RACE AGAINST TIME

Two Augusts ago. before anyone had heard of Rodney King and it was still a viable national conceit to believe race had been put in its place, Roy Williams and Kevin Shay walked across the SMU campus to La Madeleine, a popular coffeehouse of the cognoscenti. The two friends, one black, one white, one a politico, one a journalist, had just been to services at the Rev. A.A. Taliaferro’s non-denominational St. Alcuin’s Community Church and wanted to continue their discussion about a political earthquake shaking Dallas. Williams was more than a little familiar with the tremors. His name, along with that of fellow “gadfly” Marvin Crenshaw, was listed on the plaintiff’s side of a landmark federal lawsuit filed in May 1988 challenging the city of Dallas’ at-large system of electing council members.

In 1991, that lawsuit would prevail. U.S. District Judge Jerry Buchmeyer agreed that at-large districts discriminated against blacks and Hispanics and ordered municipal elections under the single-member system, known as 14-1. now in effect. Dallas politics, like post-King LA, were changed forever. But on that summer Sunday morning in 1989 at La Madeleine, nobody knew what would happen. In fact, given the resistance of some council incumbents and the emergence of a conservative white backlash campaign, it seemed likely the struggle to break oligarchic political rule in Dallas was far from over. The struggle had been going on-at least in court- since 1971. when Al Lipscomb. now a council member but then a “black activist,” had co-filed the first in a series of redistricting suits. And although times and demographics had changed dramatically-whites in 1990 slipped to only 49 percent of the population-it seemed that the fray might stretch on another 20 years.

Williams and Shay got to wondering about that. What would people 20 years from now remember of the long, often maddeningly complicated chain of events? Already, many of the previous two decades’ struggles seemed to have been forgotten, ignored or-more troubling- remembered wrong. Political battles, whether over redistricting or anything else, are by definition filled with contending points of view. What we remember is, as they say from Watts to Beijing, what those who won want us to.

“We should document what’s going on,” suggested Shay, editor of a small community newspaper. Williams agreed.

Their self-published paperback. Time Change: An Alternative View of the History of Dallas (To Be Publishing Co., 1991), delivers the promised record. Broader in scope than the collaborators originally intended, the book is a road map of the major players, issues and ideas in the political history of Dallas as seen not by the traditional white power structure, but by those in opposition. 11 is a black history. Events of the past spring make it, and two related works on the connection of race and politics, powerful local supplements to several new nationally oriented evaluations, including Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations and Studs Terkel’s Race.

“We wanted to make an indentation into the mind-set of the dominant ideology,” Williams says. “We wanted to have an alternative view to keep the other guys honest.” It wasn’t easy. Altogether, about 30 publishers rejected proposals for the book, and several agents declined to offer representation. It only appears now because production costs for the initial 1,000 copies were underwritten by entrepreneur and author G.T. (Jerry) Waters, now of Santa Fe, whom Williams knew through Father Taliaferro’s church.

Williams and Shay are optimistically thinking of a second printing, but if so, they’ll be lucky. Dallas doesn’t deal with the hard issues of race in its past any better than Los Angeles lives them out in the present. Former Dallas Times Herald columnist Jim Schutze’s controversial The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City (Citadel Press, Lyle Stuart, 1986), the only other book specifically viewing Dallas politics through a racial lens, has sold a scant 5,000 copies since its publication in 1986 and is now in stock only at Black Images bookstore in Oak Cliff. “I don’t know if it was read by any white people other than my mother,” shrugs Schutze, now a free-lance writer and columnist for D.

But The Accommodation almost didn’t even get that far. When former City Attorney Alex Bickley, then executive director of the legendary, white-controlled Dallas Citizens Council, was given an advance copy, he went ballistic. He also went to the board of Taylor Publishing Co. and, as Schutze recalls, “pretty much told them the book was terrible and this guy is a Communist and it will start a riot.”

Taylor Publishing, primarily a high-school yearbook marketer, killed it. In fairness, Taylor seemed never to have understood the kind of book one of its now-departed editors had asked Schutze to write. It was literally taken off the presses, plates and all, during the printing run. Schutze’s $10,000 advance was written off as a tax loss. Had Schutze’s agent, Vicki Eisenberg, not convinced New York publisher Lyle Stuart to pick it up (Taylor gave the book, down to the plates and cover, to Stuart for free), it would never have been a part of the alternative record of Dallas history.

These publishing travails are relevant to the book’s social value, and thus to the social history of the city, because one of the things that happens to alternative points of view is that all too often they don’t get printed, recorded, televised or distributed. Never brought forth, they are casualties of the marketplace. If you really have something of quality, we like to think, somebody will make a buck off it. But alternative views are seldom profitable, and lack of quality is often the least of reasons.

It is important to deal with this straight on, especially regarding Time Change. Its uneven prose and sloppy organization could easily have been excuses for rejection by book editors. Is that why it had trouble getting to market and wound up being self-published? Maybe. On the other hand, maybe it’s like an exasperated English punk guitarist once retorted to his mainstream critics: “It doesn’t matter if we know all the f-ing chords.” He was right. The chords aren’t the point.



THE POINT, IN WILLIAMS’ AND Schutze’s accounts, is to acknowledge race as the major, ongoing, unresolved conflict in Dallas history. It is no more a phenomenon of merely the last decade than the LA riots were a response simply to the King verdict. But you’d never know that just by reading the paper, watching TV or listening to friends-particularly white ones-who express concern with what they consider the recent “polarization” of Dallas.

For such people, Williams* and Schutze’s accounts are not just good-for-you civics lessons. Their “alternative” historical perspectives help provide desperately missing context-especially in a one-newspaper town-to what are often interpreted by whites as chaos and caterwauling. Consider, for example, “mainstream” reactions to “minority” political figures and issues. When City Council member Domingo Garcia-elected in the 14-1 revolution-proposed that Dallas fund arts organizations along proportional ethnic lines, instead of giving about 90 percent to traditional, white-dominated institutions, he met with enormous opposition, almost exclusively white. Among many blacks and browns, who, as Time Change shows, have been given a short shrift of city funds for everything from sewer systems to school buildings, the proposal didn’t seem short-sighted at all. It seemed fair.

County Commissioner John Wiley Price is a living metaphor of starkly opposing perceptions of political reality. Although often labeled “a joke” among whites. Price was renominated by a 2-to-l margin in his Oak Cliff district in the March primary and remains “our man downtown” to a large section of the black community. How will history judge him? Could it depend on who writes the history?

DISD board member Kathlyn Gilliam embodies the same kind of interpretive puzzle. Widely considered by whites to be the very definition of a troublemaker, she is consistently, sometimes viciously, trashed by the media, from The Dallas Morning News to the Observer, for her in-your-face behavior. She is also enormously popular among her black constituents. How can such divergent pictures of the same person exist? One clue might be. as Schutze and Williams note, similar ostracism in the past of two other outspoken black female politicians, former council members Elsie Faye Heggins and Diane Ragsdale. Perhaps there is a pattern.

Even the very streets and homes in which we reside are testament (to the existence to a dangerously denied legacy of racial division. Schutze recounts a saga of planned segregation in Dallas residential growth worthy of South Africa. Essentially, the city’s black population has migrated to South Dallas and East and Soulh Oak Cliff because that’s where developers. in collusion with one city government after another, have sent them. In one case, the entire black community known as Little Egypt, in northeast Dallas, was made to vanish with a mass buy out of homes replaced by Northlake Shopping Center.

The most stunning mass eviction took place in the 1950s, when poor blacks were forced out of the Trinity River flood plain so it could be leveed, with federal funds, and turned into the Stemmons industrial corridor. It was good for “Dallas as a whole.” but not so great for some of the parts. The new owners of the land made fortunes. The dispossessed were resettled in the projects of West Dallas.

Decade after decade, such scams, and worse, were forced down the throats of Dallas blacks and browns. Police, a strong Klan presence and collusion among courts, prosecutors, the media, while business leaders and some black leaders either squashed or co-opted the explosion of outrage that might have purged the city and made racial issues the subject of open debate, not covert denial. The result has been the factionalized, toxic-and agonizingly pent-up-racial environment of Dallas. One can only imagine what might have happened here last May had Commissioner Price been found guilty of an assault charge only two weeks after the King riots.

Obviously. Time Change and The Accommodation cannot solve Dallas* racial problems, nor can any single book, individual or action. The importance of these works–the importance of any social ideas-is to give us points of reference, perspectives from which to re-evaluate, to resolve and, if we are willing, to redeem. The same utility applies to another recent book. Chandler Davidson’s Race and Class in Texas Politics (Princeton University Press, 1990). a bold, if academic, revisionist history of the political ideology of this extremely diverse state. Just as Williams wanted to compensate for “an imbalance that comes from the history of just one side,” so Davidson, a Rice sociology professor, wanted to adjust another set of scales. Where Williams talks about racial control in Dallas, Davidson talks about conservative control in Texas. But they are really dealing with the same problem: the dominance of one group by another through the control of image.

Studying voting patterns since the founding of the Republic, but with special emphasis on the post-World War II years. Davidson asserts that one of our most powerful statewide political myths is in fact a lie. A repetition of the lie occurred during the presidential primary campaign this past March when an NBC reporter referred to “typically conservative Texas attitudes.” According to Davidson. Texas may be typical, but it is far from conservative.

Considerable data supports that seemingly against-the-grain thesis. In Democratic primary elections from 1946- 1984, Davidson shows that an average of 42 percent of the vote went to liberal candidates. Moreover, self-identification polls over the years show a consistent breakdown among Texas voters: 17 percent liberal. 42 percent moderate and 34 percent ’ conservative. The spread is virtually identical to that of voters nationwide. On any given issue, says Davidson, 35 to 55 percent of the vote could coalesce around a liberal candidate. At the very least, he deadpans, this does not reflect “overwhelming conservatism.” So why, he asks, does the myth exist?

There are two reasons. The first is that conservatives, who represent an actual minority in the population, nevertheless comprise a disproportionate number-perhaps two-thirds-of officeholders, whether Democrat or Republican. It is these well-known figures-Bill Clements, Phil Gramm, Steve Bartlett-who define the public image of Texas, or Dallas, the way Ronald Reagan defined the image of the United Stales, and the way Ross Perot would like to. The occasional liberals/progressives such as Jim Hightower appear as aberrations, or, like Lipscomb and Rags-dale, as peculiarities of minority culture. They are not the norm. And that, says Davidson, is the key to the myth.

In Texas, “liberal” candidates-invariably Democrats-are overwhelmingly supported by black and Hispanic voters and by working-class whiles. “Conservative” candidates in either party rely on the white vote, especially the middle and upper classes. But to win elections, conservatives need big chunks of the white working-class vote, too. They can only get it by prying it away from its more natural liberal/progressive moorings. Race has been the pry bar since Reconstruction.

The currently racial fear messages-welfare, crime, immigration and quotas-are better disguised than those in the heyday of lynching and firebombs, but they come from the same place. The resultant myth of “typical Texas conservatism,” or its Republican yuppie relative, “Texas individualism,” is therefore not only a falsehood, but a cunning one.

The myth is ultimately a white myth, the result of historic, deliberate strategies of race hate used to divide good people one from another and deliver them unto their enemies at the ballot box.

Such strategies are no stranger to Dallas today. Consider Williams’ figures on the failure of Dallas voters to approve the 14-1 council plan Judge Buchmeyer later imposed. The tally, he reminds us, shows that 98 percent of blacks who cast ballots and 87 percent of Hispanics said yes to 14-1. And 70 percent of white voters said no. Many whites blamed the 14-1 electoral defeat-by only 372 votes-on blacks themselves. “This was their chance-they could’ve won if they’d gotten out more votes” was a typical comment.

A clearer statement about the arrogance of the “dominant ideology” and the igno rance of history could not be made. No, there was another. It came from a white juror in Simi Valley. Rodney King, she said, was “in control” of his own beating.