The Houston and Texas Central reached Dallas in 1872 and the Texas and Pacific the next year, and the two lines crossed east of downtown. Freed people had settled out there, on land thought too far from town to be wanted. They called it Deep Elm and pronounced it Deep Ellum, and because of the rails it was also called Central Track. By the 1920s it was a retail and entertainment district serving mainly Black Dallas.
Elm and Central
Blind Lemon Jefferson played for tips at the corner of Elm Street and Central Avenue. He came from a sharecropping family near Wortham in Freestone County. Accounts of where he lived and performed contradict one another, and there is no evidence he ever lived in Dallas. Huddie Ledbetter, later Lead Belly, said he met Jefferson there around 1912, and accounts have the two playing for tips in the district and in white neighborhoods.
A Paramount scout found Jefferson on that corner, and he went to Chicago in 1925. His first two records, religious songs from December 1925, carried the name Deacon L. J. Bates. In March 1926 he became the first male folk blues singer and guitarist to record. By his death in Chicago on December 22, 1929, he had made more than eighty recordings, or 110 sides counting alternate takes. They sold well in Northern cities and not especially well in Texas.
Through the 1920s the labels that made race records sent scouts and engineers to Texas once or twice a year, set up in a hotel room and put the word out. Columbia came in 1927 and 1928 and recorded Washington Phillips, Lillian Glinn and Blind Willie Johnson. Brunswick and Vocalion followed in 1928, 1929 and 1930, and Victor recorded Bessie Tucker in 1929.
The color line
All of it happened under segregation. Texas required separate railroad waiting rooms by laws of 1910 and 1911, and by 1930 Black Texans could not use the better restaurants or hotels unless separate ones were provided. In neighboring Freedmantown, Black businesses grew from about fifty after World War I to more than 130 in 1924, and the Dallas Express, founded in 1892, condemned segregation and mob violence in its editorials.
Ku Klux Klan No. 66 was organized in early 1921. On April 1, 1921, Klansmen led by Hiram Wesley Evans abducted Alex Johnson, a Black bellhop at the Adolphus Hotel, and flogged him. No one faced legal consequences.
What the expressway took
The Houston and Texas Central tracks were removed for Central Expressway, which one account completes in 1949 and another in 1953, when most of Stringtown, the Black corridor along the rails linking Deep Ellum to Freedmantown, was gone. Voters approved a $40 million bond for the Bartholomew plan in 1945. An elevated extension, now I-345, followed. By one account, its 1969 elevation eliminated the 2400 block of Elm, the community's center.
The Leadbelly in Deep Ellum marker stands in an alley off Commerce Street in Deep Ellum. The William Sidney Pittman marker, at St. James A.M.E. Church, honors the architect of the Pythian Temple, which once held Black doctors, dentists and lawyers and the Dallas Express.