Black South Dallas is both an epicenter and a black hole. It is the mecca of Black Dallas resistance and culture, and it is also, disrespectfully, an afterthought in the history of this country’s annals of African American accomplishments and struggles.
Black South Dallas has produced so much and credited for so very little. There is even a pernicious fabrication (transmuted into an even more ridiculous myth) that Black South Dallas didn’t participate in the Civil Rights Movement. Fortunately, there is the history of Lincoln High School to dispel that delusion.
Lincoln High School History
Lincoln High School (now the Lincoln Humanities/Communications Magnet High School), was designed in the International architectural style that emerged in the 1930s. It was also the second high school built specifically for Black people in Dallas. During the Jim Crow segregation era, Booker T. Washington High had become unacceptably overcrowded. However, the ‘Separation of Races’ ordinance in the City of Dallas Charter ensured that Black students could not and would not attend school with white students.
Built on a location facing Oakland Avenue in a South Dallas that was still majority white, Black people in South Dallas had to fight for the existence of Lincoln High School. White students in South Dallas attended Dallas ISD’s older Forest High School (now James Madison High School), and some white South Dallas residents felt building a brand-new school for Black students near their neighborhood was untenable. According to the Dallas Landmark Commission’s Landmark Nomination form for Lincoln, construction of the school took almost ten years “after delays caused by threats of bombs and other forms of violence by whites who lived in the area.” This description in the form details the events in 1939:
“Due to concerns of the safety of the students at this high school, Lincoln students were required to stay in school until 4:30 p.m. so they would not meet white students from Forest Avenue High School on the way home. Following the end of the 1939 school year an injunction was filed to keep Lincoln from reopening in the fall “for the school was too good for Negroes and therefore should be a white school” Despite these distractions, the first graduation class was the summer of 1939. Parents of Lincoln High School students joined with their children to march to the school for the first few days of school that fall until the injunction was lifted by the District Judge. These resentments and threats of action against the students continued. By the summer of 1941, some white residents had threatened to form a guard around the school to prevent its opening again as a “Negro school”. Another temporary injunction was issued that fall to keep Lincoln from reopening, but this also failed.”
In the midst of this tumult, Dallas Independent School District’s Lincoln High School produced so many great jazz musicians that Marilyn Walton, a jazz singer and former Lincoln band member, compared them to the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. The greatest, in my educated opinion, and most unsung of these is Bobbi Humphrey, who is a legendary flutist, writer, poet, photographer, educator, activist, and record label owner.
Dallas Raised
Born Barbara Ann Humphrey in Marlin, Texas, on April 25, 1950, yet raised in South Dallas. Bobbi attended Lincoln High School, where she first picked up the flute. In a 2018 video interview with O&A NYC Magazine, Humphrey remembered riding in the back of the bus in a segregated Dallas, growing up across the street from a blues ‘honkytonk’ called The Doll House, and participating in Lincoln’s Marching and Symphonic bands.
A prodigy in the making, Bobbi’s mastery of the flute by the time she graduated in 1968 was so apparent that she attended Texas Southern University on a full music scholarship. However, when she returned to Dallas to attend SMU, her first fortuitous meeting with a legend would change her life. Describing the experience in a 2006 interview for WaxPoetics, the ‘Mama Don Dada’ explained:
“When I was at Southern Methodist University, Dizzy Gillespie told me, “If you go to New York, in about a year or two, the whole world will know your name.” So I came up to New York on June 1, 1971…When my father put me on the plane, he said, “I don’t want to see you back in Dallas till you put the Humphrey name up in lights.”
Three days after moving to New York City with $400 in her possession, Humphrey was on the stage playing with jazz great Duke Ellington. Three weeks after moving to New York (and tying with Stephanie Mills at the Apollo Theater’s amateur night), Bobbi Humphrey became the first woman signed to Blue Note Records.
Making Jazz History
Blue Note has produced some of the greatest Jazz recordings of all time, and practically every great Jazz artist from 1950 to 1975 appeared on the record label’s recordings. Humphrey recorded six albums on Blue Note, Flute In, Dig This, Blacks and Blues, Satin Doll, Live at Montreux, and Fancy Dancer, and several others for Epic Records and her own record label, Paradise Sounds.
To say that Black and Blues became a stand out is the epitome of understatement. Today, it holds the distinction of being one of the most sampled Jazz records in history, with at least 187 samples by Hip-Hop artists and producers.
Common (formerly Common Sense), a hip-hop artist and actor from the Southside of Chicago who actually sampled Bobbi Humphrey’s music twice before, would be the only Hip-Hop artist to invite Bobbi Humphrey to play on an album. They recorded “Between You, Me and Liberation” on Common’s Electric Circus album, and Erykah Badu, another legendary music artist from South Dallas, was present (she was dating Common at the time) and videotaped the session.
Living the Dream
Bobbi Humphrey’s contributions are what she calls a publicist’s dream. After meeting Stevie Wonder backstage with her parents in Dallas at the age of 15, she would meet him again at the Apollo Theater and become good friends. Wonder invited her to play on what is arguably the greatest album of all time, Songs in the Key of Life, and he became godfather to Humphrey’s daughter, Ricci Lynn.
Don’t mess with a Black woman in America with a barcode and a URL!”
bobbi humphrey
Humphrey also discovered another great Dallas-area artist, Tevin Campbell! Campbell’s mom passed a videotape of Campbell to Humphrey, who instantly identified his talent and flew Tevin Campbell to New York City to secure a record deal (Tevin would later sign with the late great Quincy Jones and his record label, Qwest Records).
A Living Legacy
Humphrey was also one of the first jazz artists to adapt to the tech future of the music business. In that same 2006 interview for WaxPoetics, Humphrey stated:
“I’ve set up my own e-commerce site, bobbihumphrey.net. From here until perpetuity, I have a store that can sell all of my intellectual properties. I openly embrace the technology, because they used to have artists thinking it was rocket science in the sense that we really needed them. Don’t mess with a Black woman in America with a barcode and a URL!”
There is no doubt that you have heard a Bobbi Humphrey song sampled or referenced by your favorite artists, including Tyler the Creator, Digable Planets, Eric B, and Rakim, to name a few. Bobbi Humphrey played the Montreux Festival in Switzerland in 1973. The next year, she performed on a special television series with Sly and the Family Stone.
In 1976, she won the Billboard award for Best Female Instrumentalist. Her (self-admitted) favorite awards are the three consecutive wins as Best Flautist by an Ebony Magazine readers’ music poll from 1975 to 1977.
She should have a statue in her likeness right outside of Lincoln High School. In her words: “…In every war, there’ll be some loss. But I’m prepared to pay that cost. So, besides my music, hopefully, that will be my legacy, being an artist-activist. Equity—that’s the only remix I want to hear!”
Writer’s Note: I used to be a rapper, and I found out while writing this that one of the first songs I recorded in 1997 used a sample from a Bobbi Humphrey song from Blacks and Blues, “Baby’s Gone.” My mind was blown. What a legacy.
Jerry L. Hawkins is an artist, educator, archivist, historian, Presidential Leadership Scholar, and Executive Producer and Narrator for the “Recovering The Stories: Exploring the History and Resilience in Dallas Communities” PBS/KERA Documentary Series. Jerry was formerly the Founding Project Director of Bachman Lake Together, and the Founding Executive Director of Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation. You can email Jerry at jerry@dallasweekly.com.
