Jim Schutze presents an intriguing explanation, going back to the origins of the civil rights movement in Dallas. And he presents a solution:
The old culture, black and white, has produced numbing voter apathy, one of the worst crime rates in the nation, a badly neglected infrastructure and, even worse, a growing despair of the future deep in the heart of the city.
And yet the answer is so simple. Burn down the plantation. Pay the city council members $120,000 a year. Get real people on the council. Put a real mayor in charge with a strong-mayor reform. Throw open the windows and start fresh.
Not sure I agree with all of that. (What good, someone please explain to me, have Council salaries done, except to give Council members more time to act as the political bosses of their districts?) But it’s a damn sight better than what Elaine Agather and the Dallas Citizens Council have to offer–which is precisely nothing.
