Last week Deep Vellum Publishing Company, a small distinguished nonprofit Dallas publisher, announced it will re-publish my 1987 book, The Accommodation, about the racial history of Dallas. I have been thinking about it all week, ever since I found out.

First of all, the re-publishing of the book has precious little to do with me. Years ago I conveyed the rights to the book to Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price. There’s a whole personal back-story there about why I did that and why he and I had a falling out and why he sat on the rights for so long. (Ed. Note: Jim explained this peculiarity to us on our EarBurner podcast, back in the early months of the pandemic. Listen here.)

But you know what? This week when I was pondering, I decided his and my personal stories about this are not all that interesting anymore. Commissioner Price and I are two old guys who should get over it. I hope somewhere in this new adventure a moment will arrive for us to shake hands again. But much more interesting things are in play right now than our personal feud – more important things to talk about.

I was inspired to write my book by one specific moment in my life. On the evening of August 20, 1984, when it was still 97 degrees outside, I sat in the over-air-conditioned Dallas Convention Center listening to the late W.A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas. He was delivering a typically flouncy long-winded invocation to the Republican National Convention that was about to nominate Ronald Reagan to his second term as president.

Expressed entirely in cowardly euphemisms and dog-whistles, Criswell’s message was that Dallas was a White Jesus town, a city that had never taken the boot off the neck of the Black man, had never allowed riots and uprisings like those that had shredded the rusting decadent metropolises of the northeast. The path to salvation for the rest of the nation, he said, was for everybody to be more like Dallas, which meant implicitly that some weak-sister cities might need to hike up their trousers and put the boot back on the neck.

I was appalled. And I don’t mean the riots back up where I had come from six years earlier had not been terrible. They did deep lasting damage. What appalled me was Criswell’s proposition that we go backward, that we reverse course and return to … what?

What? That was the question. What was the past here? Where would Criswell’s road back take us? What kind of town awaited us behind that deeply shadowed bend in the road?

To cut to the chase, I spent long evenings over the course of a couple of years researching that question in what is now called the Dallas History and Archives Division of the Dallas Public Library. A team of expert librarian-scholars helped me overcome some of my own dearth of scholarly training as I pursued this singular quest.

By the way, if you want a more comprehensive look at the history of Dallas, you should read Darwin Payne’s book published in 2000, “Big D: Triumphs and Troubles of an American Supercity in the 20th Century.” If you want a keen appraisal of what the city’s all about right now, go to Jamie Thompson’s new book, “Standoff: Race, Policing, and a Deadly Assault That Gripped a Nation.”

My book had a narrow focus. If the nation did what Criswell had urged, if we went backwards on race, where would we wind up?