On February 27th, 2:00-3:30pm at the Frank Crowley Central Jury Room, join author and journalist, Jim Schutze; Dallas County Commissioner District 3, John Wiley Price; Dallas County District Attorney, John Creuzot; and UNT Dallas College of Law Professor, Cheryl Wattley, as they discuss the powerful, long-repressed classic of Dallas history, The Accommodation!
Reception and book signing to follow.
Written by longtime Dallas political journalist Jim Schutze, formerly of the Dallas Times Herald and Dallas Observer, and currently columnist at D Magazine, The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City details the violent and suppressed history of race and racism in Dallas from slavery through the Civil Rights Movement, and the city’s desegregation efforts in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Known for being an uninhibited and honest account of the city’s institutional and structural racism, Schutze’s book argues that Dallas’ desegregation period came at a great cost to Black leaders in the city.
“The Accommodation is one of the first major works about the history of race and racism in Dallas, and its importance to the counter narrative of ‘Dallas as a great city for all’ can’t be understated,” shares Jerry Hawkins, Executive Director of Dallas Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation, who also serves on the Deep Vellum board of directors. “The telling of a Black story by a white author deserves continued critique and interrogation, however with The Accommodation, Jim Schutze delivered a must-read treatise about racism in Dallas that was both eye-opening and prophetic.”
The Accommodation was originally set to be published by Taylor Publishing Company of Dallas in 1986 before being dropped from publication. It was then published by Citadel Press of New Jersey in 1987 before rights were purchased by Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price.
While long out of print, this title has seen repeated waves of interest among Dallas residents since its original publication. Most recently, it has been called “The Most Dangerous Book in Dallas” by Peter Simek of D Magazine and “essential reading to understand Dallas” (Tim Diovanni, Dallas Morning News) and has been distributed digitally and in samizdat printouts among Dallasites interested in learning more about what makes Dallas the city it is, and how to address that history to build a better, more inclusive city together.
Jim Schutze was born in 1946, spent his childhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan and attended high school at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, after which he was an automobile assembly-line worker in Detroit for six years. He is retired from a decades-long career as a newspaper columnist writing about local politics in Dallas, Texas. Schutze’s book on race relations in Dallas, The Accommodation, was pulled from the presses by a local publisher and suppressed in 1986. Re-published 35 years later in the wake of the George Floyd murder, it was selected for a citywide reading program in Dallas.