UT Dallas professors look back on the work of recently departed Dallas historian Dr. George E. Keaton Jr.’s, whose lifelong mission of exalting and guarding local Black stories often crossed paths with School of Arts, Humanities and Technology faculty.
Keaton, the founder and executive director of Remembering Black Dallas, Inc. (RBD), was best known for his efforts of preservation, research and promotion of Dallas African-American history, life and culture. AHT professors joined forces with Keaton frequently, most remarkably by developing enrichment opportunities for UT Dallas history students and by helping raise a monument honoring a historically-prominent African-American landowner.
“Everybody who knew Dr. Keaton had something that they liked and respected about him,” said Dr. Kimberly Hill, associate professor of history. “For myself, I know for sure I’m a better professor and I’m doing a better job of serving my community because of him.”
Hill, who joined UT Dallas faculty in 2014, teaches African-American History, Themes in Social History, Long Civil Rights Movement, Harlem Renaissance, and The African Diaspora, among other courses. She began researching Texas civil rights activities shortly before moving to Dallas, which led her to Remembering Black Dallas, Inc. and to meeting Keaton.
We would benefit from additional historical preservation in Dallas,” Hill said. “Our historic Black neighborhoods often get demolished or overlooked. Dr. Keaton wanted to make sure that major events and major names in local Black history wouldn’t be forgotten.”
As she was planning her Spring 2015 African-American History course, she decided to invite Keaton as a guest speaker. From then on, Hill and Keaton worked together to create opportunities that would enhance the students’ experience in historical documentation.
Hill recruited students from her classes to volunteer for the African American Museum of Dallas, where students helped organize the museum’s archives and collected information on the oldest Black families in the city in a space provided by Dr. Keaton. The student-volunteers recorded interviews with elderly African-Americans on the topics of Freedman’s Towns, urban migration and residential segregation in Dallas. Their work contributed to the Remembering Black Dallas oral history project, some of which was later published as the book Our Stories: Black Families in Early Dallas.
“It would have been really easy for him to just say no to coming to speak to my classes on the assumption that if there are twenty students in the class, maybe only two or three of them would get involved since I didn’t require them to do interviews,” Hill said. “But still, just for the sake of getting those two or three more interested, he kept coming. And because of that, it became a self-sustaining program that got students interested in engaging with Black history in other ways.”
On Sept. 10, the City of Dallas hosted a dedication ceremony of a sculpture honoring Anderson Bonner, a Black man who, upon his emancipation, became one of Dallas’ largest property owners at the end of the 19th century.
Sankofa is the work of UT Dallas AHT associate professor Andrew Scott. The monument of the orange bird, now a state historical marker, stands on the city’s Anderson Bonner Park (just southwest of the intersection between I-635 and U.S. 75.)
“I like to think of George as a cultural warrior,” Scott said. “He was the spiritual center for that project. I used to call him my Northstar for that project. One of my proudest things about this project, and that I hold really dear now, is that I got a text from him where he basically said, ‘you really knocked it out of the park, and you did everything that we hoped this monument would be.’”
At UT Dallas, Scott’s work combines digital fabrication, traditional fine arts practices, and collective cultural ideals. He teaches courses on design and computer modeling for digital fabrication, where students conduct advanced research in issues, methods and practices and learn about computer modeling techniques as tools of sculpture.
Scott describes history as his third love, after art and music. And for almost every work he produces, he aims to engage those three domains. Like Sankofa, most of his visual art projects are deeply intertwined with themes of justice, race and equality.
Scott’s “Gavel,” a 31-foot stainless steel gavel commissioned by the Ohio State Bar Association in 2008 and located outside the Supreme Court of Ohio, serves as a symbolic reminder to the Ohio Supreme Court to uphold justice for all and protect society’s most vulnerable. Most recently, the artist created the visuals that accompanied Grammy award-winner trumpeter Terence Blanchard during the performance “Gordon Parks: An Empathetic Lens.” The show honored civil rights photojournalist Gordon Parks, who focused on topics of inequality, labor and poverty.
When the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture granted Scott the Anderson Bonner project, he worked directly with the Bonner family and Keaton to develop a sculpture that would honor the memory of the prominent Black real estate entrepreneur. Whenever there was a historical question, or clarification was needed, Keaton was the source of information. And he was always a text message away.
“George was a Griot,” Scott said. “That’s sort of an African word that describes a person that holds the historic memory of the place and conveys that. It’s a monumental loss, but we celebrate when our ancestors ascend to that next level. And, in many ways, we realize that we become responsible for picking up that mantle and carrying that baton forward.”