EDITOR’S NOTE

U.S. District Judge Jerry Buchmeyer once rendered a three-page opinion in iambic pentameter, with phrases roughly aping Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. He often invites jurors to his chambers at the conclusion of a trial for picture-taking sessions and questions and answers. (One persistent query, he reports, is: “How dumb do those lawyers think we are?”) A fan of Humphrey Bogart, Captain Marvel, and Dr. Seuss, Judge Buchmeyer once offered this insight into his judicial prowess: “The secret is to act as if you have known all your life what you just learned ten minutes ago.”

Obviously, Judge Buchmeyer is a man with a highly developed sense of humor. But the case that rests before him now, the challenge to the city’s council election laws, is anything but funny. In fact, it’s sad.

You can read the behind-the-scenes story of how well-meaning city leaders tried, through charter reform, to bring a racially divided city together (see “The Tragedy of 10-4-1,” by Dennis Holder, page 84). You will read how that effort began in hope and ended in “the most racially divisive election in Dallas history.” We won. Hip, hip hooray.

The tentative victory enjoyed by the forces that shaped 10-4-1 (a process in which I played a small part as a member of Dallas Together) will be shattered, I believe, when Judge Buchmeyer hands down his ruling on Roy Williams and Marvin Crenshaw v. The City of Dallas early next year. If history is a telling adviser, the jovial judge has seen the past and he is not amused.

Specifically, I cite Buchmeyer’s decision concerning the city’s role in the systematic segregation of public housing over the past fifty years. In August Buchmeyer blasted both the City Council and the mayor for thwarting (deliberately, he believes) his 1987 order to dismantle the black ghetto that is the West Dallas housing projects. Accusing Mayor Strauss of frustrating the process of relocating blacks to white residential areas, Buchmeyer named the city as a codefendant in the case, an action that could well end up costing taxpayers millions and millions of dollars. It may also, as former council member Jerry Rucker predicts, become the story of the decade.

Devising a new method of electing council members will be far less costly-I hope. But it has already exacted a price. Political leaders on both sides had been moving haltingly toward a negotiated middle ground. Hands were outstretched. As recently as early last spring, council member Al Lips-comb was publicly effusive over charter revision chief Ray Hutchison. Hutchison, in turn, spoke glowingly of the intelligence and the rationality of Diane Ragsdale. Those heady days seem distant indeed. Reporter and writer Holder, who has written on city affairs and the local media for D for the past five years, watched the uneasy truce as it was eventually blown to bits.

I don’t envy Jerry Buchmeyer as he ponders the fete of Dallas. His decision will have incredibly far-reaching consequences. It will surely, in the decades to come, tip the political balance toward the minorities who, if demographic projections hold, will outnumber whites by the end of the century.

But if current tensions continue and worsen, the balance will shift long before that. Whites who have little understanding of local politics-and today’s peculiar racial back-and-forth-are already deserting Dallas for the shelter of the “safer” suburbs. The business community, which is still predominantly white, is going to be left holding the bag on its investments, forced to barter with black and brown power brokers whom it barely knows, much less respects.

Buchmeyer is one of the most highly respected judges in the federal court system. Along with his humor, he is known for being fair. I believe that-like federal Judge Barefoot Sanders, who seemed incredulous that the Dallas Independent School District would ask to free itself from court control of school desegration-the judge will be harshly critical of the city. We need to be looking for that middle ground again.