Reckoning with the past as Dallas looks to a more just future – The Dallas Morning News

A monument was placed in the heart of downtown Dallas in late November, memorializing the spot where Allen Brooks was lynched by a white mob on March 3, 1910. Brooks death captured in a black-and-white souvenir photograph as he hung from a telephone pole, surrounded by a huge crowd of onlookers was turned into a postcard.

A memorial for Santos Rodriguez, the 12-year-old Mexican American boy murdered in 1973 by a Dallas police officer during a Russian roulette-style interrogation, was installed in December overlooking Pike Park, once a community nexus for the nearly gone Little Mexico neighborhood. A ceremony for the 6-foot statue is scheduled for late January.

These steps are small, say Dallas leaders and activists, but not insignificant. They are signs that the city is slowly, belatedly reckoning with its racist past.

In the year and a half since George Floyds death and Black Lives Matter marches, bureaucracies and civic organizations in Dallas have begun or stepped up a wide variety of equity efforts, however incrementally.

One example: For the first time ever, departments across the City of Dallas in the 2021-22 budgeting process included equity impact assessments as part of their requests. Meanwhile, the city is expected to release its comprehensive racial equity plan this spring.

If were going to be serious about the work of equity, we have to not only hold it up as a value but we also have to make sure that we can walk the talk, right? said Liz Cedillo-Pereria, the citys chief of equity and inclusion. That were putting resources behind it, budgeting for it ... as a lifelong Dallas resident, I do think this work is groundbreaking.

Each of Dallas largest governmental entities is now making deliberate efforts to look through an equity lens during planning and decision-making, although its far too soon for these newly formed efforts to have driven substantial changes.

There is or should be a sense of urgency, activists say.

Dallas, much like every other major metropolitan city in the United States, has a lot of ground to cover in redressing social injustice.

The city has persistent gaps between residents of color and white residents across a wide spectrum of issues, including stable housing, health care, employment, educational opportunities, and incarceration and contact with the criminal justice system.

If social justice is as the United Nations defines it the fair and compassionate distribution of the fruits of economic growth Dallas is far from meeting that call.

Its not to say that people arent doing some good things, said Michael Sorrell, Paul Quinn College president. But if youre not fighting the fight with everything you have, youre not fighting to win.

Even since before the COVID-19 pandemic, for many living in Dallas, striving for the American dream is merely that: a dream.

Dallas is riven with massive divides along race and class. It has intense pockets of poverty and segregation, born from a deep history of racist governmental and private practices and a more recent history of inaction and apathy, which have put Black and Latino families far behind.

So much of that is intertwined with intergenerational poverty and particularly for Black Dallasites is tied to racism and historical disenfranchisement.

This isnt coincidental, and it isnt limited to Dallas. A recent Brookings Institution report found 1 in 5 Black Americans are experiencing poverty for the third generation in a row, compared to just 1 in a hundred white Americans.

From womb to tomb, communities of color face inequities at literally every stage of life in Dallas, said Drexell Owusu, chief impact officer for The Dallas Foundation. Whether its housing or jobs or transportation or health care, I think the biggest challenge faced by the communities of color in Dallas is apathy and stubbornness a tacit acceptance of the status quo. Everything we have ever done in Dallas has led us to the outcomes we are seeing now.

To this point, Dallas hasnt reversed, much less slowed, these trends.

Racial/ethnic segregation and economic segregation was recently growing in Dallas, according to researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington, who completed the North Texas Regional Housing Assessment in 2018.

Such divides have catastrophic effects, particularly on the citys future.

One in 3 children in Dallas over 100,000 kids live in poverty. Many of them likely wont get the boost they need to break that intergenerational cycle.

Research led by Harvard University economist Raj Chetty highlighted the profound impact that a childs neighborhood has on his future. If a child is fortunate enough to move to a better area early in life, the better that childs chances.

Chettys Opportunity Atlas used U.S. Census data to track 20 million Americans from childhood to age 35, to see what neighborhoods tended to offer children a better life than their parents.

Many of the citys neighborhoods fared badly, including wide swaths of southern, West and northwest Dallas. Economic mobility in those areas ranked in the bottom 20% nationally.

Chettys research revealed nine of Dallas census tracts were among the nations worst in moving children out of poverty, ranking in the bottom 1%. All were in South Dallas, Fair Park and east Oak Cliff.

Again, this is not coincidental.

Those areas overlap neighborhoods whose conditions were crafted by forced residential segregation and intentional underinvestment through redlining, balkanized by postwar construction projects, or abandoned by white flight during Dallas ISDs paltry attempts at integration in the 1960s and 1970s.

Following the protests after Floyds death and the many discussions and task forces that followed was a renewed call in Dallas to tackle equity gaps in key areas, including housing and infrastructure, education, the economy, health and public safety.

Here is a glimpse of some of the ongoing work.

Among the many challenges Dallas faces, perhaps none are thornier and central to all other problems than housing.

In a city that is as geographically bifurcated between haves and have-nots, making tangible headway on housing will be a generational challenge.

A safe, stable home can be the key mechanism for low-income families to find their way out of poverty.

And housing policy sets the scene for scores of other issues, said Mike Koprowski, national campaign director for the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Koprowski led Dallas ISDs office of transformation and innovation from 2014 to 2017, later forming a Dallas-based nonprofit focused on housing opportunity.

Housing policy is school policy, he said. Its health policy. Its hunger policy. Its climate policy. Housing influences nearly every sector of life.

In recent years, Dallas has made equity a focus in its housing and infrastructure efforts to admittedly mixed results.

Over the past 18 months, the city has taken steps to better utilize city-owned land near DART stations for mixed-income housing, particularly in southern Dallas. The city also created a public facility corporation a nonprofit entity with broad powers of financing mixed-income housing developments aimed at income levels that arent addressed by either housing tax credits or market-rate construction.

Dallas is in desperate need for more affordable housing for low- and middle-income families, with a shortage of 20,000 units at its own count.

Darryl Baker, a community activist and founder of Fair Share for All Dallas, said his group would like to see the full range of housing options in southern Dallas, not only low-income rentals, with the No. 1 goal of the comprehensive housing policy being home ownership.

One of the stated goals in the development of the citys first comprehensive housing policy adopted by City Council members in 2018 was to overcome patterns of segregation and concentrations of poverty through incentives and requirements.

Instead of the usual practice of funneling federal dollars and development into the poorest parts of town with poor oversight or worse the new policy was designed to use data analysis to identify where the city could use its limited resources to redevelop, stabilize or help spur growth throughout Dallas.

Plans to supply thousands of units per year have yet to be met, though, hampered in part by a sclerotic permitting process that went from bad to worse during the pandemic.

An audit on the comprehensive housing policy from TDA Consulting, released in mid-December, said Dallas 2018 plan was a better guide to compliance with federal, state and local regulations, but was silent on equity.

The plan offered no specific strategies on how to level the playing field for residents and communities of color, and lacked goals tied directly to increasing equity by reducing racial disparities, the report stated.

Before release of the audit, Cullum Clark director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative lauded the city housing policys stated goals but criticized it as too rigid given the shortage. That cuts out much-needed development in areas that fall out of the 15 reinvestment areas, he noted.

Theres probably no major city in America that is really kind of an A performer in creating the policy mix that could build housing at that scale, Clark said. Youve got your available toolkit. Dallas utilizes some, but not all, of those tools.

Infrastructure plans, too, have slowly begun to take more equitable approaches.

Thanks to federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, the city allocated $37 million to expedite the installation of water and wastewater services to 46 unserved but occupied areas. Those projects will now be completed within the next four years, as opposed to the decade-long forecast in 2020. All but three of those are in southern Dallas.

Public-private partnerships sparked several park projects across southern Dallas. Most notable are the Southern Gateway deck park near the Dallas Zoo and the South Oak Cliff Renaissance Park. The first phase of Fair Parks revitalization a 14-acre community park built on land that Dallas wrested from Black families 50 years ago to turn into parking lots for the State Fair of Texas is scheduled to open by spring 2024.

The citys massive sidewalk master plan, adopted by the council in June, considers equity in scoring needs, prioritizing sidewalks in communities with high percentages of low-income residents, people of color and those lacking other forms of transportation.

But as with most other sectors of government adequate funding is the sticking point to progress. Reaching all the goals in the sidewalk master plan alone could run $2 billion.

Perhaps nowhere in the city are institutions more engaged in equity work than in the public education systems and colleges.

The efforts are broad, ranging from the Dallas County Promise an initiative among 11 area school districts, Dallas College and 11 four-year universities from across the state to provide last-dollar scholarships to cover costs that financial aid does not to Early Matters Dallas, a broad coalition pushing for early childhood education.

That push is needed.

The gaps on standardized tests between white students and children of color in 144,000-student Dallas ISD are large. Economic factors play a huge role, as 88% of the districts Latino and Black students are from low-income families more than 50 percentage points higher than for DISDs white students.

School shutdowns and the shift to virtual learning during the pandemic have likely widened those achievement gaps, experts say.

In December 2017, Dallas ISDs board of trustees passed a sweeping racial equity resolution, acknowledging the historical effects of racial and economic segregation on its students. They pledged to relentlessly pursue improvements to fix them.

That led to the creation of DISDs racial equity office, one of the first of its kind in the state. While its taken time for that office to find its way, the effort is now gaining traction as it systematically reevaluated programs and initiatives while setting equity goals along the way.

Were asking questions that are really centered around students, student outcomes and particular groups of students that we know and the data will tell us that have been historically disenfranchised or historically underserved, said DISD board member Karla Garcia.

Following Floyds death, trustees passed a Black Lives Matter resolution and started work to address disciplinary policies that disproportionately affected Black students. In 2018-19, Black children made up about 22% of DISDs students but nearly 52% of out-of-school suspensions and 35% of in-school suspensions.

That effort resulted in the first-of-its-kind ban of discretionary suspensions, replaced by reset centers at each of the districts campuses that are staffed with educators who specialize in social-emotional learning practices.

In planning Dallas ISDs record-setting $3 billion bond, the district prioritized improvements with the help of a Community Resource Index developed by Dallas nonprofit Child Poverty Action Lab that measures a neighborhoods access to health care, food, transportation and recreation.

The pandemic prompted DISD to create Operation Connectivity, an attempt to bridge the digital divide in underserved parts of the city by providing internet access and devices to students who lacked technology at home. The efforts found a willing partner in Gov. Greg Abbott, who helped launch the program statewide.

North Texas is an engine of job growth and prosperity. However, Blacks and Latinos, particularly low-wage employees living in southern Dallas, are too often left behind.

In 2018, an economic opportunity assessment by the Communities Foundation of Texas and the Center for Public Policy Priorities (now named Every Texan) found that nearly a quarter of all workers in the Dallas metropolitan area earned an annual median wage of less than $25,000.

And the K-shaped recovery that the U.S. economy has seen since the pandemic has exacerbated those existing gaps. Low-wage workers were more likely to lose income during the pandemic and are more likely to feel the crunch of inflation in the coming year.

Earlier this year, the City Council passed a comprehensive economic policy that called for the creation of a new economic development corporation. Its primary focus would be to attract business and create job opportunities to southern Dallas through, among other items:

Its long overdue and much-needed, Mayor Eric Johnson told The Dallas Morning News in June.

Nevertheless, the citys economic future likely hinges on being able to develop its own skilled workforce.

DISD has leaned heavily into its P-TECH and early college high school models, which are designed to graduate students with both a high school degree and either an associates degree, 60 college credit hours or an equivalent industry certification.

Paul Quinns work college model requires students to hold a job, with corporate partners paying them a stipend while offsetting a large portion of students tuition. Students graduate with degrees and work transcripts from the historically Black college but little in the way of debt.

The University of North Texas at Dallas prides itself on being one of the nations most affordable colleges. The student body is 79% Latino or Black and hyper-local, with about 90% of its students coming from the Dallas area.

You shouldnt be in this business if you dont have the ability to evolve or have the ability to speak to the issues that people are actually impacted by, Sorrell said, noting that equity should be at the forefront for all education institutions.

On the first weekend of December, Parkland Hospital held pop-up clinics in the parking lots of two Dallas-area Walmarts and a flea market to provide COVID-19 vaccinations.

They werent there by happenstance, said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins.

Parkland had crunched the numbers, identifying the areas with low vaccination rates and high-risk communities.

Everything that we look at on the health front, from the countys side, looks at it through a health equity lens, Jenkins said.

It comes as little surprise that the economic and housing disparities also carry a significant health impact.

High-poverty areas in Dallas overlap with areas of high food insecurity and inaccessibility. According to 2019 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, large portions of southern, southeast, west and northwest Dallas are considered low-income and low-access, where the nearest supermarket is more than a mile away.

The citys zoning has a large environmental impact, with industrial manufacturing zoning largely clustered in West Dallas and near the southern portions of the Trinity River.

Meanwhile, the rate of uninsured in Texas is 1.75 times the national average, and Dallas Countys rates are even worse. Only 64.6% of Latinos in Dallas County have health insurance.

A lack of regular family doctors and medical clinics in southern Dallas, particularly for those who dont have the means to pay, limits preventive care leading to greater risks of death from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and influenza and pneumonia.

Black residents, and those living in southeast Dallas, have the highest risks for dying early or living with a disability caused by disease than anyone in Dallas County, according to a 2019 Community Health Needs assessment from Parkland and Dallas County Health and Human Services.

And COVID-19s impact has disproportionately landed on the countys Black and Latino populations.

Parkland is trying to expand its reach with its 12th health center recently opened at RedBird Mall. Work to develop the systems 12th school-based clinic on one of Dallas Colleges campuses is also underway, Jenkins said.

When Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot took office in 2019, he made waves by tackling the nexus of crime and poverty.

Creuzot, a former prosecutor, said after his swearing-in ceremony that far too often, the criminal justice system penalized those living in poverty, particularly people of color.

Are we creating people with criminal records because theyre poor? he asked.

His office made a series of sweeping policy changes including opting not to prosecute low-level marijuana possession or theft of personal items less than $750, and pushing for bail reform to ensure that a risk assessment is fully considered in the determination of the bail amount.

The policy changes drew the ire of state leaders like Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, as well as law enforcement unions.

Despite national studies that show equal levels of use of marijuana among Black and white Americans, Black residents in Dallas in 2018 were four times as likely as non-Black residents to be referred by police for prosecution on marijuana possession.

A recent report from Southern Methodist Universitys Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center on one of Creuzots efforts on marijuana possession shows it didnt work as intended.

While overall referrals dropped by more than 30% in 2019, that ratio between Black and non-Black referrals actually rose to 4.4 times more likely.

Eddie Garca became Dallas first Latino police chief when he was hired in February. One of his early calls to action was the importance of community policing and building relationships with young people.

Council member Casey Thomas said community engagement was a key criterion in searching for a police chief, looking at ways in which we can use resources to as hell say weed and seed. Weed out those negative elements, while seeding in those positive things.

And to that end, the council approved a $1.6 million contract in April for Dallas CRED, a chapter of a national nonprofit focused on the reduction of youth incarceration and gun violence.

A coalition of Dallas community activists called for 10 policy changes needed in the city in the aftermath of Floyds death. They included creating a system of mental health professionals to work as first responders in lieu of officers, as long as firearms arent involved; investing in other alternatives to police response; and adopting policies to restrict the use of deadly force.

Those changes, in large part, have not happened.

The council reallocated $7 million from the Police Departments overtime budget in 2020 but that went toward code compliance, streetlights and the hiring of non-police employees for desk roles in the department a measure that Mayor Johnson railed against. However, DPDs total budget increased, both in 2020 and 2021. The current budget for the department is $567 million, the largest of all city departments.

The city expanded its RIGHT Care teams a collaboration of police, paramedics, social workers and clinicians created to deal with mental health-related 911 calls from five to 10, with an additional $2 million investment.

Carvell Bowens, a community organizer on the Right2Justice campaign from the Texas Organizing Project, said the debate around the proposed reallocations was disappointing, immediately turning into fodder for political gain.

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Reckoning with the past as Dallas looks to a more just future - The Dallas Morning News