Poster for SouthWestern Association American Geographers (SWAAG) session on Fair Park

The Southwestern Division of the Association of American Geographers is having their convention in Fort Worth, Texas.  I am going to have a poster session there.

So I finished making up my poster. The convention is in Oct. 2019.
CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO SEE IT FULL SIZE.

Fair Park paper with about 100 pictures released.

PAPER ON FAIR PARK WITH ABOUT 100 PICTURES

There are formally listed 84 Figures, but some of those figures are sets of pictures. There is a total 102 pages.

http://templeofdemocracy.com/history-paper-the-triumphalist-white-supremacy-of-fair-park.html

It is a big pdf so it might take some time. It is over 50 megabytes.

I am now going to ask scholars and cultural leaders to co-sign our letter. We have a total of 40 signatures so far.

http://templeofdemocracy.com/fair-park-letter.html

Next step will be to ask corporations to not participate in the State Fair and entertainment groups to avoid the location.

Paper on the Triumphalist White Supremacy of Fair Park has been released. Campaign for co-signers started. UPDATE

This is the link to the paper.  UPDATE: The version with 100 pictures added has been uploaded.

http://templeofdemocracy.com/history-paper-the-triumphalist-white-supremacy-of-fair-park.html

This is the letter for which we are soliciting co-signers.
http://templeofdemocracy.com/fair-park-letter.html

Now that the video and position paper is done we are going to restart getting signatures for our letter campaign. We are also going to write corporations asking them not to participate in the Texas State Fair.

This is the video that goes with the paper.

AntiNeoConfederate Channel on YouTube.

This is a link to a video on the channel. You can go there and subscribe to the channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wll-kvEcOAY

This is the link to the channel itself.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_TBuNDUeTcx0e2SlYfCYqw

Next show will be on the neo-Confederates pro-slavery ideology and the Kennedy Twins belief that the slave holders should have gotten slavery reparations.

This is the video embedded. The paper that goes with the video has been released. http://templeofdemocracy.com/history-paper-the-triumphalist-white-supremacy-of-fair-park.html

UPDATED Full video on the Triumphalist White Supremacy of Fair Park now online. UPDATE

This is the updated video.

I did the voice narrration without a script. I thought it would save time. In the future if I am doing video, I am going to have a script.  Update. I have moved this video to AntiNeoConfederate. (One word).  The old link will work, but use this link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wll-kvEcOAY

The link to the channel is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_TBuNDUeTcx0e2SlYfCYqw

UPDATE Paper that goes with the video is at http://templeofdemocracy.com/history-paper-the-triumphalist-white-supremacy-of-fair-park.html  UPDATE 2: Paper with pictures is now available.

1936 Johannesburg Empire Guide Arrives from Australia/ Like Fair Park and looks like Fair Park

This is the cover of the booklet. If you were doing a quick glance you might mistake it for Fair Park. Art Deco was used at expositions in the 1930s to make white racist regimes seem modern and of the future.

 There is a tower to send out beams of light like the 1936 Texas Centennial

 Art Deco buildings at the exhibit. The lower one is very similar in style to buildings at Fair Park.

British Imperialism is so superior with their Art Deco building.

They find the famous ruins in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia after a British imperialist, very mysterious. Though it is obvious that the people of Zimbabwe in the past build these buildings, they speculate that maybe it is the Queen of Sheba. They find it mysterious because they can't imagine anyone besides white people building these buildings.

UNFINISHED TASKS

It might be thought that with the Confederate War Memorial in Pioneer Park being removed that the tasks of de-racializing the Dallas landscape is over.

In fact there is a lot of issues with the Dallas landscape to be dealt with.

I give this brief list.  These are the known issues at this time. More might be discovered. Notice that on the list there is the Hatton W. Sumners Court Room at the Red Museum. This is new.


1. The replica Arlington House in Oak Lawn built to glorify Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy.

This needs to stop being a building to glorify Robert E. Lee and be a location for weddings. Perhaps it could be a museum on slavery in Texas.

2. Many DISD schools named after Confederates and other white supremacists.

There are quite a few schools that need to be renamed.

3. Two minor Confederate monuments in Oak Lawn Park.

One of the monuments is to so-called Black Confederates and makes the city a laughing stock. I had given information on both monuments to the Confederate Monument Task Force, but that farcical body didn't do anything with the information.

4. The whole Fair Park is an assemblage of white supremacist art and architecture.

I have a Word Document and a PowerPoint presentation on this, but both need to be updated. I have discovered that many exhibitions, fairs, expositions, etc. in the early 20th century  are about systems of white supremacy  and futher Art Deco is used in these other events to support white supremacy. I am currently doing reading and then will rewrite the Word Document and do a Power Point.

5. Hatton W. Sumners honored at the Red Museum.

Sumners is a racist monster. He was a leader in the opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation and also was opposed to all civil rights legislation of any type. For more information there is this blog posting.

https://dallaslandscape.blogspot.com/2019/03/hatton-w-sumners-court-room-at-red.html

Turns out that the Texas Tribune took money from the Hatton W. Sumners Foundation in 2018 and not 2019. Their web page was confused. However this blog posting gives a lot of information about him and how the Texas historical establishment has covered it up.

https://dallaslandscape.blogspot.com/2019/02/asking-texas-tribune-to-give-back.html

6. Many streets named after Confederates, white supremacists, and one after Nathan Bedford Forrest.

There are many streets that need renaming. We need to also consider repartions of the landscape. I have done a great deal of research about both names and the struggles to rename streets after minority civil rights leaders. People don't think it is important, but the reality is that these struggles show how fiercely the resistance against the loss of the white landscape is.

This map is from the Dallas County records. When city staff said they couldn't find evidence I had to wonder how hard they looked or who did they depend on. There are Dallas Morning News advertisments which give a "Forrest" address in Dallas.



7. Exclude Lost Cause jurors from Jury duty.

The article with the proposal to exclude from jury duty those who believe in the Lost Cause is online at Black Commentator.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/507/507_confederacy_jury_selection_sebesta_hague_guests_share.html

8. There is the John Neely Bryan monument stone in Pioneer Park. It isn't a tombstone.

9. There is the DISD history books which give the Confederacy a free pass.

There is likely more things to be discovered.

As to where it will all end. I don't know, I suppose when the landscape is deracialized.

Fair Park, Art Deco and White Supremacy and Empire Exhibitions

We read about there being a Fascist architecture and a Soviet Archtecture, but we tend to think of Art Deco as just Deco, decorative and not having a politics.  Yet it appears that Art Deco served a purpose in supporting white supremacy during the 1930s.

Look at these pictures.

And this picture.

These are pictures for the Empire Exhibition of 1938.  If you read the literature of Texas Centennial guides and other items, you find the word "empire" over and over again. Not surprisingly the formula of Fair Park is in a larger context of other empire exhibitions using Art Deco to make white supremacy seem modern.

I have purchased several books on this, a couple have shown up in the mail. One is "Modern Architecture and the End of Empire," by Mark Crinson and the other is "Hybrid Modernities: Architecture and Representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris," by Partricia A. Morton.

I have on order yet one final book, "A Dream of the Future: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville World's Fairs."

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0190274727

I think these new materials will give some new insights into Fair Park, but also give more credibility into the observations I have made about Fair Park. They aren't some local eccentric perception made by myself, but something that has been generally observed by the larger academic community.