3 February 2-8, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents A COTTON RECKONING COTTON GROWN AND PICKED BY BLACK HANDS BUILT DALLAS, HISTORIAN CLARENCE GLOVER SAYS, AND IT’S TIME TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT. BY JACOB VAUGHN O ut on a rural piece of land in Lancaster, Clarence Glover stepped up to a structure that sat on a wooden pallet and was wrapped in a blue tarp. Storm clouds overhead spat out a light drizzle as Glover untangled knotted up bits of bungee cable that held the tarp down. When he was done, Glover revealed what was underneath – a 500 pound bale of white gold, otherwise known as cotton. He could tell you all about the stuff, like who picked it, where it was processed, and all the possible uses for it. One figure he cites of- ten is 313,600: that’s how many $100 bills one 500-pound bale of cotton can produce. The white gold built the city of Dallas, Glover said, a fact that he thinks has largely been forgotten. Shedding light on this history and its implications for the city today has be- come somewhat of a crusade for Glover, a 66-year-old civil rights activist and former history professor. Understanding cotton’s role in our history, Glover said, is crucial to reckoning with the city’s racist past. Without this understanding, he argues that racial and economic justice is unattainable. “When you’re talking about racial justice, you have to understand it begins with eco- nomic justice because of what African- Americans contributed to this city and to this nation and to the world, being the epi- center of the cotton industry in Dallas at the time,” Glover said. He said Black people didn’t see the fruits of their labor in the cotton industry during slavery. Then throughout the Jim Crow era, they were never compensated fairly for pick- ing cotton while white people profited dis- proportionately off it. “So, now we have to have a conversation on how do we begin to distribute wealth more equitably,” he said. Reparations could be the answer, Glover said. Looking at the history of the cotton trade throughout slaverhy and the Jim Crow era, who picked the stuff and how they should be compensated for that work, could be used to determine who gets how much. “That’s going to be a difficult conversa- tion, but cotton becomes a concrete object around which we have this conversation now,” he said. It’s a difficult conversation to have, Glover said, because it’s painful and shame- ful. It’s shameful for white people to recall because of the part their ancestors played in creating it, and It’s painful for Black people because of the horrors they endured and the inequities in the cotton industry throughout slavery and the Jim Crow era. One of his messages for years has been that Black people should be proud of their part in the cotton trade because of the instru- mental role it played in the global economy at the time. They should also be retroactively compensated for the role they played in the economy. It’s not a very popular opinion, he said, but it’s one he’s held for decades. Glover moved to Dallas from his home- town of Shreveport over 40 years ago. Raised in the historic plantation town Dixie, Louisiana, he picked cotton as a child and heard stories from relatives about doing the same. This filled him with a sense of pride about his family’s history and role in the cot- ton trade. It’s this sense of pride that led him to create African American Cotton Pickers Day in 2020. Designed to | UNFAIR PARK | >>p4 Jacob Vaughn Dallas civil rights activist Clarence Glover says, “Believe me, cotton built this city. If there hadn’t been cotton, there wouldn’t be a Dallas.”
