From "Patch[es] of Nowhere" to Somewhere: Placing Sites of Racial Violence on the Dallas Landscape

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Many cities in the U.S. have rendered landscapes of racial violence invisible by effacing such sites from their cityscapes and any memory of them from public consciousness. Martyrs Park in Dallas, Texas was the scene of an 1860 lynching, the culmination of hysteria over a rumored slave revolt. A 2018 article referred to the park, less than 500 feet from the site of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, as a “patch of nowhere,” forgotten even by the city’s Park Department. Despite the potential for place-based commemoration to inspire reckoning and promote healing, Dallas has been reluctant to acknowledge its history of racial violence and contemporary implications. This paper examines the Dallas County Justice Initiative, an organization documenting, memorializing, and educating people about Dallas’ racial injustices. This community history project re-materializes these places and roots them in the contemporary landscape, creating a counter-narrative that acknowledges Dallas’ history of racial violence.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2023 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow