By Garry Blanson
When many Black People think of Dallas, Texas, they think of things like the Dallas Cowboys, the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, the movie North Dallas Forty, or even the Medical City Dallas Hospital, which is located in North Dallas. Surprisingly enough, this week’s Black Pioneer, Anderson Bonner once owned the land that The Medical City Dallas Hospital now sits on! In addition to the land that the hospital is on, Anderson ended up owning thousands of acres of land in what is now North Dallas.
Anderson Bonner was born a slave in Alabama around 1839. Also, it is rumored that he was possibly a member of the 100,000 Negro refugees that were forcibly transported to Texas by their White slave owners, during the American Civil War to keep the Union Army from freeing them. Furthermore, it was reported that on “June 19, 1865,” Union General Gordon Granger and Union Troops under his command arrived in Galveston, Texas, and pronounced the end of slavery (on June 7, 1979, more than a century after the abolition of slavery in Texas, Texas House Bill 1016 passed in the 66th Legislature Regular Session, declaring June 19, “Emancipation Day in Texas)!
The following year, on “June 19, 1980,” Texas became the first state in America to officially and legally make Juneteenth a national holiday!
Although he was thought of as an illiterate man, he was intelligent enough to see that he could split up the 60 acres of land (keeping part for himself and his family members, and renting out the rest to Negro sharecroppers). Anderson’s plan proved to be quite profitable, and he was able to use some of the money from his rental properties to buy more land. Over a period of years, he had accumulated over two thousand acres of land in what is now North Dallas and the Dallas suburb of Richardson.
In his honor, his family established the Anderson Bonner Endowment scholarship, which assists RISD graduates who attend Prairie View A&M University.
In closing, I would like for you to think about “ALL” of the land in the city of Monroe, West Monroe, Sterlington, Bastrop, and Ruston, Louisiana that was “ONCE OWNED BY BLACK PEOPLE!“
