In Black America

On this week’s In Black America, producer and host John L. Hanson, Jr. speaks with King Hollis and Lindell Singleton, co-directors, writers and producers of Quakertown, USA, a film about a thriving black settlement originally called Freedman Town, in North Texas, which was eliminated by malevolent political and economic forces in 1921.

The full transcript of this episode of In Black America is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.

Announcer From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America.

King Hollis I’ve heard about Quakertown my whole life, but didn’t know all the details. Lindell came across a story and we had this show in the area and my family would talk about it and he would. He started diving deep into the story and he found some great stuff. They started doing his own work on it. Then we had a pause on that. And then we through the Dallas Black Film Festival in the city and conversations to go ahead and really get the resources behind making the story is a story that, you know, to their credit, agreed to come up with half of of what we needed resource wise to give us into production. And so that’s how we kind of got started with this.

John L. Hanson Jr. King Hollis, co-director, writer and producer of Quakertown, USA. For decades, the community of Quakertown was excluded from local history in Denton, Texas. The only trace of evidence that could be found of the community’s displacement was in a book from 1978 titled “History of Denton, Texas From It’s Beginning to 1963”, sentences that mention this event simply saying, quote, “one of the first necessary steps was that of buying several pieces of property from the owners. The project required several months, but most of the former residents of the area soon had new and better homes about a half mile east of the railroad depot. This newly settled area was called Solomon Hill”, end of quote. Unfortunately, this was not entirely true. Quakertown was settled by free slaves and their descendants following the Civil War. The town thrives as a self-sustaining community with its own businesses, schools and social institutions. Today, that story is being put on film titled Quakertown, USA. I’m John L. Hanson Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week’s program, Quaker Town USA with King Hollis and Lindell Singleton. In Black America.

Lindell Singleton The community no longer exists. There is where the community was. It currently is currently a city park, and in the design of the bond initiative that it was passed by the citizens of Denton and the municipal bond park bond vote is what it was call that initiative by referendum. It put in motion and apparatus to remove to separate two Black folk in that community from their homes, property and businesses. And it is today that community is a city park. And there’s been a significant amount of scholarship that has been written, produced over the last 40 years. It really puts this story, the details really, to what happened.

John L. Hanson Jr. Lindell Singleton, co-director, writer and producer of Quakertown USA. The story of Quakertown, began in 1875 when 27 families from the White Rock area of Dallas, Texas, moved two miles south of the Den Square to a new settlement. They called Freeman Town. Getting logs from the surrounding was they built their own log cabins and created the first community that truly belonged to them. The growth of Freeman Town and the opening of Fred Douglas School, Dean’s first public school for African Americans, led the community to relocate along Pecan Creek. Moon There was cheap and it was a flood zone, but the land was good and water was abundant. In 1903, the College of Industrial Age, now Texas Women’s University, opened the campus, closed the Quaker town’s northern border, and the college president said it was protecting them from receiving accreditation. Years later, abandoned election path and Quaker Town was no more. Recently in Black America spoke with Lindell Singleton and King Hollis. King let’s start with you. Give us a little background about yourself. Were you born and raised?

King Hollis I was born in Texas. I was raised in Dallas. I’d been a filmmaker for now 32 years. In the film business. I’ve had the pleasure of doing most of that time with Mrs. Singleton, who actually, when I was a young in a gang and was a mentor, one of my mentors. And then we carried on our family hood brotherhood into film. And we’ve been making a lot of documentaries together among amongst other things. And so I’m a director and I’m I do a lot of producing and writing and also post houses and I direct commercials. I direct documentaries, feature films and episodic television as well. And so I love what I do. I love who I do with more. And it’s a pleasure to be here.

John L. Hanson Jr. Same question, Lindell.

Lindell Singleton Well, I am from from Los Angeles, California, and I’ve been in Texas for a while now. And I was very fortunate many years ago to meet this 20 year old kid who produced a film called Suicide King. And I looked at that film and thought, this kid is the most incredibly talented filmmaker I may have ever encountered. And I was so overwhelmed by his work as a young man, as a 20 year old. He and I just began a journey many years ago that we still continue to this day, partnered on many, many hours of television content, feature length, documentary aids, and a host of other creative projects. And I’m very proud to work with him and to be affiliated and associated with him. And he’s one of the best directors in America.

John L. Hanson Jr. How did you first, I guess, go to you, Lindell, or get involved with the filmmaking business?

Lindell Singleton Well, as an L.A. kid, I grew up going to movies all the time. I took the city bus to theaters on Hollywood Boulevard and and walked up and down Hollywood Boulevard and went to movies and and was fascinated with with movie making. I got a still camera when I was young and the no to. And I just began taking pictures and writing stories and just never really shied away from that. And the filmmaking part of it, the moviemaking part of it is just an outgrowth of a commitment that I have to just to storytelling, first of all. And then secondarily, the place I am now in my life is the commitment to using documentary filmmaking as a tool to leverage social change.

John L. Hanson Jr. King, same question.

King Hollis Yeah, I was kind of on that story Troubled, young, troubled kid, you know, and decided that my answer was film and started down that journey and really, you know, not very like mine is, you know, the most powerful voice in the world is this medium media. And I felt that having a voice, African-American people in particular, need to have a voice in framing their own story, shaping the whole image. And that was one of the driving forces outside of my love of just pure storytelling and entertainment. We know that the revolution will not and will be televised. And so we wanted to be a part of that change. And yeah, we do things with the and sometimes we may do things for business, but whenever we can make change and have a voice with any type of, you know, social justice or, you know, improving humanity, that’s what we’re going to do.

John L. Hanson Jr. How did you all come to work on the project? Quakertown in Denton, Texas.

King Hollis Yeah. It’s interesting story. So I’m from Denton, so I’ve heard about Quakertown my whole life and but didn’t know all the details. Lindell came across a story. And we had just we just showed him, Yeah. You know, my family would talk about it and he went he started diving deep into the story and he found some great stuff. He started doing his own work on it. Then we had a pause on that. And then we through the Dallas Black Film Festival and the city and conversations to go ahead and really get the resources behind making the story in the city of Denton, to their credit, agreed to come up with half of of what we needed resource wise to get us into production. And so that’s how we kind of got started with this.

John L. Hanson Jr. For those that don’t know, give us a historical perspective of Quakertown.

King Hollis Lindell has a great, can give you that.

John L. Hanson Jr. Lindell.

Lindell Singleton Yeah, in in a nutshell. And if I go too long, just tell them to shut up. The story of Quaker is a uniquely American story, and it is a story about what happens when dreams are deferred or who really gets who really gets an opportunity to pursue this thing called the American Dream. There were roughly between 4 and 500 families that had come to Denton, Texas, and built this thriving, prosperous, extraordinary community. And. The community was. It was not a community of sharecropping. It was not a community of poor folks. It was a community that that they, one can argue, was upper middle class. When I say that, I mean there were hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, dress shops, telephones, cars, electricity. These people were living extraordinarily well for anybody of that period of time, not just not just Black folks. And that community was destroyed. And the story of our movie, Quakertown, USA, is this story about how and why a thriving, prosperous Black community that was a beacon of light for the entire South could be just ripped apart and destroyed really in the course of a single bond election.

John L. Hanson Jr. How did you all go about telling that story since Quakertown no longer exists, or does it still exist to some extent?

Lindell Singleton Well, the community, the community no longer exists. There is where the community was. It currently is currently a city park and in the design of the bond initiative that it was passed by the citizens of Denton and the municipal bond park bond vote is what it was called that initiative by referendum. It put in motion and apparatus to remove to separate the Black folk in that community from their homes, property and businesses. And it is today that community is a city park. And there’s been a significant amount of scholarship that has been written, produced over the last 40 years that really puts the story that details really to what happened. And so we were able to construct that from from written accounts, obviously from archival stuff, from newspapers, from academic papers, from the many Ph.D. folks that we talked to that we interviewed who were able to construct the what. But the challenge that Mr. Hollis and I had was why why destroy this community? And that’s really what our story is about. It’s a it’s a crime drama, and it’s about the theft of dreams and hopes and property and business and money from Black folks. And. And why?

John L. Hanson Jr. I guess the next question is, how long did it take you all to research Quakertown? Prior to going into production? What type of information you all needed to to tell a complete story?

King Hollis Well, I’m going to I’m going to have to depart. I just make a decision and then I’ll have a comment. Like I said earlier, you know, Lindell had started researching things years before, which I think is about seven years prior. But when we got together with the city and got some resources that we could put together. One of his gifts is put together incredible research teams. And we have an academic team second to none on this. And that was a strategy. And let me mention about the importance of stories like this, and is that we don’t know them. That’s rather important. They don’t know these stories. And, you know, us researching things, we found things that we didn’t know that that was shocking. That will drive tragedy, you know. And and, you know, it’s important that we understand how we got here. And that’s what the true value of these stories are. They don’t really illuminate the past. When you go through these type of stories, they illuminate you right now. They actually make you really understand the world around you today because it puts us in great context. I think that’s one of the strong things about these these type of stories.

John L. Hanson Jr. Lindell, when you look at the project thus far, what are some of the things that you did the research, but some of the things that you found out during that process of filming.

Lindell Singleton If any? Yes, that’s an important an important question. Just to to speak to your previous question and echo what Mr. Holler said. You know, we had a profoundly gifted and diligent research team. It was led by Dr. Ann Hawkins, who is who works for the chancellor of the University of Texas Arlington, and she’s formerly assistant pro growth at State University of New York. And she led our research team. And, you know, and she brought in academics from the University of North Texas and Texas Women’s University and a host of other folks to have other places around her around the nation. And we spent about ten months in just straight digging into the story, turning over every stone, uncovering everything imaginable so that we could speak to the veracity of this story and make sure that that there was really no parts of the story that we presented that could really just be challenged from a factual from a factual perspective. So our research team was was extraordinary. And we owe them, you know, we owe Dr. Hawkins and our team just really a debt of gratitude. But in terms of just to get to your second question about what we uncovered, that was stunning, I guess shocking. It’s how Black folk and white folk really weren’t that separated, that there was there were there were Black people and white people during that period of time that live together, lived in the same community, worked in the same community. They had a shared economic ideology. They weren’t there wasn’t as much antagonism at a local community level. Then you kind of think that it should be now. Of course we’re not deny the existence of, you know, the Ku Klux Klan of systemic racism, the impact of Jim Crow, the white caps, the denial of the denial of the opportunity to vote, which was really a big part of why why the destruction of Quaker happened. Because, you know, the Black people there had they had a profound amount of economic power, but they weren’t able to to to migrate that economic power into a political foundation that would ensure that would create a pathway to their success. They weren’t quite able to do that to to to manage that. But the Court answer to what your question is that we were struck by just the way that white folks and Black folks were just they were getting along, they were working together. They were living in the same community, going to the same churches, white folks renting from Black landlords, German and Irish immigrants living in the Quaker community. I mean, these were things that I don’t think we were just kind of prepared for it when we kind of began it because we weren’t really we weren’t it just wasn’t something we were expecting that to kind of happen upon. So that’s that was probably the one thing that just for me, for me personally, that’s the one thing that just shocked me. From our from our data gathering, from our team’s data gathered.

John L. Hanson Jr. If you’re just joining us, I’m John L. Hanson Jr. and you’re listening to In Black America from KUT Radio. And we’re speaking with Lindell Singleton and King Hollis, producers and director of Quakertown, USA. I guess the next question is how did that section in Denton become Quakertown?

Lindell Singleton There’s some conflicting stories, if you will, about how the name Quaker became attached to it. And I’ll tell you that the one that we’ve that we’ve arrived at, that we that we think is really the most plausible story and likely the the one that has the most validity, in our opinion is the filmmakers, and that is the Quakers Society of Friends as an entity, rejected the owning and the trafficking of human beings. They rejected slavery and they had a profound belief in the in creating a sense of community to creating a place where every human was valued. There was virtue in the humanity of every person. And it’s our belief as filmmakers that the folks who founded that community, that they they desired that kind of a cellular DNA level, if you will, to create a community and then county that it lived out the reality of of what it meant to be a Quaker. You know, there was no society of friends, church or anything like that in the community. But our sense in just kind of digging through this story, you know, getting our hand in the middle of it, is that the people who founded Quaker wanted the community to embody the spirit, the essence, the DNA of what the Quakers stood for. That’s our sense.

John L. Hanson Jr. During this process. While you all were filming in Denton were the citizens that came up to ask, what were you all doing? And I guess were there any regret or remorse from them for what happened to that section of town?

Lindell Singleton Now, to answer your question. There were there were many folk that came to us and and, you know, wanted to know about the about the movie and about what we were doing. And and that’s intriguing because for the longest period of time, as we have talked to to to some of the 90 year old former residents or women who had sent to memory of since memory their family and husbands of widowed widowers, I should say, of folks who lived there for the longest time. And that would be from the time of the removal, which was 1921, 1922, up until the 1980s, no one who was relocated wanted to talk about the removal. They wanted to just keep it under the rug. It was and this is my opinion, it was it was too painful for them that the transgenerational trauma of the removal was too much for them to be able to to articulate because, you know, they lost everything and were relocated several miles away and lived in a community that, you know, for 50 years or longer or 40 years. The longer it lacked basic city services. It was a far cry from what their family members had had in Quaker in many ways. And many people wanted to many people knew about it, but they didn’t understand the depth of what happened there. And they only would remember that a parent or an older relative had said, Hey, over here where the park is, You know, we used to live over there. We had a place over there. But, you know, they they took it from us. And that was really we heard that over and over again. You know, they took it from us. And that became kind of the reverberating cry from, you know, from a lot of the a lot of the older folk is that, you know, it’s quite a lot of quite a lot of pain. One of the one of the ladies who was in her 90s, Ms. Alma Clarke, you know, she her husband had actually been part of the removal. And she was saying that her husband, whenever he drove there’s a great story she tells. She said she’d have to they’d have to drive by the park to go to pay their utility bill every month. And she said every month when they drove to pay the utility bill, the water bill, actually, he would just become agitated and angry driving by the park because the park symbolized for him what it was. It was a constant reminder of the profound depth of the loss. So there’s a lot of significant amount of pain from from the folks who were removed and from their descendants.

John L. Hanson Jr. Do you find it coincidental that a month after voters in Denton approved the removal of Quakertown, the Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa occurred?

Lindell Singleton That’s another piece of the story that um that’s a strand that when we saw it, we’re like, wow, this is like basically eight weeks after the the park bond vote that they’re ostensibly gutted the Quaker community. And you get what happened in in Greenwood in Tulsa. Yeah, that’s that is a coincidence, as one might say.

John L. Hanson Jr. Well, you are able to connect with other generational people, white and Black in Denton during that period. And some of the conversations you all had.

Lindell Singleton Because of the, you know, the removal happened in in 1920. So. Right. You know, there there weren’t there was nobody around who actually, you know, who had lived in the Quaker community. Closest connection that we had was Miss Alma Clark who was like 94 or 95. And in this this Betty Kimball, who is, I believe, 92, 91 or 92 years of age, and they were connected through a husband or through a relative that they were close to. And those were that those were the only two folks that we were able to locate who just had that that visceral sense memory of of being connected to the community.

John L. Hanson Jr. Did Texas Women’s University participate in this project?

Lindell Singleton Yes, Texas Women’s University did participate in the project. They were they were gracious in in opening up the school to us. We filmed for multiple days on campus. And the the chancellor, the president of the university, you know, Dr. Carine Feyten. She’s in the movie. She and her and her staff, her team, they opened up everything at the at the university to us. And we filmed there for a number of days. So, I mean, we’re very we’re thankful and appreciative to the university for their role in helping us to helping us deal with the logistics of getting this picture made.

John L. Hanson Jr. How difficult were you able to make a decision because you have to have a film or documentary, a lens that’s viewable. So it just can’t go on and on and on making those tough choices. What we’re going to leave in the film and what we going to put on the cutting room floor?

Lindell Singleton Well, that’s you know, that’s always the the rub as a filmmaker, isn’t it? Isn’t it? You know, one of the things that you learn early on is that the real power in media, the real power in film and television is who gets to make the decision as to what gets left out. Profound power in that as a storyteller. And it’s a situation where we have to determine what’s best for the story and and make the choices that we have to make. You know, for example, we made a film years ago about your school well, not really about your school, but your school. University of Texas was a major player in that. And it was about the end of the football rivalry between University of Texas and Texas A&M, which actually they’re going to be playing again this year. But we made a film called, you know, Lone Star, Holy War.

John L. Hanson Jr. Lindell Singleton, co-director, writer and producer of Quakertown, USA. If you have questions, comments or suggestions as to future In Black America programs, email us at inblackamerica.org. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on Facebook and X. You can hear previous programs online at kut.org. Also, you can listen to a special collection of In Black America programs, an American archive of Public broadcasting. That’s americanarchives.org. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for technical producer David Alvarez, I’m John L. Hanson Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week.

Announcer CD copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing to In Black America CDs, KUT Radio, 300 West Dean Keeton St, Austin, TX 78712. This has been a production of KUT Radio.

This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.