Dixon Village is a fitting tribute to original Tacoma civil rights champion

When I ask Tom Dixon, the first CEO of the Tacoma Urban League and a man who led the organization for more than three decades, to describe his life, he leans back in his chair. Then he harkens back to his father. “My father was a country doctor in Sparta, Georgia,” Dixon, 85, told me from the Tacoma Urban League office he helped build so many years ago. “And from our house to the school house was three miles. He drove his five children to the schoolhouse every day of school. And he never passed a walking student.&rdquo “Some days we would end up at the school house with 12 or 14 students,” Dixon continued. “My brother and I would sit on the bumper, or on the fender, but my father never passed a walking student.” It quickly became clear that the story was a metaphor for the way Dixon has led his life. And a fitting one.

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