Ranger statue taken down in Dallas.

https://dallaslandscape.blogspot.com/2020/06/ranger-status-disappears-in-flash-power.html

All the details are at the above blog.

The power of history.

Paper with pictures about the Triumphalist White Supremacy of Fair Park Completed. / On to bringing down the SCV

PAPER ON FAIR PARK WITH ABOUT 100 PICTURES

There are formally listed 84 Figures, but some of those figures are sets of pictures. There is a total 102 pages.

http://templeofdemocracy.com/history-paper-the-triumphalist-white-supremacy-of-fair-park.html

It is a big pdf so it might take some time. It is over 50 megabytes.

I am now going to ask scholars and cultural leaders to co-sign our letter. We have a total of 40 signatures so far.

http://templeofdemocracy.com/fair-park-letter.html

The following blog will be tracking the Dallas white landscape closely, as opposed to this more general blog which deals with neo-Confederacy.

https://dallaslandscape.blogspot.com/

On to bringing down the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Getting a Powerpoint Made, a video made, and then this 102 page paper, has taken time. I have had to concentrate on it intensly since it is a current issue with events underway. However, with this done, it is now going to be more time to pursue other topics, which specifically be about leting the general public know about the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

I have set up my video studio and gone through and prepared materials and hope to do the first video soon.

I expect to bring down the Sons of Confederate Veterans by informing the public what their agenda is. I want to make it very clear I don't support violent actions.

Robert E. Lee is totally gone from Turtle Creek Park, Oak Lawn name gone also. Dallas Southern Memorial Association EAT DIRT

Years ago after testifying to have the Dallas Southern Memorial Association (DSMA) a reporter wanted to interiew me. So we sat at a table to talk, The members of the Dallas Southern Memorial Association sat at the table next to us. So we moved to another table and they followed to a table next to us with triumphant grins on their faces.

My message to the DSMA today is EAT SHIT!

This was the inscription on one of the benches for the Robert E. Lee monument. CLICK ON THE IMAGES TO SEE THE COMPLETE IMAGE FULL SIZE.

The inscription reads "NO CALUMNY CAN EVER DARKEN HIS FAME FOR HISTORY

Continuing. HAS LIGHTEN UP

Continuing  HIS IMAGE WITH HER EVERLASTING LAMP

These are scenes of the location today.

This is a view from the opposite direction.

It seems that racist garbage isn't going to be celebrated forever.

Of course there is more to be done. I have recently typed up an inventory of what remains to be done in Dallas.

See this other blog focused on Dallas itself. https://dallaslandscape.blogspot.com/

And the Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1983418798539308/

FIRST ORGANIZATIONAL MEETING TO DECONFEDERATE DALLAS

We will be having an organizational meeting Thursday, April 18th at 7:30 pm. WILL UPDATE WITH LOCATION SOON.

The agenda is about deracializing the landscape and will include additional items.

It will be somewhere along Highway 75 (Central) near a DART light rail station. I will be updating this posting when I fix the location.

Meetings will be 1st and 3rd Thursdays of each month.

We will be discussing possible projects and an agenda.

To find background information on Dallas there are these online resouces.

1. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1983418798539308/

2. http://templeofdemocracy.com/dallas.html

The following agenda is by no means complete but I think it is a good start.

UNFINISHED TASKS

1. The replica Arlington House in Oak Lawn built to glorify Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy.

2. Many schools named after Confederates and other white supremacists.

3. Two minor Confederate monuments in Oak Lawn Park.

4. The whole Fair Park is an assemblage of white supremacist art and architecture.

5. Hatton W. Sumners honored at the Red Museum.

6. Many streets named after Confederates, white supremacists, and one after Nathan Bedford Forrest.

7. Exclude Lost Cause jurors from Jury duty.

We need to have regular meetings and plan strategies. The easy victories are done. Now we enter the hard fight against the racialized landscape.

Dallas moves to remove another Confederate statue. Richmond however still stuck in the Confederacy

The Smithsonian article about the vote to remove the Confederate War Memorial in Pioneer Park. It is online here.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews-history-archaeology/dallas-city-council-votes-remove-massive-confederate-war-memorial-180971503/

This is the 2nd statue it is going to remove.

This Smithsonian has changed a lot since it was publishing stuff criticizing suggesting that Richmond, Virginia, which still hasn't gotten rid of any Confederate monuments, was somehow wiser than New Orleans which got rid of them all.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-richmond-has-gotten-right-about-interpreting-its-confederate-history-180963354/

When you are behind Dallas that must really hurt.

This is the town of M.E. Bradford and William Murchison. All their little dreams of neo-Confederacy Gone With the Wind!

As I have stated before, each time a statue is removed, the ones that remain seem more anomalous. With Austin, San Antonio having gotten rid of Confederate stuff, and Dallas moving forward, it won't be long until someone in Houston will decided it is time to move forward. 

No major metropolis wants to feel their are more retrograde than Dallas. Houston will start moving to re-examine its memorials.

As time goes on smaller metropolises will want to look at getting rid of their Confederate statues also, since Confederate statues will stand as a mark of backwardness. 

Neo-Confederacy is crumbling a statue at a time.

With enemies like this you don't need friends. "Citizens Matter" campaigning for the Confederacy and against police accountability

This is the website for Citizens Matter, a local group.

http://www.citizensmatter.us/index.php

This group is mobilized to defend the Confederacy and abolish the Police Review Board for the City of Dallas.

They have raging maniacs with paranoid fears of Muslims.

The Dallas Observer has a recent article about them.

https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/real-question-in-police-review-board-debate-is-race-11523932

I couldn't design a better group to be the supporters of the Confederacy to give neo-Confederacy a bad name.

Crazed groups like this is the natural evolution of neo-Confederacy as more and more people decide to give up the Confederacy the residual of supporters will be people such as Citizens Matter.

The head of Heritage Defense is Walter Donald Kennedy of the Kennedy twins. This is again a sign that neo-Confederate groups are shifting to ever more overt radicalism.

I am back. Ready to start activism. Both for Dallas and nationally. The Confederacy is going to start coming down.

Start coming down more than it has I suppose I should say.

I have been pouring a lot of time into researching the built landscape of the city of Dallas. Also, helping the people in Austin a little on their stuff. They took my material on the Children of the Confederacy to the right people and the plaque is down.

I have also done a lot of thinking about how the landscape is imagined. How the build landscape is named.

Yesterday was my last planned visit to an archive. It will be a few days to organize the materials I collected last week. And I expect as I start writing and producing I will find gaps and will be visiting a library or archive again.

But sometime next week activism starts and research as an activity will be a minor component of my time.

I am going to be writing up my Dallas research findings, then creating powerpoints, which will be story boards for the production of videos. I am excited to get into video production.

Being retired I have been able to spend 40 hours a week doing research, digging in archives. I have made amazing discoveries. Also, my research has been assisted by the digitization of resources. I am able to do searches and find things that previously I would have only found if I had been doing research over decades and was luck.

Who would expect that former Dallas Morning News columnist Lynn Landrum would reference Van Evrie as a legitimate source to understand African Americans in an article? I would have never looked for this, and even if I thought it might have existed, it would takes months of research to find it. With digitized data and searching I found it.

So I hope not only to reshape how the Dallas built environment is understood, but also show how modern technology can enable comprehending a build environment of a locality.

This blog will be more general anti-Confederate stuff. For Dallas follow my other blog.

https://dallaslandscape.blogspot.com/

Robert E. Lee Plaque Removed From Frank Crowley Court House/ Exchange Club has this plaque in public places across the nation

I was on jury duty earlier this week and I was pleased to see that the Robert E. Lee plaque had been removed from the "Freedom Shrine" in the Frank Crowley Court jury room in Dallas, Texas.

We had criticized this plaque being in the jury room in our essay published in the Dallas Morning News. 

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/04/dallas-confederate-memorials-scream-white-supremacy

There had been no reporting of it being removed, but when I got there I could see that it was removed and that there were two holes in the wall left from the screws that had held it in place.

This "Freedom Shrine" is distributed by the Exchange Club which is a national organization.

It is a set of plaques with important documents in American history. There is Lincoln's Proclamation of Emancipation and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. I am sure some members in the past were whining that the South was being put upon and the Exchange Club stupidly added in Robert E. Lee's letter of acceptance to be the president of Washington College.

These "Freedom Shrines" are all across the nation in public buildings and likely in every state in the nation. Removing the Robert E. Lee plaque from a jury room is an obvious thing to do. It can be asked to be removed as being a thing that biases jurors.

Next time you see a "Freedom Shrine" look at it and see if there is a Robert E. Lee plaque included.

The Exchange Club still included the Robert E. Lee letter in their Freedom Shrine display. It is item No. 19 here.

https://members.nationalexchangeclub.org/sites/default/files/attachements/30-PieceFreedomShrineArrangements.pdf

It is also in their 20 piece collection which you can see here. It is item No. 19

https://members.nationalexchangeclub.org/sites/default/files/attachements/20-PieceFreedomShrineArrangement.pdf

Why is the Exchange Club still including Robert E. Lee in a Freedom Shrine in 2018? They are an out of touch white club. I am sure they have some African American members who I am sure will come to their defense.

This could be a starter project for any effort to de-Confederate your city.  A small victory is encouragement to go after larger projects.

Also, each of these plaques in a government building legitimizes the Confederacy and their removal de-legitimizes the Confederacy and Confederate monuments. So removing these plaques also helps in removing other Confederate items.

Most importantly though is that we need to take the Confederacy out of the criminal justice system.

BEFORE AT THE COURT HOUSE

AFTER

CLOSE UP   You can see the drill holes.

"Confederate Identity Extremists" and elastic definitions

On Dec. 16, 1773 a group boarded a ship and threw the cargo of tea into Boston Harbor.

Were they Colonial Identity Extremists?

Years ago, when I graduated and I was living in an urban old style apartment building, we saw a tall person drag a smaller person into a doorway in the alley way and started to beat the person severely. Back to the alley way were the kitchen windows to the apartments and we, me and my neighbors started calling out, "We are calling the police!" so to get the criminal to run and stop the beating. Imagine our surprise, when the tall person held up a police badge and was rather smug about it.

At the time there were no smart phone cameras or smart phones or digital cameras at all. There was nothing we could do to document it. No one called, because you didn't want thugs in blue calling on you. So it essentially never happened except in stories related by me and other residents.

Christopher Daniels who goes by the name Rakem Balogun in the heat of anger said some really bad things about the shootings of police officers in Dallas and Memphis. This article by the Dallas Morning News (DMN) which got published rather late sometime after Daniels was released from prison details his statements on Facebook.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2018/05/14/black-activist-celebrated-murders-police-social-media-says-feds-targeted-political-views

I raised the issue whether the DMN would cover this story at all which was getting global coverage. I discuss the rather delayed reporting in one of the numbered sections below.

This is The Guardian coverage of the story.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/rakem-balogun-interview-black-identity-extremists-fbi-surveillance

This is the Aljazeera coverage of the story.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/05/judge-orders-release-black-identity-extremist-180504115412408.html

I am quoted in another story where I create the term, "Confederate Identity Extremist."

There are multiple issues raised here.

One

First, the statements made by Daniels are not acceptable. Five officers didn't come home that night. They had people that loved them. They were just people trying to do their job.

These type of statements are the type of thing that results in mob violence and lynch law where rage sweeps respect for the law aside.

Of course appealing to the rule of law when videos keep surfacing of law enforcement officers not following the law and abusing their authority makes my position seem foolish to some. Where is the law it could be asked?

Further the courts seem to be unable to convict police officers when they murder someone and the evidence is obvious. Prosecutors seem to be all fumble fingers on these prosecutions, because I think they don't want to do what is necessary to successfully prosecute the case.

Again, with the videos and the failures of prosecutors to do their job, appealing to the rule of law makes my position seem detached from reality and self-serving.

However, situations come up where rage threatens us to be pulled into a vortex of violence. I think we must resist making statements like this. I had a real fear at the time of these shootings that there would be a chain reaction of violent actions and violent actions in response that could spiral out of control. Down in Baton Rouge there was another individual who went on a murderous rampage.

Recently in Balch Springs a teen was murdered by a police officer. There are indications that it was fairly clear this officer had menacing rage and should have been removed the police force some time ago. However, the problem officer was tolerated and it resulted in a young teen murdered. The trial is coming up this June 2018.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/courts/2017/12/20/murder-trial-cop-killed-jordan-edwards-pushed-back-june

I suspect that one way or another the police officer will either have a hung jury, get off, or have a ludicrously light sentence.  At that point the DMN will report the usual vetted "leaders" making pious statements. There will be discussions of how the trial went wrong or some proposed changes. It will be treated as some aberration in the law rather than the systematic problem it is. Lots of local ministers will ask for prayer, but it will be a substitute for engaging the question. I am not taking a position against prayer, I am just saying that a call for prayer can be an opportunistic move to avoid an issue.

I think that for some in Dallas all this will be "blah, blah, blah" and the belief in the rule of law will seem ridiculous.

The opinions in this blog posting will seem like babbling in the reality of a nation of murders by a society in which Black lives don't seem to matter very much.

What is worse is that though it might be a "few bad apples" who do these deeds, time and time again it is revealed that other officers gave the bad actor a free pass. And these officers murdering individuals act with the expectation that their behavior would be tolerated.

For people to believe in the rule of law we actually need to have the rule of law and not excuses or expressions of ain't it awful.

Regardless of the above, the officers killed were people going to their jobs, and there needs to be police for society to function, and they were killed by a delusional individual and that night there were people who loved these officers who realized they were never coming home.

The descent into savagery which we see nations and places descend into is because the humanity of individuals is forgotten. We must take action to avert going down a path which leads into this descent.

Since the above sounds like some treacly thing some local leader might say on TV so we all feel good about the situation so let me restate it.

The killing needs to stop, and it needs to stop soon, and those who kill need to be punished. While this problem exists we need to consider our actions.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans Commander-in-Chief has done writing in which never mentioning Black Lives Matter by name, has in his columns in the Confederate Veteran, had writing which I think is very clearly about the police shootings and Black Lives Matter and which attempts to represent the whole protest movement against the police shootings as wrong and the result of some nefarious movement.


Two

There are racist and reactionary political factions who like to portray calls for accountability in police behavior as somehow as an attack on the police. Everyone is accountable for their actions and this includes the police.

What is more disturbing is the assertion that lawless action by police is needed to preserve public order.

These racists are looking hard for any pretext to move the conversation or distract the conversation from the issue and to make it look like it is about attacking the police. In this environment Daniels's statements enable the opposition. Though I don't know how much a person is responsible for self-serving and dishonest actions of another.

Three

Looking at the pictures of Rakem Balogun and associates, I see khaki outfits and guns. What it reminds me most is This is Texas Freedom Force. I did look up the word Balogun and I think it means "war lord" in Nigerian. I have been to Scottish Highland festivals also. It all reminds me of Cosplay.

As a cultural geographer you realize that people in the late 20th century and in the 21st century consume identity. If you want to sell someone something sell an identity with it.

Nationalism is also a component of this movement which has names derived from Africa.

Nationalism is a European ideology with which the Western European nations created themselves as very powerful nations, and which many ethnic groups in Eastern Europe saw the means to wrest power from the Russian, German, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires in the late 19th and early 20th century.

It was seen as a means to achieve independence from European empires across the globe in the 20th. The idea of nations is the globally triumphant ideology such that we have trouble recognizing that it is an ideology and thinking outside of its concepts.

I think its ideological success comes from the fact that it has allowed dispossessed groups to achieve power.

Nationalism is what led to violent war in the 20th century. With World War I and II the 20th century is the century of violence. There were calls to have a conflict with Russia, there could have been a World War III, but it was realized that it would be a war of total destruction of of the Western world if not the radioactive poisoning of the Northern hemisphere. Nagasaki and Hiroshima with the small 20 and 40 kiloton bombs gave insight as to what 10 and 20 megaton bombs might do. Nationalism and violence seem follow each other in history.

Nationalism is a time worn strategy to create a state or to coalesce an identity to fight for rights, particularly when the dominating society is demeaning your identity. That is why there are parades or festivals in the United States for so many groups. We have Christopher Columbus day for Italian Americans, St. Patrick's Day for the Irish Americans, other groups have parades and days also. Solidarity in politics works.

Though now that persons with Irish ancestry are part of the dominate group and most white Americans and maybe most African Americans have some Irish ancestry, St. Patrick's day means green beer. Which is another thing about identities, they are put on like clothes when needed.

So these Black nationalist groups are latching on to a strategy which works for other groups.

Of course sense nationalism is imagined, a nationality can exist if you convince people of its existence. This creates an inherent instability. Is it Great Britain or Scotland and England and Wales and Northern Ireland, and what about Cornwall, and then you can pull maps of the distant past and image further more nations. What about the Heptarchy? The success of a nationalist project depends also by suppressing other possible nationalisms.

Nationalistic difference within a state is separatism and thus threatens social unity. That is why the national American metaphor is the "melting pot" and there historically have been speeches against "hyphenated Americans."  However, the quickest way to get rid of "hyphenated Americans" is to truly eliminate prejudice against a group which is being hyphenated. Black nationalism exists since there really isn't a post-racial society in America and the "melting pot" is seen as a deceptive fiction.

You won't be very credible saying were are all in this together, when there is an ongoing pattern abuse by the police and others which make it very clear that we aren't.

I can see nationalism being used to keep from being co-opted by the system by being separatist, but I also see it as leading to carving out worlds of nationalist fantasy in which you can live inside.

In 2018 I see that with the Baloguns that African nationalism is still seen as a strategy.

All of the above is to explain that I find nationalism dubious, but I also find that these nationalists are the least accommodating of racism. So I think that they will continue to find follows.


Four

The Aljazeera article was on May 5th, the Guardian article was on the 11th, and the DMN didn't report it until the 14th after it was becoming an issue locally on Facebook. The DMN is still the Dallas Managed News. This is an important national story with a local connection. The DMN has a past history of doing things like this hence their nickname.

People in Dallas are somewhat annoyed, including myself, that the DMN does stuff like and I posted links here and there so that the story would be known and I was testing to see how the DMN would respond.

They just did a court report type article. No insight at all.

But never fear there is this article form the DMN.
https://www.guidelive.com/bars-and-cocktails/2018/05/15/waste-away-margarita-mile-app-dallas-new-cocktail-crawl#_ga=2.112256132.1647958528.1526036106-1544550825.1491865227

Four

The most serious thing about this whole "Black Extremist Identity" is that it seems elastic. In this article below I point out that you could create a classification "Confederate Identity Extremist."

http://atlantablackstar.com/2018/05/15/federal-judge-finally-releases-man-fbi-targeted-black-identity-extremist-now-hes-job-home/

Also, there seems to be selective enforcement involved.

It seems that the FBI combed through Daniels' past to find something on which to prosecute his ownership of a gun, though it is fairly apparent to anyone that this detailed going through Daniels' past was based on what Daniels' statements in the present.

Though one neo-Confederate group has said some quite threatening things online I haven't seen the FBI acting on them.

I pointed out the comments of Miss. State Rep. Karl Oliver who called for the lynching of opponents of Confederate monuments. Did the FBI visit him?

As frequently is the case, the government overreaches and threatens constitutional liberties with a case where the defendant is unpopular with the public, has done something where sympathy is little, and has limited support.

The Aesop fable of the small tree being surrendered to the woodsman resulting in the destruction of the great trees of the forest applies here.

I think that the FBI acted out of anger and once this BIE thing got started no one was willing to critically examine it, maybe because it was not politically tenable to ask questions. Maybe the FBI wanted to prosecute an African American so they could look "fair" when they went after white supremacists. Regardless, they have made themselves look less credible and look like they were influenced by Info Wars, a really ridiculous conspiracy website.

Will be presenting at the South Dallas Cultural Center about the white supremacy inherent in Fair Park

April 28th, 2-4 pm, Sat. at the South Dallas Cultural Center I will be giving two presentations on Fair Pair and I will be on one of the panels.

We expect to have a good crowd attend. What is happening is that more and more people are realizing that Ed Sebesta does fairly good research and he is likely to have the story on some item of the Dallas landscape and Ed Sebesta will have documentation that it is about white supremacy.

Also, I expect that with this presentation, and the others planned after it, a lot of people will know about my research into the neo-Confederates.

I am also developing methods which I think will serve as a model to other cities to get rid of their Confederate built landscapes.

Click on it to see the whole thing.

Kay Bailey Hutchison Confederate Convention Center

The City of Dallas thinks that since the Confederate War Memorial is in a section of the park that people generally don't visit that maybe they can just let it stay.

However, monuments live in the imagination. The physical monument is just there to place in your thoughts the monument in your imagination. You don't need to be there every day, the impact of a monument isn't proportional to the percentage of time you are in its proximity. In fact monument that require some pilgrimage or trek can be only seen once but have the greatest impact on the imagination since they require a special visit.

The Confederate War Memorial has some special elements which I think will give it a place in the imagination of the nation and the residents of Dallas, and not in a good way. It turns out that being downtown the monument can be photographed against a backdrop of skyscrapers.

The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center is one of those designs of a large amount of glass windows and the Confederate War Memorial reflects very well both during the day and at night off those windows in the most interesting ways. I put some of the pictures on the following web page.

http://templeofdemocracy.com/dallas-convention-reflections.html

I am mailing all copies of all the pictures on the above webpage, except one, to Mayor Rawlings and the City Council. They have all the same little comments that I show associated with the images in the above web page.

As a method of getting your city to rid itself of a Confederate statue I don't think my method of photographing the reflected images off the convention center has much general applicability. This combination of architectural style and close proximity was rather fortuitous.

However, photographing images of the Confederate monument against local landmarks I think could be applied to varying extent in a lot of situations.

The other lesson is to really look at your local Confederate monument and its location. We had been at this monument multiple times, and no one noticed the reflected images until the last anti-monument mini-rally and then only myself. One pointed out people picked up on the symbolic meaning fairly quickly.

So ask yourself do you really see your Confederate monument? Have you looked early in the morning, noon, late afternoon, night. What does it look like in rain or fog? Is it always illuminated at night or never? Does it have ultraviolet fluorescence? Have you tried photographing it with polarized filters?

There must be a lot of ways to get the Confederate monument seen for the thing it is, and get others to really "see" it.

Police Harassment after ministers event.

About half the group had dispensed all ready and some people still hadn't left and were talking and the group was gradually leaving as people wrapped up their conversations.

However, the police showed up and told us we had to leave. This is a public park and people just told the police that they were going to be staying.

What was interesting is that the police did this with media people still there with TV cameras. The police backed off when they realize they were being filmed, not just by me, but by the media.

The video is unedited. People come up to talk to me not realizing that I am taking video of a developing situation.

WARNING: Some bad language.

https://youtu.be/vYQX5kuPVIY


Click on the image to see the whole video.

Confederate Monument a Bad REFLECTION on Dallas, Texas

This is the Confederate War Memorial reflection on the windows of the Dallas Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. Took it 3/29/2018.  What organization wants their event reflecting the Confederacy.

https://youtu.be/Klxrs0H_fVk

Click on video to see the whole thing.




https://youtu.be/NTOHsij2Dhc

Click on video to see whole thing.

Dallas Jaycees carry giant Confederate flag down Commerce street in 1964. Confederate "heritage"

Note the time is 1:24 for the scene.

Neo-Confederate often like to go one that it was some fringe elements that "mis-used" the flag.

Here we see the Jaycees carrying the flag as a protest against possible civil rights legislation.

This is the link to the video so you can watch it in full.

https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1062768/m1/

It is about the sit-ins at the Piccadilly restaurant in Dallas, Texas in 1964.

This is the link to the story. https://blogs.library.unt.edu/yesterdays-news/2018/02/19/piccadilly/

The Confederate flag wasn't misrepresented by a few fringe groups. It was understood as representing white supremacy by mainstream southern society.

Mentioned in article in "Dallas Weekly," working on Dallas.

I am given a mention in this article in the Dallas Weekly.

http://www.dallasweekly.com/opinion/article_b67080e4-1033-11e8-b70b-afc8ad98c639.html

I have just finished rough drafts of two papers. One is on Fair Park, the other on the Confederate memorial at Pioneer park.

I had heard that the Confederate memorial at Pioneer Park was coming up for consideration in late February, but I don't think that is going to happen.

However, I decided to write up a draft to be prepared if and when the Confederate memorial at Pioneer Park comes up. The paper is 24,097 words long. There is a real racist history involved.

The Fair Park paper is more modest at 5,744 words.

In both cases there is additional material, but I wanted to have fairly comprehensive papers readily available if either Fair Park or the Confederate monument issue comes up.

My plan is to research and write up Dallas and there is a fair amount to be written up.

I am going to get back working on the streets and get the 2nd version of the map done.

I don't think the issue of Confederate named schools is going to come up until I make it an issue so I am holding off researching the schools.

White Wash of John H. Reagan Elementary School in the Dallas Independent School District

GENTRIFICATION AND WHITE SUPREMACY

Recently the Oak Cliff edition of the "Advocate" published a white wash of John H. Reagan for whom the John H. Reagan Elementary school is named after.

At the following web page you can read and download a pdf about the "Advocate" article and how bad Reagan was.

My paper only has some examples of John H. Reagan's rancid views. I wrote it quickly in response to the "Advocate."

This is the link to the Oak Cliff "Advocate" article.

http://oakcliff.advocatemag.com/2017/12/backstory-one-low-income-school-oak-cliff-bears-name-confederate-leader/

This is the link to the page on John H. Reagan Elementary school with the information on his racism.

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/john-h-reagan-elementary-school.html

I am starting to populate the DISD Confederate school web pages with information.

Dallas African American Republican Taft Thompson defends Confederate monuments and Donald Trump.

This is a video from the Dallas Women League of Voters panel on Confederate monuments 11/30/2017. I have put together the segments that Dallas Republican Taft Thompson spoke, as well for contrast the comments of Rev. Maxie Johnson. A short segment by Buddy Apple is included where he backs up Thompson.

I used Movie Maker to segment and then stitch together segments.

There is the introduction where the topic of the panel was introduced and the bios of the panelists were given.

Taft Thompson speaks at 3:10 and 9:40.  They are quite something else.

Not the party of Lincoln anymore, not the party of Frederick Douglass anymore.

DePaul Univ. Jan. 2018 Map of the Month is Dallas Confederate Streets/ New Protest Walk Planned.

DePaul Univ. has put online the Jan. 2018 Map of the Month of Dallas Confederate Streets.

http://via.library.depaul.edu/mom/47/

You can also get a 2-sided one page map at:

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/dallas-streets.html

The backside refers to all the Confederate streets in Dallas with the web links for the informational pages for each street.

Another protest walk is planned.  Feb. 3, 2018 2pm up Gaston and down Junius Street.

https://www.facebook.com/events/420415618376646/

The the following map has Throckmorton Street added.

Jim Schutze of the "Dallas Observer" ridicules people who make excuses to keep Confederate monuments

Jim Schutze in this article doesn't use the term "banal white nationalism" but it is obvious he understands the concept if only in his own terms.

http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/trumps-shithole-remarks-were-exactly-what-we-needed-10256390

This is one quote.

We are masters of denial. We always have a cover story. Last September, when Dallas was in the throes of debate over removing a memorial to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, one of my own great awakenings as a reporter was to the fact that Dallas apparently is home to a large population of militant monument removal fiscal hawks. 

These are people who are not racist, according to them, and who say they have no feelings whatsoever about the Civil War or slavery. Their great concern in life, their cause, their noble crusade is that no Civil War memorial shall be removed at a cost one penny greater than the proper going rate for Civil War monument removals. 

Who knew?

Another quote:

And lastly, for weeks after the removal finally was accomplished, the removal hawks were busy spotting all kinds of social needs, from better public schools to free mental health care, that could have been paid for with the money they felt had been squandered on the removal. One of them asked me, “How many hot meals for the elderly could have been paid for with that money?” Isn’t that wonderful? Suddenly they’re all Mother Theresa. 

Look, I hope what I am saying here does not come across as making me out to be the cool guy. Sometimes we white folks do that — make fun of other white people for being racially clueless as a way of making ourselves look cool. I assure you, I suffer no such delusion. Where racial cluelessness is concerned, I think we have more than enough to go around.

I think a lot of people are recognizing these arguments for what they are. Excuses. 

Map of Confederate and KKK streets in Dallas. UPDATE:

This is the map of Confederate and KKK streets in Dallas. Junius St. is both Reconstruction KKK and Confederate. R.L. Thornton is 20th century KKK. The others are Confederates, but they might have been KKK, we just don't have documentation.

UPDATE: Map is online at http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/dallas-streets.html

It is like Dallas has a Confederate infection.

Sat. Jan 6, 2pm 2400 Gaston Ave. we start the walk up Gaston Ave. and then back down on Junius St. I will have a sign and be taking video.

This is the Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/events/303683380120314/

We have information on the web pages for the two streets.
http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/gaston-avenue.html
http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/junius-street.html

Click to see whole image.