Knights' Tale

He, Portia and their growing family moved to Dallas in 1913; Pittman received several commissions in Texas, chief among them the temple for the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal organization formally established in the 1860s. Pittman was hired by the Knights' "colored" fraternity, which began around 1875. According to state records, in June 1911 the Grand Lodge of the Colored Knights of Pythias of Grand Jurisdiction of Texas bought from Tom Angus a plot of land on Elm Street. The Knights paid Angus $10,666. In 1913, the Pythians announced the land was to be the home of its "State Pythian Temple."

In 1915, the lodge filed with the city Building Permit No. 376, for a "4 story brick lodge building" to be constructed on Elm Street. Walton Construction Co. was the contractor, using Pittman's plans. City records show the cost of the building, the Pythians' Texas headquarters, as $736, which, say several local historians, can't be right.

It opened in 1916 and housed Dallas' first black dentist and first black surgeon, among many other professionals for whom the temple was a godsend. Lawyers and accountants (including former Dallas City Council member Al Lipscomb's grandfather) worked out of the building, as did the few insurance companies that would sell policies to blacks. There was a barbershop, and black high schools and colleges held their graduation ceremonies and dances in the grand fourth-floor ballroom, its arched windows providing a spectacular view of the burgeoning downtown.

Eighty-one-year-old Louis Bedford, among the first black judges from Dallas appointed to the federal bench, recalls going to dances at the Pythian Temple after he graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1942 and during his time at Prairie View A&M University. Long before that, his grandfather had been the Pythians' grand secretary, with an office in the building.

"Very few people who are acquainted with the building are in existence," Bedford says. "Most are passed on. People who are in their 40s, 50s , 60s have no recollection of that building. They just saw it as a building the insurance company used. It's a shame."

But all you really need to know is this: "The building at 2551 Elm remains the only commercial structure in Dallas built for blacks, by blacks, with black money," the Dallas Times Herald noted in 1986. Today, says Whit Meyers, former owner of the Gypsy Tea Room, which sat directly across from the Pythian Temple: "That building, more than any other in Deep Ellum, is a flagship, an icon, a symbol."

William Sidney Pittman would design other buildings around town—most notably, the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church, which still stands as an office building on Good-Latimer Expressway—but he didn't get much work after the temple's completion. Ruth Stewart, a professor at New York University and the biographer of Portia Pittman in 1977, always believed that was because whites weren't comfortable using a black architect, and blacks with money hired white architects.

But it was more than that: Pittman could be mean to strangers and to his own family.

"From his mother he inherited that primitive discipline, giving severe punishments," Booker Pittman recounted in the 1984 book. "Beatings and whippings which lasted until he was exhausted and we children [were] left semi-conscious. Later on, as we grew older, my brother Sidney, the oldest, and my sister, the youngest, and myself decided to give father the characteristic title of 'Big Pitt.' Physically he wasn't a big man, but he had the headstrong, disciplined personality."

That personality forced Portia Pittman, a beloved music instructor at the high school named for her father, to leave her husband in 1928.

A year later, Pittman embarked upon his second career: publisher and writer of the newspaper Brotherhood Eyes, known as "a newspaper that doesn't cross the color line." It read like Hunter Thompson filtered through an alto sax. It was ahead of its time by decades in its content and use of language ("A gang of cake starters hung around her house day and night, piano playing half the night and all the day long and such bumping and thumping").

It contained "serious and frivolous news items of Negro life in Dallas," and often featured stories about shootings, hidden "love nests" and other scandals reported back to him by his Eye-spies across the state and throughout the South. At the cost of a nickel, the paper was a must-read in the black community: "I can remember people saying, 'I'm gonna buy me a copy of the Brotherhood Eyes,'" says Judge Bedford. But it would also serve as Pittman's undoing.