Historic Billy Earl Dade Middle School Demolished in South Dallas

South Dallas said goodbye this spring to a building that has stood at the corner of Malcolm X Boulevard and Al Lipscomb Way since 1912, as Dallas ISD begins demolishing the old Billy Earl Dade Middle School Learning Center to make way for a $50 million career institute.

Community leaders, residents, and DISD staff gathered for a farewell ceremony hosted by DISD Trustee Ed Turner, who framed the moment in generational terms.

“Today, we stand on sacred ground, a place with a complicated past, a powerful present, and a promising future,” Turner said. “We’re not just turning soil, we’re turning the page on a new chapter in the story of Sunny South Dallas.”

The three-to-four-month demolition will clear the site for the Adelio Williams Career Institute East, a workforce training program currently housed at Lincoln High School. The DISD board voted 8-1 at its March 20 meeting to adopt the new name, honoring Adelio Williams, a beloved South Dallas plumber who died in 2021.

The building’s history stretches back more than a century. Originally founded as John Henry Brown School, named for a former Dallas mayor and state legislator, the campus primarily served South Dallas’s Jewish community in its early decades. As the neighborhood shifted demographically, the school was renamed for Billy Earl Dade, one of Dallas ISD’s first African American principals. DISD closed the campus in 2013 after opening a new Billy Earl Dade Middle School directly across the street.

That layered history drew speakers who took care to honor what the site has meant before embracing what it might become.

“It’s not that we are eliminating the past, because we cannot understand today if yesterday did not happen,” said former Dallas City Council member Diane Ragsdale, a longtime South Dallas leader who spoke at the ceremony. “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.”

Remarks also came from Brent Alfred, DISD’s chief of construction services, and Dr. Todd Atkins, senior pastor at Salem Institutional Baptist Church.

Alfred revealed that the old Dade site had been put out to bid, and that outside interest almost pulled the property away from the community entirely. A wealthy outside buyer reportedly expressed interest in the land and, according to Alfred, planned to erect a statue designed to provoke and taunt South Dallas residents. DISD intervened.

“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. He added that community feedback pushed the district to retain ownership and give South Dallas residents a seat at the decision-making table.

Dallas Free Press, the publication that originally reported on the ceremony, reached out to DISD for more details on the bidding process and the identity of the outside buyer Alfred referenced. The district declined interviews and directed the publication to file an open records request, leaving key details unresolved.

The episode raises questions worth watching closely. When public school districts sit on historically significant land in communities that have faced decades of disinvestment, the pressure to sell can be intense. Outside buyers with the capital to bid high do not always have community interests in mind. That DISD held the line here, at least according to district officials, reflects the kind of accountability that organized communities can demand when they show up consistently.

The Adelio Williams Career Institute East, once operational at its new South Dallas home, will join a network of Dallas ISD career and technical education programs designed to connect students with industry credentials before they ever reach a college application or a job listing. For a neighborhood that has historically been bypassed when Dallas talks about economic development and workforce investment, the institute represents a concrete commitment.

South Dallas has been promised futures before. The people who gathered to say farewell to the old Dade building know that. But they showed up anyway, because the land is theirs, and they intend to hold the district to what comes next.