Language Matters: Storytelling for Racial Justice

June 23, 2020

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Racial healing recognizes the need to acknowledge

Racial healing recognizes the need to acknowledge and tell the truth about past wrongs created by individual and systemic racism and address the present consequences. It is a process and tool that can facilitate trust and build authentic relationships that bridge divides created by real and perceived differences. One of the tools of racial healing is a racial healing circle. #dallastrht #flashbackfriday #renow2019 #racialhealing #howweheal

For almost two decades (1982-2000), the neighbors

For almost two decades (1982-2000), the neighbors in the Pleasant Grove community of Deepwood persistently wrote letters, testified and pleaded with The City of Dallas to close what the city allowed to become the largest illegal dump in Texas history, the Deepwood dump. The City of Dallas all but ignored the Black residents of the once all-White neighborhood until they decided to sue the city. They won their lawsuit and the Trinity River Audubon Center, where they and every resident in 75217 can attend for free, was built over the dump as a landfill. Watch the @bcworkshop documentary “Out of Deepwood” on YouTube. #howweheal #narrativechange #dallastrht

1956 Crisis at Mansfield High School: Students lau

1956 Crisis at Mansfield High School: Students laugh and smile while talking to a Texas Ranger, who was dispatched by Gov. Allan Shivers to damper the threat of racist White mob violence when Black students and their families attempted to register for school. A racist effigy hangs on the school as a threat to Mansfield's Black community in the background. (Texas State Library and Archives Commision) #narrativechange #howweheal #dallastrht

Alex Macon explains: "Redlining is a term for the

Alex Macon explains: "Redlining is a term for the denial of loans, mortgages, and other services based on a neighborhood’s demographic makeup — in the U.S., Black communities have usually been the ones targeted. The practice gets its name from the red outlines drawn around "high-risk" neighborhoods in maps created in the 1930s by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation..." This 1937 HOLC map of Dallas showed that White neighborhoods marked green were considered "best" for government-backed mortgages, blue "still desirable," yellow "definitely declining," and the Black neighborhoods marked red were "hazardous" and ineligible for loans. (@d_magazine) #narrativechange #dallastrht #redlining

From the very beginning to present day, Dallas has

From the very beginning to present day, Dallas has been intentionally segregated by race and racism. After White militia groups massacred and removed American Indian people from their sacred homelands in the mid-1800s, White settlers from Southern and Northern states moved to North Texas with enslaved Africans to claim free and/or cheap land. These and subsequent White leaders made a choice that Dallas will be a segregated city by race and racism, and that segregation will exclude Black people and other people of color from economic and political opportunity.
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According to the City of Dallas' website, Black people "were restricted from serving on the Dallas City Council for Dallas' first hundred years. For most of the twentieth century, the City Charter contained a Segregation of Races section that authorized the Council to divide Dallas into specific areas for “whites" and the "colored races.”
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This text shows the language of the 1931 City Charter; this section was not removed by City Council until the 1968 charter revision. #dallastrht #narrativechange #howweheal