![]() ![]() “The Citizens Council, the corporatist leaders of the city who believe they have the best interest of the city in their hearts and minds, but they do backroom deals to make sure everything in Dallas just fits the Dallas way.”įor years, an apocryphal story spread in Dallas that John Wiley Price owned the rights to the book, Evans said. “This bootleg version of a book that speaks to the heard of why Dallas is the way it is and how it operates,” Evans said. One of those fans was Evans, who eight years ago moved to Dallas and started a nonprofit publishing house and book store called Deep Vellum, a play on words with its location in Dallas’ Deep Ellum district east of downtown.Įvans set a goal of one day getting the rights to republish The Accommodation. What happened next became somewhat of an urban legend, circulated by many who read bootlegged copies of the book and helped make it an underground classic for those deeply interested in Dallas history. Schutze’s supporters cried foul, and The New York Times wrote a story about it. The publisher then dropped the book, citing poor sales. Originally, 5,000 copies were printed, but legend has it that 2,000 were burned in a fire at a bookstore. In the end, a deal was struck in which working-class Black families were encouraged to move to a North Dallas neighborhood called Hamilton Park, created just for them, and the whites would stop the bombings.īut as a result, white and Black civic leaders gave in to each other rather than engage in solutions, hence "the accommodation," the book argued.īecause The Accommodation highlighted the city’s racial problems, many in Dallas were not eager for the book to succeed. City leaders were pressed to find a solution in a racially tense period in which big businesses didn’t want the stain of racial violence on their city. Schutze documents court cases describing bombings perpetrated by whites, angry at the progress of the working and middle-class Black Americans as they began moving into white neighborhoods.Ĭity police struggled to contain the bombings. The book begins in the 1950s, describing a rath of bombings happening in homes bought by Black Americans in mostly white neighborhoods. At the time of the book’s release, the Dallas Citizen Council, a group representing powerful business leaders, greatly influenced the politics and decisions being made in the city. The book’s brazen naming and shaming of leaders in Dallas’ political world may have played a leading role in its initial limited run. For this, the book earned the superlative “the Most Dangerous Book in Dallas.” Schutze named civic leaders and powerful business leaders in the book and pointed out their contributions to Dallas’ racial politics. The book took a critical view of both the white and the Black leaders, painting both sides as being complicit in laying the groundwork for how race relations the divisions in the city would play out in Dallas for decades to come. Schutze argued in The Accommodation that the reason for this was because the white and Black leaders of the time struck an unspoken understanding, or an “accommodation,” on how integration would work in Dallas. But in Dallas, the civil rights movement passed relatively quietly compared with other U.S. Across the country, cities were embroiled in protests, sit-ins, and riots that were part of the civil rights movements. The Accommodation lays out the story of race relations in Dallas during America’s struggles with desegregation. “It's a vital work of Dallas history that opens the door to larger conversations about the stories we need to tell about the city we call home,” said Will Evans, the founder of Deep Vellum. The book is considered one of the first to discuss in detail race relations and politics in Dallas and is considered an important book of modern Dallas history.Deep Vellum Books will republish the book in September.It has been out-of-print since, but its popularity resurged as PDF versions of the book circulated around Dallas. Jim Schutze's book was first released in 1986. ![]()
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