The Flats

Almost nothing was written about The Flats, so Garland historian Emily Chavez rebuilt it from census records, photographs and the memories of former residents. She found that Black residents could not own homes near the square, so the neighborhood was wooden rental houses called flats. The Lucy Hughes A.M.E. Church was the first Black place of worship in Garland. The community lasted from the 1910s into the early 1960s, then was bulldozed. For the site, artist Reginald C. Adams and neighbors laid nearly 20,000 hand-cut tiles into a 36-foot mosaic of fifteen scenes.

What the plaque says

The Flats The Flats was a thriving business and residential community for Black citizens of Garland during segregation. The area contained scattered dwellings since the early part of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Garland experienced an increase in Black residents. In 1936 Garland Independent School District (GISD) moved the 1922 Garland Colored School from Roosevelt Street in the West End to the 200 Block of North Fifth Street. The school educated students through eighth grade. The core of the Flats centered on Fifth Street, State Street, portions of Walnut Street and the then-existing Fourth Street north of state. An estimated 70 homes made up the community. Invigorated, the Lucy Hughes African Methodist Episcopal Church moved from the West End to Fourth Street. The community's stores included hair salons, a barber shop, several cafes and self-owned businesses. Due to its proximity to downtown, residents shopped in segregated facilities of downtown Garland. After a 1946 fire destroyed the all-white Garland Elementary School, GISD held a bond election to construct a 25-room white elementary school and a 13-room junior high, and for Blacks, a 6-room school to be built on a 7-acre tract at the corner of Carver and Hopkins. The facility, earlier renamed George Washington Carver School, opened in 1948. Carver closed in 1970 after integration. New housing developments outside of downtown drew residents, businesses, and the Lucy Hughes Church away from the Flats. Once considered the hub of community life for Garland's Black citizens, little physical evidence remains of the thriving community. (2025)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 11 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.
• Fair Park — 12 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.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 12 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.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 13 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.

More markers nearby

• Garland — steps away
• First Christian Church of Garland — 0.3 mi
• First Methodist Church of Garland — 0.3 mi
• Garland Lodge No. 441, A.F. & A.M. — 0.4 mi