Dallas has been, still is and probably always will be a city of bigots

It is a bigotry I like to call "Tolerant Bigotry." I vividly remember the first time I ran across it, back in the early 1960s. "I have nothing against colored people. I just don’t want one moving in next door to me."

When I first moved to Dallas in 1968 to go to work for UPI I had hair down to my waist. I worked the overnight shift at UPI and usually around 2 or 3 in the morning I would make the short drive from our Patterson Street offices to the Dallas Morning News to pick up a paper as it was coming off the press. I could not drive three blocks without being stopped by a Dallas cop, told to get out of my car and being frisked. Back then we had press cards issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety and it go so that I would wear it as a badge when I had to go out at night. The cops would see that badge and back off a little bit after they stopped me and told me to get out of the car. I know if I had been black with an Afro back then, I wouldn’t have dared to go out at that time of night.

Dallas bigotry is well documented, back from when the white establishment created black residential neighborhoods in the Trinity River floodplains and divided the city between the white north and black south. It carefully crafted an electoral system that made sure blacks had no voice in city government.

Of course, much of that overt racism is gone, but it didn’t go without a fight or a series of lawsuits. But it still exists. I remember in early 1990s when Cinemark wanted to build its very first movie theater in Dallas — on Inwood Road just north of Forest Lane. The neighborhood rose up in fury and forced the city council (illegally, it turned out) to deny Cinemark the zoning it needed to build the theater. Why was the neighborhood so outspoken? Because blacks go to movies and they didn’t want "those kind of people," as one resident told me, roaming around their streets and homes.

This same kind of bigotry was out in full force Wednesday at City Hall when the subject of supportive housing was being discussed. It was another example of that same old tired form of Tolerant Bigotry. "I have nothing against homeless people. I just don’t want one moving in next door to me."

It was an absolutely disgusting display, one that made me ashamed of the people who live in Dallas, particularly those who live in the area immediately surrounding the Farmers Market. Back in the ‘60s, the argument bigots used was all black people wanted to rape white women. These days, it’s all homeless people are habitual criminals who want to ransack your homes and cause you bodily harm. This in spite of reports that show in 100 percent of cases, crime has been reduced in areas where supportive housing is created. 100 freakin’ percent!!! But bigotry, by definition, always flies in the face of facts.

It’s really a simple proposition. The only way to solve the homeless situation — to even make a dent in it — is to find homes for as many of them as possible. In Dallas, the majority of the homeless congregate downtown. So it makes sense to find housing for them downtown and the area around the Farmers Market offers the most available property for the construction of this supportive housing.

Off course, it’s not a Farmer’s Market issue. If someone wanted to construct a project in just about any area of Dallas, especially any area north of I30 and east of I35, the same Tolerant Bigtory would raise its ugly face. It would simply be Tolerant Bigots with different names. But the message would be exactly the same. "I have nothing against homeless people. I just don’t want one moving in next door to me."

The only bright spot in all this, although it was a significant bright spot, was that the Dallas City Council, in a rare display of enlightenment and acceptance, voted to support providing tax credits for two of the proposed projects. That doesn't mean they're a done deal because it's the state, not the city, that hands out the credits, and the city can still vote to block the projects as the political process continues to unfold.