I'm not sure how you write a story about how great the schools in Highland Park, Texas, are without noting that they exist entirely to allow rich white Dallasites to maintain Jim Crow-style segregation.
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wsj.com/articles/scott…
This is a map of the Dallas Independent School District. See the white hole in the middle labeled University Park and Highland Park? Those are called the Park Cities, and they make up Highland Park Independent School District.
It's very white.
Dallas ISD students are 69.9% Hispanic and 21.4% Black.
Highland Park ISD students are 6% Hispanic and 0.8% Black.
85% of Dallas students qualify for free/reduced lunch.
0.2% of Highland Park students do.
schools.texastribune.org/districts/dall…
schools.texastribune.org/districts/high…
dmagazine.com/publications/d…
None of this is accidental, of course: Rich white people have zealously guarded the enclave they've built for themselves, for many decades.
justice.tougaloo.edu/sundowntown/hi…
When the town was planned in 1913, it required all property owners to have a deed covenant saying it "shall be used for residence purposes only, and by white persons only...not excluding bona fide servants of any race."
Ah, but what if those live-in servants had (gasp) kids of their own?
Highland Park taxpayers literally *paid* Dallas schools to take its few Black residents off their hands into the 1960s.
hpbagpipe.com/9000/features/…
The years after Brown v. Board of Education were spent trying to figure out how to avoid getting sued and forced to educate Black kids.
Dallas eventually stopped taking them.
An alderman — a recent president of the Dallas Bar Association! — asked residents to fire all their Black servants so the town could avoid the issue.
Another alderman suggested ethnic cleansing, "that all Negroes be moved out of Highland Park," but someone noted that's illegal.
In 1969, when the town worried that some of its ~50 Black children — again, the kids of live-in servants — might try to enroll, it banned all kitchens in "servants' quarters." Starve 'em out!
It worked: The number dropped quickly to zero.
hpbagpipe.com/9000/features/…
Well, one.
There was one Highland Park family who didn't want to give up their live-in maid. So she kindly rented an empty apartment within Dallas district boundaries so her maid's kids could pretend to live there.
Highland Park didn't get its first Black student until ***1974***.
They'd never even *had* to set up "separate-but-equal" school systems.
They'd found the simpler solution: Just don't have any Black students to begin with!
wfaa.com/article/news/l…
That student, James Lockhart, enrolled for a single school year.
Six years later, as of this 1980 Texas Monthly story, he remained the only Black graduate in Highland Park history.
texasmonthly.com/arts-entertain…
An HP senior in that story: "I think it’s real scary to go to school with blacks and I’m glad I don’t have to."
The writer: HP kids see "people of different races not as fellow students but as servants, people who provide convenience and comfort for them, who aim to please."
Highland Park didn't have a single Black homeowner until ***2003***.
The town paper put the event on p. 1 with the lede: "Guess who's coming to dinner — and staying for a while?"
peoplenewspapers.com/2011/07/14/200…
(That story also called the female half of the homebuying couple, then 36 years old, "a girl.")
newsweek.com/american-postc…
(It probably helped her cause that she was at least a Black *Republican*. She later self-published a book titled "Being Black and Republican in the Age of Obama.")
peoplenewspapers.com/2011/07/14/200…
In 2005 — not long ago! — I was covering K-12 schools for @dallasnews and co-wrote this story:
Highland Park HS had an annual "Thug Day" when all the rich white kids dressed up as Black people.
Also, "Fiesta Day," for dressing up as your lawn guy.
archive.ph/BPPhE
"Students at Highland Park High School dressed as gang members, rap stars, maids and yard workers this month during homecoming week — a tradition one Dallas civil-rights leader says is racially insensitive."
(See, we needed someone in the lede to *say* the obvious. No bias!)
"On senior Thug Day, students wore Afro wigs, fake gold teeth and baggy jeans. On Fiesta Day, which was to honor Hispanic heritage, one student brought a leaf blower to school."
An outraged whistleblower called us about it.
The kids I interviewed at Highland Park High all thought it was all fine.
Seriously, read these quotes. (Names omitted to protect the teenaged.)
No students were ever punished.
The magic of all this segregation is that Highland Park residents pay a school property tax rate ~10% ***less*** than Dallas residents do —
but their tax base means they still get to spend 78% ***more*** per student than Dallas schools can.
That tax base has also allowed Highland Park to have 3.5x as many officers per capita as Texas (and 2.8x Dallas), despite having little crime.
For decades, HP police have been used as a sort of private security guard for keeping undesirables out of town.
Police can do that because Highland Park makes all sorts of normal behavior — jogging! eating in a park! playing tennis! "protracted lounging"! — either illegal or reserved for Highland Park residents only.
books.google.com/books?id=abhID…
Here's Highland Park Police's spokesman in 2016 saying HP residents "abide by the law," so the lawbreakers are "people that are domestically employed here...landscapers...housekeepers and things like that."
dallasnews.com/news/politics/…
Matthew Stafford, Clayton Kershaw, and Scottie Scheffler are very talented athletes, and I have no reason to think they aren't wonderful people.
But a story that portrays their high school as some kind of hits factory should acknowledge *why and how* it became one — bigotry.
*** (Quick addendum/correction: The story I linked to in this tweet was about both Highland Park and Memorial Villages — which is to Houston what HP is to Dallas. The quote is actually from the Memorial Villages PD, not the HP police.)
(I can assure you the sentiment is the same in both towns, but just FYI, that's my mistake.)
Bonus: You'll be SHOCKED to learn Highland Park has been a leader in pushing anti-CRT nonsense.
npr.org/2021/07/11/101…
The idea that Highland Park schools might be "indoctrinating" its students against white people may be the most hilarious thing I've ever heard.
Also, I found some clips on the time in 1982 Highland Park started arresting non-Highland Park residents who had the UNMITIGATED GALL to jog on its streets.
(For their own safety, of course.)
In 2017, Chinese-American author @JamieFord gave a talk at Highland Park HS.
"...students began to interrupt with random cascades of clapping and cheering, so loud he struggled to talk over them."
Then they "clapped and cheered the Japanese Internment."
dallasnews.com/news/2017/02/2…
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