Joppee Community

Joppee's long fights were for a school, a road and a bridge. Residents organized the South Central Civic League in 1948 under the Dallas Negro Chamber of Commerce, led by Laura Belle Foster and P. H. Foster. Melissa Pierce, a formerly enslaved woman whose family held land, donated the ground for the Melissa Pierce School, dedicated in September 1952 for Black students of the Wilmer-Hutchins district. Dallas annexed Joppa in 1955. Railroad tracks long cut the neighborhood off, and a bridge over them opened in 2007 after residents had pressed for one since the 1990s.

What the plaque says

Joppee Community Located on the banks of the Trinity River, near the Great Trinity Forest, the community of Joppee is one of the few remaining freedman towns in Texas. Following emancipation, freed slaves from the nearby Miller Plantation established their own community here in 1872. The owner of the plantation, William B. Miller, hired former slave Henry Critz Hines to oversee his business, The Honey Springs Ferry Company. It was an important service to carry goods and passengers over the river. This also provided a lucrative entrepreneurial opportunity for Hines. He used his resources to take a major role in the establishment of Joppee. Over time, many freed slaves from East Texas settled in the community. They worked and lived alongside the rest of Dallas society as it developed into a larger commercial area. The 1870s saw the introduction of railroads into Dallas, and by 1890 the ferry service closed. Joppee continued to be an important place for African Americans following the civil war and reconstruction. The community offered refuge in times when Ku Klux Klan activities tried to push African Americans out of the area. Joppee had school and church structures, such as the New Zion Baptist church which still exists today. Joppee resident Laurabelle Foster chartered the South Central Civic League in 1948, under the auspices of the Dallas Negro Chamber of Commerce. Generations of African Americans have lived in Joppee and many descendants still do. Some of the earliest Juneteenth celebrations began in the Joppee community, and continue today. (2015)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• African American Museum, Dallas — 4.4 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Fair Park — 4.5 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 4.6 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 5.7 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.

More markers nearby

• Big Spring — 1.7 mi
• Lincoln High School — 2.6 mi
• Tueria Dell Marshall — 2.7 mi
• Salem Institutional Baptist Church — 3.0 mi