Black History Month // Fort Worth Weekly

Home of Juneteenth

With the museum opening in 2026, Fort Worth will add to our country’s dialogue about race.

BY MADISON SIMMONS

Ground will be broken this year on the National Juneteenth Museum on the Historic South Side. A combined vision of the Grandmother of Juneteenth, Dr. Opal Lee, and community leader and museum CEO Jarred Howard, the multipurpose space will open in 2026.

The idea started with a conversation in Lee’s living room in 2018. At the time, Howard, who grew up on the South Side, was an executive with the Chamber of Commerce, and he had to deliver some bad news to his family friend: The chamber could not financially support one of Lee’s causes.

“And what about you, Jarred?” Howard recalls Lee saying. “What will you do?”

Howard shared with her a vision that he had held in his heart for years. He imagined a multipurpose campus that would serve the community not just as a museum but also as a gathering place, entertainment venue, and economic center. He said he envisioned the museum on the South Side, where Lee is also from, but he had no land.

“Look no further,” she told him. “You have the property you need,” and offered him the lot she owned on the 900 block of East Rosedale Street.

Lee had operated her own Juneteenth museum out of a house on the property. The holiday, long celebrated in Texas, commemorates the date Union troops came to Galveston in 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and freed more than 250,000 people still enslaved. The retired schoolteacher began fighting for national recognition for Juneteenth in 2016. She started a walking campaign from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., stopping to make speeches and gather signatures on a petition along the way. In June 2021, President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan law declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday.

Lee and Howard have worked closely with each other and with the community on plans for the museum since the start. Howard said members of the Historic Southside Neighborhood Association have advised the museum board at every step of the process.

“The South Side is [filled] with historical events and figures, many of whom are no longer reflected in our textbooks and annals,” he added. “As the city of Fort Worth grows and evolves, I wanted to make sure this pocket of Fort Worth was included.”

Designed by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) with lead designer Douglass Alligood and executive architect KAI Enterprises, the 50,000-square-foot center will hold the museum itself, a theater for lectures and performances, a food hall, a business incubator for new minority-owned businesses, and a public courtyard and greenspace. l

Howard: “The South Side is [filled] with historical events and figures, many of whom are no longer reflected in our textbooks and annals.”

Courtesy Jarred Howard

The 50,000-square-foot center will hold the museum itself, a theater for lectures and performances, a food hall, a business incubator for new minority-owned businesses, and a public courtyard and greenspace.

Courtesy Bjarke Ingels Group

The Grandmother of Juneteenth, Dr. Opal Lee, helped create the National Juneteenth Museum.

Courtesy Opal Lee

Ground will be broken this year on the National Juneteenth Museum on the Historic South Side.

Courtesy Bjarke Ingels Group

The food hall will be a centerpiece of the National Juneteenth Museum.

Courtesy Bjarke Ingels Group

MUSIC

Old-Timey Tunes

Black artists from across the country converge on Fort Worth Saturday to celebrate our musical roots.

BY STEVE STEWARD

I didn’t know what the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival was until I heard about it in 2014, and I was confused as to what was jazzy about it, because the lineup included Foster the People and Arcade Fire, both of which make probably the least jazzy music I could possibly imagine. This year, “Jazz Fest”’s Biggest Font notables — listed beneath the Rolling Stones, whose font, oddly, is the same as the Biggest Fonts beneath — include The Killers and HOZIER. I bring this up because on Saturday, Southside Preservation Hall will host the fourth annual Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival, an event that puts the spotlight on the building blocks of American popular music with a lineup of Black artists. FWAAMFest showcases what Jazz Fest intended to before the arrival of Vampire Weekend, Greta Van Fleet, et al.

Instead of that noise, FWAAMFest celebrates old-timey music — early blues and jazz, bluegrass, and folk — performed by contemporary Black artists.

Produced by Decolonizing the Music Room, a nonprofit that works to center Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian voices in music education and related fields, the all-ages FWAAMFest is the only major city festival in the nation focusing on AfricanAmerican roots music.

“Black musicians have been there since the beginning of this music, yet there is little to no representation in the large music festivals that cater to these genres,” said Brandi Waller-Pace, founder and executive director of Decolonizing the Music Room. “We aim to change that.”

Waller-Pace is a musician, educator, and “scholar-activist,” a singer and multi-instrumentalist (banjo, bass, guitar, piano, and ukulele), and a veteran teacher in both Fort Worth and Lake Worth school districts. She has a master’s in jazz studies from Howard University, and she is about halfway through the music education Ph.D. program at UNT. These professional backgrounds — onstage and in the classroom — drove her in 2019 to launch an educational website that would eventually become the nonprofit Decolonizing the Music Room in 2020.

“I’m a nerd on research and training,” Waller-Pace said. “I was teaching, training, doing research, doing racial equity work with FWISD, and I started playing old-timey music in my early 30s. Those things began to converge. Through my core knowledge as a Black person in the southern United States who has a degree in jazz studies … I saw that a lot of white-washed stories made their way into American music curriculum. It got to a point where I was starting to write and share out, and a couple people suggested it might be time to put all of this in one place. And that’s how the website was born.”

Decolonizing the Music Room provides training and free educational content to music educators, endeavoring to create community programming for people of all ages to build an equitable future for music education and performance across multiple underrepresented communities. Waller-Pace wanted to hold a festival highlighting Black artists working in traditional, early-20th-century roots music traditions, as well. Due to the lockdown, the inaugural event was virtual. The concert on Saturday will be its third in-person iteration.

Her inspiration for the festival came from experiencing similar events around the country. “Part of the main mission is to introduce the Fort Worth music scene to this” music.

One gathering up north included a discussion “about inclusion rather than creating its own spaces. Both need to exist, but I am more a space-creation person. … I was like, ‘I can do that in Fort Worth.’ ”

She laughed. “And, somewhat selfishly, a lot of these artists I want to see would have to come play here.”

FWAAMFest’s 2024 lineup highlights old-timey Black roots music, but many of the artists see their sounds through contemporary lenses. The headliner is Lizzie No, a New York singer-songwriter working in the Americana genre, as well as multi-instrumentalist Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, who draws from preWWII African-American roots traditions like ragtime and blues. FWAAMFest also includes Grammy-nominated bluesman Jontavious Willis; New York Blues Hall of Famers and roots music scholars the Piedmont Blüz Duo; up-and-coming intersectional folk singer-songwriter Crys Matthews; New Orleans-bornand-bred composer Joy Clark; Dallas-based EJ Mathews, whose “backwoods funk” and “swamp blues” are the sound of growing up in

Georgia and Texas; globetrotting West Africaninfluenced guitarist Corey Harris; New Orleans-by-way-of-Athens, Georgia, “folk rock diva” Lilli Lewis; roots musician and former The Voice contestant Stephanie Ann Lewis; and the traditionalist duo Spice Cake Blues.

While all these artists are influenced by the rhythmic and melodic hallmarks of Black roots music traditions, their respective takes on country, folk, blues, and jazz are as unique as they are compelling. For casual listeners who have never done a deep dive into the forebears of their favorite musics — specifically hip-hop, jazz, pop, rap, and rock — these songwriters might not be household names, but in the world of roots music traditionalism, they are some of the biggest artists out there. Rolling Stone called Lizzie No’s 2019 single “Narcissus” a “crisp alt-rock gem,” and Lilli Lewis’ 2021 album Americana was a favorite among the critics at R.S., NPR, and OffBeat Magazine. The Piedmont Blüz Duo and Corey Harris have played all over the world, and Taj Mahal is a big fan of Jontavious Willis. In other words, the FWAAMFest is pretty stacked.

“Each year,” Waller-Pace said, “there are some blow-your-mind people that just don’t get enough recognition in general. It’s a reclamation of our own culture. There’s so much more to recreationists, and there are people who have engaged with this music and are innovating in new ways. … This is an opportunity to spread the true history of where we come from, and these artists are working their asses off for what is core historical knowledge.”

Like every nonprofit, Decolonizing the Music Room depends on donations and fundraising.

“The fundraising and financial support is always so crucial,” she said. “There is such a disparity in resources of independent giving and grants for Black-led organizations and other organizations that center minorities, and it takes all of us working together to bridge that gap.”

And as a musician and former teacher, she knows what it’s like to make a living playing music — besides funding the logistics of Decolonizing the Music Room and FWAAMFest, she stresses the importance of paying people what they’re worth.

“We don’t want to exploit our artists and educators,” she said.

To bolster its fundraising, Decolonizing the Music Room sells merch via DecolonizingtheMusicRoom.com, where you can also find educational resources about opening up music education to people of all colors and identities as well as information about the BBIA Music Education Symposium this October, a “three-day conference for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people in music education and related fields to connect through community, learn collaboratively, make music, and imagine a just future.”

In its aim to provide a space for Black artists to perform traditionally Black music, FWAAMFest offers Fort Worth culture lovers the opportunity to hear old-timey sounds performed by incredibly talented artists today. Their muses come from the lived experiences that make roots music — the heritage behind just about every popular song from the past 150 years or — so sublimely powerful and wonderful. Jazz Fest is still pretty cool, but when it comes to Black roots music, FWAAMFest is where it’s at. l

The roots of Lizzie No’s genre-hopping, Americana-influenced alt-rock go deep.

Cole Nielsen

Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival

Noon-10pm Sat at Southside Preservation Hall, 1519 Lipscomb St, FW. $20-50. 817-926-2800.

BUCK U

Teeter Totter Bubble Fodder

TCU basketball finds itself at the mercy of the selection committee after another underwhelming late-season run.

BY BUCK D. ELLIOTT

Hello darkness, my old friend. TCU basketball has grown their cache, as well as our collective expectations, tremendously since the arrival of Coach Jamie Dixon, yet as we stumble through early March and NCAA tournament selection nears, it seems like the same ol’ song and dance for TCU hoops. Can their soft non-conference schedule hold up? What credence is given to the late-season slump the Frogs often experience? Is the Big 12 really as dominant a hoops conference as everyone was led to believe at the beginning of the season? These — along with other questions — can largely not be answered by the Frogs on the court but must be asserted by the selection committee at which Frog nation is now beholden to.

The season is not completely over. By the time you read this, the purple men will have already tipped or finished their game against Oklahoma on the second day of conference tournament play in Kansas City on Wednesday. The Frogs and Sooners are seeded 8th and 9th respectively and are largely considered the last members to be selected to the big dance. Oklahoma has the better conference record by one game, but the Frogs’ head-to-head victory over the Crimson back in January gives them the slightly better seed, though it’s moot in an 8-playing-9 scenario. The winner of the scuffle receives the joy of facing top-seed and top-ranked Houston to open the tournament’s third day. The Cougars have only three losses since washing out of last year’s Sweet 16, against Kansas, Iowa State, and … TCU (by one point).

Dixon’s Frogs are likely receiving a tournament invite regardless of their outcome against Oklahoma, but a victory

on Wednesday would banish the drama from Selection Sunday. Losing four of their last six tips leading into Kansas City hasn’t helped the situation, but give credit where credit it is due: This season, along with a W against H-town, TCU has also beat conference heavies Tech and Baylor. The purple hoopers also swept bottom-dwelling West Virginia but are haunted by close home losses to Cincinnati and UCF, who are chillin’ with the Cowboys and Mountaineers in the Big 12 basement.

As the season closes, this year matches Dixon’s two best conference records and will finish .500 (9-9) in the Big 12 for the third overall time this year, a record that’s classically plenty for tournament selection and is likely the case again. Almost every bracketology prognosticator forecasts the Frogs among the field of 68 and to be the last conference

squad invited. At the risk of sounding repetitive, the sinking Frog lily pad is partially because they don’t roster a big man who can place the team squarely on his comically large back when field shooting is cold. The lack of an imposing inside presence via non-shooting forwards or centers has relegated a traditionally good defensive team to tied for 165th nationally in scoring defense, though their high-scoring conference can be partially blamed. Blocks are also nothing to brag about at 112th in the country.

Frog scoring hasn’t been a problem from the field, and their effective FG percentage is adequate at 96th in the country. Dixon’s dribblers have staked their reputation and success on the transition game and dunk on their competition as the overall leader in fastbreak points. Consequently, that also leaves TCU vulnerable to teams who cover the court well on defense and force the opposition into a slower game with fewer freestyle opportunities. The local boys are most comfortable running and gunning in full-court situations, which also tends to lead to lower overall possession time and opportunities for very high-scoring games (which reads like a nod to their football counterparts this season).

Feeding into their style, the Frogs are 18th in steals this season — one of their only encouraging defensive stats — and make hay with their transition opportunities. The question is: Is TCU capable of a multifaceted style within the inevitable ebbs and flows to outlast the notoriously unforgiving tournament? Every team starts their season with the goal of cutting down the final net and wearing it on their heads as the blasphemous Christs of the hardwood, but realistically, the Frogs are looking to quench their sweet tooth by advancing to the round of 16, which has eluded our local college for the last 56 years.

This week serves as a preview — any team TCU faces in the conference tourney represents a dancing squad and an indication if Dixon’s eighth iteration possesses the energy and expertise to assert what they’re good at while minimizing and concealing where they struggle. Opposing game plans will surely center on an agonizingly slow pace, forcing the Frogs to make the absolute most of their offensive possessions and creating a tempo that is anything but fun to watch.

The purple men have failed to eclipse 80 points in 16 of their 31 games this season and have lost nine of them. In contrast, they have lost only twice in the 15 tips where they have exceeded fourscore. Pace matters for this group. They want to fly and avoid the grind. In the past, Syracuse, Gonzaga, and Arizona have represented Frog Kryptonite: With offensively and defensively talented big men, these squads are filthy in the paint, they grind tempos down, and they have sent the Frogs packing.

Those are the greatest considerations and threats when our local ballers are assigned their first-round opponent on Sunday. TCU may not possess the firepower to raise the final nets this year, but surviving until the third round would be the greatest success that any purple-loving Boomer or young’un has adjacently experienced from Frog hoops in their lifetime. l

Frog hoops has matched their best conference record in the Jamie Dixon era and enjoyed high-profile wins despite a lateseason conference slump.

Courtesy TCU Athletics

THE DOCK BOOKSHOP

Since 2008, the owners of this Eastside oasis have weathered economic adversity, a pandemic, book bans, and racism.

BY LAURIE JAMES

Black History Month

The conservative argument against Black history is racist. Don’t be fooled. Learning about the past is the best way to not repeat it, and for the average Black American, discovering the horrors of slavery won’t make her feel like a victim. It will empower her to take hold of her future and say,

“Never again.” Banning books is just a different kind of slavery. It’s all up to us. If Black Americans and their allies know the truth, if they know recorded history, then maybe they won’t fall for the Anti-Black Power Structure’s systemic, heavily mediatized b.s.

Fighting this asymmetrical war is The Dock Bookshop’s mission, and by

merely existing and selling the kinds of titles that Anti-Black, Anti-Woman, Anti-LGBTQ America wants to hide, the 16-year-old Eastside institution offers some hope to sane North Texans. You can read more about The Dock on pg. 4, and when you’re done with that nice piece, our month-long celebration of Black History Month continues with a review of the new

During Jamaica’s civil war, the reggae superstar didn’t choose sides. He let his music do the talking, and what his music said was, “Equality, Justice, and Peace,” three things that the frightened Anti-Black Power Structure in the United States today continually tries to destroy. — Anthony Mariani

Bob Marley biopic on pg. 13.

The Dock Bookshop

Since 2008, the owners of this Eastside oasis have weathered economic adversity, a pandemic, book bans, and racism.

BY LAURIE JAMES

One of the largest Black-owned bookstores in the entire Southwest, The Dock Bookshop has been celebrating Black History Month every business day for 16 years. Since opening in an unassuming space in a Meadowbrook strip mall on the East Side in 2008, sisters Donna and Donya Craddock have created a hub for Black culture, life, and literature throughout North Texas. Although the last decade and a half haven’t been without challenges, the siblings have succeeded. Their latest victory?

Prime Time himself, NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders, has chosen The Dock as the location of one of his few North Texas stops during his current book tour.

Older sibling Donna says The Dock is a labor of love. “It’s not something you get into for a lucrative business. We fill a particular niche. We lift up African-American voices, and so a lot of literature is in that lane, but we embrace all voices.”

On the day I caught up with the Craddocks, they were beginning to wind down programming for Black History Month while getting ready for Women’s History Month or, as they call it, Women’s Herstory Month. As part of the bookstore’s

mission, it’s a great space for events other than book signings, including community meetings and performance art. Every Tuesday, Dock Open Mic Nights showcase poetry, spoken word, music, and comedy, allowing “local artists to share their gifts,” Donna said.

Many national figures have visited, most recently Actor/politician Hill Harper, who was at the bookstore to promote his book The Conversation, about how men and women can build loving, trusting relationships. The Dock’s March lineup features Beto O’Rourke and his tome We’ve Got to Try on March 10, and March 16 is when Prime Time stops by, reading from, signing copies of, and selling his title Elevate and Dominate.

Sanders is “a dynamic personality and a great motivator,” Donya said.

When asked how a small retailer in a quiet suburban neighborhood pulled a heavy hitter like Neon Deion, who could easily command a staggering appearance fee, Donya said that many small bookstores across the country are the beneficiaries of celebrities pushing local. “People are becoming intentional about supporting local businesses.”

To RSVP with a purchase of Elevate and Dominate, visit TheDockBookshop.com.

Along with the open-mic and evening with Sanders, other upcoming engaging nights at The Dock will start with what Donna calls “HerStories: A Celebration of Women’s Herstory Month and International Women’s Day.” The Craddocks are also planning a Sister Sunday event –– more information will be available soon on the bookstore’s website.

Only about 20% of all businesses nationwide are owned by women, and of the approximately 300 independently owned bookstores across the country, less than 5% are owned by Black people. While The Dock has earned national accolades, nothing has been easy for this two-woman operation. Being unique has helped. The tragic murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Aubery around the time of the pandemic galvanized the general population, many of whom probably did not know there was a Black-owned bookstore in their midst.

“The murder of George Floyd on TV — the public was just traumatized,” Donna said. “It caused some people to want to learn more and engage more and stop the violence against Black people.”

She added that white people came in to show support, to help, and to better understand what was happening and how they could effect positive change.

Another push came from celebrities recommending shopping local, like Martha Stewart.

The famous homemaker’s team, Donna said, “came out and said if you really want to understand and want to connect, start with locally owned Black bookstores in your community.”

The Dock appeared on one of Stewart’s lists of “good things” in 2020.

continued on page 5

Since opening The Dock Bookshop in 2008, sisters Donya Craddock (left) and Donna Craddock have seen lots of cultural shifts up close.

Laurie James

During the pandemic, people of all colors and creeds visited The Dock for critical information.

Laurie James

The Craddocks made news when they opened The Dock Bookshop nearly 16 years ago.

The Dock Bookshop via Facebook

Feature

The post-COVID, post-Donald Trump years have been marked by a rise in censorship that feels unprecedented, and The Dock has both seen and felt the weight of this over the last two years. Donna said that while the American Booksellers Association celebrates Banned Books Month in October, she and her sister have become aware of a larger issue that isn’t confined to a single month.

“People don’t want to deal with the history,” she said. “We have customers coming in asking about banned books, and we point to the whole store and say, ‘Pretty much all of them.’ ”

The creep of nationalistic, conservative-led anti-anti-racism into public schools has actually changed some textbooks. Donya calls this a “manipulation of language,” adding that “it’s a mass rewording of culture and watering down of history.”

Donna adds that a robust collection of reading material of all kinds is “more about representation for everyone — it’s not about you necessarily, whether you like what the book says or not.”

“That’s why we need the independent booksellers,” Donya added.

When I asked the women to pick their favorite titles right now, they both laughed. The Dock is a dream for any bookworm, with rows and rows of well-organized, seemingly endless selections for almost every reading taste. How could anyone choose? Donya said she’s more interested in Black dystopian

fiction, while Donna favors historical fiction and their extensive children’s section.

Another reason this woman-owned bookstore is crucial (not just during Women’s History Month) is that historically, women writers’ voices have not been heard, whether they’re Black, white, brown,

red, yellow, alive, or dead. Even in the notso-distant past, female authors used their initials or male-sounding pseudonyms to publish under, but from Donna Craddock’s perspective, that hasn’t been the case for a while.

“Women authors are on a roll,” she said. “I’m excited about where we’ve come from.”

During March, The Dock has added an appearance by Michelle Stimpson, whose latest book, Sister Greens, is about more than cooking.

“It’s a new day and a new age for Black authors,” Donna said, “even if they’re on the banned books list.”

After a busy February and March, the Craddocks are looking forward to celebrating the bookstore’s 16th birthday in May. They’re also recruiting sponsors to launch the third annual Trinity River Book Festival in September. The event kicks off with a Run to Read in Trinity Park.

Donya, newly returned from a conference for Reading the West, a program of The Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, is also relishing the opportunity to feature local and regional authors. She said The Dock “caters to the local rodeo scene with Western literature,” which has its own section near the front of the store.

“It’s about putting Texas on the forefront,” she said. “It takes us being in this space to tell the East Coast and West Coast not to leave us out. It’s about carving out our place in the literary world.” l

continued from page 4

The Craddocks are leading the literacy parade with the Trinity River Book Festival.

The Dock Bookshop via Facebook

Located in an Eastside strip mall, The Dock Bookshop is a hub for Black culture and life.

The Dock Bookshop via Facebook

Dock co-owner Donna Craddock loves that kids of all colors, shapes, and abilities can find a book about someone like them at her store.

As Dock co-owner Donya Craddock’s favorite genre, Black dystopian fiction has a place at her bookstore.

Next month, it’s Prime Time at The Dock Bookshop.

Laurie James Laurie James

The Dock Bookshop via Facebook

SCREEN

Catch a Fire

The musical biography

One Love oversimplifies the life of reggae legend Bob Marley.

BY KRISTIAN LIN

Biographical films have grown wiser to the trap of presenting their subjects as saints who succeed because they’re touched by the divine. Even some Christian movies — not all but definitely some — have received the word that reckoning with their real-life subjects as flawed human beings is a better way of conveying their message, not to mention making for better entertainment. These days, a movie about a real person must at least pay lip service to that person’s imperfections. Unfortunately, lip service is about all that Bob Marley: One Love gives us, when it could have offered us so much more.

The film concentrates on a three-year span of Marley’s life, starting in 1976, when Bob (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is already rich and famous and planning on a concert in Jamaica that will unify a country on the brink of civil war. Some gunmen who aren’t prioritizing unity descend on his estate outside Kingston and shoot him, his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch), and his manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh).

Ben-Adir is a British actor who portrayed Malcolm X in One Night in Miami and one of the Kens in Barbie, which gives you an idea of his range. This is the first film

that truly showcases him, and he seizes the opportunity. It’s a relatively simple matter to imitate Marley’s Jamaican accent and his rapturous dance moves onstage when he was in the music’s spell. Ben-Adir does more than that, especially in a scene when he’s creating “Exodus,” and you can see him listening to the sounds his backing musicians are making while singing a vocal line to fit what they’re doing. He also contributes a rare bit of humor, when he and his friends are arrested in London for walking while Black, and he tells the bobbies, “All the ganja is mine.”

I should note that Ben-Adir does not do the singing. Marley’s songs here have been re-recorded by his son, Stephen Marley, though Lynch is actually singing Rita Marley’s backing vocals.

Sitting in an auditorium with Marley’s hit songs coming through the speakers for 104 minutes can’t be a bad thing, and the film does conjure a truly remarkable scene late when Bob returns to his Jamaica home,

fingers the bullet holes in the wall, and is surprised to see the man who shot him (Micheal Ward) standing in his living room again, this time begging for forgiveness. In a flashback, young Rita (Nia Ashi) introduces teenage Bob to Rastafarianism, and the movie goes over the barest-bones precepts for the audience members who think it’s all just dreadlocks and marijuana, so there’s that.

Rita does bitterly allude to the children Bob has had with other women, and we do see Bob savagely assault Don over his supposed skimming of the fees from Bob’s planned Africa tour, but these feel weirdly out of the flow of the movie, stuck in there for form’s sake or maybe left over from a much longer film that has been cut down. Bob Marley was hardly the only messenger of peace and love who struggled to put that into practice in his life, but some of Rita Marley’s memoirs make for chilling reading. Director/co-writer Reinaldo Marcus Green (who’s turning into a biopic guy with Joe Bell and King Richard) doesn’t grapple

with the contradictions of the man whose music was so powerfully positive and who could be a terror to be around.

Marley’s family is intimately involved with the production of this film. That does hamstring the storytelling, but it doesn’t explain why the movie gives us so little sense of Marley’s place in the evolution of reggae from ska and rocksteady or how he managed his career to attain stardom or how his religious beliefs interfered with the treatment of the cancer that took his life. We’re left with Marley as some messianic figure who briefly alights on this earth. It’s credible as long as the music is playing or Ben-Adir is delivering Marley’s words about engendering peace. Too bad the rest of the film couldn’t achieve the same power. l

Bob Marley: One Love

Starring Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch.

Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green. Written by Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, Zach Baylin, and Reinaldo Marcus Green. Rated PG-13.

Kingsley Ben-Adir portrays a reggae giant in thrall to his music in Bob Marley: One Love.

Courtesy Paramount Pictures

In honor of Black History Month, this week’s column is about soul food and other delicious offerings from several Blackowned businesses we are proud of here in North Texas.

1.) Soulfood Sundays are so popular at Smoke-A-Holics BBQ (1417 Evans Av, Fort Worth, 817-386-5658) that it’s walk-in only. On other days, you can order online, but on these special Sundays, you’ll need to go in person for the brisket, ribs, sausage, smoked oxtails or meatloaf, smothered chicken, turkey and dressing, pork chops, and all those sides 11am-2pm. For future event dates for this or Turkey Leg Tuesdays, follow Facebook.com/Smoke1TX.

2.) Black Coffee (1417 Vaughn Blvd, Fort Worth, 817-782-9867) and Carpenter’s Cafe & Catering (1116 Pennsylvania Av, Fort Worth, 682-499-8630) often partner on community events, and they will again in March when it’s time for the annual Watch Women Werk celebration. Read more about that in our inaugural Women’s Issue Wed, Mar 6. Meanwhile, if you need to be caffeinated or fed, you know what to do!

3.) Club Ritzy (1201 Oakland Blvd, Fort Worth, 817-888-3360), “the new upscale home for grown folks’ entertainment,” is hosting a ladies’ night with party band the Distinguished Gentlemen 8pm-2am Fri. As of press time, I’m still not sure what the individual cover charge is, but you can reserve tables online starting at $50. You are encouraged to wear sophisticated black and yellow attire for this special event. Have dinner while you’re there. The kitchen serves appetizers and wings, plus catfish, chicken tenders, pork chops, and shrimp. For all the dining choices, go to ClubRitzy.com/ Food-menu.

4.) For a sit-down soul food experience, visit Drew’s Place (5701 Curzon Av, 817-2424454) 11am-3pm Tue-Sat. Since it opened in 1987, Drew’s has been a favorite with our audience and, therefore, the readers’ choice winner for best soul food more than once.

5.) The home-style favorites at Rosako’s Soul Food & BBQ (2816 Brown Tr, Bedford, 817-785-3393) caught our eye during Best Of 2016, and this best soul food winner is still continued on page 12

The ladies at Black Coffee and Carpenter’s partner on many community events.

Courtesy Mia Moss and Katrina Rischer-Carpenter

Courtesy Ministers of Smoke

ATE DAY8 a week

continued from page 8

going strong. After enjoying the black-eyed pea salad, fried green tomatoes, and mac ’n’ cheese, be sure and leave room for some house-made banana pudding, sometimes whipped up with chessmen cookies instead of vanilla wafers.

6.) Madea’s Down Home Cooking (1019 W Enon Av, Ste D, Everman, 817-551-9295) won our readers’ choice for best soul food recently, and for good reason. The cornbread is deep-fried, and it gets better and better from there. Along with specialties like oxtail, you can also order amazing chicken-fried steak. While you can dine in if you like, the food is ordered cafeteria style and brought to you in to-go containers. Either way, dig in!

7.) Having survived post-pandemic supply-chain issues and some severe storm

damage, MaMa E’s (818 E Rosedale St, Fort Worth, 817-877-3322) is still serving some of the best soul food around plus that famous “red drink.” Ribs, links, turkey legs, and chopped or sliced beef are served with red beans and other traditional sides. For dessert, enjoy fresh-baked cakes, cobblers, and sweet potato pies.

8.) Speaking of soul food, the 1997 film of the same name is available to stream on Hulu right now. Widely acclaimed for presenting a more positive image of Blacks than was typically seen in movies at the time, Soul Food brought soulful Southern cooking into view for everyone else. The soundtrack is heavy on Babyface, who also makes a cameo, and may have you feeling nostalgic for ’90s R&B. The food served at the Sunday supper makes me wish that Smell-O-Vision was real and also inspires me to check out the businesses listed above.

By Jennifer Bovee

The dining scenes in Soul Food may have you longing for Sunday supper.

Courtesy 20th Century Fox

The Distinguished Gentlemen perform at Club Ritzy Friday.

Courtesy Club Ritzy

STAGE

Driving While Black

Fort Worth Opera’s dwb is a poignant exploration of a mother’s fear and love.

BY REESE PIERCE

The automobile has been an iconic symbol of freedom, accomplishment, wealth, comfort, and status in America since the late 19th century. Though slow-moving like most new technologies, car ownership was commonplace by the first quarter of the 20th century, but this guarantee of mobility, like the promise of freedom, wasn’t equitable for everyone. This vision of a new future was stalled for the disenfranchised Black population, and this historic American emblem didn’t mean the same thing across class and racial boundaries. For evidence, look no further than the 1936 publication of The Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide to safe travel for Black Americans.

From a metaphor for freedom to an anxiety of the open road, this duality of experience lies at the heart of dwb (Driving While Black), a one-act opera starring Soprano Marsha Thompson (Mother), Cremaine Booker (Cellist), and David Verin (Percussionist) with music by Susan Kander and libretto by Roberta Gumbel. First debuting in Kansas in 2019, this moving piece hampered by the lockdown is finding new life as it makes its regional debut thanks to the Fort Worth Opera. Set in the present day, the story focuses on the existential crisis of a Black mother as her son approaches age 16.

Facing the effects of racism and the history behind the policing of Black bodies in the United States, Mother delivers a montage of vignettes following the developmental stages of her son from birth to driving age.

At TCU’s Van Cliburn Concert Hall, Director Ayvaunn Penn offered the perfect backdrop for Mother’s dread. The stage, though minimally appointed, subtly displayed the ensuing narrative journey. A series of six full body-length mirrors with accompanying chairs faced the audience in a semicircle. Below each lay a pair of shoes that evolved in size as the semicircle moved from stage right to left, suggesting the progression of age from newborn to young man. This sparse staging fully focused attention on Thompson as she freely moved through the vignettes with a fluidity that verged on stream of consciousness at times. It was in this space that Mother explored both her fears and her joys. She moved from chair

to chair in each stage of her son’s life as her fears and apprehension grew.

The cast, like the set, is minimal. The music provided by cellist and sometimes actor Booker and percussionist Verin played a large role in defining the emotions of the piece. At times frantic and dissonant while at other times slow and melancholy, the music worked in lockstep with Thompson to evoke Mother’s internal conflict. The soprano effortlessly commanded the stage as she vacillated between sorrow and amusement in her multitude of roles, playing not only the woman at the center of the drama but also different voices (both male and female) announcing headlines that thematically linked her worries to real-world events.

In one scene, she voiced a young man, new to town, who became a victim of mistaken identity. He overheard the police who were “deaf to [his] utterances of innocence” as they deliberated whether to take him “down to the creek where no one can hear.” Detained, loaded into a paddy wagon, and released in an unfamiliar neighborhood, he eventually arrived home, shaken and terrified. Booker’s foreboding pizzicato punctuated this scene as

the young man’s emotions crescendoed until he was told he was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

If you’re thinking this might be more akin to a one-act musical, make no mistake. This is a full-on opera, and it doesn’t veer from the traditional format other than eschewing the Italian ladies in large wigs for a relevant dive into a Black mother’s hopes and fears in contemporary society. The production is fully committed to the genre, but the added layer of racial tension brings the story into a timely light.

At heart, dwb is still a tragedy. Social injustice drives the production’s emotional heft with the repeated refrain: “You are not who they see,” a constant reminder to her son that his race precedes him as he enters the world. Mother also evokes Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech and the reminder of unfulfilled dreams and promise as she wonders, “How can I set you on a path in this world that doesn’t live up to its promises or dreams?”

Equally heartbreaking and enlightening, dwb drills down on a crisis that plagues far too many parents. l

As the Black mother of a Black boy of driving age, Soprano Marsha Thompson moved from chair to chair in each stage of his life as her fears and apprehension grew.

Freddie Watkins

dwb (Driving While Black) Sat at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd, FW. $55. FWOpera.org.

Saturday

I heart Erykah Badu . So much so that I intend to drag my Arlington ass to Big D on Saturday for the rare treat of seeing her perform in her hometown at her annual birthday show at The Factory in Deep Ellum (2713 Canton St, Dallas, 214-749-5757). This all-ages concert kicks off at 8pm with doors at 7pm. Tickets start at $65 at AXS.com.

25

Sunday

This weekend marks the final performances of Exit, Pursued by a Bear at Theatre Wesleyan (1205 Binkley St, Fort Worth, 817-531-4211) with Ashley H. White, Circle Theatre artistic director, as guest director 7:30pm Thu-Sat or 2pm today. In this dark revenge comedy, Nan decides to teach her abusive husband a lesson. She and her dancer friend tape Kyle to a chair and reenact past painful scenes for him. In the hopes that a bear will maul him, the friends plan to cover Kyle in meat and honey. Tickets are $5-10 at TXWes.edu/TheatreTickets.

26

Monday

NIGHT & DAY

22

Thursday

Now thru Sun, Mar 3, Jubilee Theatre (506 Main St, Fort Worth, 817338-4411) presents Bread ’n’ Gravy: The Songs and Life of Ethel Waters . As one of the first Black women to have a successful career on Broadway and in film, Waters is considered a trailblazer. Crystal Williams will play the title role 7:30pm Thu, 8pm Fri-Sat, and 3pm SatSun. Tickets are $40 at JubileeTheatre.org.

One Love is more than just the name of the new biopic about Bob Marley. It is also the name of a Caribbean bar and grill at 2315 S Cooper St in Arlington (682-323-4950). Sing along and dance with DJ Elf 8pm-11:45pm at Hooked on Karaoke every Friday. Food and drink prices start at $5, plus parking and admission are free. Before or after, check out Jamaica Gates Caribbean Cuisine (1020 W Arkansas Ln, 817-795-2600), which sits just across the intersection.

Friday

The latest Monday night event at The Cicada (1002 S Main St, Fort Worth, @ the_cicada_ftw) started last week and will continue for the foreseeable future. What is it? It’s Van Damme Mondays ! Every Monday, The Cicada will screen a different Jean Claude Van Damme flick, and domestic beers and well drinks will be $3. The bar is open 2pm to 2am. While owner Tyler does love a “good flying roundhouse kick and split,” she asks that you not attempt any sweetly devastating moves on your bartender.

27

Tuesday

At 7pm, Meow Wolf: The Real Unreal (3000 Grapevine Mills Pkwy, Ste 253, Grapevine, 866-6369969) hosts an Artist Talk in celebration of Black History Month with two of the immersive installation’s visual collaborators, Brook Chaney and Kwinton Gray. While this is a free community event, a donation of $10 at the door would be appreciated. The Meow Wolf Foundation will match all proceeds in support of the Black-centric Kinfolk House art space in Fort Worth and its Emerging Artist Grant.

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Wednesday

The second annual Fort Worth Music Festival starts today. This multiday concert and conference will take place in the Stockyards at Tannahill’s Tavern & Music Hall (122 E Exchange Av, Fort Worth, 817-900-9300). Along with networking opportunities for aspiring artists, agents, managers, and promoters of Texas-based music, there are a lot of great performances scheduled from the likes of Abraham Alexander and so many more. For the full story, pick up our Wed, Feb 28 edition. Tickets start at $39.50 at FortWorthMusicFestival.com.

By Jennifer Bovee

Crystal Williams brings legendary Black star Ethel Waters to life at Jubilee Theatre thru Sun, Mar 3.

Courtesy Jubilee Theatre

Erykah Badu’s annual birthday show is Saturday in Deep Ellum.

Courtesy Erykah Badu

Exit, Pursued by a Bear wraps up this weekend at Theatre Wesleyan.

Courtesy Theatre Wesleyan

Local R&B sensation Abraham Alexander is among the headliners of next weekend’s Fort Worth Music Festival in the Stockyards.

Rambo Elliot

SCREEN

Bad Patterns

Comic spy thriller Argylle writes itself into a corner.

BY KRISTIAN LIN

A certain subsection of Taylor Swift fans spent this past January advancing the theory that she had written the script for Argylle. There’s some reason to think this — Apple Films drummed up publicity for the movie this past fall by publishing a real novel under the name of its main character, Elly Conway, and created some fake social media profiles for her. When the trailer went public, fans noted the resemblance between the short red hairdo on Elly (Bryce Dallas Howard) and the wig that Swift wore in her “All Too Well” video. Swift does have a (pretty funny) history of working under pseudonyms, and she resembles Elly in being a devoted cat owner.

All this was enough for some people, but I never believed it, just as I never believed the NFL rigged the Super Bowl for Swift, or that she was secretly gay, or that Paul McCartney has been dead for 50 years, or that Stevie Wonder has been able to see this whole time. If I do find out that I’m wrong and she wrote this, I’ll be very disappointed, because this comic spy thriller is tedious and a lot less clever than it thinks it is.

Elly lives quietly with her cat in a cabin in Colorado where she writes a successful

series of spy novels about the dashing Agent Argylle (Henry Cavill), who repeatedly saves the world from mad scientists and nefarious billionaires. While she’s traveling by train to visit her mother (Catherine O’Hara), a stranger named Aiden Wilde (Sam Rockwell) comes up to her dressed like a homeless man, identifies himself as a spy, and proves it by killing an autograph seeker along with a bunch of other armed people on the train who are evidently after her. The first sign that all isn’t as it seems is during the fight, when Elly keeps hallucinating Argylle doing the fighting instead of Aidan. The film starts promisingly enough, with Aidan pulling a terrified Elly through the streets of London to a villa in the south of France while she demands to know why they’re being shot at. The problem is that director Matthew Vaughn and actual screenwriter Jason Fuchs — he also portrays the moderator at one of Elly’s book signings

— are too much in love with their plot revelations. Elly’s entire life turns out to be a lie, a plot devised by the former CIA director (Bryan Cranston) who’s employing one or more of her allies and may be a pawn himself. Argylle also continues to appear to Elly to give her advice on how to get out of her jam. A spy named Keira (Ariana DeBose) is a character in Elly’s novels but then turns up in her real life as well. Then comes the point when Aidan, without warning, throws a punch at Elly’s face, and she’s more surprised than anyone when she sidesteps the blow and judo-flips him over her shoulder.

Some fans are touting this as a new meta way of telling a story, yet I kept feeling touches derivative of better spy movies before this. Vaughn has shown the abilities to be darkly funny and orchestrate an action sequence, but here the mix is entirely off. The comedy intrudes when the movie needs gravity, and the movie takes itself

too seriously when it needs to be funny. The climax just piles set piece on top of set piece, and while some of them might have had an impact in a more judicious movie, they add up to too much of the same thing here. The supporting cast is stacked — John Cena as Argylle’s tech guy, Dua Lipa as a femme fatale, Samuel L. Jackson and Sofia Boutella as people who know Argylle’s real identity — but the movie makes poor use of all this star power. Even the great Rockwell is off his game, which is how you know it’s all gone very wrong. On paper, this film probably looked like a blast of thrills and meta comedy, but on the screen, it fails comprehensively on every score. l

This cat is as well-developed a character as any in the spy comedy Argylle.

Courtesy Universal Pictures and Apple Original Films

DELIGHTFUL ‘DETAILS’

At Zona 7 gallery downtown, photographer Dontrius Williams

proves little things matter.

BY JUAN R. GOVEA

NIGHT & DAY

Fort Worth Opera’s dwb (Driving While Black) tops this week’s things to do.

BY JENNIFER BOVEE

EATS & DRINKS

Pakistani and Texas flavors shake hands at Sabar BBQ.

BY CODY NEATHERY

SCREEN

True Detective: Night Country looks to retcon S1 — rejoice or cringe?

BY REESE PIERCE

MUSIC

Young, fast, loud, and positive, Toxic Madness glows.

BY JUAN R. GOVEA

ART

Delightful ‘Details’

At Zona 7 gallery downtown, photographer Dontrius Williams proves little things matter.

BY JUAN R. GOVEA

Photographer Dontrius Williams felt like he had to pick a lane about 10 years ago, so he “went straight to film. To me, digital images lie flat, but it’s the look with film. It’s the grain and contrast I like, and that’s when I started photographing with purpose.”

Some recent results of his “purpose” are on display now through February 29 at Zona 7 in Sundance Square. Williams’ third solo show, Details collects more than 30 of his candids and portraits. While some document different parts of the country, a majority revolve around Sundance Square, where he is an artist in residence. Search the Instagram hashtag #details or visit @willid420 for more. Whether on a tiny screen or irl, Details is powerful yet also welcoming.

Every photo is in black and white and has been shot with Kodak or Ilford 35mm film on a medium-format camera. For his street work, Williams goes for his Leica M2, and for the studio, he picks up his Mamiya 7 II. The prices on his Details pieces range from a few hundred dollars to the thousands.

Originally from North Carolina, Williams lived in Katy and Corpus Christi before making Fort Worth his home in 2011. He’s been a full-time photographer since he picked his lane, and now, at 37, he’s in the groove. l

Details by Dontrius Williams

Now thru Feb 29 at Zona 7, 404 Houston St, FW. Free. 817-222-1111.

Williams loves details, hence the name of his show. At the Brooklyn Artists Ball at the Brooklyn Museum last year, one attendee jumped out at him. “I spotted this woman holding a handbag with ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful’ on it in neon blue lighting. I couldn’t have dreamt of seeing this scene, and, really, that’s what I love about street photography. I quickly shot from the hip and was blessed by the photo gods with the framing of her being surrounded by all the women and their high heels. The small details are what I enjoy the most about this image.”

Some of Williams’ favorite pieces come from his work in urban street culture with a focus on Black beauty. “Key” is a portrait of one of his friends, a powerful Black woman with an Afro.

Williams said “Cowboys of Color” was particularly important to him. “This was my first time attending the rodeo, and being able to see a performance by the Black cowboy crew, Circle L Five, was a highlight on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day.”

Dontrius Williams

Dontrius Williams

Dontrius Williams

Williams: “I pay attention to small details while out on the street taking photos.”

Juan R. Govea

Pregnant With Death

Will exposing a local atrocity improve race relations in a tiny Texas town or make them worse?

BY E.R. BILLS

At approximately 3 a.m. Sat., July 20, 1895, a terrifying explosion occurred two miles southeast of Mart, Texas, 20 miles east of Waco and barely across the Falls County line. The sound was heard from 10 miles away, and the people of Mart dressed quickly and went out into the night to determine the origin of the blast.

Emmett and Prince Elliott and J.C. Douglass saw smoke and flames in the distance. They were reportedly the first to arrive at the scene of the carnage and could scarcely believe their eyes. The debris radius was lit by human candles — human corpses on fire.

What had been a familiar house owned by a respected Black family was now a smoldering crater. A partially denuded Black woman was walking around with a baby cradled in her arms. A young Black male

hired-hand was leaning against the remains of a structure, bloody and inarticulate. The bodies of Mary “Fanny” Phillips, her three sons — Tom, Absalom Jr., and William — and Hannah Williams, her granddaughter, were scattered across the area wrapped in flames that emitted an unspeakably grotesque light. Fanny’s body was knotted up in her bedsprings, her knees touching her chin, her entire figure “baked and shrunken.”

incident — or series of incidents — was so old and buried, it might as well have never happened.

Texas is funny like that.

In 2017, I tried unsuccessfully to pinpoint the exact location of the former Phillips place but had no luck. Then I stopped by the Nancy Nail Memorial Library in Mart and spoke with a white librarian and a white patron who had lived in the town for decades. I explained to them what I was looking for, and they seemed surprised. They said they had never heard of the explosion. In fact, they wanted copies of what I had so they could start a folder on it in the library. I obliged them, and the librarian gave me the name of the oldest living Black citizen in the community and said I should contact her. I did, but she was also entirely unfamiliar with the incident. She’d never heard anyone — Black or white — ever mention it.

Fanny’s brother, Ben Harrison, was found several hundred feet away, blinded, maimed, half-naked, and “incoherently muttering.”

Fanny, Tom, Absalom Jr., William Phillips, and little Hannah Williams were “Blown to Eternity” by a significant quantity of dynamite, and their white neighbors in Mart were shocked.

During a break in my writing schedule in 2017, I decided to pursue a story that had bothered me for a couple of years. It involved the abovementioned act of terror in Central Texas, but it was based on secondary and tertiary sources and seemed to have vanished from local histories. In my wheelhouse, for sure.

But just because you go looking doesn’t mean you’ll find anything. It was a fishing expedition, but I didn’t get a single bite. The

It was one thing to go into a community and remind them of something that had happened because they had denied it happened or covered it up. This was obviously different because Mart didn’t have a reputation like Palestine or Slocum or even the nearby McLennan County seat, Waco, where two Blacks had been burned at the stake, one in front of a cheering white crowd of thousands (while the mayor and police chief watched on) and chronicled in photographs that became popular lynching postcards.

Mart seemed like a nice town, and I was confronted with a small community that wasn’t actively engaged in conspicuous obfuscation. Would exposing a local atrocity improve race relations or make them worse? They seemed fairly good already. Would writing about this incident foster a kumbaya moment or create racial resentment where there seemed very little to speak of?

I decided then, if nothing else, I would err on the side of the truth — so far as it could be known.

As it turned out, the origin of the July 20, 1895, blast stemmed from an incident three months prior, on April 17. Here is a published account dated April 18, 1895, in the “Budget of News from Waco” section appearing in the Fort Worth Daily Gazette the following day.

Further particulars and details of the tragedy near Mart yesterday evening have been received and show it to have been a most fatal one. Two men are dying and the third is fatally wounded. Phil, George and Ned Arnold, brothers, are young farmers living at and near the tragedy. It seems that Ned Arnold recently brought to the neighborhood several young negroes from Arkansas for farm work. At present he had no work for them and he had told his brother Phil that he might secure the negroes to work for him. One young negro of the party had become a friend of Abe Phillips, a negro farmer of the community, and the latter sought to prevent the lad from going to work for Phil Arnold. After several ineffectual attempts to secure his

continued on page 5

These overhead depictions show how enormous the blast was.

Courtesy Galveston Daily News archives

This is near where the old Phillips house once stood.

E.R. Bills

services, Phil and George Arnold and Watts Vaughn at noon yesterday went to Phillips’ house to induce the negro to work.

They were unsuccessful and as they were leaving, Phillips followed them. When about 600 yards from his house he was heard to say: ‘G—D yes, and I’ll shoot you.’ He immediately opened fire on Phil Arnold with a revolver and had fired two shots without effect when Arnold brought his revolver into play and fired four times, putting as many bullets in the negro’s body, one through the stomach and three in the head.

When Phillips opened fire, Richard Bragg, a negro, in front of whose house the shooting occurred, began firing at Ned Arnold. The latter returned the fire and Bragg was shot in the wrist and through the bowels. His wound is fatal.

A few moments after Phil Arnold had shot Phillips, the latter’s son, Wes Phillips, a boy of 17 or 18 years of age, [quietly] walked up and emptied the contents of a double-barreled shotgun into Phil Arnold’s back, killing him almost instantly.

The negro lad made his escape and he immediately sought the officers of [Falls County] to give himself up, fearing lynching at the hands of Arnold’s

friends. He reached Reisel last night and was turned over to the sheriff of Falls County and jailed at Marlin.

The community in the neighborhood of the tragedy is greatly excited and deplores the affair.

The Arnolds are said to be highly respected and peaceable young men, while the negro Phillips, who was killed, has always been considered a troublesome character.

Virgil Gillespie, a young farmer and neighbor of the Arnolds, arrived in [Waco] this morning to purchase burial clothes for the body of Arnold and told the story of the tragedy to the reporter.

It was the longest report I could find on the incident. The Galveston Daily News account, also from April 19, provided one more salient detail: “The trouble resulted from a bound boy who ran away from Arnold.”

“Bound boy.”

Not a term I was familiar with, so I looked it up.

Obviously archaic, “bound boy” referred to someone who was often sent or taken from an orphanage to become an “indentured servant.” This would primarily refer to a white child, not a Black slave or, arguably, even a recent descendant of slaves so soon after Reconstruction in Arkansas, Texas, or any other area in the former pro-slavery South. Slavery-like conditions still existed. Did Phil Arnold bring “bound” Black boys (or men) from Arkansas to work for him? Did Abe Phillips unintentionally or intentionally attempt to nullify this illicit and possible criminal agreement? Or did one of the Blacks Arnold brought down from Arkansas simply decide he no longer wanted to work for him? Texas wasn’t a “right to work” state back then, any more than it is now, but it was much worse for Blacks. That’s why so many migrated north.

Whatever transpired to deliver three “bound” young Black men to the Mart area, Abe Phillips apparently intentionally or unintentionally complicated the agreed-upon — or forced-upon — terms. And the resulting confrontation was deadly.

Almost three months to the day after the altercation is when someone detonated explosives under Abe Phillips’ widow’s house. It disturbed the Mart community.

continued on page 6

The victims of the bombing supposedly lie in the Goshen Cemetery.

E.R. Bills

Before the sun rose, hundreds of people on the ground gazing with awe at the horrible scene in which a household had been annihilated with dynamite in an explosion so terrific that doves, scissor tails and mocking birds roosting in the elms had not only been killed but picked clean of feathers, and a six-room cottage had been effaced and no fragment of it left too large to go into an average heating stove. Wherever one goes in the precinct, whatever group he joins, he finds the explosion under discussion. In the fertile valleys, the crops are laid by and the affluent farmers have organized protracted meetings where eloquent ministers are administering spiritual pabulum to large congregations, but in the intervals, the congregation scatter under the shade trees, turn their faces toward the SmithStrange farm [where the Phillips family resided], and talk about dynamite.

Commenting on the local produce, a Black woman said that “things don’t taste right ’round here” anymore, and the more superstitious elements of the African-American community believed a “supernatural agency was involved.” They claimed ghosts wandered among the elms and shrieked through the night in the rows of cotton.

On the evening after the Phillips house was destroyed, three Black men were fired upon when they attempted to retrieve a wagon, presumably to help clean up the destruction.

The people of Mart were indignant. And the onlookers of the aftermath did more than gather souvenirs. They helped treat the wounded, assisted in burying the

dead, and held a public meeting to condemn the atrocity, even drafting a resolution.

Whereas, a … crime was committed in our community on the night of the 20th instant in the massacre of a family of negroes, some unoffending children being in their number, by the use of some explosive substance, causing the

instantaneous death of five persons and seriously wounding two others, and the following night some negroes proceeding upon the public highway were fired upon, as we believe, with intent to kill, and

Whereas, such unlawful acts are calculated to tarnish the fair name of our community and thus deter good people from settling among us, be it Resolved, that we citizens of Mart community, in mass meeting assembled, desire to express our total disapproval and condemnation of such unlawful acts and deeply deplore their occurrence in our midst, and we invite and demand the fullest investigation of the affair by the proper authorities, and we promise continued on page 7

These renderings are of the Phillips cottage before the bombing.

Courtesy Galveston Daily News archives tk

any assistance that may be within our power to enable the officers to bring the criminals to justice.

Resolved, that a petition to the governor of the state, signed by the members of this meeting, be forwarded asking that a sufficient reward be offered to induce a first-class detective to penetrate the mystery that seems to surround this affair.

In the days that followed, it was discovered that a child had died in the Phillips house on the Thursday before the explosion, and while the Phillips family was at the child’s funeral in Harrison (eight miles both north of Mart and southeast of Waco), the Phillips family’s “watch dog” was poisoned. Then, after the explosion, which spread debris over 75 acres and blew the Phillips’ smokehouse to smithereens, local dogs who partook of the scattered Phillips bacon store got sick, and some died. One local doctor said the “atmosphere around the Phillips premises was pregnant with death.”

The perpetrators of the atrocity didn’t leave anything to chance. If there were any questions as to whether a white life mattered more than a Black one on July 20, 1895, the answer at the Phillips residence was resounding. And one local white man, again, described the ghastly carnage. “There they lay, scorched and burning, their eyes starting, grinning as if in horror, mutely detailing the story of an outrage which I hope will stand alone in the annals of Texas crime. I hope the man who did the deed saw his handiwork as I saw it, and I’ll warrant he will have it visit him in his dreams — that old mother roasting, coiled in red hot steel springs and beside her brood of children! I tell you it was worse than pen can portray it.”

The undertaker had problems getting the grotesquely contorted corpses into coffins. The funeral march to Harrison was haunting and somber. Then several black families fled the area. It was said that the “dreadful explosion” would “stand as a mark of happenings in the Mart region. ‘This thing happening before,’ and the other thing ‘after dynamite night’ will be fixed sayings with both white and black in that country.”

I couldn’t find any evidence of the old Phillips place or anyone, Black or white, who knew anything about it.

As I wandered through the somewhat overgrown old Goshen African-American Cemetery on the corner of a bend in FM 1860 in the old Harrison station area, looking for the graves of the atrocity’s victims and that of Abe Phillips, I kept thinking about a metaphor in Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition Speech, two months (September 18, 1895) after the retaliatory attack on the Phillips family. Washington probably didn’t know about Mart area barbarity, but still.

A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast

of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: ‘Water, water; we die of thirst!’

The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ A second time the signal, ‘Water, water; send us water!’ ran up from the distressed vessel and was answered: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ And a third and fourth signal for water was answered: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next door neighbor, I would say: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ Cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.

Washington’s comments were optimistic about progress, hopeful and practical. And probably useful to many. I wish more Texan members of the “friendly” vessel had bought in.

All I discovered (and carefully avoided) in the Goshen Cemetery was snakes. Then I drove around and eventually spotted an elderly Black man opening his chain-link fence driveway gate. I asked about the local Black graveyards and particularly the one in Old Harrison. He confirmed that it was the Goshen Cemetery and said he tended it when he had the time. I asked him if he’d ever heard of the explosion south of Mart, and he said he hadn’t. I asked him if he had seen headstones for members of the Phillips family sharing the same date in 1895, and he said he wasn’t aware of any.

There was no fixed memory of the act of terror that befell the Phillips family in 1895 and no sign of their remains. The local judge and law enforcement officers at the time of the incident believed hostile neighbors blew up the remaining members of the Phillips family to avenge the death of Phil Arnold, but no one was ever arrested, charged, or prosecuted for the atrocity. West Phillips was apparently acquitted for shooting Phil Arnold, and Richard Bragg’s wounds were, in fact, not fatal. Bragg moved to Waco, but both reportedly spent the rest of their days dodging assassination attempts. In fact, an attack on Bragg’s new residence was reported in the August 16, 1895, edition of the Galveston Daily News. Bragg survived once more, and the culprits behind the ambush were never apprehended.

Texas is funny like that: long and tall on every myth and stray scrap of charming rustic lore but short on remembering (much less owning up to) obvious mistakes and monstrosities.

The Lone Star State is parched in more ways than one. l

Fort Worth native E.R. Bills is the award-winning, bestselling author of The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas and Tell-Tale Texas: Investigations in Infamous History

SCREEN

Alone in ‘Night Country’

Supernatural or something less? True Detective’s fourth season may only hint at a big, dramatic payoff.

BY REESE PIERCE

Early in Episode 2 of True Detective: Night Country, tough cop Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) drops in on Fiona Shaw (Rose Aguineau), a local who recently found a group of missing scientists with the help of the ghost of her dead boyfriend. Aguineau’s character sets up the entire show for viewers by telling Navarro all the reasons ghosts might appear. You know, things like they miss you, they need you, or they want you to be a ghost, too, but it all might be nothing because she also warns, “Don’t confuse the spirit world with mental health issues.”

These confounding rules for what becomes commonplace in True Detective Season 4 establish the tone for what follows: a lack of commitment to originality and good storytelling and also a departure from the realism of previous seasons. Night Country aspires for new ground but reminds viewers from the outset it’s playing tennis without a net.

Night Country is set in Ennis, Alaska, a fictional small town north of the Arctic

Circle. Like real locations in that part of the globe, Ennis can go as long as 65 days in complete darkness, which makes for an appropriately creepy setting. The show follows two very sullen and hard-to-like cops as they struggle with an unsolved murder, a mining company opposed by the native population, and a new mystery stemming from the disappearance of the scientists. Like earlier seasons, the detectives must deal with their demons (which take precedence over everything else here) and come together to solve the mystery, this time in the heart of “Night Country.”

Isa Lopez’s vision as showrunner and writer for this new take on True Detective seems, at first, hopeful. Clearly interested in subverting norms to update the series, she makes some interesting and enjoyable decisions early on. By ditching the gothic-tinged opening songs prominent in past seasons from artists like The Handsome Family and Leonard Cohen in favor of Billie Eilish, Lopez declares that women will dominate. Though Eilish might seem an odd fit for a series like this, her droning lyrics over the frenetic intro credits effectively create a mood.

The most noticeable departure from past seasons is that stark lack of testosterone. Scoring Jodie Foster as Liz Danvers was a big win. The Oscar winner turns out a great performance as a police chief exiled

to the hinterlands. Though like most of the other characters, she is downright unlikable, and instead of being balanced out by a partner with a different disposition, we get another grumpy and likewise unlikable lead, Navarro. The rest of the cast is made up of virtual unknowns aside from John Hawks (Deadwood) as previous police chief Hank Prior and Christopher Eccleston (The Leftovers) as Danvers’ boss and sometimes lover Ted Connelly. Both actors add much-needed depth as morally questionable lawmen. Conversely, rookie cop Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) does a great job contrasting the corrupt older men and proves to be one of the only likable characters onscreen. He also ends up driving much of the detective work. Though the acting is strong, the cast members have little to do with a bad script and endless scenes of empty promises.

Night Country has a lot of basic problems. First, the show lacks originality. The storyline seems to have been taken straight from Season 1 of AMC’s Dark Winds: an investigation involving native tribes, killers loose in the sprawling back country (the desert in lieu of the frozen tundra), supernatural elements arising from tribal superstitions, and an evil mining company. There are also echoes of Twin Peaks with its weird mythos, The Thing with the scientific lab possibly uncovering something supernatural, and a flawed female detective

working with a younger, greener detective in Mare of Easttown

Yet none of this is as troublesome as Lopez’s attempts to retcon one of the more contentious parts of the True Detective anthology. The final episode of Season 1 left many viewers and critics wanting more when in the end there were no supernatural elements. It turned out it was just some crazy cult, but the heightened intensity of that final episode lay in the possibilities. The audience didn’t know what to expect. Lopez deflates all chances of this type of ambiguity and nuance by ditching this trope. Instead of providing the sophistication of the supernatural mixed with the unfolding murder investigation, Night Country dives headlong into the supernatural in the first episode. Now the show must either deliver on this supernatural promise or find some alternative explanation for the voices everyone in town is hearing. Either way, it’s not a murder mystery. It’s The Thing.

And this is to say nothing about the show’s pacing problems and narrative issues. The first episode works well, but very little happens in the ensuing four. The story meanders, with Lopez preferring to focus more on the issues of the native population and the internal lives of the detectives than on creating an interesting mystery. Of course, the native population deserves the focus and character development is important, but Lopez opts to tell instead of show through a series of exposition dumps that slow the pace to a dead stop.

Doing most of the real detective work, Danvers’ protégé Peter functions like Inspector Gadget’s niece. The only truly competent person, he is the FBI and Lisbeth Salander all rolled into one, and the only device pushing the investigation forward is everything he discovers.

With one episode left, there is much to tie up. What is the supernatural force at work in Ennis? What is hiding in the ice caves? The only real hope is for Lopez to go fully supernatural and have Danvers, Navarro, and company march into the caves and fight a swirly snake monster (this is what the previews seem to be hinting at), but something tells me this is all a hallucination brought on by the evil mining company’s drilling, and the only thing they are going to find in those tunnels is a disappointment similar to what it is like watching this great series melt down. l

Fans can stream the fourth season of this anthology crime drama on Max (formerly HBO Max).

NIGHT & DAY

Welcome to Black History Month!

The first national celebration that focused on the history of Black Americans was Negro History Week in 1925, a bookend timeframe in February between the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It was so well-embraced that according to BlackHistoryMonth.gov, President Ford expanded it to a month in 1976, encouraging Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Beyond learning history, there are culturally relevant, noteworthy events to check out this week and beyond. Here are a few ideas.

Also, our beloved Opal Lee, the Grandmother of Juneteenth, will celebrate Black History Month with the Burleson City Council at Burleson City Hall (141 W Renfro St, 817-426-9600) 10am-noon. There will be a moderated one-on-one discussion and programming by the Burleson Public Library. Copies of her book Juneteenth: A Children’s Story will be available for $45 for hardcover or $25 for paperback.

At noon, Elite Experiences Events hosts a Black History Month Food Fest at Lofty Spaces (816 Montgomery St, Dallas, 214-457-0789), showcasing Black-owned businesses from North Texas and beyond. The Melanin Market will have barbecue, candied yams, fish, fried chicken, funnel cakes, greens, oxtails, pork chops, tacos, turkey legs, and some vegan options. Vendors will also sell accessories, clothing, jewelry, bath/body products, and more. Tickets are $10 at TexasFoodFest.com.

Along with the works of Dontrius Williams featured in this week’s Arts story, Arts Fort Worth offers another exhibit by a Black artist that you should see now before it comes down soon. Barron Wortham’s Lingering in the liminal, lord have mercy and lift the veil is up now thru Saturday at the Frost Bank Gallery at Arts Fort Worth (1300 Gendy St, Fort Worth, 817-738-1938).

Fort Worth Opera presents the regional premiere of the modern American one-act opera dwb (Driving While Black). As a Black mother’s child grows up and learns to drive, she has visions of everything that could go wrong for her “beautiful brown boy” facing a world (still) full of inequality and racism. Each performance will be followed by a discussion with composer Susan Kander and librettist Roberta Grumbel, moderated by TCU faculty members Dr. Stacie McCormick and Dr. Brandon Manning. Performances are 7:30pm Fri-Sat at Van Cliburn Concert Hall (TCU campus, 2900 W Lowden St, Fort Worth, 817-2577000) and 2pm Sat, Feb 24, at the Kimbell Art Museum (3333 Camp Bowie Blvd, Fort Worth, 817-332-8451). Tickets start at $20 at FWOpera.org.

The Cowtown Coliseum (121 E Exchange Av, Fort Worth, 817-625-1025) in the Stockyards hosts the annual Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo 1:30pm and 7:30pm. Named after the first Black cowboy movie star/rodeo performer, this event celebrates and honors Black cowboys and cowgirls and their contributions to building the West. The invitational also serves as a cultural event and opportunity for families to enjoy and embrace cowboy culture via reenactments, history highlights, and Western adventure. Tickets start at $15 at BillPickettRodeo.com.

Did you know Fort Worth is home to the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum?

Located at 2029 N Main St (817-534-8801), the museum welcomes visitors 11am-4pm Wed-Sat. Learn about the history of the minority cowboys, buffalo soldiers, and frontier people of the past, present, and future. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors/students, and free for children ages 5 and younger.

Formerly local songstress Tatiana “LadyMay”

Mayfield is now a world traveler. Tonight, she is back in North Texas to help the McKinney Philharmonic Orchestra pay tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, the Queen of Jazz, to celebrate both Black History Month and Women’s History Month in March.

Accompanied by the MPO’s big band and strings, Mayfield will perform the classics, including “Tisket a Tasket,” “Soon,” and “Someone to Watch Over Me.” This performance will be at the McKinney Boyd High School Auditorium (600 Lake Forest Dr, McKinney, 469-302-3400) at 7pm. Tickets are $20 at McKinneyPhilharmonic.org.

Deion “Prime Time”

Sanders has a new book out called Elevate and Dominate: 21 Ways to Win. Cool. What makes it even cooler is that the NFL Hall of Famer from the Dallas team that plays in Arlington has chosen Fort Worth as his North Texas stop on his book tour. The Dock Bookshop (6637 Meadowbrook Dr, 817-457-5700) will host Coach Prime at 5pm. As is customary with most book signings, you must purchase a copy of the title to enter. TheDockBookshop. com/Event makes that easy.

Anytime

I have a passion for cinema but a pocketbook that keeps me surfing for free streaming ideas. Budgeting is the very reason I love my Roku TV. There are many apps to choose from, and you can search for films or topics on the home screen, which also has some non-disruptive ad banners. One ad I was served recently was for #TubiBlack. Clever, right? Tubi has hundreds of free titles across every genre and for certain times of the year, including Black History Month. If you want to get your history on, go there and watch the likes of Lean on Me starring God (i.e., Morgan Freeman), The Rosa Parks Story with Angela Bassett (who does not age, #BlackDontCrack), or Deacons for Defense with Forest Whitaker.

But Wait! There’s More (We Hope)

This column is by no means a comprehensive list of BHM events. To submit your ideas for listings and potential articles, please email Question@FWWeekly.com We’d love to hear from you!

By Jennifer Bovee

Lingering in the liminal, lord have mercy and lift the veil is up now thru Saturday at the Frost Bank Gallery at Arts Fort Worth.

This week at TCU or Sat, Feb 24, at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth Opera presents the regional premiere of dwb (Driving While Black).

Courtesy Fort Worth Opera

Eat, shop, and celebrate at Black History Month Food Fest Sunday.

Courtesy Texas Food Fests.

Head to the Stockyards for the Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo at the Cowtown Coliseum Saturday.

Courtesy Bill Pickett Rodeo

LIVING LOCAL

North Texas Kid Chef Goes Global

Promotional Feature

Julian Frederick is dedicated to helping other kids through cooking. Courtesy

Step Stool Chef

North Texas native Julian Frederick, the young Head Chef and CEO of Step Stool Chef landed a deal with a global tech company called Side Chef to launch ondemand cooking classes exclusively for kids in 2020 at the age of 12.

This minority-owned business, cofounded by Julian and his mother, Toria Frederick, has been featured in magazines, newspapers, and major TV networks across the United States.

Step Stool programs and products — like its kids’ cookbook and cooking kits for kids — help foster independent learning using a “kids teaching kids” approach to cooking, making it fun and approachable for children and easy for the parents.

Instead of parents leading in the kitchen, kids can now contribute to the cooking fun with Chef Julian›s step-by-step video

tutorials, available exclusively on SideChef Premium, a global culinary platform.

«I want to help kids build their cooking skills and confidence while creating great family-time memories for everyone,» says Chef Frederick. «The Step Stool Chef teaches kids to be leaders in the kitchen, providing tools and solutions to learn to cook in a safe space with little to no help from parents. At the Step Stool Chef, the kids are the chefs. Parents are the assistants.»

Julian was a state finalist for the Healthy Lunchtime Challenge in partnership with the White House Let’s Move Campaign. He has served on the Kids Advisory Board for ChopChop Magazine, an award-winning kid cooking magazine, and was featured on the cover of the premiere issue of CEOKid Magazine. Learn more at www.stepstoolchef.com

There are many kid-friendly recipes at StepStoolChef.com, like these Shark Quesadillas that were featured on the Foot Network.

Photo by Food Network, G.P., foodnetwork.com

Julian Frederick is dedicated to helping other kids through cooking.

Courtesy Step Stool Chef

MUSIC

Live, Laugh, Love

Young thrashers Toxic Madness kick out the jams.

BY JUAN R. GOVEA

For Diogenes “DJ” Negron-Forsythe, his love for performing goes back to Lola’s Saloon.

The beloved, defunct venue was where the now 18-year-old sang Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” as part of a School of Rock show when he was 13.

Lola’s, he said, was where he “started to develop stage performance.”

And DJ carries it through to this day with his positivist thrash outfit Toxic Madness. Before the relatively recent release of their new EP Face to Face (which includes an insane cover of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer”), the band put out a few singles and the seven-song album Live, Laugh, Love. DJ, along with bassist Aidan Reed and drummer Eddie Rubalcaba, are working on new material now (with a new guitarist) and plan to put out another EP or LP soon.

As with previous releases, the guys hope to hit the road afterward. This time, it’ll be the East Coast in July.

“This isn’t just a hobby for us,” DJ said. “This isn’t something like, ‘We’re gonna sing a few songs that we have no connection to, make a couple bucks, and leave.’ To us, this is a way of life and something we want to do until we die.”

Though they’ve been together only a couple of years, the Toxic Madness guys have already been seemingly everywhere. They’ve played Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, Rubber Gloves in Denton, and Three Links and Reno’s Chop Shop in Dallas, among other spots, and last month, the band rocked Tulips FTW. The guys have been able to tour so much with the financial support of family, friends, and merch sales.

“I like hardcore punk because it really speaks from the mind but also the heart and soul, like calling someone out with the truth,” Reed said. “We try and have fun and make it fun at shows.”

Like true punks, the guys say they don’t want to be perfect. They just want to be themselves.

DJ said, “Punk, for me, going a thousand miles an hour and going as heavy as possible is a healthy form of expression.” l

DJ Negron-Forsythe: “This isn’t just a hobby for us.”

Juan R. Govea

Toxic Madness: “To us, this is a way of life and something we want to do until we die.”

Courtesy Toxic Madness

MUSIC

Yes, LABELS

With a new album on the way, this young yet fully formed punk trio demands your ears now.

BY STEVE STEWARD

The week before last Halloween, a guy I know came up to me and said, “Dude. LABELS. Did you see them?”

He was talking about the local psyche-punk band that had played The Boiled Owl Tavern during Arts Goggle the previous weekend.

It was the third or fourth time I’d talked with someone about them, and every conversation was a variation of “Holy shit, they totally blew me away!”

The new fans I chatted with compared them to Nirvana and Thee Oh Sees, describing the local group in terms of what the fans imagined it would have been like seeing those legendary bands when they were relatively new.

On February 23, LABELS will release Moral Law, their third album, which is surprising to hear about regarding a band that has been playing shows for only about a year. That LABELS seem so fully formed is because they’ve been practicing relentlessly since getting together in 2019. Comparing them to a couple of seminal punk bands — because that’s essentially what the sounds of Nirvana and Thee Oh Sees are rooted in — might sound hyperbolic, but when you look up LABELS and give listen to a couple of their tracks, you find that this is a band that takes pieces of related genre hallmarks, from garage-rock to psychedelic and punk, and electrifies these sonic limbs and hearts into a new species, like if Dr. Frankenstein built Robocop out of a pile of pawn shop amplifiers, detachable-face cassette decks, and dusty, knock-off sunglasses.

Composed of Braden Burgan on guitar and vocals, twin brother Taylor Burgan on drums, and friend Deven Johnson singing lead, LABELS formed during the guys’ senior year at L.D. Bell High School in Hurst.

“We were really into basketball in junior high and high school up ’til, like, 11th grade,” Braden said at a coffeeshop recently with his bandmates. “We were like, ‘We’re for real going to the NBA.’ ”

“And then we figured out, no, we’re not,” Taylor said.

The Burgans’ dad, Scott Burgan, had played in local bands — Hillary Smile and Rosemary were a couple of them — and the drummer of one of those groups had left some of his gear lying around the house.

“He just left his drums in our shed,” Braden said, “and we were like, ‘OK, we’re done with basketball.’ [Dad] was like, ‘Oh, you wanna see my guitar?’ The cymbals were super-rusty, super dry-sounding. It was one cymbal, a snare, and a kick. But it worked.”

The brothers learned to play guitar and drums on their own, and they started writing their own songs while they were figuring out their instruments.

“We played the same kind of music back then as we do now,” Braden said.

But he was too nervous to sing, so the brothers recruited Johnson, a mutual friend since 10th grade.

“It was so cringey at first because I had, like, a British accent,” Johnson said. “I guess I thought it was easier to make stuff up in a British accent.”

At the time, the trio was heavily into a British punk duo now known as Soft Play.

“I liked the way [the singer’s voice] sounds,” Johnson said.

The band learned how to work Logic Pro the same way they learned to play instruments — “by just doing it,” Braden said — and recorded an album in 2021, though it is no longer available on any streaming services.

“Since we started making songs right when we started playing, we weren’t good,” Braden said. “The songs weren’t bad, but we weren’t ready to play them live at a show, so we took [the album] down, because it wasn’t the best sounding. We didn’t know what we were doing. We just wanted something out.”

The three might not have been totally stoked with their first effort, but a year later, with better gear and more confidence in both their playing and recording chops, LABELS self-produced their second album. Braden described the 10-song Brain Fragments as “slower, kind of more ‘songwriting,’ I guess.”

Brain Fragments does indeed hover around mellower tempos, but it establishes a few aesthetic ideas that I’d argue give LABELS their signature sound, a sort of giddy psychedelia constantly truncated with compression, giving what might be a hazy guitar journey considerable amounts of hip-shake. It makes me think of a long, plastic bag full of weed smoke that is for

some reason crimped in regular intervals — “Dream Forever” is a good example of this, but the rest of Brain Fragments offers the listener plenty of other vivid mindscapes to go with slinky, fuzzy guitar riffage.

Of the new album Moral Law, LABELS have increased both the speed and the complexity of their riffs.

“The new album is way harder,” Braden said, “a whole lot of hard-rock, punk stuff.”

The LP leans heavily into the garage rock/psychedelia made popular in the earlyto-mid 2000s by artists like Jay Reatard, Ty Segal, and Thee Oh Sees, but it also drifts into a sort of mid-tempo, effects-heavy, sludge metal-esque guitar-pop reminiscent of Dinosaur Jr. Johnson’s vocal delivery, often deadpan, reminds me of the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn — if Finn were 21 and had grown up listening to late-’90s Family Values-era hitmakers like System of a Down and Eminem. Though his voice and phrasing might suggest otherwise, Johnson really loves rap.

“I might write lyrics that sound like a rap in my head, but I change the flow, so they fit more in a punk song,” Johnson said. “I love Sublime. There’s a song on the new album called ‘Time Spent’ that I had a kind of reggae vibe in my head when I sang it,” adding that Sublime frontman Bradley Nowell is one of his biggest inspirations.

“That’s funny, because it’s one of our heavier songs,” Taylor said.

Moral Laws, as a whole, isn’t a stoner-metal album at all, but it is definitely heavy and has a similar effect on the brain. The album’s first single, called “3D” and released on January 23, sounds to me like if Jacuzzi wrote a Paranoid-era Sabbath song made for a Jim Henson show about a digital afterlife. Another song, “The Feeling,” reminds me of the conversations you have with yourself during Hour 3 of a decently intense mushroom trip. Then there’s “I Just Want to Be Human,” which builds on a majestic, disorienting guitar phrase reminiscent of a Pearl Earl song, then hurls you into the cosmos like the way that same trip might spin you into a state of galloping overstimulation.

And what, if anything, is LABELS’ music about? While some of the songs carry a current of melancholic ennui, mostly they’re just full of good vibes.

“We’re nice people,” Braden said. “We just want to promote the positive, y’know?” l

LABELS: “The new album is way harder, a whole lot of hard-rock, punk stuff.”

Levi Anderson

Coining a Texas Heroine

Jovita Idar was doing DEI long before it was welcome — and before conservatives turned it into a cultural boogeyman.

BY E.R. BILLS

The New York Times’ 2020 series of feature obituaries, “Overlooked,” was primarily devoted to women and “people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported” in the publication. It was an ambitious project and one that Texas itself, as a state and a society, would arguably do well to replicate. Especially since a Texas woman named Jovita Idar was one of the series’ most compelling figures, and, on August 15, 2023, she became the second Latina and first Tejana to be featured on United States currency.

Jovita Idar’s face now graces the unfrumpy side of American quarters, and her presence is wildly original and artistic. On the flipside, George Washington appears more and more irritated by the usual oxymoron that undermines so much of our legal tinder: “LIBERTY” in large all caps up top and an arguably contradictory, monotheistic “IN GOD WE TRUST” smaller and left adjacent. Idar’s reverse appearance incorporates her chief cause, “MEXICAN AMERICAN RIGHTS”; her primary callings, “JOURNALISTA” and “TEACHER”; and the names of the publications where she championed Washington’s liberty in the face of Anglocentric injustice.

The “Overlooked” story on Idar in the New York Times was particularly intriguing to me because I had stumbled onto reports mentioning her family years before and, at first, didn’t make the connection. When I started researching her for another story, I recalled the original link. I discovered that something was missed or “overlooked” in all the new reporting and most of the scholarship.

Idar was born in Laredo on September 7, 1885. Her father, Nicasio Idar, was born in Port Isabel. Nicasio’s father was a Portuguese sailor who was rarely around and, according to Idar’s youngest brother, Aquilino (in a 1984 interview), Nicasio’s mother “sold” him to some cowboys for a year of work in Oklahoma when he was a teenager. He then got a job in the Nuevo Laredo railyards and worked as a yardmaster for 20 years. Nicasio met Idar’s mother, Jovita Vivero, of San Luis Potosi, in Rio Grande City, and they married. They had 13 children. Three died at birth, and one didn’t

survive childhood. Jovita Idar was the second eldest. Nicasio had done fairly well and settled in Laredo, where in the mid-1890s he founded El Partido Independiente de Laredo to help Mexican and Mexican Americans there organize politically. By 1896, he was elected a Justice of the Peace. Nicasio and his wife’s children were raised with the relative privilege of la gente decente citizenry, and he placed a special emphasis on education and public service. Aquilino has said his father often discussed these matters with them.

Out in the yard, my father used to sit right there, and all of us — seven brothers and two sisters — used to form a circle around him. And he would talk to us about Mexicans, about Mexican Americans; how to fight for the Mexican people; what to do for the Mexican people. How to think. Don’t let anybody tell you how to think, because you are a freethinker. You are standing on the face of the earth on your own two feet. So use your own brain to work your way up in any situation. He said, “You don’t depend on anybody to tell you that you’re going to heaven, to paradise, or this and that. You’re gonna stay here until you die.”

Idar was able to attend the Laredo Seminary (later known as the Holding Institute), founded just three years earlier by the Methodist Episcopal Church.

From here in examinations of Idar’s life, most narratives — including the Times’ “Overlooked” account — jump to her father’s activism and his work as the editor and publisher of La Crónica, a local Spanish newspaper, but there was more to Nicasio’s progressive work. It included membership in Mexican-Tejano social and fraternal orders in the Rio Grande Valley, including the Masonic-structured Gran Concilo de la Orden Caballeros de Honor, of which Nicasio was the

the Times’ “Overlooked” story describes it, “Laws of the Jim Crow era enforcing racial segregation also limited the rights of Mexican Americans in South Texas (they are often referred to by scholars today as ‘Juan Crow’ laws). Signs saying ‘No Negroes, Mexicans or dogs allowed’ were common in restaurants and stores. Law enforcement officers frequently intimidated or abused Mexican-American residents, and the schools they were sent to were underfunded and often inadequate. Speaking Spanish in public was discouraged.”

Laredo lodge secretary. And Crónica articles reporting on the lodge parroted Nicasio’s views. One from December 17, 1910, titled “Excitativa Del Gran Concilio de La Orden Caballeros de Honor a La Raza Mexicana,” is almost striking for its candor.

It is not possible … to attain respectability, trust, and protection within the American nation, if we ourselves do not have this with our co-nationals; if we believe that the Mexicans are unworthy of our association with them, of us joining their associations, we should not expect that the Americans would gladly receive us in theirs. If we do not have trust in the men of our own race, how can we expect other races to have trust in us?

As Gabriela González puts it in Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights (2018), the article “critiqued the divisions among MéxicanoTejanos, particularly the selfish shortsightedness of the comfortable class for their lack of loyalty to the group and their lack of respect for Mexicans of modest means.”

After Idar’s graduation and attainment of a teaching certificate, she worked as a teacher in Los Ojuelos, a small community between Laredo and Hebbronville, but she was discouraged by the conditions and school facilities in the community and reportedly resigned, opting to work with her father and two of her brothers, Clemente and Eduardo, at La Crónica. In Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican Americans from Colonial Times to the Present Era (2011), Zaragosa Vargas notes the ways “the Idar family sounded off against separatist and inferior housing and schools, the abysmal conditions faced by Tejano workers that took on the visage of peonage, and the gross violations of Tejano civil rights” in the pages of La Crónica. And this, at a time when, as

Idar, herself, was particularly compelling. Often composing diatribes under pen names like “Ave Negra” (Spanish for “Blackbird”) or “Astraea” (the Greek goddess of justice), she tirelessly advocated for Mexican Americans and, particularly, women, asserting that they should educate themselves and not acquiesce to lives of subservience to men or, for that matter, the patriarchal Catholic Church. For La Crónica, it verged on a crusade. The publication’s writers openly blamed religious fanaticism for Mexico’s staggering illiteracy rate, noting that “83% [of the Mexican Republic] are illiterates who vegetate like pariahs, unconscious of their existence, and ignorant of their rights and duties as of a republic that proclaims to figure in the vanguard of the most cultured and powerful nations on earth.”

A controversial, anonymous article in the February 2, 1910 edition of La Crónica warned of the patriarchal monopoly of the Catholic confessional.

The confessional scares me, and I advise mothers to teach their daughters to confess their guilts and faults not to God, or to confess them before the lattice of the confessional, to the ear of a man who has no right to listen to the conscience of youth, and who is susceptible to feel all of the human passions precisely because he is human and celibate. The mother loves her daughters with heartfelt, immense, pure, and incomparable love, and she is the legitimate confessor of the family and the legitimate counselor of the home.

Then, a week later, a Crónica piece titled “Vulgariza La Revista Catolica” clarified the publication’s position: “We do not want the woman to stop believing in whatever God strikes her fancy. … We only want to destroy the idols of the woman’s heart and have her turn her face once again to her God, so that she can adore him with more intelligence, freely.”

By the time “Debejamos Trabajar” appeared in the December 7, 1911 La Crónica, Idar had secularized the sentiment, so that it appeared more palatable (if not more digestibly feminist): “Working women know their rights and proudly rise to face the struggle. The hour of their degradation has passed. … They are no longer men’s servants but their equals, their partners.” And she was known to take it even a step further, flatly proclaiming, “Educate a woman, and you educate a family.”

In a 2017 interview with the San Antonio continued on page 5

Activist/journalist Jovita Idar became the second Latina and first Tejana to be featured on United States currency.

Express-News, González, an associate professor in history at the University of Texas-San Antonio, said Idar “worked toward the creation of a better world where women and men of all backgrounds would be able to thrive and contribute to their communities. She labored for social justice, for an end to racism and segregation, for women’s rights, and for the rights of children to have an education and therefore greater opportunities.”

Idar and her family utilized La Crónica to support the creation of El Primer Congreso Mexicanista (the First Mexican Congress) to advocate for justice and equality for Hispanic people in Texas. The Congreso met for 11 days in September 1911. They recognized Mexican-American achievements, celebrated their Mexican heritage, sponsored empowering speeches, and staged festive community performances. Idar and other women were prominent participants in the event and subsequently formed the Liga Femenil Mexicanista (the League of Mexican Women, of which Idar was the first president).

In 1913, Idar crossed into Mexico and worked with La Cruza Blanca (a medical aid organization like the Red Cross) during the Battle of Nuevo Laredo in the Mexican Revolution.

La Crónica closed its doors after Nicasio’s death in 1914, and Idar became a staffer for another Spanish-language newspaper in Laredo, El Progreso. When El

“You don’t depend on anybody to tell you that you’re going to heaven, to paradise, or this and that. You’re gonna stay here until you die.”

Progreso published an editorial by a Mexican revolutionary named Manuel Garcia Vigil that was critical of the United States’ occupation of Veracruz later that year, members of a local company of the Texas Rangers appeared outside the door of El Progreso with the intent to shut it down, but they hadn’t planned on encountering Jovita Idar. She defiantly berated them, reportedly issuing a succinct lecture on the First Amendment and freedom of the press. The Rangers retreated. They returned the following morning — when Idar wasn’t around — to destroy El Progreso’s offices and printing equipment and arrest the other employees.

Idar’s stand against the Rangers was incredibly brave considering their reputation for violence and bloodshed during encounters with Mexican and Tejano populations along the border at the time, and the history of her fearlessness and resolve is thankfully becoming more widely known. But a largely forgotten incident early in her life had a

more profound effect on her and her family’s social and political outlook (and perhaps the city of Laredo itself) because this incident shaped the family’s views moving forward. A brief account of the Laredo Smallpox Riot is available online via the Texas State Historical Association’s Handbook of Texas

LAREDO SMALLPOX RIOT. A smallpox epidemic at Laredo that began in early October 1898 led to events that eventually climaxed in March 1899, when a violent showdown between Mexican Americans and Texas Rangers resulted in the immediate death of one man, the wounding of thirteen, and the arrest of twenty-one participants. On October 4, 1898, Laredo physicians began noticing a disease resembling chicken pox among the city’s children. The first death directly attributed to smallpox, that of a Mexican child on October 29, prompted Mayor Louis J. Christen and local officials to start a committee to investigate reports of the illness. By the end of January 1899,

more than 100 cases of smallpox had been reported in Laredo. Dr. Walter Fraser Blunt, State of Texas health officer warned that more systematic and thorough measures would have to be taken to control the epidemic. Dr. Blunt’s instructions included houseto-house vaccination and fumigation, the burning of all questionable clothing and personal effects that could not be fumigated, and the establishment of a field hospital to disinfect patients. This field hospital was in effect a quarantined area, referred to as the “pesthouse.” Most of the vaccination and fumigation efforts were directed at the poorer barrios of the city along Zacate Creek on the east side of town.

Conditions worsened to such an extent that on March 16, 1899, Blunt arrived from Austin to take charge of efforts to control the epidemic. A serious problem arose when a number of Laredo residents began to resist the vaccinations and fumigations. Blunt responded by requesting the services of the Texas Rangers to help medical teams carry out house-to-house vaccinations and fumigations. On Sunday, March 19, 1899, a small detachment of Rangers arrived from Austin and joined in the efforts to get all residents immunized. The arrival of the Rangers heightened the apprehension of some people being forced to submit to the radical health measures. Friction between Mexican Americans and Texas Rangers was

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long-standing in South Texas. Where the Rangers met resistance, they broke down doors, removed occupants by force, and took all who were suspected of having smallpox to the pesthouse. A throng of angry protesters gathered and showered the Rangers and health officials with both words and rocks. In the ensuing melee, Assistant Marshal Idar was hit on the side of the head by a stone, and one of the protesters, Pablo Aguilar, received a shotgun wound in the leg.

“Assistant Marshal Idar” was Jovita’s father, Nicasio.

As educated members of la gente decente, Jovita Idar and her family were caught between historically abusive and overbearing American law enforcement and medical officials and, on the other side, the uneducated, “pariah”-like members of their fellow Tejano

and co-national community.

The next day, the Laredo Times reported that Deutz Brothers, a local hardware store, had “received a telephone order for 2,000 rounds of buckshot to be delivered to a certain house in the southeastern portion of the city, but instead of filling the order, the authorities were notified and given the location where the delivery was to be made.” Sheriff L.R. Ortiz quickly obtained a search warrant and took with him Capt. J.H. Rogers and his detachment of Texas Rangers. The elite squad had been reinforced that morning with the arrival of more Rangers on the train from Austin. Together they began a house-to-house search in the immediate area where the ammunition was supposed to have been delivered. At the home of Agapito Herrera, trouble began for Sheriff Ortiz and the Rangers. Herrera, a one-time Laredo policeman, met the lawmen outside his home and took Ortiz aside to talk privately. As the discussion continued on page 9

As educated members of la gente decente, Jovita Idar and her family were caught between historically abusive law enforcement and, on the other side, the uneducated, “pariah”-like members of their fellow Tejano and co-national community.

Wikimedia Commons

heated up, a youngster standing in the doorway shouted “ya!” and darted inside. Almost simultaneously, while the nervous Rangers drew their guns, Herrera disappeared into the house and ran out the back door accompanied by several armed men. In the ensuing gunbattle, Capt. Rogers was wounded in the shoulder by a bullet fired from Herrera’s pistol. Herrera himself was shot in the chest by Ranger gunfire.

Ranger A.Y. Old ran up to the wounded Herrera and pumped two fatal shots point blank into his head. The dead man’s sister, Refugia, was shot in the arm, and a friend, Santiago Grimaldo, was shot in the stomach.

After evacuating Rogers, Rangers returned to find an angry crowd of about 100, some of whom were armed, gathered around Herrera’s lifeless body. After the hurling of more taunts, someone in the crowd fired a shot. The Rangers promptly opened fire into the crowd, wounding eight, including one man mortally. As evening approached, the Rangers retreated to Market Square. All through the night, sporadic gunfire could be heard in the same troubled neighborhood. Realizing that the situation could easily worsen, the Rangers called on the cavalry unit stationed at Fort McIntosh for additional support in restoring order. On the morning

“Working women know their rights and proudly rise to face the struggle. The hour of their degradation has passed. … They are no longer men’s servants but their equals, their partners.”

of March 21, the Tenth United States Cavalry [composed of AfricanAmericans], under the command of Capt. Charles G. Ayers, moved into the affected neighborhood to maintain the peace and assure that the work of controlling the smallpox epidemic continued unhampered. Rangers also patrolled the area, searching for and arresting anyone they thought involved in the riot. Liberal journalist Justo Cárdenas and twenty others were arrested. Few disturbances were noted in the days that followed. The army seemed to have taken control of the situation, and Mayor Christen pleaded with other areas of the state to send food and clothing to the victims of the epidemic. Throughout March, many children continued to die of smallpox, but in April, the number of deaths decreased dramatically. The situation had

improved so much that by May 1, 1899, Blunt ordered the quarantine lifted.

Today, one in five Texans is still not vaccinated for COVID, and certainly during the pandemic’s heights and leveling off, our uneducated, ill-informed or ignorant, “pariah”-like neighbors (of all ethnicities) reacted in much the same way their counterparts did in Laredo in 1899. The difference is that the undereducated and underprivileged members of the Tejano and Mexican community in Laredo at the turn of the 19th century had a legitimate excuse. They faced Juan Crow discrimination and underfunded education systems.

The Texans who verged on rioting and violence regarding the COVID vaccinations at the dawn of 2020 had complete access to informational opportunities and educational programs, and their obliviousness to public health considerations and borderline

spiteful intransigence are still inexplicable and stupefying.

Jovita Idar’s family bore Nicasio’s attackers no ill will, and the patriarch, two of his sons, and his daughter set out to help them by educating them and providing them an alternative, cogent voice in the Mexican-American population’s ongoing struggles for equality and justice in their community. And not for monetary reward, fame or political gain — but for the future of La Raza

Idar married Bartolo Juarez in 1917 and moved to San Antonio. Though childless, she helped raise the children of her sister Elvira, who passed away during childbirth. Idar established the Democratic Club in San Antonio and became a precinct judge for the party. She also created a free kindergarten and served as an interpreter for Spanishspeaking patients at a local hospital. Idar struggled with tuberculosis for many years and succumbed to a pulmonary hemorrhage at the age of 60 on June 15, 1946.

Jovita Idar championed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) a century before it was a thing, well before it was cool, and way before Anglo conservatives made a political football out of it. And they were no match for her almost unparallelled Third Estate bum rush. She was more Texan and American than the entire lot then — and now. And her quarter grants no quarter. l

Fort Worth native E.R. Bills is the author of Tell-Tale Texas: Investigations into Infamous History and The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas.

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EATS & drinks

Peace, Love & Gritz

Beloved Chef Keith Hicks needs help, so Fort Worth is doing what it always does: putting on a benefit show.

BY ELAINE WILDER

Beloved local Chef Keith “Buttons” Hicks is suffering from end-stage Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and needs help. He is in palliative care and requires a double-lung transplant — plus a lot of support from the community he loves so much.

Transplant patients need money — lots of it. The original owners and management

team of his namesake Buttons Restaurant, with locations in Fort Worth, Addison, and DeSoto, along with co-workers from all the restaurants he’s made a mark on throughout his career, have united to help.

At 6pm Wed, Jan 31, Ridglea Theater (6025 Camp Bowie Blvd, Fort Worth, 817738-9500) will host the Button’s Family Affair Benefit Concert, and everyone is invited. This event will be staffed by Hicks’ friends and former Buttons owners, managers, chefs, bartenders, servers, and hosts.

“I know personally what it takes to prepare for an organ transplant because of my Pops,” said Carolyn Hughes, Hicks’ sister who is spearheading the event.

When Buttons was open, it hosted many fundraisers, she said, and now it’s time to return the favor.

“Every single one was done out of pure love and compassion toward our community family,” Hughes said. “Right now, I’m coming to you and asking you to please help me raise a whole lot of money to help support Keith. This is a journey that he should not have to bear alone. It’s also a journey that he should be able to afford, and with your support, he will.”

If you’ve eaten out in the area over the years, you’ve undoubtedly sampled Hicks’ upscale Southern cuisine — he was doing chicken and waffles before anyone else — and you’ve probably seen him around: big Black guy with the white beard, big smile, and joyful spirit. And if you’ve run into him, you’ve probably heard his catchphrase: “peace, love, and gritz, katz!”

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When Hicks’ Buttons restaurant was open, it hosted many fundraisers, and now it’s time to return the favor.

Courtesy Elevated Content Co.

Eats & Drinks

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Chef Hicks has been a longtime culinary fixture in North Texas, having worked in kitchens at Mercury Chophouse, the Worthington Hotel, and the Italian Villa, in addition to his own place. After Buttons closed, he found a new home at The Rim Restaurant Waterside (5912 Convair Dr, Fort Worth, 817-663-2950).

The artists slated to perform at the benefit regularly played Buttons, including John Adam, Paul Cannon, Bobby Counts, Velvet & Jerry Clark, Kenya Crawford, Lori Dawn, Melanie Dutton, Rob Holbert Band, Ahmad Johnson, Kurt & Ceici Jones, Sam Jones, Killa Bug, Jackie Don Loe, Monty McKlinton, Quinton Moore, Linny Nance, Fredrick Nicholson Band, Natural Change, Taylor Pace, Bergette Rideau, Stephanie Sallie, Honorary Howard Scott, Second Nature, Roxie & Ashleigh Smith, Tone

Sommers, and Lewis Stephens.

There will be complimentary appetizers and food for purchase featuring Hicks’ favorites made by Billy Kidd of Taco Casa and Ty Frazier of Our Doors to Yours, both former Buttons chefs. Selections from Hicks’ current home kitchen at The Rim and from Fat Face Full and Ms. Angi’s Louisiana Kitchen will also be available for sale.

Tickets start at $25 per person on Eventbrite.com. In addition to the GA tickets, you can purchase a table for four for

$400, VIP high-top tables for two for $200, or VIP seats for $65 each. MJ Apparel will sell T-shirts on-site, with proceeds benefiting Hicks.

You can also donate by going to GoFundMe.com/f/keith-button-hicks.

Hicks is a wonderful fella, and even if you don’t know him, just know that he loves this town and this food scene and would welcome any donation of any size you’re able to comfortably afford. We wish him all the best. l

Will chicken and waffles be among the Buttons favorites served at the Ridglea Wed, Jan 31? We hope so!

Courtesy Buttons

Natural Changes Band will join a fabulous lineup of local talent playing the Button’s Family Affair Wed, Jan 31.

Courtesy Natural Changes Band

Courtesy

Go Fund