Dallas civil rights leader Juanita Craft’s birthday celebrated at African American Museum

Inside Fair Park, two teens at the African American Museum in Dallas answered a question: What does freedom represent to you?

They were there Thursday for the 124th birthday of Juanita Craft. The late civil rights leader and Dallas City Council representative was a “local icon of liberation,” said Marvin Dulaney, the museum’s historian and scholar-in-residence. An archival collection was shown alongside the museum’s “Icons of Liberation” gallery, which features the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.

Craft was a “barrier breaker, a freedom seeker, a freedom fighter,” said Lisa Ross, president and CEO of the museum, to dozens of attendees who later crowded around a pop-up exhibit for the civic leader.

“She understood the power of what happens when we work together and we push with our fists and not our finger,” Ross said. “She understood the absolute necessity and the dynamic force of sisterhood. She was a force in this city.”

Born Feb. 9, 1902, Craft started her life the same year a state poll tax law was passed, which made it harder for some to vote. She would go on to become the first Black woman to vote in a public election in Dallas County in 1944. A leader in the NAACP, Craft was credited with organizing more than 180 chapters and youth councils.

Craft’s home drew visits from King, Lyndon B. Johnson, Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt. Dulaney said that while Craft did not receive the same international platform as others, including men like King or Mandela, she serves as a local example of how anyone can become engaged and create change.

“We often forget that it’s these people who, on the local level, are also active and who are also icons in their own way,” Dulaney said. “Indeed, they’re meeting with young people every day and working in the community every day to change basic things.”

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Visitors on Thursday got to peek at archival items that tie back to Craft’s story as part of the celebration put on by the museum and nonprofit Friends of Juanita Craft Civil Rights House and Museum. They were only expected to be on display for a few days.

Dulaney said the civic leader’s work “epitomizes” the grassroots nature of the Civil Rights Movement. Craft “was out there organizing, working with people, which is what the movement was all about,” he added.

Racial tensions were high when Craft moved into her home in South Dallas in 1950. There were bombings in the surrounding area that year. During the ‘50s, she led efforts to end segregation at the State Fair of Texas. In 1963, she took dozens of students to the March on Washington. In 1975, when she was 73 years old, Craft was elected to the Dallas City Council. She served two terms. She died 40 years ago, on the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.

Craft’s house on Warren Avenue is now a museum.

Diane Ragsdale, a former council member and community advocate, was among those celebrating Craft’s legacy. She was a “Craft kid,” joining the NAACP youth council under Craft’s leadership when she was 11 years old. She said Craft’s contributions inspired her activism and fostered community.

The pop-up exhibit, alongside King and Mandela in an esteemed museum, was “right where it needs to be,” Ragsdale said.

“It elevates and amplifies her history and her service and also our struggle as Black people,” Ragsdale said of the display, adding, “You want more young people to be aware of Mrs. Craft and her history and her sacrifice, but that is something that we have to make happen.”

Dulaney said there was a need for increasing education around Black history and civil rights at a time when he said it is being “sanitized,” pointing to changes made by the Trump administration, including the removal of an exhibit on slavery in Philadelphia last month.

“We need to teach young people about what happened in our past,” Dulaney said. “By telling the story of slavery, we indeed increase the empathy that people have for each other.”

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As Dulaney showed the museum’s exhibits, Christin White was encouraging her two teenage sons to have pride in themselves, learn Black history and form their own opinions.

“We repeat things if we don’t learn it the first time,” White said. “Our people have fought for so many different freedoms, so many different privileges. I think a lot of the kids, they just don’t know anything about that.”

White sat at a dry-erase board with the boys, 14-year-old Mikael Chambers and 13-year-old Mikelan Chambers, and pressed them to answer the prompt: What does freedom represent to you?

Mikael wrote that freedom means “to do whatever you want with your life without someone judging you.” His brother wrote that freedom means “to give and obtain knowledge.”

Then, they left the exhibit and gathered with the crowd to sing “Happy Birthday.”

This reporting is part of the Future of North Texas, a community-funded journalism initiative supported by the Commit Partnership, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, the Dallas Mavericks, the Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Lisa and Charles Siegel, the McCune-Losinger Family Fund, The Meadows Foundation, the Perot Foundation, the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas and the University of Texas at Dallas. The News retains full editorial control of this coverage.