12 issue areas including, commercial and business, real estate, oil and gas, personal injury and medical or other professional malpractices.

“I’ve been on the bench now for three years and I think people now know that I’m prepared and I’m confident but I have to earn it. Respect isn’t just given to me,” Williams said. “I have to give my A+ game every day. I can’t have a bad day.”

Kristin Tucker '99 From English classes with former Upper School English Teacher Dr. Pat Saxon to dance classes with Performing Arts Chair Beth Wortley, Kristin Tucker ‘99 remembers Hockaday as a place where she could explore her passions.

Tucker felt that teachers at Hockaday helped strengthen her writing abilities and encouraged her to pursue her love of the performing arts. Combining her two passions, Tucker has started a career as a freelance screenwriter.

She has worked on shows including Disney Channel’s “Dog with a Blog” and "Ball Street," along with participating in the NBC writers' program. Whether outlining story ideas, pitching jokes for a script or watching her work in action behind the camera, Tucker never expects a day at work to be the same as the last.

“There’s been a lot of progress with more black women in front and behind the camera,” Tucker said. “I’ve definitely seen the benefit of having a minority voice in the room.” ”

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African-American History Course Focuses on an Untold History

Upper School History Department chair, Steve Kramer, teaches a new African-American History class this semester. The class is being taught without a traditional textbook; rather, Kramer gleaned together a set of primary and secondary sources to fully encapsulate the African-American voice throughout various points in history.

Morgan Fisher, Business Manager, and Eliana Goodman, Staff Writer

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After nearly 16 years absent in Hockaday’s extensive course catalog, the African-American History course has finally made its reappearance. However, it is different than an average history class according to Upper School History Department Chair Steve Kramer, the course provides a unique perspective and goes beyond what a Hockaday student would typically learn about African-American history in a class like United States History.

Kramer teaches the class with the goal of capturing the African-American people’s voices throughout history.

“The idea [of the class] is to hear the voices of the time period,” Kramer said.

For example, one of the books on the syllabus, “Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era,” provides a summary put together of primary sources, so the reader could hear the African-American voice during that time.

Since the class is a one semester course, Kramer said it is difficult to teach all of African-American history in such a limited time.

Therefore, he tries to utilize the technique of “post-holing or siloing,” which is separately teaching parts of related topics through various sources, then stringing the parts to create a whole by the end of the course Compared to U.S. History, which typically analyzes how African-Americans have been acted upon, according to Kramer, the African-American history class aims to look at agency how African-Americans respond to the actions inflicted upon them.

“For a great deal of African-American history, they’ve been acted on, so our goal is to see how they act and react [for the purpose of capturing their voice],” Kramer said.

During his time in college and high school, Kramer never took an African-American history course. But he studied slavery at the University of Maryland through the Gilder Lehrman Institute in 1995. Kramer also received a master's degree at Teacher's College Columbia University's Klingenstein Center, a program for private school teachers to learn about administrative structure in private education.

At this Columbia education course, Kramer completed a project about self-help in minority communities, prompting him to enroll in Columbia’s course about the history of Harlem and a

course about the issue of color in America which mostly focused on African-American issues but also included issues of other minorities.

“Out of [those courses] I found something I’ve wanted to research on my own [African-American History], which I’ve been doing for the past 20 years off and on,” Kramer said.

With his extensive knowledge and passion for African-American History, Kramer decided to offer the course at Hockaday. While it is not a completely new course, Kramer has modified the ways in which he will teach the course. For example, the class has no textbook; rather, the students are provided with series of books and handouts including primary sources and secondary analysis.

Eight students are taking the class this semester, including Seniors Sydney Polk and Aryn Thomas.

Polk said she signed up for the class because she “wanted more than just the standard textbook black history and more than just hitting the high points.”

She also said that the class is different than other history classes because non-African-Americans are “nervous” to take it.

Four non-African-Americans, however, including Senior Nic Kennady, did enroll in the course.

“I signed up for African-American history because I find that when we learn about American history, we don't focus on African-Americans except for small bits during the Civil War and Civil Rights movement. With the way our society treats people of color, especially African-American people, I felt responsible to further educate myself on the history,” Kennady said.

Thomas agrees with Polk and Kennady; she wants to learn more about her own heritage, especially since African-American history is often not taught as fully in traditional history classes.

“I wanted to learn more about my own history because we don’t really get much of that in my other history classes. We get a basic overview but not the full story. It’s a one-sided story.”

Thomas said.

Books Read by AfricanAmerican Authors The Hockaday English department is dedicated to capturing voices of all people.

For example, the overall theme for Form I English is “ The Danger of a Single Story”; Form I’s entire curriculum revolves around sharing often untold stories. In addition to this focus on global perspectives, here is a list of just four of the books read in Upper School English classes written by African-Americans.

"A Raisin in the Sun"

by Lorraine Hansberry Summer Hamilton teaches Form III "A Raisin in the Sun," a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award winning play, which tells the story of a poor African-American family, the Youngers, who live on the South Side of Chicago. A way for the Youngers to escape the ropes of poverty arises as the matriarch of the family receives a $10,000 life insurance check after her husband’s death. The play focuses on the other members of the Younger family’s plan for the money while revealing insight on each character’s dreams and ambitions; the play comments on the importance of having dreams, even in an oppressive society. The notion of dreaming is even apparent in the play’s title, which takes inspiration from Langston Hughes’ "Harlem."

"The Color Purple" by Alice Walker Jennifer Boulanger teaches Form IV Alice Walker’s "The Color Purple" in her Contemporary American Literature class. The Pulitzer Prize winning novel follows the path of two sisters, Cecile and Nettie from their abusive household to their perspective marriages. Walker brings racism, love, sexuality, abuse, and faith into question as the protagonists age. "The Color Purple" was adapted into a Golden Globe winning movie starring Whoopi Goldberg.

"Annie John" by Jamaica Kincaid Jennifer McEachern teaches Form II Jamaica Kincaid’s "Annie John," a novel which follows the protagonist, Annie John, through her adolescence. It focuses on Annie’s simultaneous declining relationship with her mother and fear of separation from her childhood home, while also highlighting Annie’s life at school as a star student and delving into the dynamics of adolescent friendships.

"Beloved" by Toni Morrison Janet Bilhartz, Jennifer Boulanger and Mira Cranfill all teach Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”, a haunting novel about a woman, Sethe, and her family, who have been ostracized from their community after the tragic murder of Sethe’s daughter. Told through flashbacks, visions, and dreams, the arrival of a woman named Beloved to the Suggs household shocks the family, since “beloved” is the word written on the baby’s headstone. Chaos ensues as Beloved gets involved in a Suggs family love-triangle; paranormal matters weave into Morrison’s tale while dealing with racial issues post-slavery.

10

Dallas: America's Most Racist City?

Over the past 153 years, Dallas been undergoing the arduous process of racial reconciliation. From the post-Civil War and Reconstruction Era through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, African-Americans have primarily been involved in this effort, though. In spite of the racial division and oppression, African-Americans have created strong communities, churches, newspapers, businesses and other organizations that serve their needs. Today, their rich and unique culture is distinct part of Dallas’ history.

Emily Fuller, Arts&Life Editor, and Emily Wu, Staff Writer

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Chains broken, bodies freed, a new era began on June 19, 1865, for African-Americans in Texas. This day would be celebrated for years to come as Juneteenth. Nearly two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued and over a month after the rest of the Confederacy ended the practice of slavery, African-Americans of Texas in bondage, who comprised 30 percent of the state’s population, were released.

Proud Dallas resident of 39 years and Lower School Music Teacher Sabrina Kessee has observed that Texas often lags behind the rest of the country on racial relations.

“Slavery was still happening although people in other states were free. It seems Texas has repeated this pattern for many years when it comes to race,” Kessee said.

However, jubilation over emancipation did not last. By 1877, when reconstruction came to an end and Jim and Jane Crow laws began to segregate Texas, African-Americans continued to build communities. In the late 19th century, newly freed African-Americans flocked to Dallas for labor and agriculture jobs. For example, the creation of a train yard south of downtown and the jobs that accompanied this new industry attracted many African-Americans.

New to the city, this population of migrants settled in the neighborhood surrounding the railway because they were only permitted to purchase homes in certain areas.

This specific community came to be known as Freedman Towns and later Deep Ellum.

Wherever black people settled though, they were met with opposition. Senior Genny Wood, who researched Deep Ellum for her Junior Research Project, said that this neighborhood became a national landmark for Blues and Jazz because of the struggles the black population endured living in a Jim Crow era.

“Their pain was closely intertwined with their music, and I argued that because of this it became an epicenter for jazz where big names such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson recorded music,” Wood said.

Although African-American music grew richer, their struggles did not stop.

During the 1920s, according to D Magazine, one of every three eligible men were a member of the Ku Klux Klan and Dallas

was considered to be one of the most racist cities in America. At the time, the sheriff, police commissioner, police officers, chief district attorney and judges were also Klansmen. Journalist of this article, “When Dallas Was the Most Racist City in America”, Darwin Payne, shared the following reasons behind this outpouring of racism.

“Because of the nervousness about social changes that the rest of the nation shared after World War I, this outlet for fundamentalist Protestant religious values, strong anti-crime measures, intense patriotism, and superiority of native-born Americans became popular,” Payne said.

The State Fair of Texas in 1923 even had a Ku Klux Klan day, in which members across the country appeared. With performances from the Ku Klux Klan drill team and bands, this day on Oct. 24 was advertised to bring Klansmen together and glean new members.

Nearly 30 years later, African-Americans still faced economic and geographic discrimination. Tanvi Misra of the online publication, CITYLAB, wrote that black families who lived in South Dallas were economically isolated and physically fenced off from the rest of Dallas. If they tried to move out to other, better neighborhoods, they were terrorized.

In 1941, 18 houses bought by African-Americans in white neighborhoods in South Dallas were bombed. In the 1950s, the African-American community continued to be under constant threat. Donald Payton President of the African-American Genealogy Interest Group in a documentary called “Bonton + Ideal: A Dallas Neighborhood Stories Film” by Craig Weflen ascribes this to the number of African-Americans who wanted to better their situations after returning home from World War II. “They didn’t want to live in the Ghetto anymore. They started to move out. They started to have bombings in South Dallas. People would buy houses and the next night people would throw dynamite into their house. It brought in fear, but they lived through it,” Payton said.

Although the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal,” an imbalance in the allocation of funds created more problems for the black committees.

“When one area gets more funding than the others, you have other areas that are abandoned. Dallas has an issue with giving

PERCENT OF THE DALLAS POPULATION THAT IS AFRICANAMERICAN ACCORDING TO THE 2010 U.S. CENSUS

12 lots of its attention to just more desirable areas to live in the past. That is a huge place on where we can grow,” Kessee said.

Dallas has made efforts to grow though.

Both native Dallasites, Kessee’s parents grew up through some of the most significant changes in the racial dynamics of Dallas.

“When my parents first went to the movies together, the only place they could sit was the balcony,” Kessee said. “They live in a different city now.”

But Dallas has changed for the better. In 2007, the magazine Black Enterprise rated Dallas the fifth best city for African-Americans to live in.

“I can see why we are ranked top 10. We are south west but there are different states in the south that don't move as progressively as we do. Texas, especially Dallas, is a place to relocate,” Kessee said.

A William H. Frey Brookings Institution study has also reported that in the 2000s Dallas had the fourth largest migration of African-Americans. The city’s effort towards progress was what was bring them here.

Members of the Dallas community have worked to create a progressive city that challenges its complicated past. Declining areas of South Dallas and Oak Cliff are beginning to be revitalized through city and grass roots efforts. For example, Mayor Mike Rawlings has acknowledged past neglect of South Dallas and has sought repudiation with the GrowSouth Initiative to invest in the local economy of the region.

At Hockaday, this goal of reconciling a previously segregated city also regarded as a priority. Upper School ceramics teacher Kevin Brady recalls an African-American advisee of his that had her heart set on Stanford who was told numerous times to not apply because they would not let her in.

“She was told she could never get in because of her race, but she ended up getting her bachelors and masters degree there,” Brady said.

But Brady sees Hockaday as being a much better place in terms of diversity today.

“I can just see that girls of color are much more accepted here than 25 years ago,” Brady said.

In her 13th year at Hockaday, Kessee speaks to this, being an African-American teacher at a predominantly white school.

“When I first came here, there was only me and another African-American teacher. So I think looking back then and looking at now, you can see the progress education is making,” Kessee said.

But Kessee notes that with this progress, there is still racial reconciliation that needs to happen.

“When we are still crossing over thresholds such as ‘first African-American music teacher’ you see there is still more work to be done and conversations to hold,” Kessee said.

For example, with a reported 22 percent of the county’s population being African-American, it was still not until 1995 when the city of Dallas elected its first black mayor: Ron Kirk.

In an essay published in the East Texas historical journal, Theodore M. Lawe described the racial politics in the 20th century and progress made by the African-American community.

“Such political accomplishments were the results of population growth in the African-American community and the community’s development of sophisticated political

“

WHEN MY PARENTS FIRST WENT TO THE MOVIES TOGETHER, THE ONLY PLACE THEY COULD SIT WAS THE BALCONY. THEY LIVE IN A DIFFERENT CITY NOW." SABRINA KESSEE

skills, which resulted from direct community intervention tactics, federal legislation, Supreme Court decisions, over 100 years of community struggles and demands, and other external influences,” Lawe said.

Nevertheless, there are still unresolved issues hidden that stand in the way of Dallas’ progress.

Wick Allison of D Magazine cautioned the city that the homogeneous neighborhoods of the Park Cities, Preston Hollow and Greenway Parks could be detrimental to the city’s future. According to Allison in 2009, New York had 94 Fortune 500 companies, California had 98, and Texas had 118, of which 46 are in North Texas. For the companies, if a relocation decision is based purely on costs, taxes, convenience and labor, Dallas wins hands down. However, there is more to it than that: they warn that unresolved racial tension will threaten the economic growth of the city in the future.

“Successful black, Hispanic, and Asian executives don’t need us. We need them,” Allison said.

After the 2016 shooting of 14 Dallas police officers that killed five, Kessee noticed the need for more change as well.

“This biggest conversation that needed to be had after this was why there was a need for a march in the first place,” Kessee said. “I optimistically think that it created a conversation where people wanted to get on the right side of, whatever that side is.”

Kessee believes the catastrophe heightened people’s awareness of Dallas’ racial situation.

“Texas has this history of not getting on the progressive track. I think now currently we are much better, but thats because of the youth voice goes faster and because you guys pushed for it. But, specifically, I think that's what makes Dallas different,” Kessee said.

1990 9.2%

2017 23%

Percent of the African-American community in Dallas with a bachelor's degree or higher Source: blacksindallas.com, University of North Texas's Center for Development and Research

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Confederate Reckoning

Located on Richmond's famous Monuments Avenue and erected in 1907, this statue of Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart has gained the ire of local activists, who advocate for the removal of all Confederate monuments.

Photo provided by ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

In the recent controversy about the Robert E. Lee statue in Dallas, supporters and critics presented a variety of views. Some art experts argued that the statue was aesthetically significant and a stellar example of sculpture. Advocates of neo-Confederatism and the myth of the Lost Cause - a belief that the Southern troops fought valiantly against a better-equipped North during the Civil War contended that the statue honored the military skills and personal integrity of a great American.

Steve Kramer, Upper School History Department Chair

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Many who attacked the continued display of the sculpture argued that Lee represented two values hard to reconcile with contemporary attitudes about the Civil War: support for the institution of slavery with the attendant belief in black inferiority, and treason in waging war against a duly-elected national government.

One voice that has remained largely unheard is that of African-Americans at the time of the unveiling of the statue in 1936. The Dallas Morning News has no articles presenting the view of African-Americans about the statue, as far as I can ascertain. The local black newspaper, the Dallas Express, has no extant issues in local libraries or archives for 1936 although the University of Texas, Austin, and Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls apparently do have issues for 1936.

Not being able to get to Austin or Wichita Falls any time soon, I have tried what might be the next best approach: following African-American attitudes about the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee, and statues using issues of black newspapers available digitally from the years 1890 to the early 1920s.

The information from such sources indicates that African-Americans, while acknowledging Lee’s soldierly skills, saw little reason to honor such a man with memorial statues.

In 1890, the city of Richmond, Virginia, placed a statue of the general within the city boundaries. The Richmond Planet, the local black newspaper, noted that Confederate emblems adorned the city at the unveiling ceremony with

“no flags of the Union to be seen.” The Planet concluded that “this placing of Lee on equality with Washington [and] Jackson” glorified the statesrights doctrine of the “right of secession and the honoring of men who represented that cause. . . .”

This handed “down to generations unborn a legacy of treason and blood.”

The Indianapolis World, another African-American newspaper, asserted in June 1890 that “a severe penalty should be insisted upon anyone who dared to unfurl that rag [Confederate flag], emblematic of rebellion and crime.”

In the same year, the New York Age, one of the most prominent black journals, asserted Lee “was a traitor, and gave his magnificent abilities to the infamous task of disrupting the Union and perpetuating slavery.”

Another southern black newspaper, the Louisville Champion, observed that no other country would tolerate the presentation of a statue memorializing a man who “attempted to destroy” the country, and “this rehabilitation of the infamous cause of the Confederacy is rank treason.”

The Baltimore National Home Protector acknowledged Lee’s virtues as a man, a soldier and defeated general “though the general was guilty of treason against the United States” he took an oath to protect and “fought bravely to forever establish and extend the accursed institution of human slavery. . . .”

Continuing, the Protector argued that the monument was “an opportunity to justify the southern people in rebelling against the U.S. government and to flaunt the Confederate flag in the faces of the loyal people of the nation; this occa-

14 sion calls for serious reflection.”

Members of the African-American community expressed strong opposition to the Lee monument in Richmond and the cause it celebrated.

Although the archives of the Dallas Morning News contain no mention of the reaction of the city’s black population to the erection of the Lee statue, the digitized files of the Dallas Express for 1919-1922 include a few depictions of the Confederacy, without mentioning Lee. In 1921, R. S. Jenkins in a speech welcoming the African Methodist Episcopal bishops to a Dallas convention declared that “the teachings of a certain people” might “render a verdict that the sons of the Southern Confederacy . . . gave their talents and fortunes for the low and ignoble purpose of blighting and destroying the religious hopes and educational aspirations of the offspring of a race held in bondage for more than two hundred years.”

A 1920 editorial titled “Poison Gas” asserted the “spirit of the Confederacy still survives.”

Quoting the Chicago Whip, the Express lamented the “honors” the South reserved for “the veterans of that bloody fratricide,” adding “mouldering [sic] gray uniforms are treasured not as memorials of the ‘lost cause,’ but as silent reminders of slavery and human chattel.”

In a brief comment in 1919, the Express complained that the mayor of Richmond and the governor of Virginia refused to be present to welcome returning World War I African-American troops and closed the armory so the troops could not have a meal there, an indication of white southern sentiment toward African-Americans.

This attitude was found as late as 1939 in the Dallas Morning News when an associate managing editor, in a brief article titled “Freedom’s Price,” asserted that “Emancipation and education, no doubt, have conferred inestimable benefits on the southern Negro, but it has robbed him of many insouciant virtues which made him a delightful and dependable element of southern society.” The editor also lamented that the “Negro mammy has gone” and the “South no longer echoes her picturesque speech or her colorful songs.”

This limited information indicates that African-Americans as late as the 1920s continued to have disdain for the white South’s embrace of the values of the Confederacy, correctly noting that the war had been about protecting slavery while whites embraced black inferiority and resignation over the ‘lost cause.’

Historic Dallas Community Makes Strides Toward Prosperity

Nestled between the Trinity River and the C. F. Hawn Freeway is the South Dallas neighborhood of Bonton. The landscape is sparse, with few buildings besides the houses themselves, and this neighborhood is one of Dallas’s most neglected areas. Bonton is the oldest black community in the city, and since its creation, discrimination has caused the neighborhood to be known only for crime. To put this into perspective, Bonton’s first recognition in the Dallas Morning News in 1932 was for a gang-related shooting.

Ali Hurst, Copy Editor, and Shea Duffy, Staff Writer

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According to D Magazine, In the early 1900s, when Jim Crow laws codified and encouraged racial segregation, wealthy merchants living in South Dallas designated an area to house their black workers. From the early years of Bonton’s existence, a strong sense of community and camaraderie has been present in the neighborhood, but so has racism.

Following World War I, more whites began to move into South Dallas, using Jim Crow laws to justify forcing the residents of Bonton further along the flood plains and the train tracks. This constriction of land placed the people of Bonton at the meeting of the Trinity River and White Rock Creek. Patrick Wright, a lifelong resident of Bonton and the Director of Sales at Bonton Farms, recognizes the low quality of this area designated for Dallas’ black population.

“We were on mush land. They let us rent this land that was mush,” Wright said.

During rainstorms, when the water levels of the Trinity River and White Rock Creek would rise, the neighboring wealthy white population, fearing for the safety of their lawns, opened the nearby floodgates, releasing more water into Bonton.

“We had a lot of people getting rescued off the top of their houses. That’s how much water there was. That created a lot of racial hatred,” Wright said.

Not only was Bonton’s land physically undesirable, but when black residents attempted to move north of their restricted neighborhood, surrounding whites bombed their homes. These racially-motivated acts of violence caused Bonton to be known colloquially as “Bomb-Town.”

In the 1960s, the C.F. Hawn Freeway, a physical barrier that separated the black community of Bonton from the rest of Dallas, was constructed. This decade also saw a large migration of black people from small Texas towns and surrounding states to Dallas looking for work, including Wright’s parents.

“Blacks were migrating here to make a better way for themselves, to try to find a future for themselves,” Wright said.

Wright was born into a neighborhood plagued by poverty and discrimination and destined for rampant crime and hopelessness. “This area of Bonton has always been the most despised, hated, and feared communities out of all communities. Nobody comes to Bonton,” Wright said.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the neighborhood of Bonton still faced the repercussions of segregation, isolation and racism, resulting in more violence and

crime. Danny George, Farm Manager of Bonton Farms and lifelong resident of Bonton, was raised in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and remembers the strife his community felt during his childhood.

“It was terrible. It was like growing up in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Daily gunshots, killings, shootouts with the police,” George said.

In addition to internal violence amongst members of the Bonton community, the primarily white Dallas Police Department and existing racial hatred of the time resulted in a lack of understanding and widespread police violence.

“And you had all white cops patrolling the all black neighborhood at the time. That wasn’t good either. The way we looked at it, they were all Klansmen, except they gave up the hoods and put on police uniforms,” Wright said.

Abundant crime and violence in Bonton has created a negative stigma around the neighborhood since its early years, but Wright and George both believe that their peers’ criminality stems from the community’s isolation from Dallas. South Dallas is home to almost half of the city’s population, yet its residents are excluded from employment opportunity, as 99 per cent of Dallas’s jobs are located in the north. Thus, the residents of Bonton have had to rely on illegal activity to provide for their families.

“People were aggravated. Not to justify wrongdoing or breaking the law, but people did what they had to do to survive. They had to sell drugs, prostitute, drop out of school, hustle, burglarize. That’s what they’d do because there’s no work here,” Wright said.

Founded in 2012 with a mission to restore lives and provide fresh food to the residents of Bonton, Bonton Farms has served as an oasis of hope in the community. The Bonton neighborhood is one of 40 food deserts in Dallas, and reaching the closest grocery store to the community requires a three hour round trip bus ride.

Bonton Farms has aided the community’s overall health and continues to expand job opportunities for Bonton’s population.

But, according to Wright and George, there is still much to be done to repair the effects of historic volatile racism on Bonton.

“It’s a group thing. Everybody needs to put their hand in and get down and dirty. It’s just not one person or one individual group. As whole, we never know what we can do. We can break barriers, the sky’s the limit if we work as a team, as family,” George said.

BONTON BY THE NUMBERS As a result of systemic oppression and government neglect, the Bonton community has struggled with poverty, lack of infrastructure and healthcare. A look at these statistics provide insight into the problems facing this historic community.

43%

of the population lives beneath the poverty line

63%

of residents lack personal transportation. The nearest grocery store is three hours by bus.

85%

of male residents have been to prison

$13,000 is the average yearly salary of employed residents

35%

of the population has graduated high school or has achieved an equivalent degree

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“Unfortunately, 'post racism' is also a myth, like unicorns and black people who survive to the end of a horror movie.�

Justin Simien Director of "Dear White People"

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post-racial (adj.) [pohst-ray-shuh-l]

1. characterized by the absence of racial discord, discrimination, or prejudice previously or historically present Katie O'Meara, News Editor, and Mary Orsak, JADE Editor

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Nestled behind Interstate 45 on 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., St. Philip’s School and Community Center serves as a stark reminder of the progress of the African-American community in South Dallas. While the brick building now provides legal services, routine health checks and an education to children from preschool to sixth grade, nearly 70 years ago a crack house shared the same address. Seventeen liquor stores stood within four blocks, and the current football field, where the neighborhood’s five teams regularly practice, was once a motel infamous for prostitution.

In 1959, a coalition of neighbors, local congregants and the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas aimed to rid the community of crime and to inject it with hope. First, they established a gymnasium to provide their children with safe recreation. By 1967, they added a daycare center for working families.

Now, St. Philip’s serves a community of over 1700 individuals who utilize the facility’s school, North Texas Food Bank food pantry and Children’s Health Pediatric Group clinic.

Terry Flowers, Ph.D., the Perot Family Headmaster and Executive Director of St. Philip’s School and Community Center, hopes to educate the next generation of leaders, who will return to this community and help improve the conditions of the neighborhood for their children.

“We try to put service in the DNA of our students. So we are teaching them through many ways that their sole purpose in existing is to serve God and you are best able to serve God by serving people,” Flowers said. “You are best able to serve others by advancing yourself academically and with that you are placing yourself in a stronger position to bless your family, your community, yourself.”

Despite the progress the community has witnessed - including better infrastructure, improved plumbing, reduction of liquor-related businesses and access to wireless internet - the prosperity of downtown Dallas, visible from nearly every classroom at St. Philip’s, still eludes the community.

In this way, South Dallas is emblematic of African-American communities across the country. After wresting themselves from abject poverty and widespread crime that often plagued black neighborhoods as a result of Jim Crow laws, these communities have begun to flourish, and when coupled with the election of the first African-American president, this success has led some Americans, like conservative radio host Lou Dobbs, to declare "We are now in a 21st-century post-partisan, post-racial society."

However, a closer examination of African-American communities across the nation contradicts this optimistic - and, at times, naive - assertion.

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BLACK FOLKS ARE THE MOST RESILIENT PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET AND IT IS JUST A MATTER OF ELIMINATING THE BARRIERS THAT ARE DESIGNED TO MAINTAIN THE INEQUITIES THAT EXIST TODAY. " SARA MOKURIA

A Flicker of Progress Born on the southside of Chicago during the apex of the Civil Rights movement, Flowers recalls a tumultuous childhood. From pre-kindergarten to 12th grade, he attended nine different schools due to his family’s constant relocations.

“When I was there, we moved a lot because of the gang activities. My mother moving us from place to place trying to get us to safer environments,” Flowers said.

Although his mother had a steady factory job, his family struggled with poverty, a common theme among African-American families. For example, according to Pew Research Center, 41.8 percent of all African-Americans in the U.S. lived below the poverty line in 1966.

“We were poor and we didn’t know it. I call it po’. Po’ is when you can’t afford the ‘o’ and ‘r’. Poor is when you don’t have options,” Flowers said.

Despite these obstacles, Flowers still experienced much of the “typical” American childhood: he played outside with his friends, attended church once a week and dreamt of success, which he imagined as a life similar to the characters on his favorite television shows like “Leave It to Beaver” and “My Three Sons”. However, even at a young age, Flowers recognized the hurdles that stood between himself and the “American Dream.”

“What you are living in in comparison to what you are watching on television, sometimes for us [the images of the American Dream on television] seem like a fairytale,” Flowers said.

Although Flowers recognized the racial barriers that would have to surmount in order to achieve success, former North Carolina governor Terry Sanford in 1971 proclaimed the nation to be “post-racial” to a meeting of the Southern Growth Policies Board, marking first known use of the phrase. To Flowers, the nation was neither post-racial in 1971 nor in 2018.

Due to the guidance of his mother and grandmother and his faith in a higher power, Flowers defeated the odds and attended Upper Iowa University in 1976. After graduation, Flowers followed his girlfriend to Texas who planned on attending Texas Woman's University, and while living in Dallas, Flowers noticed in an ad in the Times Herald for the principal’s position at St. Philip’s. Moved by the school’s mission to educate young African-Americans often overlooked in Dallas, Flowers applied for and received the position in 1983.

Since then, Flowers has dedicated himself to the improvement of the African -American community in south Dallas, a community which reminds him at times of his neighborhood in Chicago. Now, the neighborhood once saturated with liquor stores has developed into a blossoming, supportive community, symbolic of the improving conditions for African-Americans in the United States.

On a national level, the poverty rates for

18 African-Americans have fallen by more than 10 percent since 1966. According to the Brookings Institute, 44 percent of white individuals agreed they would move homes if they had a black nextdoor neighbor; by 1998, that figure dropped to one percent.

These statistics and the success of St. Phillip’s, however, are misleading. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household income for African-Americans is $35,400 while the median household income for whites is $60,250.

In addition, a study by Brandeis University found that the wealth gap between African-Americans and white has tripled over the past 25 years. Furthermore, the local high school near St. Philip's, James Madison High School, where approximately 97 percent of the students are designated as economically disadvantaged, reported only 1.4 percent of students met the college-ready criteria on the SAT, ACT or exit-level TAKS exam. For comparison, the city average is 18.4 percent, and the state average is 38.7 percent.

As a result of years of government neglect and oppression, local residents in South Dallas often lack Flower’s optimism about the future neighborhood. Instead, they see these numbers and accept that too many barriers stand between the community and success to even try.

“They see promise and improvements when a crack house goes down. But there are a lot of people who suffer from nihilism. That is a disease that can go viral very easily,” Flowers said.

A Bleak Reality Even though progress has been made since the Civil Rights Movement began over 60 years ago, the cyclical and systemic nature of racism has continually stifled overall growth for African-Americans, according to Sara Mokuria, co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality and the Associate Director of Leadership Initiatives with the Institute for Urban Policy Research at the University of Texas at Dallas.

In the wake of the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia., the city of Dallas assembled the Mayor’s Task Force on Confederate Monuments, of which Mokuria was a member.

Even though the group provided suggestions on the fate of the monuments, Mokuria believed that their removal should not have even been a question. Rather she thought that the task force should have simply decided what to do with the monuments and numerous streets throughout Dallas which are named for members of the Confederacy.

“It didn’t happen that way, but I feel like the Confederate Monuments Task Force, what it provided me with was the breadth and depth of Confederate relics that are woven into the fabric of the City of Dallas,” Mokuria said. “It made me really reflect upon what we do with crimes against humanity. The level of racism and racial terror that the last 400 plus years of U.S. history is rot with.”

For Mokuria, the history of Dallas has created an environment where the systemic racism seen cannot be improved.

“There needs to be some reckoning with the reality of our city. Like the fact that there was a time when one in three white males in the City of Dallas were part of the KKK. What does that mean, in terms of how Dallas operated,” Mokuria said. “It is almost unfathomable to acknowledge the level of depth and breadth of racism and racial terror that is part of the making of this city, the history and the present of our city. So I think that we have to acknowledge that and we have to

talk about that and we have to connect that to the inequities that we are experiencing today.”

Mokuria attributes these inequities to the disparities that exist within the education system, medical treatment and the criminal justice system. According to Mokuria, the unequal access to these resources can be directly related to poverty rates within the city.

Currently, Dallas has a 30.6 percent childhood poverty rate, which ranks as the third-highest in major cities, and an overall 22.9 percent poverty rate according to the U.S. Census. Within that figure, according to Pew Research Center, 83 percent of low-income households are non-white.

On the other hand, 95 percent of upper-income households are white.

“That level of inequity that exists cannot be separated from the systemic racism that has been woven in and embedded in the way that this city works for decades,” Mokuria said.

Additionally, this poverty and the subsequent lack of access to resources including fresh and healthy food options impacts the all parts of life for low-income African-Americans. According to Mokuria, this then leads to the body and mind not operating at its fullest.

“Compound that [stress from a lack of access to resources] with the toxic stress of police brutality, of poor transportation options, from harassment from police officers, low-paying jobs, the stress of not being able to pay your bills, being trapped in a cycle of poverty,” Mokuria said. “And then you go into schools that are not creating adequate means for you to learn the skills that you need in order to go on to college and to be able to compete in the job market. It is this cycle where systems operate together to create an oppressive environment. I don’t want to paint this picture like this is the case for everybody because it is not, but there are systemic forces that make it very difficult for folks to succeed.”

Yet for Mokuria, even in the face of adversity, “black folks are the most resilient people on this planet and it is just a matter of eliminating the barriers that are designed to maintain the inequities that exist today.”

Obama and the Post-Racial Myth On Jan. 27, 2010, President Barack Obama addressed a joint-session of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives for one hour and 90 minutes. During this first State of the Union, Obama discussed jobs, education and healthcare.

Later that night, Chris Matthews of MSNBC uttered the following infamous quote on live television: “It's interesting: he is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”

Matthews is not the only pundit to proclaim the United States “post-racial,” especially following the unprecedented election of the first African-American president.

One of Obama’s most vocal supporters, Ta-Nehisi Coates, responded to this misnomer, writing in The Atlantic, “The Obama-era qualifier is also inherently flawed, because it assumes that the long struggle that commenced when the first enslaved African arrived on American soil centuries ago could somehow be resolved in an instant, by the mere presence of a man who is not a king.”

Renowned American philosopher and activist, Cornel West, challenged Coates’ neoliberal view of Obama and described the 44th president as “a person who is afraid and intimidated when it comes to putting a spotlight on white supremacy.”

Raymond Wise, Ph.D, Director of Afri-

19

can-American Choral Ensemble and the Associate Director of African-American Arts Institute at Indiana University Bloomington, disagreed with Cornel’s pessimistic analysis of Obama’s presidency that the president neglected the needs of poor African-Americans and preferred to appease white individuals, rather than truly fighting inequality.

“The point is because we had the first African-American president did not mean that he was the president of only African-Americans. In that regard, I do not agree with many of my other African-American colleagues who suggest that he did not do enough,” Wise said.

Regardless of one’s judgment of Obama’s eight-year presidency, Hockaday senior Madison Camper wholeheartedly disagrees with the term “post-racial.”

“A lot of people think that we are in a post-racial society because Obama was elected president and that just because we took that one step, that whatever comes after means that there is no more racism because we had a black president and he had some success,” Camper said. “But especially now with our new president it is showing even more that we are not in a post-racial society.”

Like Camper, Mokuria recognizes Obama’s role in the revitalization of white supremacy from individuals like Richard Spencer and even President Donald J. Trump. However, Mokuria welcomes this more honest conversation about race and hopes that such conversations will result in tangible change.

“While there were many wonderful and beautiful things that came from Obama’s presidency, the backlash that we are experiencing now, and in some ways it is a positive thing because so many people thought ‘Oh, well Obama has been elected.

Racism doesn’t exist. We are in a post-racial society.

Everybody can succeed,’” Mokuria said. “But this backlash has showed us how entrenched and how deep and toxic and alive racism still is in our country. So, I think his tenure as president has dredged all of that to the surface and now we are in the midst of having to deal with it and acknowledge it and see it.”

For Camper, Trump’s election at first brought her fear, for during his candidacy white nationalists like former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke but also held high-level campaign positions.

“When Trump was first elected I was very scared. I didn’t know if I would be treated the same going anywhere, going to a predominantly white school. I was really scared because I didn’t know how people would react in the world and what would come from this,” Camper said. “But I have learned to kind of accept it, you can’t really change what is gonna happen, and have hope that it is gonna get better sometime.”

Much like Camper’s hope for a better future for the African-American community, Mokuria believes that the way in which the Trump administration has brought these issues to the forefront, where they can truly be tackled.

“I think that there is myth for some folks that it was all great and then Trump was elected and now everything is horrible. But the reality is that we have been suffering,” Mokuria said. “What the Black Lives Matter movement did was push that reality to the forefront so that we as a country have to face it and deal it with and acknowledge it. And so in a similar way, it is positive that all of this virilism is out in the public and we as a society are being forced to acknowledge its existence. My hope is that we will deal with it in a way that makes us a more equitable and free and just society.”

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Diversity Drought in Hollywood This upcoming Oscars season marks only two years since the 2016 #OscarsSoWhite controversy during the 88th Academy Awards, when for the second year running, all 20 actors nominated for a lead or supporting role were white. Last year’s Oscars nominees saw more diverse backgrounds, with nominations for Mahershala Ali, Viola Davis, Dev Patel and more.

Aurelia Han, Editor-in-Chief, and Shreya Gunukula, Views Editor

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African-Americans are also represented among the Oscar nominations this year. There are three nominations in the acting categories, with Denzel Washington for his performance in “Roman J. Israel, Esq.”, Daniel Kaluuya for “Get Out” and Mary J. Blige for Best Supporting Actress with her role in “Mudbound.” Jordan Peele, who directed Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nominee “Get Out,” is also nominated for Best Director.

In other areas of the entertainment industry, the Grammy’s have set an unprecedented record by having the first all African-American nominee list for Best Album of the Year. Many people are praising Hollywood and the entertainment industry at large for this year’s diversity, but there is a fear that recognition will still be “so white” in future popular culture.

“What still is a deficiency is that one year we have a plethora of African-American movies and then the next year nothing,” Oscar winner and actress Viola Davis said, referring to this year’s movie nominees.

Hockaday mother and the official DJ of the Dallas Mavericks Ivy Awino ‘08 echoes this sentiment by worrying that attention and recognition to African-American artists is due to a reactionary period from instances like the #OscarsSoWhite controversy. She fears that if an African-American does win an award, it is only a “handout,” a pity recognition to add diversity to the winner lineup.

She urges people to wait at least five to seven years to see if this pattern lasts. “[Recent African-American recognition raises the question of] ‘Do you really believe in this or are you just doing it to be politically correct?’ When an organization comes under fire, they often just do the exact opposite of what they were being criticized for,” Awino said.

Despite this notion, Awino also recognizes the important roles for African-American individuals that have been created in the entertainment industry. Citing actors like Yara Shahidi who starred in ABC’s “Blackish” and singers like Beyonce, Awino is proud to live in an age where African-American history is being rewritten to shed a spotlight on people of color in the entertainment industry.

But Awino worries that the entertainment industry fails to recognize diversity within the African-American community. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised in the United States, Awino hopes that society will reach a time where everyone understands the scope of diversity and appreciate the cultural differences between, for example, a Kenyan and a Ugandan.

For now, Awino feels that it is important to simply get a foot in the door with racial equality. With this notion, Lower School Music & Performing Arts Teacher Sabrina Kessee, along with

Awino, feels that they have to speak on behalf of the entire African-American community to at least get the black community represented in the entertainment industry. After this battle is won, perhaps the entertainment industry can continue on the path to true diversity.

“I don’t want people to utilize me to answer questions about all black women. I think that’s what we expect people to see in the room. You want to be accepted as a whole and not just the parts,” Kessee said.

On the road to racial equality, both Kessee and Awino believe that it isn’t just African-Americans and people of color in general being recognized on the big screen that proves true diversity.

When they witness African-Americans being recognized for their hard work, they are proud, but they believe equality means more than a simple award. Instead, Awino recommends that institutions in the entertainment industry use other aspects of recognition, such as financial compensation and encouraging diversity in all levels of the industry, to measure equality “When I go to work, I expect to be compensated. When my compensation schedule looks different than everyone else’s, then we need to ask the question of why. Why was a certain position given to someone else over me? When we can answer those questions and race is not a part of the answer, then we can be equal. There needs to be other measures of fairness,” Awino said.

In addition to equal pay across different racial groups, both Awino and Kessee argue that there needs to be African-American representation both in the spotlight and behind the scenes of the entertainment industry. According to a study on media and diversity from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, out of 1,114 directors between 2007 and 2016, only 5.1 percent were African-American.

With the recent recognition of many prominent African-Americans in the entertainment industry, however, Kessee is optimistic about these numbers growing in the future. She argues that since many young children want to identify with people that look like them, African-American youth can now find role models in many of the “first” African-Americans being recognized in today’s awards season.

Dr. Raymond Wise, Director of African-American Choral Ensemble and the Associate Director of African-American Arts Institute at Indiana University Bloomington, believes that African-Americans have always been viewed in stereotypical ways.

“While it is a great thing to be rewarded for their artistic ability, you also want to acknowledge that African-Americans are significant contributors in many other areas that are yet to be acknowledged,” Wise said.

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NUMBER OF NOMINATIONS RECEIVED BY MEMBERS OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY AT THE 2018 GRAMMYS

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Unapologetically Unique The Fourcast asked African-American students, faculty and staff to wear an outfit that best describes their personal style and aesthetic. The outfits ranged from athletic apparel to business casual. These photos exhibit the vast style preferences of Hockaday African-American community.

Paige Halverson, Castoff Editor, and Ponette Kim, Staff Writer

“I would describe my style as ‘off-duty college sports star.’ I like to wear lots of comfortable clothing, like Converse and letterman jackets.”

LaBoris Bean

Athletic Coordinator

“I’m mostly about comfort and being comfortable in your own skin—emotionally and physically comfortable. I look up to Tracee Ellis Ross, because she wears what she wants and always looks so fly. And I always wear hoop earrings, really big ones.”

Summer Hamilton Upper School English Teacher

“Fashion is the beginning step towards embracing “black girl magic” and black culture. I think my look is very “Sydney” and very bold, but I can tone it down. The jacket and outfit work together and look good."

Sydney Polk Form IV

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Being African-American in 2018 In the fourth grade, our Social Studies teacher asked the class to trace our family back as far as we could. I poured through my family’s records and pasted all the names and photos I could find onto a family tree and then brought it in for review. The teacher looked it over, seemingly content until she reached the highest branch.

Kaleigh Beacham, Vice President of Black Student Union

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This branch belonged to my greatgreat-great grandfather, Horace Beacham: born a slave, year and location unknown. “Now, it says that he was born into slavery…” I could tell that she was searching for the right words. “That’s very unfortunate, but do you know when or where?”

I didn’t. She advised me to choose an approximate date of birth for Grandpa Horace in the mid-1800s and a general country of origin for my family, ideally one from the West African coast. After looking at a map of the continent, I settled on Cameroon—because, to my 9-year-old sensibilities, its name sounded the best.

I did not give the assignment much thought after I turned it in. Today, however, I can see that it illustrates a couple of key universal black experiences in the United States. To be African-American is to simultaneously live with the identity always under threat and to feel the constant compulsion to explain that identity to others.

Like Grandpa Horace’s story, black history appears to begin with slavery, and not much else.

There is a reason for that—the vast majority of black families have lived in the U.S. for many generations, and most of those families arrived here as slaves. Just as a hostage depends on a captor for food and water, those slaves lost their cultural identities, languages, religions and every other link to their homelands in order to ground them firmly in the master’s control.

Of course, African-Americans sculpted a new culture out of the plantation fields, churches, housing projects, barber shops and stages we have touched. The resulting work is rough-hewn and vaguely shaped, but instantly recognized; spectators gather on all sides with their pickaxes held high and ready to chip off a small piece.

Some laugh at the chunks that fall out into their hands; others hurry to put the fragments in their hair, on their clothes, in their speech and songs.

Everyone, it seems, wants a bit of black livelihood for their own purposes.

When I agreed to write this piece, I advised myself not to be overtly political, but I then realized that it is impossible not to be. African-American people have always lived a political existence, in political bodies.

During my great-great-great grandfather’s time, simply living free was a political statement.

Today, the way a black woman wears her hair is seen as a challenge. I have been blessed enough to not have to think about the implications of my every move, but I still experience some behavioral holdovers from past generations. Whenever I accompanied my mother to the store as a young child, she reminded me to keep my hands out of my pockets so as not to look like I was stealing.

Today, she advises me not to go to raucous parties where someone may call the police, out

of fear that I would be the first one the officers would blame. Even when I don’t wish to make a statement, my skin speaks for me, and it says different things depending on who is listening.

Today, African-Americans nominally live under the same laws as every other citizen. While I’m sure that black Americans are grateful for that fact, the lack of an obvious enemy makes progress uncertain. Abolishing slavery and outlawing segregation, while difficult, were common-sense solutions to their day’s issues. Grandpa Horace’s most pressing problem was his freedom.

Today, I have a hard time choosing between entrenched poverty, disproportionate incarceration rates and police brutality—and there is no easy way to solve any of them. There’s no longer a way to make change for all of us, and no single cause for every African-American to support.

Admittedly, black people in the U.S. today have greater upward mobility, and we can see black successes in every field. Nevertheless, for every Kendrick Lamar, there are a thousand unknown black musicians; for every Neil deGrasse Tyson, there are schools full of unrecognized black scholars; for every Barack Obama, there are countless unheard black voices calling for change.

Black communities are also striated by skin color. I know that my lighter skin grants me privileges not extended to African-Americans with darker skin. This colorism tells me that I am somehow better, smarter, more trustworthy and closer to white. This nebulous new struggle for equality has made progress an individual pursuit.

The city of Dallas is often hailed as a progressive oasis in the backward South. On the surface, a future for black communities here appears more promising than a future in Jackson or Birmingham. In reality, it’s just as uncertain. To plan a future, you must be in a safe place. Planning takes time, thought, and a stability that many African-Americans don’t have.

Blackness is a constant flux between suspicion and hope. Dallas boasts one of the largest migration rates of black families in the southern U.S. While we are increasingly taking advantages of the opportunities available here, our progress takes place on an individual level. The black collective seems to be disappearing, and many black futures are journeys taken alone.

I still don’t know when or where great-greatgreat Grandpa Horace was born, but that doesn’t cause me any internal strife. If I could make the family tree again, I would draw bold, black question marks in his portrait’s place. In my opinion, the obscurity draws me closer to my ancestors than having a country of origin ever could.

Since we first arrived in the Americas, black people have used the same strategy to cope: taking comfort in the not knowing and moving forward despite uncertainty.