DALLAS — An out-of-print 1986 book on race relations and politics in Dallas is one of the most sought after reads on how racism shaped this American city. It has circulated among fans as a bootleg PDF for years and inspired at least one Off-Broadway play.
In June of last year, someone set up a Twitter account and began tweeting out the book line-by-line every hour.
Yet finding an original copy of The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City by Jim Schutze has been nearly impossible and hardly affordable since its release in the 1980s. Used editions have sold for as much as $900 on Amazon. There are five copies available through the Dallas Public Library system, with 93 people on the waitlist as of Feb. 1.
That’s about to change, thanks to Deep Vellum, a Dallas-based nonprofit publishing house that is reprinting the book for a September release.
“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 Accommodation lays out the story of race relations in Dallas during America’s struggles with desegregation. Across the country, cities were embroiled in protests, sit-ins, and riots that were part of the civil rights movements. But in Dallas, the civil rights movement passed relatively quietly compared with other U.S. cities.
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.
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 named civic leaders and powerful business leaders in the book and pointed out their contributions to Dallas’ racial politics. For this, the book earned the superlative “the Most Dangerous Book in Dallas.”
The book’s brazen naming and shaming of leaders in Dallas’ political world may have played a leading role in its initial limited run. 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 begins in the 1950s, describing a rath of bombings happening in homes bought by Black Americans in mostly white neighborhoods. 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.
City police struggled to contain the bombings. 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.
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.
But as a result, white and Black civic leaders gave in to each other rather than engage in solutions, hence "the accommodation," the book argued.
Because The Accommodation highlighted the city’s racial problems, many in Dallas were not eager for the book to succeed.
Originally, 5,000 copies were printed, but legend has it that 2,000 were burned in a fire at a bookstore. The publisher then dropped the book, citing poor sales. Schutze’s supporters cried foul, and The New York Times wrote a story about it.
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.
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.
Evans set a goal of one day getting the rights to republish The Accommodation.
“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. “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.”
For years, an apocryphal story spread in Dallas that John Wiley Price owned the rights to the book, Evans said. Price, a Dallas County Commissioner since 1985, is known as one of the most influential political leaders in Dallas. He plays a small role at the end of The Accommodation, and Schutze frequently wrote about him in his coverage of politics in Dallas.
Evans knew getting a meeting with Price to talk to him about reprinting The Accommodation would be a challenge. Meanwhile, Deep Vellum was establishing itself as an invested, local publisher with a commitment to making diverse voices heard in both fiction and non-fiction.
“We are not only serving an elite, white audience. We are really trying to do something different. We can always do better. But we are really trying to do something here with the books we are publishing,” Evans said. “We have Muslim writers from 10 different counties and seven of them are women. We truly believe in diversity and not just tokenism,”
Recently, Deep Vellum created a specific imprint in its publishing house called La Reunion, named for one of the first colonies created in the early days of Dallas’ settlement.
“The story of Dallas is very unique and the story of Dallas is not known,” Evans said. “We are working in the community, we believe in the city. We aren't here just trying to criticize, we are trying to build and improve.”
For this goal, Deep Vellum turned to local activists and civic leaders like David Marquis, who has 40 years of experience in fighting for environmental justice in Dallas, and Chris Dowdy, the vice president of academic affairs at Paul Quinn College, whose book Unmapped shows how South Dallas is a model of how segregation worked in modern history.
It was Marquis who finally got Evans a meeting with Price in December 2019. In the meeting, Price said he was impressed by Deep Vellum’s mission and agreed to let Evans publish The Accommodation.
Coronavirus and a changing world put communication between Price and Deep Vellum on the back burner with no contract signed. Then came the George Floyd protests last summer, and a renewed sense of urgency to America’s reckoning with its race inequality. Price got back in touch, this time with an offer to sign a contract.
The timing was everything, Evans said.
Evans has been in touch with Schutze, who has not expressed interest in being involved in the new edition. The new edition will include an updated prologue written by Price.
The Accommodation criticizes not just the white leaders, but the black leaders, too, and that makes it unique, Evans said. “The power play is such that the black leaders were forced into a lot of terrible corners, but they did make a lot of choices that lead to the interesting path of the city.”
The Accommodation will be released in September and can be pre-ordered on the Deep Vellum website.
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