The Dallas Morning News editorialized against Confederate monuments and place names. The article is online.
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/20150508-editorial-time-to-place-confederate-statues-in-context.ece
Nearly 25 years earlier the Dallas Morning News was against my effort to de-Confederate Dallas. In particular my asking that the Robert E. Lee statue be taken out of Lee Park in the Turtle Creek neighborhood.
At the time there were a lot of characters that supported reactionary Dallas.
There is Beth Silver, a reporter for Dallas Morning News, hopefully she is not doing the same type of reporting for the Associated Press as she did in her reports about the Robert E. Lee statue. She has gotten a place in history as an enabler of racism.
There is Rufus Shaw, a person who liked to pose as an African American radical, spoke out against the statue until the Dallas elite gave him his marching orders and then voted for the Robert E. Lee statue to remain. He is now dead. He and his wife committed suicide. Something about shady dealings.
There is Sandra Crenshaw who also likes to promote herself as some type of African American champion. But when called upon by the white establishment in Dallas she came to the defense of Robert E. Lee.
Domingo Garcia who originally forwarded my request to the Park Board, later has been a very quiet representative.
The head of the Dallas NAACP came to the defense of the Robert E. Lee statue.
I wrote up a history when the event happen and the interesting part of the story isn't that a reactionary Dallas came to the defense of the Robert E. Lee statue, or the Dallas Morning News, an abode of reactionary creepy crawlies worked to defend the statue. It is the story of the minority leadership in Dallas which came to the defense of Robert E. Lee.
Martin Luther King said that when he visited Dallas the black leadership slammed the door in his face. The spirit of S.M. Wright still lives in Dallas, Texas.
The Robert E. Lee story is a story of minority members doing the bidding of white racist Dallas while at the same time posing as if they were champions of the African American community. In the end the Dallas elites decided they don't want this Confederate stuff and it is from the top that it is going, and not because of any minority push in Dallas. I am sure when the removal comes a lot of African American while give fine speeches with fine phrases, but they will just be providing a show for the efforts of the Dallas elites.
There is no human rights commission for the city of Dallas. Occasionally it has come up and the minority leadership of Dallas makes excuses why they can't get one instituted. Fort Worth has a human rights commission and has had for at least 40 years or more.
So when you see some minority leader in Dallas posing as some champion, ask yourself, where is the Dallas Human Rights Commission?
There is a Police Review Board but it was gutted. If there was a police shooting of an unarmed African American in Dallas the African American leadership would say all sorts of things for the camera and make all sorts of demands on the Police Review Board, but they wouldn't do anything to make sure the Police Review Board could actually do anything.
Nor is it likely that they will ever do anything substantial about police treatment of minority members.
The Confederate glorification may go, but it remains to be seen if Dallas will ever get a human rights commission or restore the Police Review Board to effectiveness. What is really happening is that the Confederate glorification is an embarrassment to the Dallas elites. It is seen as potentially negatively impacting real estate development in Dallas which is Dallas' highest moral value.
I think there is actually some value to these statues. They warn visitors and others that Dallas is a reactionary town with race problems. When the statues are removed Wicks who is the publisher of D Magazine and editor of American Conservative magazine will still be publishing D Magazine. Ron Dreher will still be writing for Dallas Morning News and American Conservative magazine.
The University of Dallas will still be honoring M.E. Bradford.
I am not focusing on tracking fringe in the Dallas establishment as much as I used to, but I think that it is still interwoven in it.
So the prominent statues and Confederate place names do serve as a warning to people about what type of town Dallas is.
I have a file box of the articles and all the papers relating to the case. I will have to go through them and write up the history.
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