Billy Earl Dade Middle School Demolished in South Dallas

A demolition crew is working its way through the old Billy Earl Dade Middle School building at the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and Al Lipscomb Way. The three-to-four-month teardown began after a farewell ceremony last spring, and what rises in its place will cost $50 million and carry more freight than most construction projects in this city.

The building’s been standing since 1912. That’s a long time to hold ground.

Dallas Independent School District Trustee Ed Turner hosted the sendoff, and he wasn’t interested in euphemism. “Today, we stand on sacred ground, a place with a complicated past, a powerful present, and a promising future,” Turner told the crowd gathered at the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and Al Lipscomb Way. “We’re not just turning soil, we’re turning the page on a new chapter in the story of Sunny South Dallas.”

The site is slated to become the Adelio Williams Career Institute East, a workforce training facility that’s currently operating out of Lincoln High School. South Dallas has watched dollars and institutions migrate north or east for generations. This one’s staying put.

The building’s full history runs longer than most people realize. It opened in 1912 as John Henry Brown School, named for a former Dallas mayor and state legislator, and it originally served South Dallas’s Jewish community. As the neighborhood changed, the campus changed with it. The school was eventually renamed for Billy Earl Dade, one of DISD’s first African American principals. That wasn’t a ceremonial gesture. It was the district acknowledging, in concrete terms, who actually lived there. DISD closed the campus in 2013 after a new Billy Earl Dade Middle School opened directly across the street.

Diane Ragsdale, a former Dallas City Council member who’s been a presence in South Dallas civic life for roughly four decades, didn’t let the occasion tip into sentiment. “It’s not that we are eliminating the past, because we cannot understand today if yesterday did not happen,” Ragsdale said. “We need to honor the past but also celebrate the future that this institution represents, an institution that will help improve the standard of living for future generations.”

The land’s recent history is worth knowing. DISD put the site out to bid, and an outside buyer with real money got interested. The plans that buyer had in mind included, by multiple accounts, a statue designed to antagonize South Dallas residents. The district pulled the property back before that could happen. Brent Alfred, DISD’s chief of construction services, addressed the decision directly. “We heard loud and clear from the community that this land belongs to the people who lived with it, suffered by it and dreamed through it,” Alfred said.

That’s not nothing. Wealthy buyers don’t usually lose bids on 145,000 square feet of South Dallas real estate because a school district decides the neighborhood deserves better. DISD held the line.

The Dallas Free Press covered the ceremony extensively, and their 2021 reporting on the building’s fate documented how close the deal with the outside buyer came to going through. It didn’t, and the Adelio Williams Career Institute East is what happens next.

Ragsdale’s framing is the one worth sitting with: it’s not erasure, it’s obligation. A neighborhood that carried a complicated institution through more than a century of demographic change and disinvestment deserves a facility that does real work for real people. Workforce training isn’t glamorous. It’s also not a statue designed to offend anyone.

Turner put it plainly enough for anyone to follow: “Today, we stand on sacred ground.”

The bulldozers are already past the point of ceremony.