Kevin Pask, Deep Ellum Blues

Although the roots revivalism of 1960s music popularized Deep Ellum's music, the neighborhood itself had virtually disappeared after the construction of Central Expressway in the late 1940s and 50s. (It had been planned as "Central Boulevard" as early as the 1930s; by the post-war years, a boulevard just sounded old-fashioned.) The first segment of the expressway was completed in 1949, largely at the behest of developers with plans for the northern sections of the city and suburbs. There were in fact numerous disputes in the early years of development, not because of any sentimental feeling about Deep Ellum, but because South Dallas leaders acutely and accurately feared their own, largely white, neighborhoods being left behind in the northward push of affluent Dallas. "Central Expressway will do more than relieve traffic congestion," proclaimed The Dallas Times Herald in its lead editorial on opening day for the expressway, August 18, 1949. "It will put new life into many blocks of blighted property that was adjacent to the railway tracks. It is this kind of public improvement that promotes city growth." Growth northward. This was the era that fixed the division between South and North Dallas as one between white and black, poor and rich. As was generally the case with such developments all across America, the expressway took the path of least resistance: railroad land and the neighborhoods of poor people, which often went together. One observer wrote of a similar process in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the 1960s, "Very few blacks lived in Minnesota, but the road builders found them."6 Central severed Deep Ellum from downtown and plowed through Stringtown, which was the black neighborhood that had once strung together, along a narrow corridor, the North Dallas Freedmantown and Deep Ellum. The expressway also paved over about an acre of the historic Freedman's cemetery in the area, using broken tombstones as roadfill (a practice that was common enough in the period, and not limited to black cemeteries).

Central Expressway seemed to enshrine a new social geography as well. It severed and effectively destroyed the North Dallas Freedmantown. It directed the development of what would henceforth be considered North Dallas (well north of the North Dallas Freedmantown). It even served to mark subtle social distinctions in the areas that developed along its path. The most affluent regions of North Dallas were almost always located to the west of the expressway: the True North of Dallas. This was a social geography of legal desegregation and informal re-segregation through development. Dan Baum writes that "the era of social engineering by the wrecking ball began in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Washington, D.C., to raze and develop a section of the run-down Southwest neighborhood."7 This, significantly, was also the year that the Supreme Court initiated the end of Jim Crow in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Urban redevelopment and desegregation: the 1954 Supreme vintage initially promised to be a good one. In Dallas, though, the end of Jim Crow only hastened the rush to the northern suburbs, and there was very little rhetoric about the "development" of black neighborhoods that might ensue. The wrecking ball in Dallas only existed to promote growth, now inextricably linked to white flight.

The postwar generation of white suburbanites, like myself, had almost no memory of the world that had been plowed over in order to create the one in which we lived. We were certainly aware of the most important social distinction in the social geography of the city: North and South Dallas. No other direction on the compass mattered quite so much — even "west," the direction that was purported to connect us to the world of the open range and make us all Dallas cowboys. In this, however, we were probably little different from the world of the white suburbs of Chicago and Boston. The suburbs evaporated the old differences between North and South on questions of race. Jim Crow largely disappeared from Dallas in 1961, the year of my birth, when black citizens organized sit-ins at the counters of drugstores across the city. I can remember no formal signs of segregation in my childhood. (My mother remembered separate bathrooms and water fountains when she arrived in Dallas in 1955.) Dallas thrived, however, on informal segregation, probably even greater than in the era of Jim Crow, when bathrooms and counters could be segregated because blacks and whites might be frequenting the same stores and public facilities. This no longer happened very much after suburban development and the new malls like Valley View; except for the excursions to Fair Park, most of the blacks that I saw as a child were maids, standing on the street corners of North Dallas awaiting the arrival of a bus.