A walk in the park returned Ada Williams to her childhood. “I remember playing hide-and-go-seek behind this tree,” she said of the mighty specimen leafing toward another spring.
Approaching the tennis court, she talked of picnics, ballgames and climbing the nearby Trinity River levee some 70 years ago. Looking at a patch of grassy land, she recalled the long-gone swimming pool.
She was surprised to learn that her romping ground was groundbreaking, a first for the city, known for years as the Oak Cliff Negro Park.
“I never heard that,” she said. “We always just called it the play park.”
And there it is, still a place to play — one that would help keep Dallas the way it was. As would Griggs Park, Moore Park and others to come.
A century ago, civic leaders were embracing the progressive ideas of city planning and beautification. Public improvements and the refining value of public space were prime topics.
In 1910, the city hired landscape architect George Kessler to craft a development plan for the still rough-around-the-edges town. His ambitious vision included ideas that would eventually materialize, such as levees along the Trinity River. Others, such as a ring of boulevards, were shelved.
But his call for more parks and playgrounds caught on. Voters in 1913 approved a $500,000 bond issue, and the city promptly bought land for seven parks, including two for black residents.
“They are the first public parks ever acquired for negroes in Dallas,” a city report informed in 1915. “It is intended to make them attractive and inviting for the colored people.”
That year, 4-plus acres were purchased for the Oak Cliff Negro Park near Sabine and Cliff streets, where Williams would later play. North of downtown, 2-plus acres became the Hall Street Negro Park.
The Oak Cliff park now bears the name of Eloise Lundy, a longtime park department employee. The Hall Street site was renamed for the Rev. Allen R. Griggs, a leading black educator and minister.
The parks have been resized and revised through the years, with more changes coming. Griggs Park will soon undergo a major makeover. A connection to Trinity River corridor trails is planned for Eloise Lundy Park.
Looking back, the first parks designated for blacks, and others that followed, helped avert a deeper change by preserving the city’s racial divide.
“They were a way to forestall integration,” said Michael Phillips, author of White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001. “They were a safety valve.”
Better than nothing
The city never officially made public spaces off-limits to anyone. It didn’t have to, said Phillips, a history professor at Collin College in Plano. Segregation was understood, he said. “People understood the consequences” of crossing the line.
Blacks may well have wanted access to all parks, said Phillips, drawing on interviews, oral histories and other research. But their public spaces provided a social center and a safe family place. With other issues of fairness and equality to pursue, he said, “they accepted segregated parks as preferable to no parks at all.”
The city leased land near downtown for what was called a Mexican Park during the 1920s before Pike Park became a Hispanic social center. In 1920, a site in South Dallas became a third Negro play area, today’s Wheatley Park.
For years, black residents had used city parks, including Fair Park. The park board changed that as the Ku Klux Klan gained clout in the city, according to a history of the Dallas park system that concluded Klan prejudice “directly affected park policies and development.”
The board first “politely suggested” that black residents move their special events from Fair Park to the Negro parks, according to the history by Texas Tech University researchers. By 1922, they were no longer allowed to play baseball at Fair Park.
In turn, baseball diamonds were built at the Negro parks, plus a swimming pool and bathhouse at what would soon be renamed Griggs Park.
“With such facilities provided,” a member of the research team wrote, “the board eliminated the ‘need’ for Negro use of white parks.”
The Eighth Street Negro Park in Oak Cliff opened in 1940 and was later renamed for black pioneer Will Moore. Wahoo Park, redesignated a Negro park in 1935, now bears the name of local civil rights leader Juanita Craft.
By the early 1940s, the parks for black residents were not only separate, but deemed clearly unequal to those for whites.
“Oh yeah, no doubt about it,” said William E. Blair, who saw the differences playing baseball in the 1940s and ’50s.
And “it didn’t matter,” he said recently. “There was nothing you could do about it.”
Separate and unequal
In 1944, the Dallas Biracial Committee called for more and improved minority parks, noting the city provided 60 acres for its 60,000 black residents and 5,000 acres for its 320,000 whites.
The Dallas Morning News weighed in editorially: “Negroes here are not objecting to segregation in the parks, but this segregation can be justified only by giving the colored people their fair share of park space and park equipment.”
The park board approved wide-ranging improvements. It added North Hampton Park in West Dallas, where the Mattie Nash/Myrtle Davis Recreation Center now stands. It opened Rochester Park in South Dallas, which now bears Blair’s name. It leased parkland and built a nine-hole course for black golfers near Love Field that were closed for airport runway expansion.
In 1953, Exline Park in South Dallas was redesignated a Negro park. By then, the push for integration was well under way across the South, as was the push back — realities not lost on the park board.
In May 1950, a petition with more than 400 signatures urged the board to remove play equipment that black children had begun using in Exall Park east of downtown and replace it with a flower garden.
Letter writers weighed in. One suggested fencing off a portion of the park to give black children “a place of their own. They are entitled to it.” Another offered that “if the old people would just get out of their selfish prejudiced ways, the children would solve this race problem themselves.”
In reply to one writer, board president Ray Hubbard looked beyond Exall Park: “We are still working on a solution for this question, not only in this park, but all of our parks, and we are going to try to hold segregation as long as we can.”
The U.S. Supreme Court followed its landmark school desegregation decision with rulings in 1955 prohibiting racial segregation at public parks, playgrounds and golf courses.
The orders would have no effect on Dallas, park director L.B. Houston told The News, because the city didn’t officially segregate its parks, dealt with issues as they arose and had opened its three golf courses to all residents after closing the black course in 1954.
With racial clashes intensifying elsewhere, seven members of the business elite’s Dallas Citizens Council and seven black community leaders formed what was called the Committee of 14 to seek nonviolent approaches to integration.
The group drew praise for its behind-the-scenes start toward the desegregation of the Dallas school district and venues such as theaters, restaurants and parks.
“City Parks Integrated In Dallas,” read the headline on a front-page story in The News on June 16, 1963, reporting the announcement by the committee’s black members.
Half a century later, Griggs Park serves a mostly white, densely populated Uptown neighborhood. The upcoming redo will include walkways, lawns and a monument celebrating Griggs and the park’s historic role.
With its outdoor play space and basketball gym, computers and meeting rooms, Eloise Lundy Park serves mostly black residents in and far beyond its Oak Cliff neighborhood of churches, aging homes and vacant lots. No marker tells of its place in history.
Darlene Session, director of the park’s recreation center, looks forward to the new trailhead and the people it will attract.
“That’s what we’re counting on,” she said. “This is going to put us back on the map.”
Follow Roy Appleton on Twitter at @rappleton and