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.

Letter to Carolyn King Arnold about the Dallas Heritage Village

This is a letter I sent to Carolyn King Arnold, Dallas City Council member for District 4.

As of 1/29/2019 I have not received any reply.

                                                                                    December 19, 2018

                                                                                    Edward H. Sebesta

                                                                                   

                                                                                    edwardsebesta@gmail.com

Carolyn King Arnold – District 4

Mayor and City Council

Dallas City Hall

1500 Marilla St.

Dallas, TX 75210

Dear Hon. Arnold:

Recently money was taken away from other arts groups and given to the Dallas Heritage Village by the Dallas city council and there was reported considerable criticism of this action.

I decided to conduct a field trip to assess the Dallas Heritage Village (DHV). The entire operation is a failure in terms of being a historical project. Well might they use the word “Heritage” rather than “history” in their name, since it seems the operation is primarily about nostalgia and not history.

In regarding the DHV’s failures, a person could focus on their handling of the Confederacy. At their book store you can purchase a model of Millermore as a plantation house, and you can get a magnetized toy (Dress up set) in which you can put Confederate uniforms on figures. However, this would be distraction from their primary failure.

The primary problem with the DHV historical interpretation in general is well represented in the following picture as part of the historical interpretation of the Renner School House.

This is an all-white student body in a multiracial Texas.  The past practice of segregation is not part of the interpretation of the Renner School House.

When I doing the field trip there were many students from the public schools and they were mostly African American and Hispanic. What they could learn if it was the Dallas Historical Village, instead of a theme park for nostalgia, is that if they lived at the time, they would be placed in segregated schools.

They would learn that in the historical period of the time of these buildings they would never be allowed to walk through the front door of these houses, and would only be visiting via the back door as help if at all. They would learn that the people living in these houses would never consider socializing with them and their families and the people in these houses would consider themselves racially superior.  They would learn that they wouldn’t be allowed into the saloon except as help, or the other stores on the DHV’s main street except as help.

The primary and dominating aspect of Dallas is its economic inequality divided largely along racial lines.  Dallas’s history is that of grudgingly implementing civil rights under the direction of a federal court order, of racism, Klan revivals, of violence against African American bodies, segregation, and racial exclusion.

The students I saw at the DHV would with a real historical interpretation would learn why many of them are in poorer neighborhoods with less opportunities, why they and their neighbors have ended up in their situations. They would learn about why Dallas has issues of economic inequality.

Yet, the real history of Dallas is nowhere to be found in the DHV. The DHV interpretation instead creates a nostalgic dream world of the 19^th and early 20^th century. It is more akin to a Disney theme park Main Street USA attraction than anything related to the historical past.

I expect at some point to have a full assessment of the DHV and issue a report, but I am backlogged in researching the Dallas racialized landscape and so the report will likely be issued sometime in 2019. However, the City of Dallas needs to start critically thinking about their support of the DHV now.

The nature of the DHV is fairly obvious and the fact that it hasn’t been flagged by the Cultural Commission for Dallas says a lot about what type of culture the City of Dallas is committed to promoting. The fact that this type of cultural production is funded by Dallas in 2018 says a lot about the real values of Dallas.

The erasure of the past and the failure to instruct on the historical realities of the Dallas past is a far, far more powerful instrument to maintain a racial order than a dozen neo-Nazi rallies. This erasure operates on a level in which the person is not likely to be conscious of its operation and so it slips into a person’s thinking without them realizing it.

The question isn’t that money shouldn’t be taken away from other projects to be given to the DHV, though additionally money shouldn’t be given to them, the question is why the City of Dallas gives them any money at all.

I would like to see a real competent historical assessment done of the DHV and the City of Dallas take appropriate actions, such as cutting off all funding.

                                                                                   

Sincerely Yours,

                                                                        Edward H. Sebesta