Hushed Up and Unhappy
Fort Worth’s black leaders won’t stay quiet much longer
By Christine Stanley and Jeff Prince Photos by Vishal Malhotra
During the late 1960s, the Rev. Michael Bell of Greater Saint Stephen Baptist Church in Fort Worth remembers being refused service, pushed to the end of the line, told where to sit, what to do, and who to do it with.
“When I was a young guy I went downtown [to Leonard Brothers department store], and I was in line and this guy ... came and stood in front of me,” he said. “I moved back in front of him and said, ‘I’m in line.’ I wasn’t angry. I just thought he didn’t see. He became irate and said he was going to call the police on me — and he did in fact call the police, who told me to leave the store.”
There was no doubt in Bell’s mind — nor, surely, in the line-cutter’s mind nor that of the police officer — about why the incident had happened. It was “simply because of my color,” Bell said. “It made you feel like millions of African-Americans have felt over the years. ... It made you feel as if other folk had control over you.”
Recognizing racism was easy back then, when the racial divide was wide, and if you had any doubt, the water fountains were clearly marked for “colored” and “white.” Though the problem of race was handled more quietly in Fort Worth than in many cities in the 1960s, the reality of racism was the same.
The civil rights movement made few ripples here, where an uneasy truce existed. Protests and marches were rare, and the city escaped the racial violence that marked cities from Dallas to Birmingham to Chicago to Washington D.C. By the time local black leaders made their way to City Hall in the 1970s they were well versed in the “Fort Worth way” — they got more done by dealing with the white power structure quietly and behind closed doors rather than taking to the streets.
Today, Fort Worth is recognized as one of the United States’ friendliest and fastest growing major cities, where racial disharmony has been historically slight compared to other cities. Yet racism hasn’t been eradicated — it’s just evolved into something trickier to spot, but just as demeaning. And the city’s method of dealing with African-American issues is stoking long-simmering inner fires that could become combustible.
In 2005 there is perhaps more frustration than ever in Fort Worth’s black community. Interviews with black residents reflect a large degree of anger at what they see as discrimination in the schools, in city spending, in housing, and many other areas.
The retired Rev. Roosevelt Sutton, a Stop Six activist, believes racism still thrives in Fort Worth and that African-Americans have only token representation at city hall. “The Fort Worth way is to not make waves,” he said. “When they refer to what’s going on in Dallas, that’s a racist way of saying, ‘Look what they let those niggers do in Dallas.’ ”
Over the years, Fort Worth’s inclination to avoid racial controversy has prompted criticism from some black leaders, such as Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price, who in 1996 called Cowtown the “Aunt Jemima capital of the world.”
The Rev. Kyev Tatum, associate pastor at Harmony Baptist Church in East Fort Worth, accuses the city of “avoiding the true suffering that’s going on over here on the South Side” and tells a story about running into Mayor Mike Moncrief at city hall and being told to “behave yourself.” Former Fort Worth City Council member Bert Williams laments a lack of black-owned businesses. Current city councilman Donavan Wheatfall sees “frightening similarities to a Birmingham,” a city that became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement after a 1963 church bombing killed four young black girls.
Many in Fort Worth’s black community don’t feel they’ve ever been given an appreciative ear or equal footing. If they ask for a fair piece of the pie, they are dubbed militant grousers. If they wait quietly, they are passed over. Four decades after Martin Luther King Jr. and others prompted historic civil rights legislation, a growing sense of bitterness is seeping into traditionally trouble-free Fort Worth. An assortment of actions by the city have many blacks complaining that Fort Worth isn’t as inclusive and friendly as it claims. They point to the Ripley Arnold razing, Woodhaven gentrification, racial profiling, continuing school inequities, and a lack of development or tax incentives in black neighborhoods. Programs designed to steer money toward poor neighborhoods such as the southeast are instead spent in areas that benefit the Fort Worth elite.
Meanwhile, black leadership is struggling internally. There is disagreement over the size and even the source of the problem. Some say racism is the old war and that the new battle pits the rich against poor people of all colors.
“I don’t buy into racism anymore; it’s all about green,” said Southeast Fort Worth Inc. President Glenn S. Forbes.
Perhaps surprising to whites, many black leaders blame integration for their woes.
“The bourgeois African [Americans] wanted integration, but the working class grassroots Africans didn’t want integration,” black bookstore owner Nia Umoja said.
Umoja said most whites don’t understand what it’s like for black children to attend public schools that, year after year, teach a European Anglo version of history, downplaying an entire culture’s significance, glossing over slavery, subconsciously telling black kids that they come from inferior, uncivilized, victimized roots.
“We are dealing with the consequences of that now,” she said. “You can’t compare European and African history because they are two different histories. It does something to the psychology of a black child.”
Umoja is one of a group of people in southeast Fort Worth who opened a private elementary school this year that teaches youngsters from an African-American perspective. “Little by little we will start seeing changes,” she said. “It might not be in our generation, but at least our children will see the change.”
When the black community does present a united front to ask the city for answers, activists say, they are ignored. A group of black church and civic leaders recently called for a federal investigation into discriminatory practices in schools and housing. Harmony Baptist Church hosted meetings attended by numerous federal representatives. City officials stayed away in droves.
While nobody is predicting a Cowtown version of Watts, many are saying the “Fort Worth way” has failed the black community and that more organized resistance, perhaps even something more volatile, may develop here.
“I think at some point it has the potential to come to a head,” former city councilman Ralph McCloud said, “but I hope that it wouldn’t come to that.”
It’s hard for black residents to see the explosion of economic development west of I-35 and not wonder why the predominately minority East Side is constantly skipped over. Urban growth continues to roll north and west of downtown, while plywood boards cover shop windows on the Southeast Side. Decaying strip malls stand vacant. There are no decent bowling alleys for family outings, no movie theaters for first dates, no Putt-Putt golf for birthdays. Residents in this neglected part of the city can forget about renting a movie from Blockbuster or Hollywood Video unless they want to drive to another part of town. However, there is no shortage of convenience stores selling high-priced food, drug paraphernalia, and 40-ounce beers.
“It’s a tale of two cities,” said the Rev. Wendell “Buck” Cass. Driving along East Berry Street in Southeast Fort Worth, he pointed to a dilapidated, rusted warehouse once owned by a department store chain. “There’s our Montgomery Ward,” he said sarcastically. An old Montgomery Ward store west of downtown has become a major redevelopment project, but here in Southeast Fort Worth, the old store’s parking lot is marked by piles of scrap metal and ratty pieces of furniture. Nearby, the abandoned Riverside Villa apartment complex still stands a dozen years after it was condemned, the pavement littered with liquor bottles. A couple of makeshift wrecking yards are just north of the condemned complex, and further up Riverside Drive drug dealers and pimps openly recruit customers in front of abandoned buildings and seedy motels. This kind of scenery permeates the area, which has been in a state of decline for decades — while, Eastside leaders charge, the city has mostly turned a blind eye.
“Racism is economics,” Tatum said.
City officials provide numerous explanations, including a lack of interest from private developers about investing in the neighborhood. Tatum and others say most city officials aren’t interested in attracting investment to the part of town roughly bordered by I-30 on the north, Loop 820 on the east, I-20 on the south, and I-35 on the west. Those same officials, however, seem intent on developing downtown, the Alliance corridor, the North Side, the West Side — just about everywhere except the black neighborhoods. And the city has shown no hesitation about displacing minorities or poor people to make way for prized developments in any of those areas.
Black residents point to the uprooting of tenants at the Ripley Arnold housing project in 2002 as an example of both racism and elitism. For 60 years the sprawling red-brick apartment complex stood at the corner of Henderson and Belknap streets at downtown’s northwest corner, perched atop the Trinity River bluff. Residents enjoyed easy access to downtown merchants and services such as public transportation. But RadioShack and city officials had bigger plans that included corporate offices and a $67 million tax giveaway, a prelude to the Trinity River Vision project that in coming years will require removal of dozens of small businesses — and probably other residents as well.
Ripley Arnold residents were the first to get the boot. Behind closed doors, city leaders, corporate executives, and housing officials struck their deals without public input and with little regard for low-income residents. Once their plans became public, Ripley Arnold residents resisted and sought help from Dallas attorney Mike Daniel, an expert in defending low-income residents battling city hall. The city made concessions and quelled some of the protest, but bitterness remains, especially after former tenants were moved farther south and complained that they no longer have easy access to social services and transportation and that some promises were not kept.
Tatum, who spent six years of his childhood in Ripley Arnold, said the way the city went about tearing down that housing project to make way for a large corporation that was given millions in tax abatements is symbolic of years of unfairness. “There is a true plantation mentality here that says, ‘Shush, don’t say nothing; if you upset Massah, none of us is going to eat.’ ”
Tatum, however, obviously isn’t heeding that warning. He helped lead Wheatfall’s successful campaign for city council and was recently picked by Wheatfall to serve on a city committee. Tatum said that’s when Moncrief cautioned him to “behave yourself.”
“He knew that I was an outspoken person,” Tatum said. “Here again, Massah telling Kunta Kinte, ‘If you don’t behave I’m going to cut your feet off.’ ”
The city leaders who advocated Ripley Arnold’s demise said it was necessary for river bluff development and downtown expansion. Critics — including many Eastside leaders — said that the need to increase the city’s tax base didn’t justify turning over years of city tax dollars to wealthy corporations at the expense of the poor. Ripley Arnold residents were scattered. Some were sent to Woodhaven, an East Fort Worth neighborhood that within a couple of years would itself become targeted for gentrification at the expense of low-income residents.
The city has numerous methods of creating development opportunities, with perhaps the most powerful being the increasingly controversial tax increment financing districts. In these districts, property taxes are frozen at the current level, and any additional taxes collected through increased property values are funneled back into the district rather than to the city’s general fund. The taxes pay for roads, parks, infrastructure, and amenities, providing an alluring attraction for developers. TIFs were intended to promote investment in blighted inner-city neighborhoods. In Fort Worth, they have gone to wealthy parts of town where investors were already itching to build.
Fort Worth TIFs have been created almost exclusively west of I-35 in areas that would not meet most people’s definition of “blight.” To Cass and Tatum, no area of town is better qualified for economic development help than southeast Fort Worth. Its pot-holed streets and lack of code enforcement stand in stark contrast to, say, the area around Alliance Airport where a TIF was created to bring Cabela’s sporting goods mega-store to one of the healthiest, fastest growing areas of town.
“The economics of racism have impacted our community,” Tatum said. “You see people walking around with no hope. It’s a lack of access.”
Only one TIF juts into predominately minority Southeast Fort Worth — and just barely. The Southside TIF stretches east to Kentucky Street, north to I-30 and south to Allen Avenue, but most of it lies west of I-35. The primary beneficiary of that TIF so far has been Magnolia Street in the hospital district just west of the freeway. The once ragged thoroughfare is now a hip hangout strip with eclectic bars and restaurants. Trees and benches line the sidewalk. Meanwhile, Southeast Fort Worth begs for something similar.
To prove to investors and city officials that Southeast Fort Worth has buying power and is worthy of attention, Bell organized “Shop Away Days” in April 1995. He bused residents to West Side grocery stores for five days and tallied up their receipts. At the end of the protest $2,850 had been spent, and Bell used that number to petition several grocery store companies to consider a southeast side location. Several companies expressed interest, but only a Minyard’s has actually been built since then. Bell said he believes “Shop Away Days” was the catalyst that made that investment possible.
City officials say TIFs are most effective in areas that are already drawing investors. “A TIF counts on a substantial amount of property value increase,” said Tom Higgins, Fort Worth’s director of economic and community development. “There’s no evidence right now that the appropriate catalysts are in place to make that TIF increase [in Southeast Fort Worth].”
Higgins and city councilwoman Wendy Davis, who is also chair of Fort Worth’s central city revitalization and economic development committee, say that racism is not a factor in the lack of investment on the southeast side. They just don’t think creating a TIF is wise in areas where property values are declining. That scenario played itself out during the creation of the Downtown TIF. Property tax values were frozen in 1994 but continued to plummet. The city had to abandon the Downtown TIF and reinstate it a year later to ensure that developers would get a better deal.
“It’s very tricky in terms of catching it at the right moment,” Davis said. “In Southeast Fort Worth that’s kind of the dilemma right now.”
Higgins said finding adequate land for development in Southeast Fort Worth is another challenge. Residents roll their eyes at that claim. Rows and rows of abandoned properties line the streets, but Higgins said their acquisition can be problematic because the lots are small, infrastructure is old, and houses are small and crowded, making it difficult for work trucks to maneuver in the neighborhood. The need to deal with so many individual property owners can make it hard to put together development deals.
“The cost of going in there and doing those things is a real challenge,” Higgins said. “When you’ve got a community like Fort Worth that has so much available land and is growing so fast, other opportunities prevail.”
Still, some development is occurring. Millions will be spent on a new public health center and library on the Southeast Side, but those development dollars came mostly from the federal government, not city or private investment. City officials are hoping that these two new “anchor” developments will generate investment, but some in the community want more and are disgusted that they’ve gone with less for so long.
The Evans Avenue Plaza near the intersection of Rosedale Street was supposed to generate investment. So far, the wide sidewalks, pretty benches, and landscaped areas are going mostly unnoticed and underused. “Nobody goes down there,” said Della Brooks, a fiery black activist and Fort Worth native. “Homeless people sleep down there.”
Brooks, who dubs the city’s elected blacks the “designated Negroes,” is best known for leading a group of picketers outside Morningside Middle School in the mid-1990s, protesting the magnet school located there.
“I understand the frustration of the community,” Davis said. “They wonder, ‘Why is everything happening to the west of where I live?’ It’s time for the city council to put its money where its mouth is.”
Former city councilman Clyde Picht, a well-known opponent of most of the city’s TIF dealings, said racism has never been a factor in the lack of redevelopment in Southeast Fort Worth. According to him, there’s a lack of communication between city hall and Southeast Side residents and a lack of knowledge on how to proceed.
“In my eight years on the council I’ve never seen anything that amounts to anything in Southeast Fort Worth,” Pitch said. “Nobody’s interested in doing it, and the city makes it too difficult to deal with. It really just requires sitting down with the community and figuring out what we really want.”
Some think the causes for neglect run deeper. “Racism is systemic,” Bell said. “It’s not like people wake up in the morning and say ‘I’m going to discriminate against a person.’ It’s like when mothers program their children to act a certain way. It’s part of the very fabric of our culture.”
Five months ago, Bert Williams somewhat reluctantly agreed to talk to a reporter about a tense time in 1983 when he was denied membership at Woodhaven Country Club. The reason for his denial was obvious — the club didn’t want black members. The soft-spoken Williams was 48 at the time and one of the city’s first black elected officials. He was also well versed in the Fort Worth method of doing business.
The NAACP was set to hold a national convention in Fort Worth in 1984, and members were willing to pour into Cowtown and march. Williams, though, preferred to handle things in the accepted local style, working with white leaders behind closed doors, twisting arms, tactfully arguing that blatant racism could lead to sticky situations that are embarrassing to cities. He wasn’t shy about letting political peers know that 60 Minutes and other national news shows were just itching to interview him. He accepted help from some of the country club’s sympathetic white members willing to speak out against discrimination.
That’s the Fort Worth way.
Two years later, Woodhaven opened its doors to black members, and other country clubs soon followed. No marches, no lawsuits, no nationwide scrutiny. Just a little determination and patience.
Now 70, Williams doesn’t want to relive those times.
“Personally, I would like to just forget it,” he said.
Black leaders who advocated negotiation over confrontation were dubbed “handkerchief heads” by Dallas activist John Wiley Price. Some Fort Worth leaders responded by telling Price to mind his own business. Former Mount Zion Baptist Church pastor L.B. George Sr. told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1996 that quiet negotiation had led to greater racial progress than in Dallas, where Price and others often took to the streets.
“We just get things done peacefully,” George said at the time.
Bell wasn’t among those telling Price he was wrong. “It wasn’t a personal attack,” he said. “It was basically [Price] saying that in Fort Worth the voices of dissent were being suppressed and that there was a need for the community to have courage.”
As for Woodhaven, much has changed in that neighborhood since the days when Williams and other blacks were denied country club membership. Luxurious homes still dot the scenic hills around the golf course, but the surrounding sea of apartments built at about the same time is dealing with some rough weather. Designed for swinging (white) singles in the 1970s and ’80s, the apartments haven’t aged well. Some Eastside leaders have charged that the city allowed developers to pack too many apartments into the area, maximizing profits but also ensuring future problems. Saturation and decline led to falling rents, which attracted black residents eager to leave poorer neighborhoods farther south.
By the late 1990s, Woodhaven had evolved from an Anglo country club district to a predominantly African-American neighborhood, a place where the median income is currently half that of the rest of the city. Nearby homeowners, both white and black, are upset by increasing crime and decreasing property values. City Councilwoman Becky Haskin is leading the charge and is on the verge of doing what Fort Worth does so well — gentrify, clear the way for investors, nudge the blacks and poor people back to the neglected parts of town where they don’t bother well-to-do folks.
First, the city relied on a contentious law to gain control over Woodhaven apartment complexes. Nuisance laws give cities power to crack down on businesses that allow crimes to occur. Cities can close properties for a year unless property owners post $10,000 bonds. Being closed down and forced to post a high bond is often enough to shut down a property. The law was designed to let cities target places overrun with drugs, prostitution, and other criminal activity. However, some cities, most notably Dallas, went overboard, targeting properties owned by people who were themselves victims. The city’s message was clear — if petty crimes occur on a property, a city can take control whether a property owner cooperates with police or not.
In the last regular legislative session, the law was amended to curtail some of those problems. “We changed the law because it was being abused by Dallas,” said bill sponsor Rep. Terry Keel, R-Austin. “You either didn’t call the police and were said to be allowing crime to occur, or you called police and were said to be a nuisance.”
Apartment managers in Woodhaven have accused Fort Worth of abusing the law in the same manner, an accusation strongly denied by city officials and police. Keel said a public hearing will be held this fall in Dallas to discuss complaints about Metroplex cities that might have misapplied nuisance laws.
Fort Worth has relied on the law to convince about 100 problematic motels, apartments, and houses to clean up or face a nuisance lawsuit. In about a dozen cases, the city actually filed lawsuits. Two of those suits were filed against apartments in Woodhaven. But apartment managers accused police of ignoring emergency calls and allowing crime to fester to make it easier for the city to prove its nuisance cases.
Last year, the city council voted to spend almost a quarter-million dollars for a Woodhaven redevelopment plan that includes tearing down a half-dozen apartments to make way for a gorgeous, landscaped gateway to the neighborhood. The apartments pegged for demolition to make way for the fancy gateway are the same ones that the city had previously filed nuisance lawsuits against.
Williams still believes that working behind the scenes, sitting down and talking with city leaders, and seeking mutual respect can continue to work today. “There is no problem that can’t be resolved,” he said.
Other black leaders say that approach has failed. “You talk about the Fort Worth way — that’s a clear sign that you’re resistant to change,” Sutton said. “They should call the city council ‘Mary Kay’ because it’s all cosmetic. The Fort Worth way of doing things does not involve black people.”
Some acknowledge the grievances but doubt whether racism continues to be the root problem. Former Black Panther Eddie Griffin sees racism as a dying concern, saying many young people today don’t pay much attention to color. Adults are less likely now to promote race hatred in their children than in the past. Mixed marriages and a more integrated mass media have produced a more color-blind society.
Now, he said, the battle is against the poor, and it just so happens that many of them are black.
“This is economic war,” he said.
Woodhaven, for instance, is not so much about white homeowners upset by black apartment dwellers. It’s wealthy homeowners rattled by the influx of poor people, old cars, crime, noise, and falling property values. “You’ve got rich and poor living side by side; of course you are going to have a cultural clash,” Griffin said. “In a weird way, it’s progress — it’s not so much about skin color anymore.”
Southeast Fort Worth Inc.’s Glenn Forbes said dwelling on race can be counterproductive. Instead, understanding money, industry, developers, and salesmanship is elemental to renewing the city’s Southeast side. “It’s always been about green,” he said.
He respects two of Fort Worth’s newest black city council members, Wheatfall and Kathleen Hicks. And he has high expectations for Southeast Fort Worth, where cheap and accessible land, easy access to highways and public transportation, and a shortage of almost every kind of private businesses except convenience stores and small restaurants offers investment opportunities galore. Investors turned around a decrepit downtown and a dangerous Stockyards area, he said, and the same will happen in the southeast.
Also contributing to problems is a fragmented black community. “It’s not about service or what is right or wrong,” Williams said. “Now it’s, ‘What makes me popular and what can I get out of it?’ That’s the mentality you have, and it’s everywhere. You go to Washington, it’s there. You go to Austin, it’s there. And in Fort Worth it’s the same.”
Few city leaders seem worried about the growing disaffection of the black community. Earlier this year, a coalition of black leaders asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate whether Fort Worth’s housing practices and school policies discriminate against poor and minority residents. A series of meetings was held and federal officials attended to facilitate a dialogue between city leaders and residents. More than 250 people showed up, but elected officials —the mayor, city council members, and school officials — were conspicuously absent, despite being invited.
“When you’re living in a city where you have people like us who are hurting, the mayor and the city of Fort Worth won’t even show up to the discussions,” Tatum said. “They basically ignore us and call us troublemakers.”
The Justice Department inquiry is now in its second phase. Justice representatives will meet with Tatum and others Aug. 9 at Harmony Baptist Church to try again to spark a dialogue that could forestall a major civil rights lawsuit. “I’ve been told that this program is most successful in places where there is a great need of a breakthrough,” Tatum said.
Michael Bell kicked a box across the foyer of Greater Saint Stephen Baptist Church on a recent day. The box, filled with yellowed newspaper clippings, was too heavy for him to carry. It’s one of many boxes that Bell keeps tucked away in a back room of his church, a place that has become as much of a library as a house of worship.
“It’s all here,” he said, removing the top from the dusty, unlabeled box. Bell knew what was inside without looking: files on Tanglewood Elementary School protests, Forest Hill police misconduct, racially motivated shootings — a history of Fort Worth and race.
Bell has been a mainstay in the fight against racism in Cowtown, taking on the police department, city hall, and the courts. His main cause, however, has been racial equality in schools. Bell is also spokesman for the Tarrant County Local Organizing Committee, a black coalition that has raised awareness, and some eyebrows, in the past. The LOC was instrumental in bringing about change in the Fort Worth Independent School District in the late 1990s and remains active.
“We’ve made some advances aesthetically, but lurking beneath the surface is racism,” Bell said.
In 1995, the Texas Education Agency evaluated the school district and designated 10 schools as low-performing. Almost all of them were located in predominately black neighborhoods. For decades, Bell and others suspected what they thought the TEA study confirmed — educational racism in Fort Worth, shown by the disparity between minority and white test scores. The school district has attempted to close the gap since then, but some feel that inequities still fester today.
Bell and the LOC began protesting for educational justice shortly before the study came out. The group wanted to level test scores across the racial divide, and they wanted sensitivity training for school district employees, since they believed that cultural misunderstandings were causing disproportionate numbers of black kids to be sent to detention rooms. The school district evolved into a majority-minority district in the 1990s, and Bell said teachers and administrators were not prepared for the culture shift.
The LOC also wanted overhauls in the district’s magnet program, viewed by many in the black community as de facto racism. Magnet schools were created in the early 1980s to help promote integration. They offer high-level, specialized classes in mostly inner-city areas to help attract whites and create a more diverse student population. In practice, the magnet schools themselves became a problem. Magnet students were predominately white, attended classes separate from the other kids, and had better qualified teachers who weren’t required to instruct regular students. Their standardized test scores far surpassed those of nonmagnet kids educated under the same roof.
“It was two separate schools,” said Christene Moss, a Fort Worth school board member since 1991.
The TEA report said Fort Worth’s magnet programs bred resentment among regular school teachers and lowered self-esteem among regular school students. The agency also said “tensions caused by the separate presence of the magnet program” were a significant factor in the low academic performance of regular, mostly minority students. Standardized test results seemed to back the agency’s claim.
“We had disposable kids,” Bell said.
At William James Middle School, 94 percent of magnet students passed the 1995 Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test versus 15 percent of the regular student population. At Dunbar Middle, it was 97 percent versus 12 percent. At Northside High School, only 30 percent of regular students passed the TAAS compared to 94 percent of Northside magnet students. Other schools showed similar patterns.
“Education was not equal,” said T.A. Sims, a school board member since 1983.
The LOC and others began protesting in front of East Side magnet schools but didn’t get much reaction from the school district. So in 1998 the protestors moved to Tanglewood Elementary, located in one of Fort Worth’s picturesque, predominately white neighborhoods. Suddenly, the entire neighborhood was aghast at angry blacks calling for change. Whites blamed rather than empathized with the protestors.
“I didn’t have a problem with the protests with the LOC group because I thought that was the only thing that really got the attention of the school board and Fort Worth,” Moss said. “Until then, they didn’t realize how segregated it was.”
Progress came, both literally and figuratively, in baby steps. Carrying signs that expressed years of pent-up frustration, picketers ambled along in front of Tanglewood at a snail’s pace to get the attention of moms and dads trying to get to school and pick up their children. Police were everywhere. Children wondered what was happening. Traffic was shut down.
“It never reached the news,” Bell said. “That’s when we knew it was deep. They don’t want to show these kinds of [black] leaders together because they think that it’s going to somehow negatively affect” the city.
Three years of protests had passed before then-Mayor Kenneth Barr and then-State Sen. Mike Moncrief interceded and helped set up a coalition of ministers to negotiate with the school district.
“I think the LOC agreement was very beneficial to the students of Fort Worth ISD,” Moss said. “That’s when the district started implementing desegregation within the schools.”
Now, minority standardized test results have climbed and the TEA’s list of Fort Worth’s low-performing majority-minority schools has shrunk. A gap still exists, however. Only 48 percent of black students in grades three through 12 passed the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test in 2004 compared to 79 percent of white students.
Others see blatant racism in a recent study that recommended closing as many as four of Fort Worth’s majority-minority schools, including exemplary-rated Van Zandt-Guinn Elementary on the Southeast side. Another school pegged for closing, Nash Elementary, sits in the way of potential development of the Trinity River bluff. The closings were meant to help heal the school district’s multi-million-dollar budget deficit, but some think it’s a direct way to move more schools to the predominately white areas of town.
“There are those who want to take away what you have,” Sims said. “It’s no secret.”
The black community’s efforts to prompt change are only fruitful, in large part, when they manage to anger Fort Worth’s whites. Some feel that intervention by city officials in the Tanglewood protests only happened because floods of Anglos were calling to complain about picketers. Black residents were put in the position of creating hostilities just to be heard.
“That’s the only time you get attention,” Moss said.
It’s no wonder that many African-Americans yearn for a modernized version of segregated communities and schools.
“One of the worst things that happened to the black race has been integration,” said Williams, a former math teacher. “We didn’t have the discipline problems when we had segregation, we didn’t have the problems with young black kids. When we were segregated we had business, cleaners, grocery stores, pharmacies. We had something we could say was our own. Right now we don’t have anything. Take restaurants out of it and you don’t have one black business in Fort Worth that employs between 10 and 20 people. Back then we had businesses. We had respect in the community.”
Tatum agreed. “During segregation we were sustaining ourselves,” he said.
During the Tanglewood protests, the LOC was so fed up with school disparities that they came up with what some viewed as a radical plan. They wanted to use recently passed legislation to create their own school district on the Southeast Side that could have removed 14,400 students — about one in five — from the Fort Worth district. Bell collected thousands of signatures but abandoned the plan in the end, feeling that creating a separate district might not help solve the broader problem.
Now, another group is attempting a similar plan on a much smaller scale.
“People who can’t treat you right won’t teach you right,” said Nia Umoja, paraphrasing Malcolm X.
In 1987, Umoja and her husband, Takuma, opened Roots N Kulture Redemptive Books and Resources on Rosedale Avenue, the city’s first black bookstore. The Umojas, members of a national group known as Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, agree with the slain African-American leader’s philosophy of nonviolent separation, self-reliance, and self-respect. They believe one way to instill self-respect is to offer an alternative to schools that teach from a white perspective. The Umojas created the Natural Born Scientists Preparatory School, a private, self-funded elementary school in its first year. They are starting slowly; only a few students are enrolled so far. “We wrote our own curriculum,” she said.
“Our plan is to take them from kindergarten to sixth grade and then find a school to put them in to further their scientific training,” she said. “We want to raise thinkers, doers, creators.”
They want to slowly increase enrollment and have developed a clothing line to help generate money. Eventually, they envision students growing up, acquiring good jobs, investing in real estate, and leading industries.
Some whites might point to the school and its emphasis on an African-American perspective as exclusionary. The Umojas have a different slant. “It doesn’t mean we are racist,” Nia said. “Our school is open to white people and Hispanics. We will be learning about everyone. We want our children to operate as whole human beings. But we teach our history from our perspective. They are going to see our history with our eyes. We have been at the bottom of the ladder too long. We have to be productive or we’re going to perish. We can’t just keep looking outside to other people and saying, help make us better. We have to do it for ourselves.”
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