Joshua Inwood has co-signed our letter concerning Fair Park.

Joshua Inwood, geography professor has co-signed our letter concerning Fair Park.

The Fair Park letter, as well as a rough draft paper on Fair Park, and a video is online at:

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

Joshua Inwood is going to be having a session at the 2020 national convention of the American Association of Geographers on Reparations and Geography.

The word about Fair Park is getting out there.

FIRST LOCAL COVERAGE OF MY RESEARCH CONCERNING FAIR PARK

FIRST LOCAL COVERAGE OF MY RESEARCH CONCERNING FAIR PARK

https://www.centraltrack.com/why-the-state-fair-sucks-its-racist-roots-are-still-being-unearthed/

Schedule Posted for SWAAG convention in Fort Worth. Will be presenting on Fair Park

This is the link for the schedule for the SWAAG 2019  Annual Meeting.

http://www.sw-aag.org/uploads/2/4/4/5/24451940/2019_swaag_annual_meeting_-_program.pdf

My poster is mentioned on page 22. I will be there Friday Oct. 11, 2019, 10:30 to 11:50 am.

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 Recontextualization Committee, overlooks major Confederate artwork at Fair Park, barely is able to get a quorum of six out of 14 members

I am attending the meetings of the Recontextualization Committee for Fair Park. This is about the meeting on 8/21/2019.

One thing is that they had a hand out of their tasks and in reading ths handout I see one of the major significant Confederate artworks of Fair Park in the Hall of State in the Texas Building is omitted.

What is missing is the three Confederate leaders on the murals at the Hall of State and also the trinity of female figures, one of which represents the Confederacy. If you look at the three figures one is the "South" and one is the "North." This is to demote the United States of America to be a faction and elevate the Confederacy as the USA's equal. Also, it promotes the idea that the South and the Confederacy is the same thing, that the South is defined by the Confederacy. None of the six members there noticed. I pointed it out after the meeting.

Also, even though there are 14 members on the committee, they were barely able to get six people to show up to meet a quorum. The committee members really have a lack attitude. Excuse was made that it was the first day of school for the universities, but there always  seems to be some reason for the lack of attendance. The second public input meeting was scheduled during the Dallas city elections.

Spoke to the Dallas City Council about Fair Park

I spoke to the Dallas City Council this morning about Fair Park, our petition campaign, and our campaign to request that businesses.

The webpage with links to web pages with all the information is

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

The above page has the links to the page with communications to the City of Dallas which is:

http://templeofdemocracy.com/fair-park-communications-to-the-city-of-dallas.html

And this is the page with the letters and other communications we are sending to corporations.

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

This is the video  of my speaking to the Dallas City Council. Following this video is the short speech I made.

The Triumphalist White Supremacy of Fair Park

Spoken to the Dallas City Council on 8/21/2019 by Ed Sebesta

The 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition at Fair Park was a self-defined empire exhibition. It was one of many such exhibitions and expositions of the 1930s in the late imperial world of white supremacy.

Its art and architecture comprise Texas’ very own white supremacist “Triumph of the Will.”

The Re-contextualization Committee for Fair Park has refused to see what Fair Park obviously is.

As a consequence a group of scholars are currently gathering co-signatures from scholars, religious leaders, and cultural leaders for a petition asking the City of Dallas and the public confront the reality of Fair Park.

We are also going to be writing the scientific, technological, engineering and mathematical societies for their support. The art of Fair Park is in blunt opposition to the participation of Latinos and African Americans in the STEM professions. Under participation of Latinos and African Americans is recognized by STEM societies as a serious problem confronting American science.

We have also started writing corporations asking them to not have any activity in Fair Park starting in 2020 if the City of Dallas refuses to recognize that Fair Park is a landscape of white supremacy and take appropriate action.

Local historical writing about the 1936 Texas Centennial and the art and architecture of Fair Park has been uninformed and un-insightful. So to inform you about the triumphalist vision of white supremacy that Fair Park is I am distributing to you a black and white version of the rough draft paper on Fair Park. We have it online in color and there is a video about Fair Park.

The City of Dallas should consider not colluding with white supremacy.

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.

Singed up for a poster session at the 2109 Meeting of the Southwest Division of the American Association of Geographers

I have registered to go to the 2019 Southwesten Division of the American Association of Geographers meeting, Oct. 10-12, 2019 in Fort Worth and signed up to do a poster session.

http://www.sw-aag.org/2019-swaag-meeting.html

I have submitted my abstract.

I have to design the posters which are 3 feet by 4 feet to have there. I am allowed up to 20 posters, but I think 3 or 4 is all I need.

What you do is stand around your poster and talk to passers by at the convention who are interested. You can have links, and other information about further online resources. I am going to learn QR code so people can just use their smartphones to pull in a link and look stuff up online.

I plan to invite media to drop by and send out a press release.

I am learning that these poster dimensions are way too large for word, so you create a large template as a PowerPoint and then put  your presentation in that. You can also generate things in WORD and do a screen capture and just put your text in as an image.

For the national convention you get one 4 feet by 8 feet template. You can't do that in PowerPoint, but have to do it in Publisher instead, but you can just generate your stuff in WORD and screen capture and drop it in as an image.

I have some time to learn this before they are due and so I can have a gradual learning curve on this, but I don't think it is that difficult.

UPDATE: Version of paper with over 100 images available. Go to this link and follow the link to the page with the paper.

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

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.

Video Preview on the Human Zoo at Fair Park UPDATE

The Texas State Fair in Dallas had an Antebellum Negro Village. This was a part of the practice of having human zoos at expositions and fairs in America and Europe.

As I work on the Sound PowerPoint on Fair Park I see parts of the presentation can stand alone as presentations and I am posting them in this blog. They are previews.

This is the link to the Video on Youtube. UPDATE. Video moved to the AntiNeoConfederate (one word) channel.

This is the link to the video.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdT2kR68BWI

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





UPDATE
This is the link for the paper. http://templeofdemocracy.com/history-paper-the-triumphalist-white-supremacy-of-fair-park.html

This is the full video

Video Preview for Fair Park Video/ Short feature on how Dallas got its start from war profiterring off of slavery UPDATE

So I have installed in my office a Rode Microphone system. It is an NT-USB. It is not that expensive and it words very well. It has a cardiod peak up, which means it picks up sound only from the direction of the speaker. I did a test video file in which I had a fan going in my office and the air conditioning was running. I didn't hear either one in the recording.

To capture and edit sound I have WavePad from NCH. Their software works and is reasonably priced.

So I have been working to add sound to my PowerPoint. Once you add sound to your PowerPoint you can convert the PowerPoint to a Video file with .mp4 format. It takes a while for the conversion. Not a really long time, but it isn't done in seconds.

Some of the slides in my presentation on Fair Park are stories in their own. So I thought I would make a short preview video based on one of the slides. This was to do a project from beginning to end. Create Powerpoint slides, add audio files, convert to video. This was to make sure all the steps in this process were feasible and to learn quickly how it would all work. It is actually fairly easy.

UPDATE: This video is on the AntiNeoConfederate (one word) channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_TBuNDUeTcx0e2SlYfCYqw

So this is the first Preview Video I made. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNLwa2QvlCw

I didn't write a script, but  just recorded segments of speech for the different parts in this video. I suppose I could have written a script, and I think that for some future projects I might write scripts, but to make this a quick project I didn't.

It is about the Texas Women in the Civil War plaque at Fair Park, but it is also about the real story of war profiteering off of slave labor which the plaque's historical fraud obscures.

The full PowerPoint has 65 slides and will take all of next week to finish adding narrations to. It is one of a forthcoming series. The whole effort I am initiating to de-racialize the Dallas landscape will be called The Tshawane Project named after the renaming of Pretorious to Tshawne and after the South African efforts to rename streets and places there.

Full video is now release as well as the paper.

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

This is the full video.

Open Letter asking that the City of Dallas confront the triumphalist white supremacy of Fair Park UPDATE

We have 39 signatures so far and we will be working at getting more signatures.

A PowerPoint presentation has been completed and presentations will be scheduled to different groups.

The letter is online with the list of people who have signed it so far at:

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

UPDATE: We now have a paper on Fair Park and a video.

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

This is the video.

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.

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.

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.