Historian and author Dr. Michael Phillips, SMU Professor Dr. Rick Halperin and Hadi Jawad, co-founder and president of Human Rights Dallas, submitted the op-ed below.<\/p>\n
August 25, a devastating fire raged through ten acres of Sand Branch. The unincorporated former Freedmen\u2019s Town stands in a floodplain fourteen miles southwest of downtown Dallas. Its residents, with an average age of 68<\/a>, scrambled to put out the flames.<\/p>\n As D Magazine columnist Bethany Erickson noted<\/a>, the poverty-plagued community lacks clean running water. The people of Sand Branch rely on bottled water to drink and bathe.\u00a0There are also no fire hydrants in Sand Branch.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Sign up for the This Week\u2019s Top Stories newsletter to get the latest stories delivered to your inbox<\/p>\n THANK YOU!<\/p>\n You’re all set.<\/p>\n CLOSE\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n As the blaze roared ominously near small, often decaying homes, \u201cresidents were using those bottles of water to try to put the flames out,\u201d Erickson wrote. Eventually, firefighters from nearby municipalities arrived and brought the conflagration under control.<\/p>\n Sand Branch residents have been politically abandoned for decades, failed repeatedly by Republicans and Democrats, and by Black and white officeholders.\u00a0<\/p>\n The community lacks not only running water, but also streetlights, a sewage system and connections to the internet.\u00a0Because it has no elected city government, people in Sand Branch lack trash collection.\u00a0Residents are forced to burn their garbage, which only increases cancer-causing toxins in the air and soil<\/a>. Meanwhile, children have drowned in gravel pits<\/a>, as D Magazine reported in 1985.<\/p>\n Population estimates vary, but the number living there probably hovers around 100<\/a>.\u00a0According to a 2014 study from the Hunger Center of North Texas, African Americans make up 87% of Sand Branch, another 10% are Latino, while whites constitute only three percent. The entire population lives below the poverty line, with income averaging $721 a month.\u00a0<\/p>\n The United Nations declares<\/a>, \u201cAccess to water and sanitation are recognized . . . as human rights \u2013 fundamental to everyone\u2019s health, dignity and prosperity.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In Dallas County, that right has been trampled upon.\u00a0As happens so often in local politics, racism and contempt for the poor lie behind this malignant neglect.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t have water here and you know why?\u201d Ivory Hall, an 83-year-old Black resident of Sand Branch, told The Guardian newspaper back in 2017.<\/a> \u201cThe pigment of my skin. If I were white like you, I bet they\u2019d have water down here.\u201d<\/p>\n For years, Sand Branch has been the site of an illegal trash dump six to eight acres in size that Dallas County Fire Marshal Robert De Los Santos\u00a0said in early September<\/a> contained \u201cthousands and thousands of tons . . .\u00a0 of rubbish and debris.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Sand Branch isn\u2019t the only part of Dallas County to live in such squalor.\u00a0 Perhaps hundreds of residents of another rural community of 7,400, referred to as \u201cNo Town,\u201d also lack running water and other modern services, according to a recent Texas Monthly report<\/a>.\u00a0 There, the yellowish water \u201csmells like feces.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Most of Dallas tends to overlook the existence of Sand Branch until something terrible happens. Then this place so rich in tragic history is completely forgotten again.\u00a0<\/p>\n Led by Rev. Allen Hawthorne from Louisiana, twelve African Americans emancipated from slavery the previous decade established Sand Branch (sometimes spelled \u201cSandbranch\u201d) in 1878<\/a>. \u00a0 As Dr. Ed Gray, director of the Dallas County Justice Initiative<\/a>, wrote in his SMU dissertation \u201cMunicipal Zoning and its Impact on Communities of Color,\u201d the name of the community derives from the sandy streams flowing from the Trinity River near where Hawthorne and his companions built their settlement.<\/p>\n According to The Guardian, \u201cproperties were established by African Americans lured by cheap land and the opportunity to elude the various indignities inflicted by the white bastion of Dallas.\u201d\u00a0 By the mid-twentieth century, the place offered natural beauty, \u201ca rich, verdant landscape of creeks, fields and huge gardens that grew any vegetable in the dictionary,\u201d as the \u201885 D Magazine report noted<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Residents dug wells<\/a> to reach water for drinking, bathing and cooking.\u00a0 But that all began to change by the 1950s when white Dallas had subjected Sand Branch to the colonization that has always characterized the history of Black communities in this region.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Hogs overran real estate owned by absentee landlords. Gravel mining began. Contamination from the mines combined with pig and human waste poisoned the local water supplies. Residents buried septic tanks that seeped contaminants into the soil, even though the city of Dallas\u2019s Southside Wastewater Treatment plant, built in 1964, is so close that, as Erickson put it<\/a>, \u201cyou can smell it.\u201d<\/p>\n By the mid-1980s, the water smelled bad too, was filled with sand and had turned brown.\u00a0 E. coli bacteria infested the local water supply and started making residents sick.\u00a0 In 1997, the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (now renamed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) also discovered that the well water contains metals such as iron and manganese that pose health risks. \u00a0<\/p>\n As a result, for more than four decades, the community has depended on bottled water, much of it donated by environmental justice groups like Southern Sector Rising and Taproot Earth<\/a>, for its needs.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe have kids with no water,\u201d the Rev. Eugene Kehey (the former pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Sand Branch) told Daeja Pemberton<\/a>, a Texas A&M law student who has extensively researched Sand Branch\u2019s water woes.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019re like a Third World country, and I don\u2019t say that loosely.\u201d<\/p>\n Dallas County has used Sand Branch\u2019s location in a floodplain as an excuse to do nothing to provide help.\u00a0 As Pemberton noted, in 1985 Dallas County imposed its own restrictions on new construction in floodplains.\u00a0 From that year until 2000, the county allowed 70 structures to rise anyway in violation of those standards. In 2000, the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned Dallas County that it had violated the requirements of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) when it allowed those structures to be constructed.\u00a0 Failure to comply could have resulted in the county losing access to NFIP funds in the future.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n FEMA gave Sand Branch residents only thirty days to choose from a menu of expensive, complicated options: raise their homes above flood level, move their residences outside of the floodplain, build a levee, or tear their homes down.\u00a0 Pemberton described what happened next:\u00a0<\/p>\n After FEMA\u2019s ultimatum to the Sandbranch community, Dallas County created the Dallas County Optional Sandbranch Relocation Assistance Program in 2005. This buyout program provided funding for thirty-six families to relocate, but after those families paid home demolition fees, they were only left with $350 each to move from Sandbranch\u2014this was not enough for a family to afford even a month\u2019s worth of rent.<\/p>\n A 2024 estimate placed the cost for the county to provide Sand Branch water at about $8 million<\/a>. County commissioners don\u2019t think Sand Branch is worth that price tag. Their preferred option has been offering residents yet another buyout.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rick Loessberg, Dallas\u2019s retired Director of Planning and Development, said in 2023, \u201cWe tried to get them water, but with the cost involved and a declining population, was it good policy to spend millions of public dollars for 88 people?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Sand Branch sits in Dallas County Precinct 3.\u00a0 John Wiley Price represents the community on the Commissioners\u2019 Court<\/a>.\u00a0 Price, along with commissioners Elba Garcia and Mike Cantrell, all agree with Loessberg and support some sort of assistance to help residents relocate. \u201cThat\u2019s the only way,\u201d Price said in August. \u201cIf this was a business proposition, we wouldn\u2019t even be talking about [building water lines]. We\u2019d be talking about relocation.\u201d<\/p>\n That will leave the people of Sand Branch high and dry once again if the relocation aid is similar to the amount provided 20 years ago. Housing has only grown vastly more expensive in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the two decades since the 2005 buyout.\u00a0 In recent years, demand for housing has significantly outstripped supply. \u201cWe had a bigger deterioration of affordability than the average metropolitan area in the U.S.,\u201d J.H. Cullum Clark, director of the Bush Institute-Southern Methodist University Economic Growth Initiative, told The Dallas Morning News earlier this year<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Any likely stipend the people of Sand Branch might receive would likely not provide enough for the Sand Branch diaspora, torn from their close-knit community, to find comparable living space, if any affordable house could be found at all.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Another option would be for the City of Dallas to annex Sand Branch, thus connecting it with municipal trash collection, water and other basic services.\u00a0 But that, according to Pemberton, would cost $11 million while Sand Branch would generate only $24,000 in tax revenue annually.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n That price tag would be a hard sell for a city council coping with declining tax revenue<\/a>. That\u2019s especially true under the leadership of Mayor Eric Johnson, whose questionable priorities include spending $2.23 million on his security detail in 2025<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The city of Dallas, Dallas County, and the entire North Texas legislative delegation, however, could do the right thing by Sand Branch if a bipartisan effort were made to lobby the state Legislature to provide necessary funds to bring Sand Branch infrastructure up to 2026 standards.\u00a0<\/p>\n