In the early 1950s, my parents waged battle at their new Casa View suburban home against Johnson grass and nut grass as they worked to cultivate their St. Augustine and Bermuda.
Other battles were being waged in the city.
From White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, by Michael Phillips, Univ. of TX Press, 2006.
By 1948 a nine-square-mile community of 25,000 blacks, Mexican Americans, and poor whites lived on a low flood plain in West Dallas. Created by the earlier construction of levees along the Trinity River, West Dallas consisted of “flimsy shacks, abandoned gravel pits, garbage dumps, open toilets, and shallow wells.” Fewer than 10 percent of those dwellings had indoor toilets, and only 15 percent had running water. Tenants drank from wells located near human waste disposals. West Dallas accounted for 50 percent of the city’s typhus cases, 60 percent of tuberculosis, and 30 percent of polio.
Desperation forced relatively prosperous blacks to again venture in the early 1950s into the Exline Park neighborhood, scene of the 1940-41 bombings. Twelve bombs in the next year and a half targeted homes sold to blacks in formerly all-white neighborhoods in a two-square-mile area of South Dallas. Not expecting white protection, African Americans armed themselves. Juanita Craft noted in a letter to Walter White, the executive director of NAACP, that bombing stopped on Crozier Street when “the widow Sharpe” ran from her home firing a gun at a speeding getaway car after one explosion.http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/021008dnmetcraft.316526e.html
1946 State Fair of Texas
http://dallaslibrary.org/CTX/photogallery/marionbutts/places.htm
