Comer Cottrell at a 1986 event for his Pro-Line company.
Glad to see this letter to the editor today about the late Comer Cottrell from Alice Murray, president of the Dallas Citizens Council. Likewise, our editorial page paid homage to Cottrell’s legacy earlier this week.
But the correspondence I most appreciated on this topic was an email Dallas businessman Charles O’Neal sent me Tuesday. He thanked me for the Cottrell tribute, but, more importantly, he offered a counter-balance to the statement at the top of the editorial that said, when Cottrell arrived in 1980, Dallas had “little history when it came to businesses owned by African-Americans.”
O’Neal noted in his email:
– Mildren Montgomery’s Garland Foods was a multi-million dollar enterprise by 1975
– Clyde Clark’s Commercial Truck & Trailer topped a million dollars before 1980.
– Joe Kirven’s janitorial/janitorial supply company was among the first Black-owned firms to earn a contract with the State of Texas.
I read last night about these gentlemen. And I was reminded about other histories I’d read that referenced the vibrancy of the Dallas African-American business community. And, most embarrassingly, I flashed back to what I just learned at last month’s meeting here in Dallas of the Texas Association of African-American Chambers of Commerce: America’s first Black Chamber of Commerce was founded in Dallas in 1926. So much for all that knowledge I gathered when it came to editing our editorial.
Yes, Comer Cottrell was in a category all his own by the sheer size of his empire. But I fear that indeed we played into the popular establishment narrative of Dallas history with the statement that our city had “little history when it came to businesses owned by African-Americans.”
This is a powerful reminder that I must always challenge my preconceptions — whether that be as an editor or a writer. Even those of us who focus so much of our time on the Bridging Dallas’ North-South Gap project, still have so very much to learn. We’ll never know it as well as someone such as Charles O’Neal, but we can get a heck of a lot closer.