West Dallas residents say they want answers about Bataan Community Center's future

Obed Manuel, Report for America Corps Member/Staff Writer - Dallas Morning News

About 30 protesters gathered outside the Bataan Community Center in West Dallas under gray skies Wednesday morning to pose one question to the Lucious L. Williams Foundation, the group that owns the center: “Where is the money?”

They renewed their years-long efforts to find out where money for the sale of other properties the foundation held in this area of Dallas has gone and why more hasn’t been spent on the Bataan Center.

Maria Lozada Garcia, president of La Bajada Neighborhood Association, reading from a statement, said that it is necessary for the community’s residents to have some kind of input on what happens with the property, where redevelopment has been hot and property values have skyrocketed over the past few years.

“If we lose the Bataan center, La Bajada loses the heart that holds the community together,” Garcia said while addressing members of the media and other protesters.

She added that it was time the Texas Attorney General’s office, with which an official complaint was filed earlier this month, the IRS and city leaders to investigate the Williams Foundation’s finances.

The foundation’s president, Karen Factory Salmond, declined to comment. Lucious Williams, who was the past president and namesake of the foundation, also declined to comment. 

Holding signs that read “Save our Bataan Community Center” and “Not For Sale” in Spanish, protesters chanted, “Where will our children learn and play?” A chorus of roosters also joined in on the chanting.

The property at 3201 Herbert Street, on which the Bataan Center sits, is currently listed as being for sale by Harold Carter Realtors for $10 million.

Mandy Watkins, treasurer for Beyond Baseball, the last group to put on official programming for community kids at the center, said that her group continues to pay rent to the foundation and is currently involved in an ongoing legal battle with the foundation to keep its lease.

Last year the group stopped using the building for after-school tutoring and a feeding program following a city inspection.

“We’re hoping that eventually we’ll be able to continue to have programming here,” Watkins said.

Watkins said Beyond Baseball would like to see the building fixed so the group can resume providing services inside the decrepit building and would want to do so for the remainder of the 8 years left on its lease, if not beyond that.

Others like Gloria Lopez, CEO of Trinity River Mission, an area nonprofit that provides after school tutoring and scholarships to kids in West Dallas, are ready to offer other solutions.

Lopez, who grew up in West Dallas and was at Wednesday’s protest, said that TRM is and has been interested for some time in acquiring the property from the foundation.

“We need a permanent home. West Dallas is our home. For us to come here would be the best legacy for West Dallas,” Lopez said. “We would have to decide as an organization and as a board, but there is interest.”

Lopez said TRM had been in talks to take over the building and to redevelop the property for a permanent location, but those talks broke down years ago.

But chanting in West Dallas was not enough for those who showed up, and following the press conference, they piled into their cars and drove over to a business park on West Mockingbird Lane, where Dikita Enterprises, an engineering firm led by Williams, has its office.

Upon arrival, though, the building’s property manager, Jennifer Jackson, said that no one from Dikita Enterprises was there.

Police escorted protesters to the sidewalk, off the private property. But about 20 minutes after the protest began, Garcia, Watkins and Lopez attempted to enter the building, only to be locked out by building security and the property managers.

“Myself and the community are extremely upset because this has been going on for years. We want the Bataan Center to be returned to the community. We want accountability and that’s why we’re out here,” Garcia said, moments after being shut out of the building.

In West Dallas, amid development and demolition, a fight to save a beloved community center

Robert Wilonsky, City Columnist - Dallas Morning News

For eight decades, the Bataan Community Center has served as the focal point for a neighborhood settled by the people who built this city on behalf of the people who owned this city. 

But now the doors at the squat beige West Dallas building dating to 1940 remain locked most of the time. A place not long ago packed with children, from sunup till beyond the dinner hour, sits silent. Spaces that served over decades as classrooms and clinics run by volunteers are empty, used mostly for storage, if at all. Walls once covered in murals that told the story of this neighborhood and the history of the Spanish-speakers who settled it have been painted over. A leaky roof has helped spread mold and rot throughout. 

The community center is not beyond repair. Yet a feeling of finality, of farewell, exists in this brick building along Bataan Street, near Trinity Groves, in the La Bajada neighborhood that has seen the sprawl of development creep to its doorstep. 

A place so important to so many is now embroiled in protracted, personal tumult that in recent years has spawned lawsuits over prior property sales, defamation of character and broken contracts and promises. Despite the best efforts of residents joined to save this galvanizing force for good in their neighborhood, there is a very real possibility it could vanish.

Because the building is for sale for $10 million. Or, it was up until this week.

"This area is a hot area for development," reads a listing from Harold Carter Realtors that appears to have been pulled Tuesday. Carter wasn't immediately available to explain why. But the ad insisted: It was "A MUST SEE."

The property had been put up on the block by the center's current owner, the Lucious L. Williams Foundation, which did not exist until a year ago. 

Williams was once president of the West Dallas Community Centers, which, under various monikers, operated Bataan and other centers like it dating back to the 1930s. A woman named Karen Factory Salmond filed papers with the state in 2018 that said the Williams Foundation is "formerly the West Dallas Community Centers." Salmond, with whom I have been unable to connect, is listed as the foundation's president.

In 2016, Williams told this newspaper he had no intention of selling the property. When I spoke with him briefly Monday he initially said he wasn't selling it, but the foundation was. When asked if he agreed with the move, Williams said, "I am a part of the organization, so yes."

And this sales pitch will not stand with the neighborhood residents for whom the center was school, kitchen, church and home.

"It's the heart of the community," said Maria Lozada Garcia, president of the La Bajada Neighborhood Association. The 50-year-old would know better than most: Her grandfather helped build the nearby Trinity River levees, and her father was Felix Lozada — a World War II veteran, West Dallas' most beloved champion and a man for whom a plaza near Trinity Groves was named shortly before his death in 2016. 

"One of the reasons this neighborhood is so united is because of the Bataan center," Garcia said Monday, as we sat inside the center with others fighting to save it.

"It's where everybody congregated," Garcia said. "It's a touchstone to the past. We have to maintain this to maintain the community."

By my count I'm the fourth Dallas Morning News writer in five years to check in on the Bataan Community Center. TV news, too, has documented its plight, including just last year, when a sports program called Beyond Baseball, started by a 1997 New York Yankees draft pick named John Darjean, tried to reopen the center — and then got the boot from Williams. Beyond Baseball's lawsuit against the foundation has been sent to mediation and is set for trial in June 2020.

Garcia and a group of residents and former Bataan center workers have taken their fight to the Texas attorney general's office, filing complaints that allege, among other things, "misrepresentation, negligence, abuse of power" and a failure to account for proceeds from earlier property sales. Ken Paxton's office will not comment on whether it is investigating the foundation.

The Lucious Williams Foundation's financials seem impossible for me to discern because the most recent 990 on file with the Internal Revenue Service is from 2014, when the foundation was still called the West Dallas Community Centers.

Garcia and the La Bajada association sent Williams a letter in recent days demanding to know how he "earned the right to rename the West Dallas Community Centers to the Lucious Williams Foundation." She also demands to know: "What gives you the right to sell the Bataan Center?"

La Bajada residents will hold a rally and press conference Wednesday to call for the foundation to return the center to the community, as well as an audit of the foundation. 

Five places like this were once scattered across this part of the city: Cultural Arts, Elmer Scott, Edgar Ward, Joseph McMillan and Bataan, which has had a few different names over the years. Per this paper, the centers opened "during the depths of the Great Depression, when the primary needs in this unincorporated area of the county were food, clothing and medical supplies."

For years they each housed clinics and classrooms. They fielded separate football teams, which played each other. And they taught kids "human development, positive self-image ... and adolescent development," former executive director Leonard Long said in 2001.

Some of this city's most famous and powerful — including civil rights activist Juanita Craft, developer Trammell Crow and state Sen. Royce West — served on the board of what became known as the West Dallas Community Centers, which operated with funding from what became the United Way. In the 1950s and '60s this newspaper ran countless stories about the difference the centers made in the lives of children who would have otherwise gone without or gotten into trouble.

Four of the centers vanished over time. The Bataan Community Center is all that remains.

Frank DeLeon, a 72-year-old who lives nearby and grew up playing football and baseball here, called the Bataan center "the core of this neighborhood."

The center has been a "haven for people," said Jessica Suarez, a 32-year-old who helped run the center until Williams shuttered it in 2015, when Williams insisted the foundation was out of operational funds.

"When I used to walk through here exhausted, having no direction and no support, I used to feel the roots of the people who fought for this," Suarez said Monday. "I used to feel this place is who we are. It's our culture. I have no words, really, to explain the feeling of it. But I was able to feel what all those ancestors ... all those people ..." She took a long pause.

"It has meant a place to go for so many people," she said. "When they close the doors somewhere else, here it's open."

For now.

Ex-Yankee player wins fight to keep his nonprofit in West Dallas, where property values are skyrocketing

Dianne Solis, Senior writer - Dallas Morning News

John Darjean, a former outfielder for the New York Yankees, was a ball of energy back in August as children filled the Bataan Community Center for a back-to-school party with free hot dogs, haircuts and backpacks.

His nonprofit group, which provides sports and after-school programs for youths at the West Dallas center, has become popular since it launched at the vacant building.

But on Thursday, the 40-year-old retired athlete looked worried as he waited for a judge to rule on whether his Bataan landlord could evict him and his nonprofit.

West Dallas Community Centers Inc., a struggling nonprofit that owns the Bataan center, sued Darjean’s nonprofit Beyond Baseball Youth Association Inc., seeking to evict it over payments owed for rent and utilities.

Darjean and his attorney say his landlord simply refused to accept his payments and wants him out.

“It was a setup, Judge,” Darjean’s attorney, Dana Hamilton, told Judge Juan Jasso. “They are trying to get out of this 10-year lease because they are trying to sell the property.”

During the 16-minute court hearing, copies of dated money orders that Darjean said his landlord would not accept may have been the decisive evidence. The justice of the peace ruled in Darjean’s favor.

True peace may be more elusive.

Former pro baseball player John Darjean (back, right) listened to his attorney Dana Hamilton after he successfully fought eviction from the Bataan Community Center by the nonprofit West Dallas Community Center. Listening with him are Robert Morris, a West Dallas Community Center board director, Eva Elvove, president of La Bajada Neighborhood Association, and Lynn Gray, a friend of Darjean.

Lucious Williams, a longtime West Dallas Community Centers board member, said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News that there was no plan to sell the Bataan Street property. The aging community center sits on a nearly five-acre plot with playground equipment, baseball fields and spectacular views of the new Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge and the Dallas skyline.

It’s also near the ballooning restaurant and apartment developments at the west end of the bridge. This year, the Dallas Central Appraisal District doubled the property’s assessment to  $1 million. It’s probably worth much more on the market.

“We have had people who want to buy it, and we should be able to sell the property if we want to,” Williams said. But, he insisted, “We are not talking about selling the property.”

Williams speculated that his nonprofit lost the eviction case because it didn’t have an attorney represent it in the proceedings. Rather, a board member did.

He also criticized Darjean over utility and rent issues and said Darjean didn’t show up for meetings. Williams denied there were disputes over programming that served the Latino population.

He acknowledged that his nonprofit has had financial problems and ran out of money to afford programs at the center. That’s why it signed a contract with Darjean’s Beyond Baseball, Williams said.

It’s a 10-year lease.

The West Dallas Community Centers has parted with another property. The nonprofit was locked in litigation for more than a year before a court ruled in October that it could sell a lot in West Dallas to Trinity Point LLC for $85,000.

The sale contract included a commission for the husband of West Dallas board president Karen Factory Salmond. Factory Salmond declined to comment.

Within the court filings is a petition signed by more than 100 people asking for three longtime board members to resign.

That sale fueled suspicions the board would sell the one remaining property and speculation that the Bataan Street center could fetch much more than $1 million.

Darjean now pays about $1,350 a month for his lease. He also says he paid about $10,000 for repairs.

The Bataan center is something of a love object in La Bajada, where 9 out of 10 residents are Latino. Generations of children played ball there, attended after-school tutoring or took pleasure in a back-of-the building mural that celebrated Mexican-American military veterans of West Dallas. A mobile health clinic was once located on its grounds.

Darjean admits he had a rocky start in La Bajada. When he took over the center’s main property in March, he painted over the veterans mural and an interior mural that featured the Virgin of Guadalupe. That provoked resentment, and Darjean said he regrets the decision.

But residents say Darjean, who is black and Creole, won them over with their shared love for baseball and children of all hues. This week, a banner was unfurled in the trees at the Bataan center. It read: “Free Our Center, Support the Bataan Community Center, Home of Beyond Baseball and La Bajada Neighborhood.”

Jessica Suarez, a West Dallas resident who once worked at the Bataan center, said the center represents triumph. The murals to the veterans and the Virgin of Guadalupewere part of that, she said.

“This place has such richness,” she said. “This was a place a child could forget that they had nothing to eat at their house, but they would here. This was the place you could come if you had the lowest grades in school, because it didn’t matter here. This was the place where you weren’t criticized. You were taught.”

In the lobby after the hearing, Darjean paid Robert Morris, the  West Dallas Community Centers board director who represented the board before the judge, his back rent through December. The parties will settle on utilities later.

La Bajada neighbors, who had filled two rows in the courtroom during the hearing, took out their phones to document the delivery with photos.

Morris, who has been on the board for about seven months, said: “We are satisfied with payment of the rent and utilities. That’s all we wanted.”

He denied there were plans to sell the property.

Darjean told Morris: “I ain’t in it for no agenda. I am only for the kids.”

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