Go Away, Dixieland (Dallas Observer 1999)
FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2016 AT 4 A.M.
BY JIM SCHUTZE
The campaign to rename Jefferson Davis Elementary School in Oak Cliff seemed to reach a decisive conclusion when the school board voted 7-1 recently in favor of changing the name. But partisans in the Confederate camp hint the Jeff Davis fight was but a skirmish in what could become a long and uncivil war ...
During debate on renaming the school for the late U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan .. the eerie sense that old Confederates might be stirring in their graves was heightened by the uncanny resemblance some of the speakers bore to old Confederates. Jim McNabb, who spoke for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, looked as if he might have come to the meeting directly from a skirmish with the blue-bellies, gray hair and beard cut in an antique style ...
Jefferson Davis Elementary, named for the president of the Confederacy, serves a student population that is 98 percent black and Hispanic. Parents have been lobbying for years to get the name changed, arguing that a slave-holding champion of the rebellion is not an uplifting icon for African-American and Hispanic kids to see every day on their way to class ...
As so many of the people who spoke against the renaming were members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Sebesta went home and devoted his weekend to digging out what he had in his files on that group. Some of the materials Sebesta produced for the Dallas Observer reached way back, including clippings from The Dallas Morning News and Times Herald in the 1950s, when the SCV was campaigning against integration. Some were more recent, as in the 1980s when the local SCV ran the following ad in its journal: "The journal has available for immediate shipment a small supply of signs to display Early American-Southern tradition. They read 'White Only' and are professionally done" ...
http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/vintage-schutze-go-away-dixieland-8338585
