Note: this is the second edition of the Dallas-area news roundup conducted by my friend Ginger. Issue 1 was last Friday. We got a lot of positive response to that and I definitely like it, so on we go. The title is taken from the email Ginger sent me, so we’ll give that a try as the feature name. Let us know what you think. Thanks!
This week’s DFW news is mostly about the suburbs: Southlake, Carrolton & Farmer’s Branch, and Arlington are featured trouble spots. Also, I’ve found Archive.ph, which archives web pages and may be useful for reviewing articles on the Dallas Morning News or the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. If you can’t get through to an article I’ve linked, I may have archived it for you.
- ‘Grandmother of Juneteenth’ Opal Lee Is Honored With Portrait in the Texas Capitol. I grew up knowing about Juneteenth, but it wasn’t until I moved to Dallas a few years ago that I learned about Opal Lee. Surprising things in this story: apparently Dan Patrick was down with putting her portrait in the Capitol, which may be the nicest thing I’ve ever heard about him.
- Another North Texas Man Arrested for Violent Role in Jan. 6 Capitol Riot. The opening line “Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a North Texas man has been arrested for his involvement in the events at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021” says it all. A number of the notorious characters of the insurrection come from the DFW suburbs, including a realtor from Frisco, and the founder of the Oath Keepers, who’s from Granbury. It’s not clear to me whether it’s the proximity to East Texas or suburban/exurban white flight, but whatever it is, there’s a lot of it in the water in north Texas.
- Southlake, Texas, rejected diversity lessons in schools. But a federal probe may demand them. This is a pretty good explainer about the problems in Southlake, one of the white flight suburbs between Dallas and Fort Worth. They have eight federal civil rights investigations into the schools. This follows on from a lawsuit about racial harassment where the school district was about to settle for DEI initiatives, but a bunch of “conservative activists” took over the school board and nixed the plan. This NY Times piece from last October fills in some of the information about that election and a big money group that’s backing these “activists” and is also heavily involved in the censorship of school libraries across the state. (An aside that Congresswoman Van Duyne, mentioned in the NBC article, is also my Congresswoman; I’m in the far eastern end of her district through the magic of Texas redistricting. Before that I was in CD-5 with Lance Gooden of Terrell as my House representative.)
- Also in suburban school-related news: Dallas man arrested after thousands of fentanyl pills found in car during Collin County traffic stop, officials say & Authorities arrest man in Carrollton case suspected to be ‘main source’ of fentanyl supply [Archive link; Dallas Observer coverage]. Carrollton-Farmer’s Branch ISD has seen about a dozen overdoses of fentanyl, including three students who died, recently. This has been an ongoing story in DFW. I side-eye the War on Some Drugs and drug-related law enforcement but junior high kids ODing and kids dying is pretty bad.
- Tarrant County officials announce efforts to fight voter fraud, even as election crimes remain rare. Nice to see a headline that announces in advance that yet another Republican effort to chase down voter fraud isn’t going to find anything because it doesn’t exist. This is a good skim of the top layer of the Tarrant County voting situation, which boils down to “a bunch of people are angry because Donald Trump lost Tarrant County in 2020”. The DMN is also on it: What to know about Tarrant County’s new election-fraud unit [Archive link].
- Followup on the Dallas City Council resolution supporting abortion: Republican lawmakers ask AG Paxton to review Dallas resolution supporting abortion rights. [Archive link] Dallas isn’t Austin or Houston but the Lege and the AG can threaten our city council all the same.
- A tale of two cities: Posting this for the graphic about the distribution of electric car chargers in Philadelphia and Dallas. The interesting piece for me is that South Dallas (Black Dallas) below I-30 basically has none but the inner suburban ring (majority-minority, but more diverse) is well served with car chargers.
- The Dallas Morning News Will Reassign Al Día’s Journalists, and Some Aren’t Happy About It. Al Día, the Spanish-language newspaper from the DMN, is going to become a weekly section of the paper; its staff, some of whom are Spanish-speakers first, has been distributed among various departments. In a time of news cutbacks, including at the DMN, I’m not sorry they have an architectural critic, but cutting this section and leaving him is telling, too.
- On the history front: 3 amateur codebreakers set out to decrypt old letters. They uncovered royal history. NPR has the best pop history piece about how the Mary Queen of Scots letters came to be deciphered. Though I whiffed on doing professional history, I still love reading about how researchers solve historical mysteries like this one, which is going to significantly change and improve our understanding of a key figure in Tudor-Stewart history.
- Last but not least: A Flickr album of photos of Cementario Mexicano De Maria De La Luz Circle S Rd. S. Austin taken by a friend of mine in Austin. He’s not a professional but he does gorgeous work. Also recommended: his albums of photos from Oakwood Cemetery in Austin.