Originally published with our media partner, Dallas Free Press
The election of Elsie Faye Heggins to the Dallas City Council in 1980 signaled a massive change to Dallas’ political environment, and she and her community knew it.
Heggins and her fellow South Dallas residents commenced giant-sized plans to terraform South Dallas. In his document, “Struggles Over Street Names in Dallas,” scholar Edward Sebesta details Heggins’ vision for reimagining her community (including a map titled “Elsie Faye Heggins’ Vision”):
“Heggins proposed that: Highway I-45 be named Ralph Bunche Freeway; State Highway 352 be named Frederick Douglas Blvd.; Oakland Ave. be renamed Malcolm X Avenue; and for Forest Ave., Kiest Blvd. or Cedar Crest Blvd. to be renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
“Heggins thought big.”
The first domino to fall was on April 8, 1981, when Dallas City Council passed an ordinance to change the name of Forest Avenue to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The renaming of this artery, a primary gateway to Fair Park and Oak Cliff, was one in a lineage of battles South Dallas residents fought to reimagine and create a Black world inside of one that disdained them.
What we name our streets, schools and civic structures, and the point in time at which we make these decisions, reflects an ongoing struggle to control and participate in the political, cultural and social narrative shaping of a city.
The Confederate link between neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and white supremacists in Dallas
Richard Spencer, creator of the “alt-right” movement with ties to neo-Nazi, antisemitic and white supremacist groups, was raised in the affluent Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, Texas, and attended the nearby private school, St. Mark’s School of Texas.
On Aug. 11, 2017, Spencer and others spearheaded a widely televised tiki-torch-lit gathering of white nationalists who marched through the University of Virginia campus after Charlottesville’s City Council voted to take down the Confederate General Robert E. Lee statue. The neo-Nazis chanted as they marched, “You will not replace us,” “Russia is our friend,” and, later that night, “Jews will not replace us,” until police officers forced them to exit.
The next day, a much larger group of white nationalists, numbering in the hundreds, gathered for the “Unite The Right Rally” and violently clashed with counter-protesters at Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee Park. Dozens of people were maimed and injured, and a white nationalist driver intentionally plowed his car through the crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
The City of Dallas, which had its own Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park, was paying close attention as the events unfolded in Charlottesville. Dallas community members, activists and clergy had been fighting for decades to tear down at least two of Dallas’ Confederate monuments among the many structures, schools and street names that celebrate members of the Confederacy.
Three days after the events in Charlottesville, then-Mayor Mike Rawlings called for the formation of a task force to study, discuss and decide whether Dallas should remove its Confederate monuments. In some cities, elected officials were making swift decisions, but “Rawlings said he relied on the city charter and policies on public art to support his decision for a slower, deliberative process,” noted Alex Macon In a D Magazine article.
Four Black City Council members at the time agreed with Mayor Rawlings that the task force process should take place, while five other white, Black and Latino members (Phillip Kingston, Mark Clayton, Scott Griggs, Casey Thomas, Adam Medrano) called for the statues’ immediate removal.
At the conclusion of the initial task force proceedings, the task force made 13 recommendations, including that the City of Dallas create a “racial equity policy after public acknowledgement and apology for the policies and practices of the City that have furthered institutional racism and segregation,” and “that streets named after a Confederate leader and/or general, who made a significant contribution to the Confederacy, specifically Gano, Lee and Cabell, be changed.”
One significant byproduct of the Mayor’s Task Force on Confederate Monuments was the research done by City staff and external researchers detailing the massive presence of the Confederacy on the landscape of the city, including a chart detailing at least 15 streets in Dallas named after Confederates. An interesting distinction (some say omission) was the inclusion of Forest Lane and Forest Avenue on the chart as having a “Confederacy Association But Not Confirmed Association to Street Name.”
Unspoken Confederate connections to Dallas’ ‘Forest’ avenue and lane
Black people in Southern Dallas have long had suspicions that the Forest Avenue street name was directly connected to Confederate General Nathan B. Forrest, an infamous slave trader, slave jail proprietor, cotton plantation owner and founding member of the Ku Klux Klan. They had the events around the renaming of Forest Avenue High School to James Madison High School as ammunition and motive.
Indeed, dozens of Dallas Morning News obituaries in the ’90s and 2000s note that alumni graduated from “Forrest Avenue High School,” and several references to “Forrest Avenue” exist in the early 1900s, including a Dec. 2, 1914 notice of street work on Oakland Avenue (now Malcolm X Boulevard) between “Forrest avenue and the city limits.”
Further evidence is in a Feb. 28, 1966 Dallas Morning News piece titled “Big D 1841-1966: Dallas Highways Today and Tomorrow” by John Geddie, part of a series “on segments of Dallas’ 185 years of dynamic growth”:
“Forest Avenue, not named for the trees, has been misspelled since shortly after it was christened for Confederate Gen. Nathan Forrest.”
As Black people moved into South Dallas in the early 1950s, white and Jewish residents who did not believe in residential integration, and were supported by the City of Dallas’ legalized segregation policies, moved out. This population shift led to an enrollment decline in the racially segregated white schools in South Dallas, especially Forest Avenue High School, which was “discontinued as a white high school” by 1956, according to the James Madison High School form submitted to the National Register of Historic Places.
“Alumni and members of the Dad’s Club of the Parent Teacher Association petitioned the school board to discontinue the school name, colors, and emblem, as well, so that they would not be associated with a “Negro” school. The school board complied with their wishes and the school was renamed James Madison High School,” states the form, written in the mid-’90s.
“Board president, Dr. Edwin L. Rippy, said that public opinion in the area was the deciding influence in the matter,” the narrative continues. “Ironically, when students and parents requested a second name change in the 1970s to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, the Dallas school trustees refused their request and explained that they didn’t rename schools at the pleasure of the public.”
In Dallas, the first Martin Luther King Jr. renaming was a community center
Elsie Faye Heggins knew this story very well. In 1980 she became the first Black person elected to Dallas City Council without puppet strings being pulled by Dallas’ white business oligarchy.
Elected to the then-District 6 seat — 11 years before Dallas had a semblance of representative government with 14 single member districts and one at-large mayoral seat — Heggins understood that the building and street names of South Dallas had to be remade in the names and likeness of Black people who now lived there.
The first win was not a street or a school but one of America’s original community centers that stemmed from Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” The crown jewel of Johnson’s attempt to totally eliminate the country’s poverty and racial injustice was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which led to the Neighborhood Services Program.
Mere months before, President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas while riding down Elm Street through Dealey Plaza. Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One at Dallas Love Field, and his administration later invited the “City of Hate,” as Dallas had become known, to be one of 14 participating cities in 1966’s Neighborhood Services Program. Its goal was to “develop outstanding examples of neighborhood center systems offering a battery of easily accessible, well-coordinated services to residents of underprivileged neighborhoods.”
This program birthed South Dallas’ Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Center, part of a 1967 City bond package, according to a history of the center. It originally was called the Park South Community Services Center but was quickly changed to Crossroads Community Center. By 1972, Elsie Faye Heggins was a Crossroads Community Center board member, as was Diane Ragsdale, Heggins’ future City Plan Commission appointee and City Council successor.
By 1975 Heggins chaired the board, and by official request of Lucy Patterson, the first Black woman elected to the Dallas City Council, Crossroads was renamed for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The names (plus two street namesakes) of all 27 Black Dallas city councilmembers
Thirteen years prior to the election of Elsie Faye Heggins, C.A. Galloway became the first Black person in the history of the City of Dallas to serve on the city council in March 1967 when he was appointed by Mayor J. Erik Jonsson. George L. Allen and Lucy Patterson would follow him, becoming the first Black man and Black woman elected to Dallas City Council in 1968 and 1973, respectively. They were followed by the legendary organizer Juanita J. Craft, businessman Fred Blair, activist Al Lipscomb, South Dallas crusader Diane Ragsdale, West Dallas advocate Mattie Nash, Elsie Faye Heggins, Donald W. Hicks Sr., Charlotte Mayes, Sandra Crenshaw, Barbara Mallory Caraway, Leo V. Chaney, Jr., Don Hill, James Fantroy, Carolyn Davis, Dwayne Caraway, Tennell Atkins, Tiffinni A. Young, Erik Wilson, Casey Thomas, Carolyn King Arnold, Kevin Felder, Zarin Gracey, Maxie Johnson and Lorie Blair.
Elsie Faye Heggins’ rise to political power is “really an undertold and underappreciated civil rights story,” said legendary activist, educator and Heggins confidant John Fullinwider in a recent conversation. “She did here what Harold Washington [the first Black mayor of Chicago] did in Chicago.”
Laughing, Fullinwinder continued: “You would have loved watching her in meetings, man. She kicked their ass. She kicked their ass!”
Fullinwider produced leaflets for Heggins’ many efforts and says he thinks the impetus to change street names to Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass was because they were all “close to her and J.B. Jackson’s heart.”
Both Elsie Faye Heggins and J.B. Jackson, for whom the DART transit center on Trunk Avenue is named, were founding members of Dallas’ Frederick Douglass Voting Council.
Heggins’ proposed street renamings were met with immediate opposition from Dallas’ white leaders. Then-Councilman Max Goldblatt led the fight, and even tried to create a new policy halting the renaming of streets that had held their name for 10 years or more.
But on April 8, 1981, Councilwoman Heggins was victorious when the Dallas Plan Commission and the Dallas City Council rejected all the renaming efforts — except the Forest Avenue change to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. She celebrated this victory with a crowd of thousands in June 1982, unveiling the new street signage in front of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. statue at the Martin Luther King Community Center followed by a parade down the boulevard.
Twelve years later, in 1994, the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce and the City applied for and received Urban Main Street status for Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. .
Then in 1997, activist and perennial City Council candidate Marvin Crenshaw led the effort to rename South Dallas’ Oakland Avenue as Malcolm X Avenue, picking up Elsie Faye Heggins’ efforts 16 years later. This made Dallas and Washington, D.C., the only U.S. cities with an intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Malcolm X Boulevard, named after the two most storied Black leaders during the Civil Rights Movement.
South Dallas now has at least six thoroughfares named after Black people: Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Malcolm X Boulevard, Al Lipscomb Way, Botham Jean Boulevard, S.M. Wright Freeway — and Elsie Faye Heggins Street.
This story was co-published by our media partner, Dallas Free Press. Follow their work, @dallasfreepress on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, or subscribe to text or email.
