Months after grocer is awarded $2 million in tax breaks, Amber Sims’ historical sleuthing reveals where the property fits into Freedman’s Town legacy.
It looks like a whole lot of nothing, this property at 3212 Cochran Street, where a hotly debated Kroger development will rise on land that hugs North Central Expressway just east of Uptown.
The corner of Cochran and Hall streets seems like little more than a wasteland of castoff rotgut pint bottles, fast-food wrappers and broken-down parking signs.
But look deeper — for the pieces of old red bricks and piles of broken masonry sunken into the ground.
This barren plot is hardly barren of significance. It is hallowed ground — those bricks its only surviving testimony to the B.F. Darrell School, originally built in 1892 as Dallas’ “Colored High School.”
None of this history was part of last year’s conversation when Kroger sought, and eventually won, a $2 million tax abatement for the massive grocery and apartment project it will begin building in August.
Throughout the debate, most of it over whether Kroger deserved financial incentives for including affordable housing in its plans, no one at City Hall apparently had a clue about the previous life of 3212 Cochran.
But now many of us know, thanks to the historical sleuthing of racial equity advocate Amber Sims, who published three essays earlier this month as part of her ongoing effort to explore, chronicle and reclaim the history of the city’s Black schools.
“This land is integral to Black Dallas’ educational history,” Amber said after we walked the property a few days ago. “That’s why seeing it fallow, with no historical marker, nothing proclaiming its importance, feels unresolved.”
There’s no time travel back to the City Council’s October vote, much less to 2015 when Kroger began the land purchase. But I hope Amber’s work will move the company to take significant action to commemorate and contextualize this site.
There’s also a good lesson here for City Hall: Carefully consider all of a neighborhood’s history when making development decisions.
Before I tell you more about the mystery Amber unraveled, let me encourage you to read the entirety of her work on the Dallas Free Press website. Her “Dallas Forgot” project is a nonprofit partnership between Dallas Free Press and the Imagining Freedom Institute. Also providing support is Press On’s Southern Movement Media Fund.
Amber, whom I first profiled last summer as an up-and-coming voice in Dallas, is juggling her Black schools research with her leadership at two Dallas-based racial-equity nonprofits, Young Leaders, Strong City and the Imagining Freedom Institute.
You can’t understand the significance of Sims’ discovery at 3212 Cochran without first knowing the history of today’s pricy, glitzy Uptown.
After the Civil War, formerly enslaved Black women and men settled their Freedman’s Town just north of downtown Dallas. As railroad lines were built where U.S. Highway 75 later would run, the neighborhood, also known as North Dallas or State Thomas, boomed and its population peaked in the 1920s.
But rail pulled out, the highway went in and, by the 1970s, with overt segregation lessening, many State Thomas residents moved to other parts of town. Those who stayed felt increasing pressure from developers who had begun to eye the neighborhood as Dallas’ next big thing.
Today almost nothing remains of that original Black neighborhood except for Freedman’s Cemetery, the burial ground for some of its first residents.
As a child decades later, Amber often stayed with her grandmother, a longtime Dallas ISD cafeteria worker at R.L. Thornton Elementary who lived not far from the former Darrell School site in Roseland Homes.
Amber’s family attended Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church nearby, and her mom regularly pointed out that the construction of Cityplace forced the congregation to leave its first home for its current Washington Street location.
That’s about all Amber knew about her neighborhood, until a series of Dallas ISD closures — most of them predominantly Black campuses — led her to dig into the history of those schools and the ones that came long before them.
It was actually a rare copy of an old children’s book that led Amber to her 3212 Cochran discovery. The Freedman’s Memorial: A Memorial, A Legacy was created to teach Dallas ISD students about the historic Black community.
Marilyn Clark, the South Dallas Cultural Center’s former education and outreach coordinator, didn’t know whether DISD ever used the book, but it proved invaluable to Amber.
The picture map on the inside cover illustrated the vibrant community that once ran along both sides of the railroad. Among the details was a name Amber had not seen in any of her previous research: The B.F. Darrell School.
Document searches produced only dead ends. But then came the 1899 fire insurance map, created by the venerable Sanborn Map Company, that designated a building at 3212 Cochran Street as Dallas’ “Colored High School.”
Information showed the campus opened in 1892, three blocks from “Colored School No. 2.” (No. 2 later became the Booker T. Washington School, and in 1922, was rebuilt to serve as the Black community’s high school in the area that is now the Arts District.)
Amber had enough threads by that point to suspect that the “Colored High School” was one and the same as the B.F. Darrell School mentioned in the children’s book. Finding a 1969 column by The Dallas Morning News’ first Black columnist, the late Julia Scott Reed, was the confirmation Sims needed.
Fifty-three years ago this month, Reed wrote about the closure of “B.F. Darrell Elementary” at 3212 Cochran, proclaiming the red-brick building a landmark of the city’s past and “the largest and oldest Negro elementary school in Dallas.”
Reed quoted then-superintendent Nolan Estes as saying the school’s closure was the result of “falling ceilings, out-of-door restroom facilities, crowded classrooms and the lack of parking space.”
The building was demolished two years later, the same year a federal judge ordered Dallas to desegregate its schools.
Amber told me that, even with all the other clues, documents and interviews she uncovered, the Clark book and Reed news story were most critical.
“Those were my needle in the haystack moments,” Amber said. “If not for those, it was really hard to say for sure.”
The eventual namesake of the school, Benjamin Franklin Darrell, began teaching in Dallas in 1899 and later became principal of the Cochran Street high school.
His name was transferred to an Oak Cliff school that opened in 1971. Today the legacy lives on as the New Tech High School at B.F. Darrell.
The land where so many of the city’s Black schoolchildren were educated for more than 75 years has sat empty for half a century, owned first by the city and then Dallas Housing Authority.
Amber hopes her research will spur Kroger and City Hall to work together to not only do what’s necessary to secure a historical marker at the 3212 Cochran site but to visually tell the story of the school and the historic roots of the area’s original residents.
“This was a community of schools, of churches, of businesses and homes,” Amber said as we looked just across the highway at Griggs Park, where so many Black children played after school in the 1940s and beyond.
“These were people who lived and thrived here, but also saved and used their livelihoods to build and improve these neighborhoods.”
The 3212 Cochran site, now destined to be swallowed into another giant upscale Uptown development, is a sad commentary of shortsightedness — property viewed only as blighted and inconsequential with no thought spared for its potential history and context.
Amber’s discovery is more than a little ironic given that it comes in a part of the city where — just as in West Dallas and the Ross Avenue corridor — too many people no longer can afford to live.
“Dallas Forgot” also should be required reading for everyone at City Hall as they try to figure how to move forward from last month’s damning analysis of the comprehensive housing policy that the council approved not four years ago.
That assessment, commissioned by council member Casey Thomas after he became housing committee chair, condemned the 2018 document for failing to confront the city’s “150-year-old legacy of race-based policy choices.”
That work starts with a city understanding its history. You build for the future — but not without acknowledging the past.
“This is not an empty lot, it’s something,” Amber told me. “This whole community was something, and it mattered to Black people from that community so much.”
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