The Communities Foundation of Texas & Deep Vellum invite you to join us for a cause-minded conversation series. We Are One City: Elevating the Story of Dallas.
Jim Schutze, author of The Accommodation and the forthcoming Pontiac, discusses the impact of republishing The Accommodation in 2021 and the Big D Reads citywide book club in 2022.
Presented with the support of the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture
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.
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 murder of George Floyd, it was selected for a citywide reading program in Dallas.