The Tenth Street Digital Museum is capturing the Oak Cliff district’s notable history. Here’s what you need to know.
The Tenth Street Historic District in Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood holds significance as one of the only intact Freedmen’s Towns—a settlement founded by formerly enslaved individuals—in the country. Over the years, the area has been threatened by the loss of numerous homes. With the demolition of each notable property has come a wave of grief for those who want to preserve Tenth Street’s Black history for generations to come.
This is where the newly launched Tenth Street Digital Museum comes in. Cousins Jourdan Brunson and Tameshia Rudd-Ridge knew they wanted to create an accessible archive detailing the significance of the Freedmen’s Town. They worked with members of the community to gather photographs, documents, and oral histories that tracked the progression of the settlement and its numerous accomplishments.
For those unfamiliar, the Tenth Street Historic District was founded by families who arrived in Texas from Talladega, Alabama via chain migration. The Freemans, Boswells, Smarts, Smiths, Bests, and Penns “built a self-sustaining community with its own churches, schools, businesses, and civic institutions across three connected neighborhoods: Tenth Street, The Heights, and The Bottom,” per the museum’s website.
Brunson and Rudd-Ridge built off of existing preservation work previously done by Black Dallas Remembered and Dr. Mamie A. McKnight. McKnight and the team gathered items and produced maps chronicling all of the places that members of the community remembered but weren’t officially on any planning records.
Rudd-Ridge said, “We saw an opportunity to support and help develop the story out more,” and so they did. One of the people they spoke with to achieve this goal for the digital museum collection was Bessie Slider Moody, an 88-year-old resident.
Moody told The Dallas Morning News, “This history is not just important, it is cherished stories of humble and determined people and their families. It just gives me joy when I think about it. I get emotional. What this project has done is take those stories, our stories, and lift them to a place where they will never be forgotten.”
If Tenth Street Could Talk helped inspire the idea for the museum
Before she started the Tenth Street Digital Museum with her cousin Jourdan Brunson, Tameshia Rudd-Ridge created the If Tenth Street Could Talk project in 2021. It took two years to collect documents preserving the history and culture of the Tenth Street District for that endeavor, but Rudd-Ridge received help from Remembering Black Dallas and the Library of Congress Community Collections Grant.
Now, the Library of Congress is helping to collect stories from Bessie Slider Moody and other Tenth Street residents for the digital museum. Mooday said, “The community was built by people who came out of bondage with faith and determination and dignity,” and this new project is capturing exactly how that happened. Not just for the people in Oak Cliffs who want to remember, but for anyone and everyone who wants to educate themselves about Freedmen’s Towns.
Moody put it best: “To know that people, not just in Dallas but across the country, around the world, can now learn about Tenth Street, is something I never could have imagined, even when I was growing up and thinking about bigger things.” Having her perspective, as well as the recollections of other residents, was the most important element of the museum’s creation.
Rudd-Ridge explained that curation “was really focused on collecting living memories that people have, and then we thought about different ways to share that.” It wasn’t always an easy task though, as she and Brunson had to collaborate with other museums to gather items that existed in their archives.
Eventually it all started to come together, and when people heard about what Brunson and Rudd-Ridge were doing, they were eager to share their insight into Tenth Street’s historic past. “We get published in an article, and then someone will say, ‘Oh, my family lived there,’ and they have more stories to tell,” Rudd-Ridge said.
If you’d like to add your own stories to the Tenth Street Museum’s digital archive, click here.
