Kevin Pask, Deep Ellum Blues

"Deep Ellum Blues" expands upon the author’s narrative of growing up in suburban Dallas, Texas, to explore the relationship between the city’s Sunbelt sprawl and the fate of historical African American neighborhoods, particularly Deep Ellum and North Dallas’ Freedmantown. Deep Ellum, along with its legendary music scene built by the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Lead Belly, and Bill Neely, all but disappeared with the construction of Central Expressway in the 1950s. It has since returned as a largely white center for alternative culture. Freedmantown has re-emerged as the gentrified "State-Thomas." These neighborhoods register the city’s changing racial geography and obliteration of history.

The railroads made Dallas, Texas into a city, highways made it a Sunbelt city, and DFW Airport made it an international city. Never much known for making things, it has been a place where products are financed, brokered, and transported: leather and buffalo hides in the first place, followed by cotton and oil, clothing and technology. In fact, as Dallas historian A. C. Greene has astutely observed, land development has always been the city's chief industry: "When the Republic [of Texas] joined the United States in 1846 it retained ownership of all its public land, making the State of Texas the nation's largest land promoter, aside from Uncle Sam himself. And in Texas, no city was so conceived and created as a real estate promotion, and no city has been so controlled in its civic and municipal directions by land development, as has Dallas."1 Almost nothing, neither geography nor government, constrained the growth of the city, and it has thrown its tract developments of ranch houses far and wide across the prairies of North Texas, becoming one of the archetypes of Sunbelt sprawl.

City of Dallas and Deep Ellum Area

This hyper-American model of speculative growth has left little room for the old, at least until very recently. For such a young city, the new becomes the old, unwanted, and forgotten very quickly. Particularly unwanted have been the neighborhoods marked by the presence of African Americans in Dallas: Frogtown or Froggy Bottom (an early mixed neighborhood of shady character adjacent to the Trinity River and its thousands of serenading frogs), Stringtown, the North Dallas Freedmantown, and Deep Ellum have all been plowed over by development, even if the latter two have known recent re-development. Legal desegregation, in fact, only heightened this process since it made it appear even more necessary for white Dallasites to live further from the center city.

African Americans were present in the Dallas area as slaves before the Civil War (97 out of a total population of 678 in 1860), but many more arrived soon after the war, and settled in a variety of 'Freedmantowns' around the city. One of these Freedmantowns remained in the far north of the city in my own childhood in the 1960s and 70s although I did not recognize it as such at the time. It was simply an old cluster of small houses and farms gathered around a church on Preston Road near what is now Alpha Road, just north of Valley View Mall (which valley? what view?). No one ever mentioned the circumstances of this place to me; probably almost no one outside the community itself knew its history. We lived in the present of suburban Dallas; the Freedmantown existed in its past. This was not strange in itself. There were still cotton fields very close to my suburb of Richardson in those days, and a Sunday drive in almost any direction would turn up numerous little farming communities, white and black. These communities sometimes co-existed in space with the northern suburbs of Dallas, but they seemed to occupy another time altogether.