In its effort to acknowledge the recommendations of the city’s black leadership, the Dallas Thoroughfare Committee has succeeded in outraging the Jewish community.
The Thoroughfare Committee touched off the conflict by recommending that the portion of I-45 known as the Julius Schepps Freeway be renamed the Ralph Bunche Freeway.
City Councilman Max Goldblatt is organizing a protest to take before the Plan Commission to keep Schepps’ name on the South Dallas freeway.
Goldblatt and members of the Dallas branch of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League are furious that the thoroughfare committee would snub Schepps without word of dissenting debate, while honoring the memory of Robert Cullum, founder of the Tom Thumb supermarket chain.
A stretch of State Hwy. 352, now under construction in South Dallas, has been named after Cullum.
“Schepps gave more of his time and money to this city than Cullum ever did,” says one Jewish business leader.
One of the ironies of this controversy is that the Jewish leadership seems to have forgotten that in 1975 the Julius Schepps Community Center on Northhaven Road was renamed the Jewish Community Center of Dallas, although a sizable portion of Schepps’ wealth was used to build the multimillion dollar structure.
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