Dallas Should Be Ashamed of Pioneer Cemetery, Where Graves of City Founders and Confederates Are in Ruin

Tuesday afternoon I received a panicked message from former Dallas County Judge Jim Foster, who was insisting that Dallas City Hall was up to no good under the cover of darkness -- which I always want to believe and often do. Just not in this case. Foster wrote that the city "is working at night to remove headstones from Pioneer Cemetery so that they can get to the Confederate monument and cart it off." He passed along photos from the cemetery in front of the downtown convention center -- of bases absent their grave markers and mysterious tire tracks. Foster pointed me toward a Facebook post, which he'd just written, chronicling the alleged dirty deed. It had already been shared and commented on dozens of times, as the conversation took the expected turn: "Those people in charge of removing the headstones and the Civil War statues are nothing but criminals."Curious but mostly bored, two colleagues and I walked over to see what he was talking about. We were met by four Dallas police officers summoned by a man from Midlothian named Joe Hocker, who had seen the Facebook post and rushed right up. Hocker, a member of Dallas' Tannehill Masonic Lodge No. 52, was convinced all the Confederate headstones had been removed. This was not true. But these days, that means nothing.  Continue reading...