the accommodation

“The oligarchy knew exactly where to watch for the trouble to start. Black demands, civil rights, the Kennedys: it had all been of one string. Perhaps nowhere in America was the attention of white leaders focused so intently on the black community as in Dallas following the assassination.”
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Dallas is a town where public debate is closely controlled, most of the time. Much of the city’s history, even its recent history, has been shrouded in mystery. *The Accommodation* is an explosive new book about Dallas that will change that chemistry forever. It is the first no-holds-barred, straight-on, unvarnished look at Dallas politics ever to come from inside the city itself. It is a story that people in Dallas have lived but have seldom heard discussed. It’s a story that may surprise even its own main characters.

The Accommodation recounts a series of organized dynamite bombings of black-owned homes in the 1950s. It explores a more recent history of land expropriation, by which the black middleclass in Dallas was stripped of the fruits of its labor. The question is whether these evils have been properly settled by history. Or have they merely been buried beneath layers of repression and censorship? Jim Schutze doesn’t draw peremptory conclusions but rather hopes that by looking closely at the real facts we may avoid similar injustice in our own day.

Jim Schutze was born in Virginia in 1946. The son of an Episcopal priest, Jim grew up in southeast Michigan, where he was to learn at an early age that racial segregation was not a creature peculiar to the American South. He attended St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire and earned his degree in Political Science from Ann Arbor in 1965.

After a lengthy apprenticeship at “The Detroit Free Press,” “The Dallas Times Herald” brought Jim to Texas in 1978 to tour the state and write features on life elsewhere in Texas. After two years on that beat, Jim came back to the “Herald” newsroom to be half of a two-man investigative team. Jim’s discovery of deliberate but hidden inequities in the city’s property tax structure set off a major political shake-up in City Hall and won him the prestigious Amos Tuck national award for economic understanding. He has also won the James Polk Award for work on police violence against Mexican Americans, as well as the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ national award for best commentary twice and Lincoln University’s national Unity Award for writing on civil rights and racial issues three times. In 2011, Schutze was admitted to the Texas Institute of Letters in recognition of his career as a journalist and author.

He is married to Mariana Green, former editor of “Texas Homes” magazine and a native Texan. They reside in East Dallas.