From KERA:
Emmanuel Glover loves music and art. So much so that when it came to buying their first home, Glover and his wife, Sarah Ashitey, chose the Gilbert-Emory neighborhood in West Dallas.
“We are surrounded by murals and graffiti work,” Glover says, referring to the West Dallas “Tin District” south of Singleton. Jazz music streams through his modern townhome. “ It makes the place beautiful because we are surrounded by art.”
Glover and Ashitey bought their home in spring 2020. Their three-story townhome was one of the first new builds in the area. The price tag: $400,000 dollars.
Glover says it wasn’t until they moved in did they learn that their new house was in a historical African-American settlement. The neighborhood once included one of Dallas’ original segregated schools — the Frederick Douglass School, named for a Black abolitionist. Community members convened the school in West Dallas in the early 1900s, and Dallas ISD closed the school on Bayonne Street in 1980. A neighboring Black church tried to purchase the former school land, but in 2017, Dallas ISD sold it to a private developer.