Petition campaign for the City of Dallas to take appropriate action regarding Fair Park is restarted.

The petition campaign to get the City of Dallas to take appropriate action regarding Fair Park has been restarted.

We have 41 signatures so far, but we had stopped gathering signatures to get the write up about Fair Park done and the video produced. Now we are back at signature gathering.

We are writing professors and cultural leaders who were also the co-signers of the petition to take down the Confederate monuments.

Our letter was published in the Dallas Morning News. The link is below.

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/08/04/dallas-confederate-memorials-scream-white-supremacy

We brought up Fair Park in our letter, but this seems to have been deprioritized and it seems that whatever response the city will take is going to be fairly trivial.

Also, since the letter I have discovered that the Confederate symbols are only a small part of a larger theme of Fair Park being an Expire Exhibit under Six Flags. The 1936 Texas Centennial is a triumphalist vision of white supremacy.

Besides our letter to the City of  Dallas we have a video and a paper on Fair Park which is available online at http://templeofdemocracy.com/fair-park.html

We will be steadily writing so many individuals per week and I think as we progress some of the co-signers will in turn help us get additional signatures.

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.

No this isn't Fair Park. Art Deco in the service of white supremacy.

I have purchased this item and it will be delivered at some point. Notice how the illustration looks like Fair Park.

Art Deco exists in the time of European Imperialism and white supremacy in the United States. It would be naive to assume that though it bills itself as progressive that it somehow exists isolated from the social context in which it exists.

The Fair Park 1936 Centennial materials repeatedly use the word "empire." It wants to locate itself with the other empires of the time.

The Empire Exhibition is nearly the same time as the 1936 Texas Centennial.  Both events promoted a white supremacist understanding of history and the world. Not surprisingly the architecture is similar.

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.