For years, Shalondria Galimore has wanted a place to bring her neighborhood of Joppa together.

The historic freedman’s town near the Trinity River, isolated from the rest of east Oak Cliff by railroad tracks and I-45, has long been left behind by the rest of Dallas.

Through systemic racism and years of neglect, Joppa — pronounced jop-ee — never received the same city resources other neighborhoods have.

Galimore, president of the South Central Civic League, knew her community needed a central, public gathering space. She envisioned a multipurpose center that could offer everything from cooking classes to after-school care, but the space was never available.

Then, three months ago, she walked into the-long abandoned and deteriorating Melissa Pierce School, at the corner of Fellows Lane and Hull Avenue. Her parents had attended the school long ago, and Galimore had been working for months to find a new use for the building, with help from the property’s owners, Habitat for Humanity.

“What we needed has been here all the time,” Galimore said of the school. “We’ve never had it. It’s important that we have it. It’s all the community has ever wanted and ever needed.”

The property, which was donated to Habitat in 2017, was officially deeded to a new nonprofit chaired by Galimore as part of the community’s annual Juneteenth festivities this year. Now, she’s hoping to give the old building new life.

‘It just felt safe’

The school was built by the Wilmer-Hutchins ISD in 1953 as a segregated school, a year before Brown vs. Board of Education. The land had been donated by its namesake, Melissa Pierce, a pillar of the Joppa community and the daughter of a formerly enslaved person.

The school remained open — and segregated — until 1968. Although the district maintained that it was separate but equal, Joppa’s school operated differently. Its school year started six weeks later, so its students could pick cotton for local landowners. It served only the all-black students of Joppa.

But the school was much more than a symbol of segregation, it was a source of pride, said Yolander Thomas, who attended the school for several years in the mid-1960s. She said the isolated community and the school kept students away from more extreme racism in other parts of Dallas.

“It just felt safe,” Thomas said. “We just didn’t really have a real problem because we didn’t know any better.”

It offered a place for students to learn close to home, rather than spending half the day being bused all around the city to other neighborhoods. It represented a significant investment in the community, even if it also was a tool of a racist system.

“That’s what it was intended to do, but it was also designed to be convenient for people who lived there,” Galimore said. “It was a win-win for students. It’s a source of pride.”

Future of landmark

By the time it was donated to Habitat for Humanity in 2017, it had been a church for a few years but had sat empty for a decade.

“It was an eyesore,” Thomas said. “It was like a slap in the face.”

Habitat was already in the community to build and refurbish houses, but the nonprofit’s expertise is in single-family homes, not large community centers or aging historical buildings.

Habitat executives said at the time that they wanted to preserve the school, but they turned to a committee of architectural experts from the University of Texas at Arlington, community members and representatives from the nonprofit to discuss options for the property.

“Anytime an organization has done extensive work in a community… always getting a community voice in what we do there is important,” said Joli Robinson, vice president of government affairs and public policy at Habitat.

Kathryn Holliday, an architecture professor at UTA and historic preservation advocate, said students helped draft possible plans for the community center and worked to include suggestions from community members.

“It really helped people see that this can be something,” she said. “It’s a civil rights landmark for Dallas.”

For several years, as Habitat considered the fate of the property, some community members wondered whether anything would come of the ongoing discussions.