Paved A Way

Infrastructure, Policy and Racism in an American City

Collin Yarbrough

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781637301173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Acknowledgement is the first step in the journey of unpacking the ways our cities are built with systems of power and erasure. True reconciliation requires acknowledgement and acceptance of past injustice. In that journey, we are only at the beginning."

Paved A Way tells the stories of five neighborhoods in Dallas and how they were shaped by racism and economic oppression. The communities of North Dallas, Deep Ellum, Little Mexico, Tenth Street, and Fair Park look nothing like what they did during their prime, and author Collin Yarbrough argues that their respective declines were intentional-that their foundations were chipped away over time.

Systemic oppression is not contained within Dallas-it can be found throughout the United States. As Collin Yarbrough writes in his introduction, "Dallas is its own city, and Dallas is every city." With this book, readers throughout the United States will learn to see how nearby cities were shaped by injustice, and how they can play a role in reversing the process.

I

REFRAME

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Adapted from “Republic of Texas, 1841
—Three Forks area,” K. M. Shahmiri, 1989.

1

BUILT ON STOLEN LAND

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I didn’t know Dallas is built on stolen land.

Growing up here, I didn’t really consider much of Dallas’s history beyond the JFK assassination. Dallasites often quip that “Dallas has no reason to exist.” The late Wick Allison, former owner and editor of D Magazine, points out that Robert Lee Thornton, Dallas’s former mayor, once said, “Dallas doesn’t give a damn about its history; it only cares about the future.” Ironically, Allison notes, this statement was part of Thornton’s presentation for Dallas’s bid to be the site for the 1936 Texas Centennial at Fair Park.[6]

I didn’t know about the existence of Dallas’s deep history until I learned about Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (DTRHT). DTRHT is an organization focused on “[creating] a radically inclusive city by addressing race and racism through narrative change, relationship building and equitable policies and practices.”[7] A friend recommended I check out their work to learn more about the untold history of Dallas. It was a moment that fundamentally changed my life moving forward. I discovered a community vision report DTRHT published in 2019, clearly highlighting the fact Dallas is built on land stolen from the Caddo, Wichita, and other Indigenous nations.[8]

This was disorienting information to read at first. On one hand, I had some exposure to the history of Indigenous people in the United States and in Texas from my Texas public school education. On the other hand, I couldn’t recall land being described as stolen by the settlers. Viewing the land as stolen provided a new lens for this narrative, and I found myself wondering the following question: what does it mean for my life to benefit from land stolen from Indigenous people?

DTRHT ensures the Indigenous narrative is not lost in Dallas’s history or future. Jarring as it is to read the statement, it’s a reminder DTRHT starts every event with and reinforces on its social media channels, encouraging others not to forget either. Being reminded Dallas is built on stolen land, with stolen people and stolen labor, pushes against the prevalent historical narratives that center colonial history around the city itself or perpetuate the myth that Dallas exists for no particular reason at all.

I continue the argument that Dallas exists precisely because it is built on the foundational racist mindset of the Republic and state of Texas.[9]

I’m offering a counternarrative.

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Land, Resources, and Genocide

Prehistorically, people have occupied the land now known as Texas as far back as twelve thousand years ago.[10]

One of the primary nations in north Texas, the Caddo, migrated to the area almost twelve thousand years ago. Their settlements were fairly large, sometimes containing several hundred people. A farmer and trader nation, the Caddo developed extensive trading networks between village complexes. Among other things, trade goods included salt, copper, pottery, wood, and flint.[11]

Several hundred years of colonial presence began in the 1500s with the Spanish and briefly in the 1600s with the French. The Caddo, Comanche, and Wichita were powerful traders and strategically chose their trading alliances between the French and Spanish colonial powers.[12] A peaceful acquisition of wealth developed as the Indigenous nations’ skills in ranching, hunting, and farming created immense opportunity for intertribal and European trade.[13]

Disease and battling between the Europeans and the Caddo hindered the resiliency of the Indigenous strength as their land was the “bone of contention between the French and Spanish.”[14] Smallpox, measles, and cholera brought by the colonial powers killed roughly 95 percent of the two hundred thousand Caddo people between the 1600s to 1800s.[15]

As the Anglo presence trickled into the land known as Texas in the 1820s, a new creed arrived as well. Historian Gary Clayton Anderson describes it as “founded on the belief that certain races of people were more accomplished and more justified in inheriting the land than were others.”[16] Racism in the 1800s and a growing body of dehumanizing literature shaped Texans’ view of Indigenous people, Tejanos, and Black people as wholly inferior and originating from “wretched races.”[17] This racist ideology, wrapped up in southern codes of honor, required cruelty and defending the White race as a necessary component for profits, wealth, status, and “progress.”[18]

With this problematic ideology, acquisition of land and owning slaves became social markers for middle-class White southerners.[19] The “everything is bigger in Texas” mentality grew from the rapid economic development fueled by cotton farming and farms, which were three times larger than the average farm across the rest of the United States.[20] Without regulations on land policies in the United States, Texas developed an identity of exceptionalism built on stolen land, stolen people, and cotton.[21]

Indigenous people stood in the way of the westward expansion of this ideology. The only option Texans saw was removal. Anderson writes, “The aggressiveness of Texans, their martial mentality and penchant for violence, their individualism and deep-seated racism, and their lust for profit made conflict with [Indigenous people] almost inevitable.”[22]

Texans were battling Mexico for their independence in 1835 and did not trust the American Indians, fearing they would be enlisted and side with Mexico in the battle.[23] While some of these claims may have been true, the fear was stoked by Texas military personnel in the wake of the battles at the Alamo and San Jacinto.[24]

In 1838, the second President of the Republic of Texas, M. B. Lamar, ushered in an era professor Scott Langston says he “is comfortable calling genocide.” In fact, the word extermination was used by Texas officials under Lamar’s leadership so often that it became policy.[25] Further fueling the westward expansion, Lamar surveyed a new capital for the Republic in recognized Comanche land, in the area now known as Austin.[26]

Lamar’s strict extermination policy in his administration worked to harass and persecute the American Indians, relentlessly burning their villages in the process.[27] His wars against Indigenous people, who he considered “trespassing vermin on Texas soil,” pushed Indigenous people out of Texas, clearing the way for White settlers who were already pushing survey boundaries west.[28] Lamar spent millions on his hate-fueled war, “shooting, looting, and burning” his way westward.[29] “Why did the genocide take place?” Langston asked me. “It all goes back to land and resources.”

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The Battle of Village Creek

Groups of disparate American Indians moved westward into the Cross Timbers and Three Forks of the Arkikosa River, now known as the Trinity River.[30] This region is west of present-day Dallas in north Texas.

Historian Gary Clayton Anderson considers the Battle of Village Creek a culminating event for much of the unrest and fighting between the White settlers expanding westward and the Indigenous nations of the land. The battle is described as a “last stand,” an event that drove the American Indian nations out of the Trinity River area and paved the way for White settlement in the present-day Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.[31]

Tensions in north Texas were high as a new rash of conflicts began to occur between American Indians and newly independent Texans. Reports came into President Lamar from many sources that the American Indians in the Three Forks of the Trinity River area were “murdering the settlers as well as stealing land from them.”[32] Ironically, at this time, volunteer rangers and militia men were plundering and destroying Indigenous villages, stealing horses, pelts (animal skins), and food, which was auctioned off in Austin.[33] A fortune was to be made in the sale of stolen Indigenous goods. Anderson highlights, “[The large village on the Trinity] made up of Wichitas, Cherokees, Shawnees, Kickapoos, and Caddos, would contain considerable plunder.”[34] Rewards would be great for those who enlisted.

On May 14, 1841, the 4th Brigade Texas rangers consisted of seventy volunteers from the northern Red River counties. General E. H. Tarrant gathered the rangers at Fort Johnson and headed south and west. Over five days, they traveled from near present-day Sherman, in north Texas, down into the fifteen-mile-wide wooded north-south barrier known as the lower cross timbers, in what is the eastern portion of present-day Denton county.[35]

Five days after leaving Fort Johnson, the militia entered the western cross timbers a few miles west of present-day Fort Worth. This area was the western boundary of Caddo aboriginal territory.[36] As they zigged and zagged around the cross timbers and various forks of the Trinity River, Brigadier Inspector William N. Porter reported to Texas’ Secretary of War, B. T. Archer:

“… we discovered tolerable fresh signs and we had every reason to believe that there were Indians in the vicinity. We soon found two of their (Indian) villages which we found to be deserted… there were some sixty or seventy lodges in these villages. [Due to their high elevation], General Tarrant deemed it imprudent to burn the villages for fear of giving alarm to the Indians… but they were in great measure destroyed with our axes.”[37]

On May 24, the militia found themselves upon an inhabited village. They dropped “all manner of encumbrances,” formed a line, and charged into the village on horseback, taking it swiftly by surprise.[38] After stumbling into another village about a mile from that one, the militia saw a third village nearly a mile long down the creek where they rallied back together after being scattered. When they split up again, the group led by Captain John B. Denton took fire. Several were wounded and Captain Denton was killed in the skirmish. The remainder of the militia group began to yell and make actions as if they were to storm the line.[39]

The village inhabitants retreated, and the rangers were told by an Indigenous prisoner that about half of the one thousand Native warriors from the encampment were away hunting and fighting encroaching Texans on the frontier. Realizing they w...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Land Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• Part 1. Reframe
• Part 2. Redesign
• Conclusion: Paving a New Way
• Acknowledgements
• Appendix
• Notes