Abstract
Dallas, TX
(Unrealized/On hold)
Dallas Historical Parks Project recognizes the rich but publicly underrepresented municipal history of Dallas’ historically African-American neighborhoods and green-spaces. DHP is a project in three parts: interpretive signs/plaques to be gifted to the City of Dallas for permanent installation in eight of Dallas’ historic “Negro Parks,” a supplementary online platform for a deeper dive, and public participatory programs to further engage the public with this history. An outline for secondary educational curriculum will be made available for schools wishing to introduce their students to this subject as well.
Inspired by a call to action by former Dallas Morning News columnist, Roy Appleton (Dallas’ parks for blacks served as ‘safety valve’ that helped preserve city’s racial divide, 2/23/13), alongside an initiative of socially-engaged artistic practice/research-based methodologies and collaboration and exchange with various communities, DHP offers up a contextual framework for critical reflection—a people’s history as told through the story of courageous and persistent citizen activism by Dallas’ historic Black communities to secure their neighborhood green-spaces.
Dallas Historical Parks Project aspires to speak truth to history and to celebrate triumph. This endeavor contemplates the complex ways Black citizens responded to social inequity and the strategies used to create community to thrive in despite such oppressive realities.
Currently, due to conflict with original funders and attempts at censorship, DHP is on hold as the project team works to raise funds and produce the project independently.
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There was an item missing from yesterday’s City of Dallas Parks and Recreation Board agenda. It was briefing about a gift two philanthropic foundations, the Boone Family Foundation and the Rainwater Charitable Foundation, planned to give to the city. The gift seemed admirable enough. The foundations wanted to install markers in seven city parks that would acknowledge their history as historically segregated African-American parks. Sparked both by the redo of Uptown’s once black-only Griggs Park in 2013 and the Facing Race conference held in Dallas in 2014, the intent was to do just that: face up to this city’s racial history, acknowledge the ignominy of the past and celebrate the role these parks played in shaping this city’s African-American community.
But while the board tabled the briefing on February 4, resetting it for February 18, the briefing didn’t happen. Instead, the two artists who were commissioned by the two foundations to prepare the text for the historical markers addressed the board. They spoke of manipulation, cooption, explicit and implicit censorship on the part of the two foundations. They outlined a research process that degraded into prolonged silences, stop orders, and backroom character attacks that led to standoff between the artists and the foundations.
“We stand here today to say that this is a larger issue than our project conflict,” said artist Lauren Woods, whose full statement to the board was read by three different speakers. “This is a question of who gets to write the public history. Who will right the public history? This is an issue our city has struggled with for too long.”
—Peter Simek, How Dallas Won the Right to Tell Its Own History, D Magazine, 2/19/2016
For more information, visit the following:
- How Dallas Won the Right to Tell Its Own History, D Magazine, 2016
- Dallas Historical Parks Project seeks help in documenting history of Dallas' 'Negro Parks’, Green Source DFW, 2014
- Segregated parks gone, but they still divide, Dallas Morning News, 2016
- Dispute over markers for Dallas' 'Negro parks' leads foundation to pull out of project, Dallas Morning News, 2016
- The Lost History of Dallas’ Negro Parks, D Magazine, 2016