A new Texas Historical Marker honoring The Flats — the free-standing Black community that occupied downtown Garland from the late 1800s through the mid-twentieth century — was unveiled Sunday afternoon at a 3 p.m. ceremony in The Atrium. The marker tells, in the brief format the state’s historical marker program allows, the story of a community that built its own homes, stores, school, and church on the ground that is now occupied by the Granville Arts Center and the city government complex.
The unveiling was paired with a performance of a key scene from “The Flats: Cradle of a Community,” the original musical drama that premiered in April 2024 telling The Flats’ story in full. Performing a scene from the play at the marker dedication closes a small loop. The play introduced the story to a wider Garland audience two years ago. The historical marker now puts that same story onto the physical landscape, where it will outlast individual performances and reach residents who never saw the original production.
What The Flats Was
The Flats was a self-contained Black community in the heart of Garland during the era of Jim Crow segregation. Like similar Black neighborhoods in cities across Texas and the broader South — Dallas’s State-Thomas, Fort Worth’s Como, the historic Black communities of dozens of mid-sized Texas towns — The Flats existed because the legal structures of the era required it to. Black residents could not live in Garland’s white neighborhoods, could not patronize Garland’s white-owned businesses on equal terms, and could not attend Garland’s white schools or churches. So they built their own.
The community’s footprint covered the central downtown blocks where the Granville Arts Center and Garland’s municipal government buildings now stand. The Flats had its own grocery and supply stores. It had its own school, where Black children received their education from Black teachers in a building Black residents maintained themselves. It had its own church, the spiritual and social center of the community. And it had its own homes, with families that traced multi-generation roots in the same blocks.
That kind of self-contained community was the rule rather than the exception across the segregated South. What makes any specific community’s history worth memorializing is not the basic structure — which was tragically common — but the specific people, the specific buildings, the specific events that defined that community’s life. The Flats had decades of those. The marker, the play, and the broader effort to recover and document the community’s history all exist to make sure those specifics do not disappear from Garland’s civic memory.
How the Land Got Repurposed
The Flats no longer exists as a community because the city’s downtown redevelopment in the second half of the twentieth century reshaped the same blocks for municipal and civic use. The Granville Arts Center, the city government complex, and the surrounding downtown infrastructure were built on land where Black families had lived. Residents were displaced. Buildings were demolished. The community’s continuity was broken.
That pattern — Black communities displaced for municipal redevelopment, freeway construction, urban renewal — runs through most American cities. Garland’s specific story is one of many, but the version that matters here is the local one: which families lived in The Flats, what they did, what was lost when the community was dispersed, and how the city now handles the relationship to that history.
The marker is one answer to that question. It is not the entirety of an answer. A bronze plaque cannot restore a community or compensate for what was lost. But it does establish, in a public and durable way, that the city of Garland recognizes The Flats as part of its own history rather than as something that happened on the edges of the historical record.
The Marker Program
The Texas Historical Marker program, run by the Texas Historical Commission, has been operating for decades and has produced thousands of markers across the state. The program has, over its history, evolved in what it commemorates. Earlier markers tended toward founding fathers, military events, and the dominant historical narratives of their era. More recent markers — including this one — increasingly recognize Black history, Latino history, women’s history, and other previously underrepresented threads of the state’s past.
That shift is the result of years of advocacy work, scholarly research, and community organizing. Getting a historical marker placed for The Flats required documentary research, sponsor coordination, fee payment, and the formal application process the Commission requires. The marker is a small thing in physical scale and a large thing in what it represents: institutional recognition that this community’s story is part of the state’s history and deserves the same kind of permanent memorialization that other communities have received for generations.
Why the May 3 Ceremony Mattered
The Atrium ceremony brought together community members, civic leaders, and the cast of “The Flats” musical drama for a coordinated unveiling that paired the institutional act of erecting a marker with the cultural act of telling the community’s story. The performed scene — a single moment from the play — connects the historical record to the lived experience of the community that the play was built to dramatize.
This is the kind of ceremony that does not draw the largest crowds the city hosts but does the most consequential work. The marker will sit in The Atrium and be read by visitors for years. The musical will continue to be performed periodically. Together they make sure The Flats has a permanent place in the city’s public memory.
For Garland residents who want to engage with the city’s history beyond what the marker itself can convey, the next step is reading the longer accounts of The Flats and similar Black communities across Texas, learning the names and stories of the families who lived there, and understanding how the same patterns of redevelopment played out in cities across the metroplex. The Garland City Council canvassed this year’s general election results on Tuesday, May 13 and welcomed new District 7 Council Member Joe Thomas Jr., closing one civic chapter and opening another. The marker dedication a week earlier was a different kind of civic moment — slower, less procedural, and arguably more important to the city’s long-term identity.