A book once banned in Dallas for telling the story of race and segregation was celebrated at a Dallas Central Library re-release Thursday.
Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price helped pull the book called “The Accommodation” from obscurity.
After author Jim Schutze first tried to get it published 36 years ago, he was at the library Thursday to receive praise from a crowd of 300 people who were anxious to get one of 30,000 copies that have just been printed.
“Oh wow, It’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable,” Schutze said.
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Free copies will be available while they last at locations around Dallas in September.
Click here to get your complimentary Big D Reads paperback edition of the book 'The Accommodation.'
For many years it was very difficult to find a copy of the book that details efforts by white power brokers in the 1950s and 60s to keep the Black community down.
From 1984 to 1986, Schutze said he spent nights at the central library after his day job at the Dallas Times Herald doing research for the book before the days of the internet.
In Pictures: Once-Banned Book Detailing Dallas Segregation Is Re-Released
Coming to Dallas to work at the newspaper in 1978, Schutze said he heard from the white leaders about how Dallas never had racial discord in other cities.
“It just didn’t exist here. Everybody was happy. But if you were here and you came from somewhere else, it didn’t feel like people were happy. It’s just felt that people were very distant,” Schutze said.
There were accommodations, Schutze said, with Black leaders to keep a lid on discord. But Schutze said the difference in Dallas was that leaders such as Martin Luther King did not focus on Dallas.
“If the civil rights movement had meant to come here intentionally and purposefully the way it went to Little Rock and Selma, Birmingham, the history would have been the same. But the fact is, Dallas sort of got a pass, and the movement went elsewhere,” Schutze said.
Displayed on the seventh floor of the downtown library to coincide with the re-release of the book are photos and articles detailing the Dallas history of racial issues just as serious as in other cities in the 1950s and 1960s. There was dynamite bombing of Black homes for which an all-white grand jury returned no criminal charges. There were racial restrictions on attendance at the State Fair of Texas.
Schutze said the history led to the Dallas that exists today.
“We have two different cities. You need a passport almost to go from one to the other. And it’s important for us to figure out how that happened. How did the money get shoved north and the poverty south,” Schutze said.
Price was aware of the book during the years it was mostly forgotten and Price acquired the rights to it. His role helped lead to the re-release by publisher Deep Vellum.
“When I sat down and I started to look at all this, I’m like, 'hasn’t anything changed?' It was an accommodation, alright. And the accommodation is, 'let’s make a few people feel like they have arrived,'” Price said.
The African American community still lags far behind in home ownership and wealth compared to the white community in Dallas and across the nation, Price said.
“We’ve got to recognize what the accommodations have been. And there’s still an accommodation. So, I just thought the book, it’s timeless,” Price said.
The book is also now available on Amazon.
Click here to buy the book 'The Accommodation' from Amazon.
