As America rapidly urbanized in the 1920s and ’30s, nearly every burgeoning city gave rise to a jumbled, boisterous side of town that lay somewhere between exciting and dangerous. One such place in my state, known as “Deep Ellum,” was a stretch of Elm Street in East Dallas. A predominantly African American community, it also hosted a freewheeling mix of immigrant laborers, rural migrants, musicians, saloonkeepers, preachers, fortune-tellers and assorted hustlers. It was both bedazzling and dicey — the sort of place where the blues lay in wait for innocents. As a popular song of the day warned:
“If you go down in Deep Ellum,
“Keep your money in your shoes
“Or you’ll go home
“With the Deep Ellum blues.
“Oh, sweet mama,
“Your daddy’s got them Deep Ellum blues.”
A 1937 article in a black weekly described it as a rollicking scene “where business, religion, hoodooism, gambling, and stealing goes on at the same time without friction.” The writer told about seeing a Bible-thumping street preacher mesmerize a crowd by prophesizing that “Jesus Christ would come to Dallas in person in 1939.” As the evangelizer grew louder, “a pickpocket was lifting a week’s wages from another guy’s pocket, who stood with open mouth to hear the prophecy.”
View the complete April 7 article by Jim Hightower on the National Memo website here.