DALLAS — White Rock Lake and the park areas surrounding it are beloved by Dallasites both for their beauty and their recreational opportunities. Whether it be biking the miles of trails around the lake or picnicking on its shores and watching sailboats drift by, White Rock Lake can seem like an oasis from the busy city life of Dallas.


What You Need To Know

  • Three Dallas-Fort Worth residents have created a podcast called "Black History for White People"

  • Now in its second season, the podcast has just released three episodes focused on East Dallas

  • The podcast comes at a time when American public schools have become a hotbed for political debate about how the nation should teach about the history of racism and diversity in the U.S.

What many who love the lake and its parks don’t know is that the area was once just a creek running through wheat and cotton farms worked by enslaved people. In fact, at one point, the largest slave-owner in Dallas County owned land here. 

Elements of Dallas’ Black history surround the White Rock Lake area of East Dallas. So much so that a podcast called "Black History for White People" devoted two episodes to the subject.

“A lot of the stuff we talk about in [the East Dallas] episodes is stuff we eluded to in separate pieces — segregation, redlining, oppression,” said Gerin St. Clair, a co-producer of the podcast. “But having one story brings it all together and that story can be told looking at the history of East Dallas.”

The 'Black History for White People' podcast first aired last summer, and was created by Brad Wygle and Gerin St. Clair, brothers-in-law and next-door neighbors who wanted to create a resource on Black history for white people, like them, that wasn’t “just about the facts of history, but through the “telling of the true story of history to teach and encourage white listeners to love the Black and brown neighbors around them.” 

St. Clair and Wygle had talked about the idea for years. When they finally decided to get the idea off the ground, they enlisted Katina Stone-Butler, a musician based in Denton, to join the team. 

The podcast trio describes themselves as “a multiethnic collective dedicated to loving black and brown people by educating, resourcing, and challenging white people to actively participate in racial justice.” 

“Rinsing the bleach off our history books,” the podcast’s Twitter profile says. “Our goal is simple—educate white people on black history.”

'Black History for White People' certainly isn’t the first such podcast to hit the airwaves in recent years. And St. Claire was quick to recognize that there are important and valuable podcasts made by Black and brown voices he hopes listeners see as a valuable resource. 

“We recognize that Brad and I are white people in a space telling the story of a culture that is not ours,” said St. Clair, who lives north of Dallas. “We want to honor Black and brown culture and stories and just be careful that we are presenting them in a way that is fair. But we also want to elevate Black and brown voices so that it's not just a couple of white people telling stories that aren't ours.” 

St. Claire said he hoped their podcast, now in its second year, will translate those stories “into a form that white people will hopefully pay attention to and tune into.”

“As soon as you start learning the history of both Black history and the history of racism in America and the way it shaped and formed the history of our country, it touches on every aspect of the realities that we live in today,” he said.

The podcast’s trailer first launched on May 20, 2020, five days before the tragic murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer. That incident set into motion a series of protests and a national reckoning in America about race and equality. 

The Dallas-area producers of the podcast had already recorded four episodes before Floyd’s death, making it impossible to address the incident in the first 45-minute to 1-hour releases, which addressed the Black Lives Matter movement and the history of lynching in America. 

The national reaction to Floyd’s murder played a significant role in subsequent episodes. In the second, the podcast turned its focus on North Texas, but it wasn’t the first time Texas came up in the series. The podcast also did an episode on Juneteeth, now a federal holiday commemorating the day the last enslaved African-Americans were informed that they were free. 

The podcast episodes also come at a time when school boards in Texas and across the country have become battlegrounds of American culture wars as parents and educators debate how the county’s history should be discussed in schools, particularly on sensitive subjects such as segregation, racial discrimination and diversity. 

“Broadly speaking, there is a lack of awareness of black history throughout the south and I think Texas was one of the worst offenders,” St. Claire said.

In both East Dallas episodes, Adam Griffin, a pastor at Eastside Community Church in East Dallas, acts as the guide as the podcast takes its listeners on a drive all over East Dallas to discuss the history and culture of the area. 

Starting at White Rock Lake, Griffin takes listeners even further back in history to a time before enslaved Africans were brought to work the cotton fields of East Dallas, and explains how the Caddo tribe once claimed the lands near the lake. 

The episode then heads north of the lake to an area of what is now Lake Highlands. Roughly 125 years ago, a section of this area was developed and called Little Egypt, one of several Freedmen’s towns in Texas. Freedmen’s communities were created after the Civil War in the era of segregation for formerly enslaved African Americans. At the time, they were some of the only places Black people were allowed to live.

A bonus episode came out of the original two-part series on East Dallas, in which residents of Hamilton Park, a neighborhood in northeast Dallas built specifically for Black families, tell stories about growing up in the area.

The East Dallas episodes came out the same month as the re-release of one of the most famous — and difficult to find — books about the history of racism and race relations in Dallas, The Accommodation by Jim Schultz. The book was first published in 1986 but in limited numbers. But its popularity as a defining non-fictional book on what Dallas Black history grew through bootleg copies of the book being passed around. This year, local publishing house Deep Vellum re-released the book and, with it, restarted a conversation about how Dallas talks about its history of race relations. 

“Although Dallas is one city, much of its history is exactly what was happening to many cities all across the country,” the host said in the East Dallas episode.