White Metropolis Revisited with Dr. Michael Phillips

In honor of the twentieth anniversary of his groundbreaking book White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion, 1841-2001, Dr. Michael Phillips will revisit the themes of the book with added material from his new book, co-authored with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas.

In White Metropolis Dr. Phillips delves deeply into Dallas's racial and religious past and traces a complicated history of resistance, collaboration, and assimilation between the city's African American, Mexican American, and Jewish communities and its white power elite, and how these groups resisted oppression - yet often worked at cross-purposes.

Exploring more than 150 years of Dallas history, Phillips tells the story of how the richest and most politically connected in Dallas manipulated the meaning of white identity in order to alternately include and exclude Jewish residents, Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, and working-class and middle-class white residents based on their compliance with the status quo, while promoting the myth of the city as a progressive, pro-business, racially harmonious community that avoided the “racial trouble” that embroiled other Southern cities. 

Michael Phillips is a scholar of American racism, right-wing extremism, and apocalyptic religious beliefs.  He covered crime as a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram before earning his Ph.D.in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002.

He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Based on his award-winning dissertation, his first book, White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001, won the 2007 Texas Historical Commission’s prize for best book on Texas history. 

He recently retired from teaching American history after a 20-year career as a professor. Since then, he has served as an historical consultant for and appeared in the award-winning documentary about the Kennedy assassination and its long-term impact on Dallas, City of Hate.  He was also an adviser and appears in a series of short films about Dallas history, Recovering the Stories, periodically broadcast on Channel 13 and available on the KERA website. 

In 2019, he won a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Community College research fellowship to examine the history of eugenics in Texas. 

Dallas Public Library programs are free and open to the public. To request accommodation, call 214-670-7809.