By now, most tuned-in Dallasites are familiar with the story of The Accommodation, our friend Jim Schutze’s landmark study of Dallas’ racial history. Over the weekend, CBS This Morning brought the tale to national audiences. In the report, Schutze and civil rights activist Peter Johnson speak about Dallas history, segregation, and the resurgent popularity of the long out-of-print book that will be republished by Deep Vellum later this year. Schutze bashfully admits to being somewhat flabbergasted about the whole ordeal.

“I feel like this book is this weird stone tablet that somebody found,” Schutze tells CBS News producer Rodney Hawkins. “When this regeneration of interest started ten years ago, I just didn’t get it at all. All the people who wanted to talk to me about it were young, 20- and 30-year-olds.”

CBS does well to note that the network’s fabled newsman Walter Cronkite was hired by Dallas civic leaders in the 1960s to create a piece of propaganda intended to tamp down on civil rights protests in Dallas. They fail, however, to note that Schutze’s book will be brought back by Will Evans’ non-profit publishing house after a bootleg .pdf version of the book floated around youthful circles of Dallas history and politics wonks for years (thought its Twitter handle gets a shout out).

Instead, Hawkins reports that “John Wiley Price fought to republish it.” Schutze, you may remember, sold the rights to Price decades ago, before the two had a falling out. Price also features in the report, and he has a new forward in the Deep Vellum edition. The CBS clip is after the jump:

Art and artists have always been part of the Dallas landscape, and the Dallas Public Library photograph collections have examples of how cultural offerings helped shape the city. The following photographs are some of the images of the arts I have encountered in the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History and Archives Collection and are available through the library’s online catalog.

The late Dmitri Vail shows his paintings and photographs in 1952. Expatriate German artist George Grosz visited Dallas to create a series called “Impressions of Dallas” on behalf of Leon Harris, Jr., vice president of the A. Harris and Company department store. Sculptor Horace Foxall and his works are depicted as part of the Marion Butts collection, as well. The Dallas Public Library’s historic connection to Dallas art is represented by photographs such as the Art Room of the original 1901 Carnegie Library, the contents of which later helped form the Dallas Museum of Art.

Classroom art instruction, art competitions, and influential artists like Everett Spruce and Ruth Uhler are among these historic photographs. Prominent public sculptures occupy other photographs. Take a look in the gallery below.

Charles DeMorse, a newspaper editor, checked into a room at the Crutchfield House, a modest two-story inn on Dallas’ courthouse square. The year was 1852. DeMorse was crisscrossing North Texas on horseback, covering court cases for his paper. In the morning, he would ride on to Denton, but that evening he wanted to unwind. From his hotel window, DeMorse spotted on the far side of the square something called The Arts Saloon. It was a curious name. “Looking again, I tried to read it ‘The Ark Saloon,’ ” DeMorse later wrote, “not understanding what a gallery of the fine arts should be doing at the city of the Three Forks, but rather supposing that a drinkery had been so termed.”

DeMorse headed over and discovered that The Arts Saloon was, indeed, more salon than saloon. Part art gallery, part dance hall, part photography studio, The Arts Saloon was run by a peculiar Frenchman named Adolphe Gouhenant. Close readers of Dallas history will recognize the name.

Gouhenant makes cameos in a dozen or so Dallas volumes, though his story is often muddled or misrepresented. Gouhenant has been lumped in with the French settlers of the La Réunion colony, even though Gouhenant arrived in Dallas years before the socialist utopians. Some Dallas historians, like DeMorse, mistake Gouhenant’s Arts Saloon for a frontier bar. In Dallas: The Deciding Years, A.C. Greene notes that Gouhenant’s establishment was “something more significant”; it was a daguerreotype studio responsible for most of the earliest photographs of Dallas. But even calling Gouhenant the city’s first photographer sells him short.

This year will be remembered. With the COVID-19 pandemic, protests against systemic racism, and a presidential election with the highest voter turnout in United States history, 2020 is clearly historic.

As I find myself looking through archival collections at the Dallas Public Library through the lens of social distancing and this year’s events, many from our past stand out.

The crowd photos depicted in the following gallery are from the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History and Archives Collection and are available through the library’s online catalog. Plenty seem unusual in these days of isolation, like the bank robber Bonnie Parker’s funeral and the crowd surrounding the subsequent 1935 “harboring trial” of her family and friends.

Also depicted are photos of Dallas segregation in travel and State Fair gatherings, images of horse-drawn transportation and Love Field aviation generations ago, as well as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson visits in Dallas. As this month is the anniversary of the JFK assassination, those images have an additional timely significance. 

Marcellus Cooper was born into slavery, in Dallas, on February 12, 1862. His mother was Black, his father was White, and his owners were the Caruth family. He went to grade school in a freedman’s town in what is now Lake Highlands. He was the treasurer of a Black library association and worked in a Jewish-owned department store while saving money for dentistry school. He opened a practice in a sanitarium operated by Texas’ first Black surgeon before moving to a building designed by Texas’ first Black architect.

Now, 91 years after his death, Cooper is set to get a historical marker on land that once belonged to his former owners.    

In the Lowest Greenville area, between Lakewood Heights and Vickery Place, there is a little neighborhood called Belmont. The accepted history for many years has been that the neighborhood got its name from August Belmont Jr., a prominent New York financier and the son of the man who founded the Belmont Stakes. The accepted history has been wrong.

Awhile back, a couple that owns a 100-year-old Craftsman in the neighborhood began researching the history of their house. Geyden and Barry Sage found far more than they were looking for. I love stories like these, pieces of our history that lie at our feet as we walk past them every day without noticing. So of course I wanted to publish it, especially when Geyden showed me all the cool early 1900s ads for the Belmont Addition that ran in the Dallas Morning News.

Thanks to the Sages’ doggedness, the Belmont Addition Conservation District has (quietly) updated its official history, and the September issue of D Magazine contains a fascinating story about the city’s history. That story went online today. Discover the truth for yourself.