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What Did Dallas Learn from Rediscovering a Suppressed Book?

Dallas, Schutze argues in The Accommodation, has always been “much more Southern, with stronger roots in slave culture,” than most residents know or care to admit. His book traces how the city’s white “business oligarchy” was able to achieve a relatively smooth transition into legal desegregation during the Civil Rights era — it’s an oft-cited source of civic pride that Dallas in the 1960s avoided the racial unrest of cities such as Little Rock and Los Angeles — while finding “informal ways to maintain actual and total separation” of the races into the present day. Read more

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