Town hall meeting discusses race, change
At the meeting based on the seven-part Fort Worth Star-Telegram series the “Color of Hate,” panelists discussed how Fort Worth has changed since the Jim Crow era.
By Jill Meninger
Staff Reporter

Rev. Alton Paris said some blacks do not take advantage of opportunities in education and such rights as buying a home because they view themselves as a inferior minority.

“Jim Crow is no longer a law,” said the 68-year-old Paris, who is the minister of the Macedonia African Methodist Episcopal Church in Kaufman. “In reality, no one can actually give black folk equality. Black people have to do it for themselves, because there is no legal discrimination now.”

Paris attended a town hall meeting on race relations Thursday night in the Ed Landreth auditorium that was co-hosted by TCU and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Event organizers expected about 250 people, but only about half that number attended.

Star-Telegram columnist Bob Ray Sanders, the moderator at the gathering, said the meeting discussed how the Fort Worth community has progressed since the Jim Crow time period and what issues it will face in the future.

Sanders said the meeting, “The Imprint of the Past, The Face of the Future: A Fort Worth Dialogue on Community and Race Relations in the 21st Century,” was in response to the Star-Telegram’s seven-part series, “The Color of Hate,” which explored Fort Worth’s history during the segregated Jim Crow era.

“The purpose is to talk,” Sanders said. “We will focus on where we are now as a community.”

A five-member panel led the discussion: Vanessa Ruiz Boling of the Human Relations Commission; Maj. General Titus Hall, a retiree from the Air Force; Tim Madigan, Star-Telegram writer of “The Color of Hate” series; Dr. Morrison Wong, a TCU sociology professor; and Louis Zapata, a former Fort Worth city councilman.

Topics discussed to improve race relations today and in the future were the role of young people; how economics is the most important issue today; and the need for quality education and open discussion of racial issues, including those that expand beyond black and white.

Another audience member, Norma Johnson, said she was privileged to live in both the segregated era and the “so-called desegregated era.”

“I would hope we would talk about how we open the lines of the community,” Johnson said. “What can we do to make things better right now?”

Zapata said he grew up in Fort Worth and he said as a Mexican, he was turned down at restaurants and bars in the 1950s.

“I see myself as a person that did not let someone tell me something because of my color,” Zapata said.

Jill Meninger