Fair Park Nineteen Thirty-Six

The Texas Centennial Exposition of nineteen thirty-six was a celebration of one hundred years of Texas independence from Mexico. Six million people came to Fair Park in Dallas between June and November of that year to see what Texas had built for itself: fifty-plus Art Deco buildings designed by the architect George Dahl, the largest single concentration of Art Deco architecture in the United States, all of it erected in less than a year with federal Works Progress Administration funding.

The Centennial was also rigorously segregated throughout. Black Texans were not permitted in the main exposition area on the same terms as white visitors. A group of Black civic leaders, understanding that the federal government was funding an event that would systematically exclude African American history, organized and applied sustained political pressure on the exposition's all-white planning committee. The result was the Hall of Negro Life, the first formal recognition of African American culture and achievement ever included in any American world's fair.

The hall was designed with contributions from Black architects. It housed exhibits covering African American history, art, and scientific achievement. More than four hundred thousand people visited it during the Exposition's run.

When the Exposition closed in November of nineteen thirty-six, the Hall of Negro Life was demolished. There was no plan to preserve it. The space it occupied was returned to other uses.

The African American Museum of Dallas opened its current building on the same Fair Park grounds in nineteen ninety-three, on land adjacent to where the hall once stood. The museum is the only institution in the Southwest devoted exclusively to African American historical materials. The arc from nineteen thirty-six to nineteen ninety-three is fifty-seven years: from the building raised under political pressure and then demolished, to the permanent institution on the same soil.