Carving Out Time to Save Your Life

As I drove to the location for our business meeting, it quickly became apparent that I was stepping into the current chapter of a much larger story—a story that a number of us know, in one way or another. Finally making my first trip to Dallas, Texas, I was meeting with both new and familiar colleagues.

An Environmental and Black Story

Approaching the location down the lengthy stretch that is Carbondale Street, shorter roads break off every few hundred feet where families live and raise children. Speed humps are laid down as a deliberate deterrence to the drag racing that once occurred regularly along the long straightaway. The first thing I notice—and, in fact, what I cannot ignore—is the seemingly endless Union Pacific rail line running parallel to Carbondale Street.

While this side of the tracks is tranquil, the other side is booming with business as shingle and gravel plants pump pollution into a spacious proximity that, in Texas, still causes me to pause and ponder. While they say that everything is bigger in Texas, the sudden and stark tangibility of “a stone’s throw away” from Black and Brown communities in the United States is more evident than ever. Within visible distance, the skyline of downtown Dallas looms in distinct contrast.

Before the shingle and gravel plants occupied the other side of the tracks, a Black woman, known in her community as Joppy Momma, lived on her own parcel of land there. Union Pacific then purchased that land, forcing Joppy Momma to move but a stone’s throw away to the opposite side of the tracks. Over the next few generations in Joppy Momma’s family, that parcel of land was somehow left and forgotten, although not by the county tax office where property bills continued to accumulate. Many years later, Kimberly High, Joppy Momma’s great-granddaughter, stumbled upon the connection between lineage and property. She then made a way to settle the tax liability of the land, revitalize it, and put it to use in a way that would benefit the local community...

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