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Dallas Will Install Street Toppers to Commemorate Late Gay Rights Activist Don Maison

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Dallas Will Install Street Toppers to Commemorate Late Gay Rights Activist Don Maison


This week, Dallas Metropolis Council unanimously accredited road toppers honoring Don Maison, the longtime homosexual rights activist and Dallas lawyer who died in February. Maison was the longest-serving president and CEO of AIDS Companies of Dallas, which supplies inexpensive housing and companies for folks residing with or affected by HIV/AIDS.

Metropolis Council members Chad West, Omar Narvaez and Homosexual Donnell Willis proposed the road toppers for Marsalis Avenue between Colorado Boulevard and Sabine Avenue. They selected this space as a result of it’s close to the Hillcrest Home, one of many locations run by AIDS Companies of Dallas that Maison was closely concerned in.

When Maison joined in 1989, the group wasn’t in one of the best situation. It had seen a couple of iterations within the decade earlier than it started working beneath its present identify.

In 1985, a bunch of individuals shaped round a person named Phil Grey, a Dallas native who’d just lately been recognized with AIDS and returned house from California, based on a historical past recounted on the AIDS Companies of Dallas web site. By that 12 months, the county had recorded 125 instances and 123 deaths. In Dallas, Grey established the Oak Garden Mail and Message Service, providing jobs to different folks residing with AIDS. However, the mail service collapsed when Grey killed himself that decade.

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Two different males who knew Grey, Michael Merdian and Darryl Moore, would go on to kind the PWA (folks with AIDS) Coalition of Dallas, which was devoted to creating initiatives maintained by and for folks with AIDS. It will later be known as AIDS Companies of Dallas. In 1987, the group started specializing in housing for individuals who had misplaced their properties due to sickness or discrimination.

“If I could provide people a place to live that had dignity, a place where they felt loved, then that’s why I was there.” – Don Maison, gay rights activist

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That 12 months, Merdian and Moore bought an condo constructing in North Oak Cliff to deal with folks with AIDS. However, the housing facility hit a roadblock when it was found {that a} $175,000 donation for the venture was made by somebody accused of embezzling $3.2 million.

The next 12 months, the group purchased the Revlon Flats, a property with 36 models that was badly in want of renovation. To make issues worse, a fireplace on the Revlon Flats stalled and elevated the worth of the venture. Round this time, somebody reached out to Maison about interviewing to be president and CEO of the group.

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There have been about 90 candidates for the place, and Maison didn’t assume he had an opportunity of getting it. He didn’t have any expertise in operating a nonprofit. One buddy instructed him it was “the dumbest profession transfer” he might make. However, he utilized anyway and bought the place in 1989, the identical 12 months the group started working beneath its present identify.

Issues had been tough within the early days with the group, Maison recalled for The Dallas Morning Information in 2003. “We couldn’t pay the payments, so we stored a really low profile,” Maison stated, however he felt he was there for a motive.

He wasn’t going to discover a remedy for AIDS. “That’s not my expertise,” he instructed the Morning Information. “However, if I might present folks a spot to reside that had dignity, a spot the place they felt beloved, then that’s why I used to be there.”

Underneath Maison’s watch, the group grew. It went from having 5 full-time staff to 60, and its housing capability tripled.

AIDS Companies of Dallas drew up plans to develop a 64 unit facility on Marsalis Avenue. The U.S. Division of Housing and City Growth accredited these plans in 1992. It will be known as Hillcrest Home. It opened the next 12 months and the group operates the ability in partnership with the Dallas Housing Authority. Now, the road the Hillcrest Home sits on will probably be marked with Maison’s identify.

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Dallas, TX

Dallas Cowboys’ Dak Prescott confirms birth of baby girl, Aurora Rayne

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Dallas Cowboys’ Dak Prescott confirms birth of baby girl, Aurora Rayne



Dallas Cowboys’ Dak Prescott confirms birth of baby girl, Aurora Rayne – CBS Texas

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Prescott announced the birth of his second child via his Instagram page, saying she was born on May 22.

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Federal agents detain three outside Dallas immigration court in stepped-up enforcement

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Federal agents detain three outside Dallas immigration court in stepped-up enforcement


Plainclothes federal agents took at least three individuals into custody outside a Dallas immigration courtroom Friday.

It’s part of a stepped-up enforcement effort from the Department of Justice to remove undocumented individuals more quickly.

NBC-5 reporters witnessed one individual detained outside a courtroom in the Earle Cabell Federal Building in downtown Dallas, and two others told a Telemundo 39 reporter that their relatives were detained as well.

Another 15 individuals were seen taken into custody over a two-day period last week, according to our content partners at The Dallas Morning News.

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Guadalupe Ontiveros says her nephew, Evin Villanueva Herrera, 18, arrived at the federal courthouse Friday for a hearing in his immigration case.

But instead of receiving a next court date, an attorney withthe Department of Homeland Security filed a motion to dismiss.

Ontiveros said she then watched plainclothes agents take her nephew, who arrived in the U.S. from Honduras, into custody moments after leaving the courtroom.

“I convinced him to come (to court) because it was the right thing to do, but the judge granted him an appeal, and as soon as we walked out the court doors, they took him,” Ontiveros said.

It’s a legal process called expedited removal, allowing the federal government to remove undocumented individuals who have arrived in the U.S. in the last two years and don’t have an active asylum claim.

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The practice, once confined to a geographic radius near the border, now applies across the U.S., according to Eric Cedillo.

“They (DOJ) have the legal ability to do what they’re doing,” Cedillo said

The Dallas-based immigration attorney who did not have any connection to the cases at the federal building Friday, said while individuals have thirty days to appeal, they must do so in custody and by mail.

He added that the stepped-up enforcement, seen in several cities across the US, has led to growing concern for those who arrived in the U.S. within the last two years, even among individuals who filed legitimate asylum claims within a year of arrival.

“It is having that effect of instilling fear in those individuals who are asking those questions of what can I do to protect myself,” Cedillo said.

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A request for comment from Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not immediately returned Friday.



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Jim Schutze: A tree hugger’s lament for Dallas industry

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Jim Schutze: A tree hugger’s lament for Dallas industry


Park advocates notched a victory before the Dallas City Council this week; an industrial developer took a hit; and I’m trying to figure out why I, a tree-hugger from way back, am not smiling.

The loser of the day was businessman and political consultant Brandon Johnson, on the short end of a narrow vote he needed to build a concrete batch plant in a heavily industrial zone near Walnut Hill Lane and Interstate 35E in northwest Dallas. The winners were advocates for nearby MoneyGram Soccer Park, 120 acres containing 19 soccer fields and a pavilion built with city money 10 years ago.

Not actually having gone to med school, I was nevertheless persuaded by testimony that it’s bad for kids to engage in vigorous athletic activity in a place where they are likely to suck in large amounts of what scientists call inhalable particulate matter — what I would call concrete dust.

So, the vote was no to particulates, yes to kids. So why no smile?

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Start with this: The place the city chose for this park 10 years ago was already surrounded by heavy industry. In more recent overarching land-use policy decisions, the city has reaffirmed that this zone, about midway between downtown Dallas and the northwest city limits, is where industry is supposed to go. So putting a 120-acre athletic park smack in the middle of it 10 years ago was a monumentally foolish thing to do, equivalent to installing slides, swings and a merry-go-round in the median of a downtown freeway.

Some advocates for the park found sympathy from some council members this week when they accused the surrounding industrial users of environmental racism. They even suggested the solution must be to run off the industrial users, who possess long-range and even permanent legal permission to be where they are. This would be the equivalent of protecting the kids on the merry-go-round by tearing down the freeway.

In spite of my huggerdom, I always balk and even recoil when I hear a certain narrative stubbornly repeated around town in which industry is painted as a bad thing, an enemy of the people. I’ve lived here more than half of a very long life, but I’m a kid from the Great Lakes region at a time when it was the steaming, bustling industrial hub of the western world. Yeah, a while back.

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I grew up among hardworking people who gathered in from around the world to work in those industries. With their good wages they bought new brick houses, sent kids to college and retired with great health care and, believe me, they did not do it by riding merry-go-rounds.

Environmental racism is real, there and here. This city has been witness to despicable cases of environmental racism, as in West Dallas, where noxious polluters were jammed in cheek-by-jowl with poor and mainly minority neighborhoods. Permanent damage was done to generations of children.

That’s a true and terrible story, a sin that cannot be plowed under with the lead-contaminated soil left behind by polluters like the infamous RSR lead smelter, closed in 1984 only after a heroic battle led by citizen activist Mattie Nash.

So how on this good earth could this city government, whose sole ultimate purpose is to protect us, have placed 19 soccer fields in the middle of a legally defined industrial area?

I assume MoneyGram paid good money for those naming rights, but if the park is to stay where it is, then another name would better suit the tradition it represents. In its present location, the park should be renamed RSR Smelter Park.

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At the risk of being drummed out of hugger ranks forever, I can’t help pointing out another aspect of this vote: the powerful effect it will have on future location and investment decisions by industry. This is how factories wind up in Mexico.

We ought to be able to agree on this much. We never want kids to breathe in inhalable particulate matter if we can help it. But if we can resolve that problem, then industry is a good thing, not bad.

Industry provides employment, which is even more important than soccer. Employment puts food on the table. No food on the table, no soccer. And industry provides massive support to the tax base. Oh, that — the money to pay for $31 million soccer parks.

Hugger be damned, I just don’t believe the city council did the right thing this week. The right thing would have been for the city to admit its mistake 10 years ago and sell the park to industry, kind of like taking the merry-go-round out of the freeway. Put the money toward building a new soccer park somewhere safer. And name it Mattie Nash Soccer Park.

But did I actually say, “admit its mistake?” Yes, well. There you have it.

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Jim Schutze is a longtime Dallas journalist and author of the recent novel “Pontiac.”

We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com



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