White Flight from Reinhardt

Originally, Martin Luther King Jr. Learning Center was named Colonial Hill. It was built in 1902 and was named after the affluent Anglo-American community it served. In the mid-fifties, the neighborhood experienced a transition as the population became increasingly African-American. The transition in the community led to African-American students being assigned to the school which was renamed Colonial Elementary School in 1957. Colonial Elementary served grades 1 - 8.

The Colonial attendance zone has experienced many changes under several court orders. From 1964 until the 1976 court order, Colonial served grades 1 - 6. In 1976, students in grades 4-6 were reassigned to Reinhardt Elementary.
http://www.dallasisd.org/SCHOOLS/es/i_l/mlk/history.htm


Perhaps the most significant problem was the flight of whites to the suburbs: in 1970 the Dallas school district was 58% white, 34% black and 8% Mexican American. Seven years later whites numbered only 35%.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,919609,00.html

The Year BA Desegregated

Learning from the Past
By Christopher Dill


I attended Bryan Adams High School in Dallas, Texas from 1971 to 74. Court ordered busing was instigated my first year with about 600 inner city blacks bused in to a predominantly white school of about 3,000.

Everything was fine for the first few months Then there was the first fight between a black and white student at lunch time. The brothers of both fighters jumped in and it quickly spread but was stopped minutes later.

However, the line had been crossed and at lunch the next day, two groups of white and black students faced each other across the tennis court, which was basically our quad. Security, coaches and some teachers kept the two groups apart. You could slice the tension it was so thick.

Suddenly, two senior hippies (yeah, this was back in the days) walked out onto the center of the tennis court and began circling each other, like WWF wrestlers.

Nobody, including the staff knew what they were doing until they began 'wrestling', including, head locks, begging for mercy, etc. Both groups of whites and black were roaring with laughter, cheering these two clowns on. Totally broke the ice.

There were no more problems the rest of the year, until the last week of school. Then some trouble maker put up racist flyers and we had our first full on riot the last day of school involving upwards of 200 students. Kids got hurt, but school was over for the summer.

Unfortunately, the black students took it on the chin that day, so the first day of school the following year, a large group of black students, about 80 -100, attacked a group of about a dozen white students. Ironically, the white students were hippies and I was one of them.

They backed us up into the lunch room where the majority of students were still eating lunch. The fighting spread into the cafeteria, then throughout the school. The papers said 500-700 students were involved. I thought that was conservative considering the scope o f the riot. This was the worst rioting ever at a US high school, before or since. Worse than South Boston, worse than Central High in Arkansas.

Ambulances pulled up to the back of the school and I carried a buddy down to the clinic. We played on the soccer team and his face was cut open by a belt buckle. I then snuck out to the parking lot with some other friends to get away. We saw students getting jumped by roving gangs of other students as we drove off, an unforgettable image and memory.

The next day, the riot squad, or swat team, was stationed at our school. There were at least twenty police cars parked around the perimeter and every hallway had at least two, sometimes four uniformed and plains-clothes policemen. This level of security remained pretty much in place for the first semester, then was scaled back for the second semester. Suffice to say, there was no fighting the rest of the year.

When I returned my senior year, everyone pretty much thought the problems were over. Security was greatly reduced and things remained calm...until the last week of school when tensions began to mount.

There were a couple of incidents, then the last day got real ugly. A large group of white students from other schools and white non- students from outlying areas showed up with bats, clubs, etc., to confront the blacks getting on the buses. These same buses had been stoned a year earlier in an 'ambush' of sorts.

The police were there this day, but not nearly enough to contain the situation. Fighting broke out, debris was thrown, but the black students got onto their buses and escaped this mob. I will never forget the look on some of their faces. Fear mainly, which no doubt later turned to anger.

I graduated, there were a few incidents the next year and not long after court ordered busing ceased in Dallas at any rate. All in all, it was a disaster for most of the white students I talked with years later (I never ran into any black students). People were embittered by the experience and only had their prejudices reinforced, certainly not healed.

It took me quite awhile to get over it and I now realized just how much my high school years were affected by the turmoil, especially academically and socially. The atmosphere was poisoned by the violence.

The administration carted out the usual standard ineffective solutions such as forming endless committees and discussion groups to improve race relations and “move forward.”

The same people who participated in these charades had absolutely no influence or credibility amongst the student population who probably viewed these students -- as I did – as opportunists simply padding their resumes for college. You never saw these kids out trying to break up fights or stave off potential fights, like me and my hippie friends did later, once we were seniors.

By the way, I spoke with some blacks after we hippies were attacked and asked them why we hippies WERE attacked -- since we were the ones who were actually cool with blacks being bused into the school, compared with the redneck types who were typical southern racists and against it.

I was told it was because we had long hair and "looked like girls." I was baffled then. Now, I think it was a merely a lack of REAL communication and interaction between the two cultures. In other words, I think if we had parties with these same blacks... there would be no problems.

How could this be done now? Don't get me started, but you can't simply get a small diverse group of smart students together in a classroom to come up with simplistic solutions to very complicated problems, and the problem of race relations in greater Los Angeles is much more complicated and evolving.

There has to be an active change in the culture of the school. You have to get very large groups of students, say the entire grade together, in Barnum Hall and get the students up on stage who are causing the problems and let them answer to their peers. Most likely, it would be a humbling experience.

Also, the administration has to be clever. The two seniors who staged the mock wrestling match probably had a greater effect at diffusing tension than all the security, committees, and endless discussions combined.

The administration might want to consider a similar tactic though I doubt they will, but keep in mind, as Mark Twain said, nothing stands against the onslaught of humor. Get students laughing together and they may Not take themselves and their conflicts so seriously.

Another idea is to play classical music at lunch time. Police departments are starting to do this in major cities in the US and Europe and it has proven to be effective in reducing crime and cleaning up crime ridden areas. It has a soothing effect on people. Some don't like it, but it will definitely set a particular tone that may be conducive to non-violence.

At any rate, do not play rap on campus, or any other popular music for that matter. The students can and will listen to that stuff all they want outside of school. Introduce a little mainstream culture, I say.

Another suggestion... recently my son went to the SAMOHI Alumni Awards and spoke with a '65 alum. She told him that back then, they got 1 hour and 15 minutes for lunch and most kids would go down to the beach and hang out, swim, surf, just generally have a good respite at the beach.

My own personal suggestion -- a big beach party for the entire school, well supervised and organized with food, games, music (reggae), etc. In fact, the SAMOHI Surf Club put on such a party last summer at the end of school. Hardly anybody from the school showed up but we had a blast anyway.

But what do I know...I'm just a surfer. I can't even get my calls returned by the administration or district concerning the surf program at SAMOHI. I doubt they would be interested in what I have to say about the current problems on campus. I'm sure they don't need my help.

Do I think these problems will get worse? I have no idea. Did I see it coming? I did indeed. My kids tell me about every fight and altercation because they know what their dad went through.

I do know one thing... each time my kids tell me about a fight or altercation, the incidents seem to get worse and worse...and this DOES remind me of my high school years. So, if anybody does has a line in with the district or administration, feel free to forward my opinion... for what it's worth.

Christopher Dill has two children at Samohi and is a volunteer surf coach.

http://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/letters/Letters-2005/April-2005/04_21_05_Learning_fron_the_Past.htm



http://www.flickr.com/photos/therefore/18636595/

Oilmen, Policemen and Nightclub Owners in the Suburbs

One aspect of growing up is making sense of your place in the world based on what your parents do for a living. In the suburban neighborhood where I grew up in the fifties, my daddy was a businessman who went to a downtown office building every day. He often worked late into the night and through the weekend. By late teens, I had categorized him as a computerdooter—he managed the accounting and tax records for bigtime oil men like Clint Murchison and Jake L. Hamon.

IBM programmer and machine operator with IBM motto circa 1950s

Many southwest daddies made their livings connected somehow to the oil industry. On the street where I grew up, we had two other types of daddies who seemed strange and alien to me. Two families had daddies who were policemen and one family had a dad who owned a bar with pool tables down on East Grand.

In the last week or so I’ve found much info on the web about the lives of Dallas oilmen, policemen and nightclub owners in 1963. Why? Because the President was assassinated here. Not only have numerous governmental agencies investigated the city, but thousands of conspiracy theorists and even Hollywood continue to spend much time obsessed with this time in U.S. history.

I was too young to have had a chance to visit Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club, but here’s a clip of a Hollywood rendition of what went on. The dancer is a fantasy combination of Candy Barr, Judith Campbell Exner, and Marilyn Monroe. In the last scene, Ruby defends working gals and the American Guild of Variety Artists.

Click below for photos from Carousel:

http://s194.photobucket.com/albums/z214/diocynic/Carousel/

Here's more on Candy Barr:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/celebrity/candy_barr/1_index.html

By 1966 or so, I was old enough to go from Dallas to Ft. Worth with a carload of high school friends to visit the Cellar. The dancers removed their bottoms as well as tops. They had lights and buzzers to warn if a police raid was occurring.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/TT/xdt1.html

If you misbehaved bad enough, the bouncers would throw you down the stairs just like Jack Ruby had done at the Carousel. [Here’s a link to descriptions of Ruby’s abilities as a bouncer of drunks from his club:

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ruby5.htm

] Supposedly the Cellar didn’t have a liquor license at the time I visited, so you could buy whiskey-flavored drinks for $4 each. By 1 am or so, I was becoming a bit sleepy from the drinks and endless naked bodies. Sitting Indian-style of the floor , I laid back on a cushion. One of the barmaids kicked me in the head—they were much rougher that Reinhardt teachers—notifying me that I had better sit up and behave.

In the early 70s, I had a friend who took me to the Busy Bee on South Industrial and the Fare on Greenville. Busy Bee was a traditional burlesque joint. The dancers were older and obviously skilled dancers who could do amazing things with their breasts. The Fare had skinny, young go-go dancers.

At this link, Joe Bob describes some of the later history of exotic dancing in Dallas:

http://www.joebobbriggs.com/misccolumns/newpuritanism.asp

Several years ago, the Dallas CVB suffered scandal in part because bed tax funds were used to take convention planners to Dallas strip clubs.

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~clj5/Ethics/articles/Isbell31.pdf

A criteria for many meeting planners is if their conventioneers will find a good selection of strip clubs in the city where they hold their convention—same as in Jack Ruby’s days. And I’m sure there are some Dallas policemen who have complex relationships with the nightclub owners. The national association of gentlemen's club owners recognizes Dallas's important role in this trade group. http://www.acenational.org/default.aspx

Big oilmen in Dallas continue to run many things, just like H.L. Hunt and Clint Murchison used their power in Dallas 1963. Arkansas oilman Jerry Jones follows Bum Bright and Clint Murchison (both of whom helped pay for the DMN Kennedy Questions ad the morning of the assassination) and Lamar Hunt, son of H.L. Hunt, in their hobbies of prime time sports glamour. Check out conspiracy theorists' stories about Murchison, Hunt and Bright at

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmurchison.htm

And what LBJ’s "girlfriend" had to say about Dallas oilmen at

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2006/300806jfk.htm

John Birchers and Bridge Ladies in the Suburbs and Phyllis Schafly Fighting ERA

In previous blogs about my experiences growing up in the suburban East Dallas in the fifties and sixties, I’ve examined blue collar workers, white collar workers, organization men, creeps, and bridge ladies in the suburbs.

I have not addressed another category—John Birchers in the suburbs—and a political connection that is old news to many but interesting to a straight white, oblivious boy like me.

Flyer anonymously printed and distributed in Dallas just before Kennedy's visit

We all remember Kennedy’s assassination and the worldwide incrimination of Dallas as a “city of hate” that somehow fostered the killing. When Kennedy began his morning at a Fort Worth hotel, he considered the hostile Dallas political environment, as shown in a Dallas Morning News advertisement published that morning.

In the aftermath, the Warren Commission found that both the DMN ad and the flyer were irrelevant; the ad was created and funded by Birchers and wealthy Dallas businessmen, including Bum Bright. The John Birch Society, which had a strong following in the fifties and sixties in the wealthy, white Dallas suburbs, claimed the assassination bolstered their conviction that a communist conspiracy existed in the U.S. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/birch.htm

I’ve never had much interest in JFK assassination theories or the history of the Equal Rights Amendment, but reading Barbara Ehrenbach's The Hearts of Men [which though published in 1983, stands credible and current today] has drawn for me a connection between the conservative businessmen and their bridge-playing, stay-at-home wives, on the one hand, and the defeat of the ERA in the early eighties.

. . . Phyllis Schafly was not one of those housewives who, as Betty Friedan observed, let homemaking “expand to fill the time available” and crowd out all youthful ambitions. Sheltered by Fred Schlafly’s more than ample income and assisted by a part-time housekeeper, she developed a new career as a one-woman propagandist for far-right concerns, publishing (and in some cases self-publishing) eight books on the twin menace of the Soviet Union and its domestic dupes. Politically, she kept one foot in the right-wing of the Republican Party and the other in the nether world of paranoid, evangelical organizations which made up what was then known complacently as the “lunatic fringe” of American conservatism. She ran for Congress as a Republican and wrote a best-selling book (A Choice Not an Echo) endorsing Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate in 1964. At the same time, she believed that the party had been taken over by a “small group of secret kingmakers using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques” to advance the interests of the “Red Empire.” If this sounds like a highly imaginative view of the Republican Party, it was by no means unique to Phyllis Schlafly. The John Birch Society, a semi-secret, right-wing organization that gained a sizable rural and suburban middle-class following the early 1960s, had consistently warned that the United States was already “50%-70% Communist-controlled.” Like Schlafly [a St. Louis, not a Dallas housewife], the Birch Society saw evidence of Red manipulation in any statesman or politician whose military aspirations fell short of nuclear Armageddon. In 1960, for example, the society’s founder and director, Robert Welch, made the surprising announcement that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was himself a Communist operative.

. . .
In 1972, both the Birch Society and Schlafly’s newsletter flagged the ERA—which at the time was solidly backed by the Republican Party—as a major new political target, and within a few months, Phyllis Schlafly emerged as the leader of a national campaign to stop the ERA. The most obvious reason for this sudden surge of right-wing interest in a feminist issue was that, by the early seventies, the old issues were not selling as well as they once had. Charges of communism in high places sounded quaint in an America that had had its own highly visible and hardly conspiratorial New Left. Détente was in progress, anticommunism was on the decline, and sheer opportunism would have impelled the right to exploit the new issues arising from social changes of the sixties—school busing, affirmative action, abortion and equal rights for women. For Schlafly, in addition, as her chronicler Lisa Wohl suggests, the ERA presented an opportunity to “enter the mainstream,” that is, to gain national attention around an issue that had no apparent connection to the tired themes of far-right paranoia. Others on the pro-ERA side made the same assessment of the right-wingers who were beginning to appear reborn as antifeminists. Pointing to the connection between anti-ERA activism and the far-right American Independent Party (which ran George Wallace for President in 1968 and Birch-affiliated John Schmitz in 1972), Congresswoman Martha Griffiths charged that the anti-ERA effort was really “a means of building a right-wing political organization among women.” But if this was opportunism, it was hardly unprincipled: The major themes of the right-wing assault on feminism were latent in far-right anti-communist ideology before feminism became a force in America.

www.phyllisschlafly.com/
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/coulter071802.asp

These guilts by association--John Birch Society related to Phyllis Schaffly related to anti-ERA politics--have exact parallels in attacks against Betty Friedan, that in her early 20s in the late forties, she was a socialist. Both women had need to dissemble about their previous political associations as their new political careers developed. As we near the 2008 Presidential elections, one cannot ignore the vicious political divisions in our country--and as Hillary said this week, that politics and the nation may be on the edge of "spinning out of control." But in some ways, this is old news when one considers the hostile political environment I grew up in during the cold war fifties and early sixties. Let's elect a President who will work to put the ERA back on the table and/or encourage social programs for our distressed citizenship--hardly a frightful possibility compared to rocketing multimegaton nuclear warheads into North Korean or Russian cities.



YouTube has a couple of videos that focus on Dallas news footage of Birchers from the early sixties, including the exploits of Edwin A Walker:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKwalker.htm

Once I had a driver's license, in the late 1960s, I remember driving by the John Birch Society's headquarters, which I believe was at the intersection of Blackburn and Oak Lawn. Jack Ruby supposedly frequented Phil's Delicatessen down the street. After he was arrested, he was certain the Birchers were out to get him.
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/JFK/Issues_and_evidence/Jack_Ruby/Timeline_of_Ruby.html

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/ruby_j1.htm

More sixties Dallas trivia--about connections among right wingers, organized crime, and strippers such as Candy Barr and Chris Colt and her 45s can be found at

http://www.lotuseaters.net/jfkdad.shtml

http://www.jfklancerforum.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=3&topic_id=19378&mesg_id=19378&listing_type=

Hefner and Kerouac

As I’ve worked on my blog over the last seven months or so, I have had in the back of my mind that I must take another look at Hugh Hefner. Boys like me who grew up in the fifties and sixties cut their teeth (and some beat their meat) on his magazine.

My dad, a very modest and conscientious man, had a subscription to Playboy through the sixties. With two teenage sons, he did not work too hard to hide the incoming, brown-paper-wrapped magazines, and my brother—five years older than me—and I had such wonderful, monthly opportunities to spend several hours poring over the latest issue.

Playboy in the sixties had among the highest subscription bases in the USA. It peaked in about 1971. As a proof of its mainstream-ness, consider this ad in a 1968 Christmas edition from Sears & Roebuck.

And consider the literary quality of contributors listed on its cover.
[Click on the picture to make it larger]

Hugh Hefner and the Playboy phenomenon is a complex topic that deserves many book-length studies. Not that Hefner intellectually was and is a very complex man. Rather, he rose to celebrity status and became wealthy at a particular point in American cultural history. By the late sixties, his only work duty was to edit incoming cartoons—of incredible adolescent and misogynist acceptability—and 18-year-old tits. His early authority figure was that celebrated and possibly clinically perverted, scientific expert Alfred Kinsey http://www.leaderu.com/jhs/reisman.html, and as a post-WWII GI early on Hefner entered into a failed marriage with a woman who cheated on him. He was an angry man, and most commentators agree that his magazine was not so much erotic as a sophisticated marketing medium that promoted a bachelor, hedonist lifestyle—not the True magazine image of the man on the hunt in the woods--but the cultivator (consumer) of the bachelor pad, jazz high-fi, culinary arts, European sports car, businessman but not organization man, lover of slam, bam, thank you, ma’am, with complexion color-corrected, young, next-door-innocent females, and with a big payoff from Madison Avenue.

As is my habit, when studying a new subject, I write relatively few words and study the smartest researchers, present and past, two of whom are

Entertainment for Men: Playboy, Masculinity, and Postwar American Culture, by Elizabeth Fraterrigo, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago, April, 2004

and

The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, Barbara Ehrenreich: Anchor Books, 1983.

Ehrenreich draws this interesting connection between the influences of Hugh Hefner and Jack Kerouac in the 1950s:

Playboy’s assault on the Beats was complicated by an ill-concealed sense of rivalry. Hefner grudgingly acknowledged the Beats as fellow rebels against conformity. He implied, however, that they were faint-hearted allies: “. . . modern-day nihilists for whom it was enough, apparently, to flout and deny.” While the beats dropped wearily from the line of the march, the playboys had gone tearing ahead. The difference, he argued, was that the playboys were ambitious; they wanted clothes, cars, fancy girls and they had the energy to find them. . . .

The Beats, whether celebrating [the working class and disenfranchised] like Kerouac or demanding an “affirmation of the barbarian” in all of us, as the briefly Beat Norman Mailer did, were an unwanted reminder of the invisible class outside and the repressed masculine self within. If they had been political in a conventional sense, offering themselves as champions of the proletariat, they would have been less, not more, subversive in an America that knew how to label, file and dismiss its pinko’s and Communists.