“PROGRESS DENIED offers a thorough, compelling, and deeply unsettling history of racial violence in North Texas. Through detailed archival research, Teague reveals the many ways violence –both obscene and ordinary–was deployed to undermine Black families’ economic stability and collective progress. Centering on Denton, Texas, Teague examines how the constant threat of physical violence, combined with ostensibly race-neutral policies, facilitated the forced removal of a thriving Black middle-class community known as Quakertown. Through close analysis of local actors and institutions, Progress Denied demonstrates how racial domination operated through interconnected systems of extralegal brutality and publicly organized political and civic exclusion –revealing institutionalized racism not as an aberration but as a governing logic of the region.”
—William Scarborough, author of Gendered Places: The Landscape of Local Gender Norms Across the United States
PROGRESS DENIED “elevate[s] Black counternarratives about the community while showing how white public memory came to hold such a prominent place in the town’s public spaces… This book will add much-needed context to what little we’ve known about the Quakertown story thus far and serve as a fruitful basis for extended discussions about historical memory in Texas.”
―Delaina Price, assistant professor of history, University of Texas at Arlington
HOLLIE A. TEAGUE’S “skillful weaving of individual narratives and broader historical context allows the reader to understand how a thriving black community allowed itself to be pushed out of existence so its people could survive.”
―Monica Cubberly, professor of history, Collin College
Hollie A. Teague, PhD 