Richard Parker is the author of Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America, now out in paperback. He is also a columnist based in Austin for The Dallas Morning News.

When the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza in 1963, their reports ricocheted off the tall buildings surrounding the green park. One bullet caught an innocent bystander. One found the governor of Texas. Two more, of course, struck and killed President John F. Kennedy, and in those few seconds frozen in time, the city of Dallas was instantly branded: the City of Hate.

A little more than 50 years later, the shots have rung out in downtown Dallas again, just a short stroll from infamous Dealey Plaza. There are some eerie circumstantial similarities, to be sure. But this time the target was not a president—it was police officers. And the political obsession of the moment was no longer the Cold War but racial division, the remaining scar of America’s greatest sin: slavery.


But today’s Dallas, America’s 9th largest city, seems the unlikeliest of places for the latest American massacre in which a black man gunned down white officers in the midst of a Black Lives Matter protest. Once virulently white, racist and reactionary, today’s Dallas is deeply politically influenced by its large African-American and even bigger Latino populations. Progressive Democrats have controlled local government for 20 years.

And, over the past several years, the city’s police have embraced the tactics of de-escalation, cutting citizen complaints by 90 percent. In other words, Dallas had come very far from being The City of Hate. To be marred by this massacre is an unlikely tragedy. To be tarnished by it is also deeply unfair.

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On the morning of November 22, 2013, the gray skies over downtown Dallas opened up. It was the city’s hapless luck that the rain came down on 100,000 people in the streets just as Dallas made its amends to history marking the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death.

Mike Rawlings was fresh from his job as CEO of Pizza Hut and new in his role as mayor. “The people of this city have been filled with a sense of industry born of tragedy—driven to improve the substance of Dallas, not just the image of it,” Rawlings told the crowd. “Today, because of the hard work of many people, Dallas is a different city.”

Dallas worked overtime that day, too, to scrub itself clean of that notorious time a half a century earlier. The Dallas Morning News culminated a yearlong series examining the assassination and its aftermath. A door-sized aluminum plaque commemorating Kennedy was placed in Dealey Plaza. The plaza had been named for George Dealey, the hard-charging newspaper man who founded The Dallas Morning News in 1885. He turned the paper against the Klan and into an empire as the railroads helped the city swell with people. But by the early 1960s his son, Ted, turned the paper into a red-baiting rag that advocated nuclear war. He even told Kennedy to his face, “we need a man on horseback ... and many people in Texas and the Southwest think that you are riding Caroline’s tricycle.”

So, when Kennedy visited this city in November 1963, Dallas had stubbornly refused to desegregate its public schools until just two years earlier. It was a hotbed of John Birchers, where Lyndon and Ladybird Johnson were spat on and Adlai Stephenson was hit in the head with a sign even as Frank Lloyd Wright designed a new theater, Neiman Marcus flourished and Picasso and Monet hung in Kennedy’s hotel during his final stay. When it was all said and done, though, the damage was done to Kennedy, the country and to Dallas. Dallas was the “city that killed Kennedy.” Or as author Bill Minutaglio would later, like many, put it in his 2013 book, Dallas 1963: “The City of Hate.”

But Dallas ceased to be that place almost immediately in the wake of Kennedy’s death, as the city constantly strove to overcome its role in the national tragedy. Throughout the 1960s, the leaders of the Dallas right wing were rejected, marginalized or dead. Voters sacked Republican Rep. Bruce Alger, organizer of that anti-Johnson protest. Bircher Edwin Walker, who organized the Stephenson fiasco, never won the governorship for which he lusted. The younger Dealey died in 1969.

In 1966, the city dropped the practice of segregating taxis. In 1970, D.F. Stafford became the first African American police captain. The fortunes of Dallas really turned when oil prices soared in the 1970s; the Cowboys became America’s team and a new wealth infused not just ostentatious displays of ego but a thriving cultural, philanthropic life, too.

Though the city’s fortune’s changed, its luck did not. Travelling Dallasites were refused service when they revealed their hometown. In 1979, the city’s taxpayers erected the John F. Kennedy Memorial, a cenotaph—a roofless and empty tomb—near the site of the assassination. Though designed by Kennedy family friend Philip Johnson, the boxy construction was widely booed by architecture critics and citizens alike.

The Dallas Cowboys went from America’s team to a perennially losing team. Even in 2013, when the new aluminum plaque to Kennedy went up, as a kind of amends, it didn’t matter; the Dealey Plaza addition was panned by no less than the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News itself who labeled it “a pathetic tableau.”

***

Belo Garden is just a three-block walk from the memorial and named for the company now run by the original Dealey’s great grandson, James Moroney. (Who also, in full disclosure, signs my paycheck as a columnist for his paper.) When the shots rang out there Thursday night, people once more thought—fleeing—that there were multiple gunmen as the echoes bounced off the tall, surrounding buildings.

Despite the eerie similarity, today’s Dallas is no more a hotbed of extremism than the bloody handiwork of Micah Johnson represents Black Lives Matter or the U.S. Army in which he served. And of all the places in America where a black man would shoot white cops during a Black Lives Matter rally, Dallas seems among the most unlikely—if the objective conditions of the city figured at all.

The city’s African-American population is influential, having held the mayor’s post, city and county government jobs and the leadership of the police department. African Americans are moving to Dallas from the north, just as they are moving to much of the urban South for a booming economy and, until now, comparatively inexpensive real estate. The number of black-owned businesses doubled in recent years, according to federal data. Black Enterprise Magazine has repeatedly ranked Dallas among the top 10 American cities for African Americans.

African Americans comprise 25 percent of the population in Dallas proper. The same is increasingly true of the near suburbs. Not that long ago, the just 10 percent of the suburb of Garland was composed of ethnic minorities. Now 15 percent are African American alone. Forty percent of Garland’s population is Latino.

The police, too, have made big strides. The Dallas Police Department has moved away from imposing military-surplus vehicles and confrontational tactics. In 2009, citizens filed nearly 150 complaints of excessive force by police officers; in 2013 they filed just 13 such complaints. No, Dallas is not perfect. But no imminent race war was looming over the city, either. Yes, Donald Trump draws big crowds in Big D, but the other big D—Democrats—have generally ruled the city and county for some two decades.

Nonetheless, Thursday’s shooting didn’t just take five innocent lives, four members of the Dallas Police Department and one transit police officer. It also rattled people’s confidence in their city, as in, “Oh no, it’s happening again.” People fretted openly in television interviews that the shootings would set back race relations, when the city had come so far. “Words matter, leadership matters at this time,” an emotional Rawlings said Thursday night when little but the body count was really clear.

“I was shocked, horrified and sad,” said Gaylen Gammill, a therapist in suburban Coleyville. “It was for the loss of life and families. I didn’t so much think about the city, but my 14-year old daughter did. She came to me asking why she kept hearing, ‘Pray for Dallas.’”

On Friday and in the light of day, people in airports across the state were glued to their phones talking about the shootings in muted tones. In Dallas, Jeff Hood, a uniquely bearded preacher and white organizer of the Black Lives Matter march, said, “This is a city of love. Our people have learned to stand up for each other.”

Of course, none of that stopped at least one politician from rushing to impose his agenda on the tragedy’s meaning—and to embrace the divisiveness that the city has tried to shed. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick went on Fox News to proclaim: “All those protesters last night, they ran the other way, expecting the men and women in blue to turn around and protect them. What hypocrites.” Well, old habits die hard—though it should be noted that Patrick is from Houston.

Patrick’s stupidity alone is good reason to pray for Dallas. Even though the police, city and citizens of Dallas reacted swiftly and smartly to Thursday night’s ambush, a politician can always be counted on to sully the city’s reputation anyway. It feeds the foreboding feeling that no deed, however good in unlucky Dallas, ever quite goes unpunished.