North Dallas Gazette, March 5, 2020: From redlining to racial equity: Dallas ISD wants to create a school-based social safety net
Leslie Williams, the head of Dallas ISD’s Racial Equity Office is intent on taking action to reverse the pervasive poverty in Dallas’ poorest communities.
“We want to address past inequities that are still having an impact on redlined neighborhoods,” he says.
He’s proposing to have neighborhood schools serve as community hubs to help improve economic opportunity through a focus on family services, education, economics and health.
It’s no secret that redlining was a common practice of financial institutions in the 1930s and ‘40s. Banks and mortgage companies literally drew a line around certain communities where they refused to make or guarantee home loans that would enable Black, Brown and poor Whites to move into those communities. Williams says redlining locked a generation out of homeownership, the major means of building wealth. He says the inequity created the intergenerational poverty that still impacts neighborhoods today. The practice also served as a disincentive to investment, stripping those neighborhoods of needed services.
