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The Dwaine Caraway Show

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Using the city's cumbersome zoning process, Caraway and Davis forced the permanent closing of three "hot-sheet" drug and whorehouse motels, two of them outside District 4 but close enough to impinge. Motel owners had hired lawyers and mounted vigorous defenses, but Caraway and Davis, acting on their own, persevered and ultimately prevailed.

Tri-City Hospital on Scyene Road, which closed down suddenly five years ago, leaving behind unpaid employees and jilted patients, is slated for a $20 million renovation and ultimate re-opening next year. Caraway's predecessor, Maxine Thornton-Reese, was assailed by opponent Larry Duncan in her 1999 city council election race for the high fees she collected as a director of the old Tri-City before it failed. Davis says Caraway has been instrumental in putting together a deal to revive the hospital.

After a college student was killed by cross-fire on November 21, 2007 at the Big T Bazaar shopping mall in Oak Cliff, Caraway helped broker a deal in which the mall owners donated $50,000 to the police department for an aerial surveillance tower, part of a new overall safety plan for the mall.

Caraway initiated monthly meetings to address the needs of the residents of Turner Courts, a Dallas Housing Authority complex adjacent to Rochester Park. Davis says Caraway pressured Dallas Area Rapid Transit to restore after-dark bus service to Turner Courts, persuaded the city to replace broken street lights and also sought code compliance crackdowns against liquor stores in the area.

With funding and volunteer staff from Allyn & Company, a political advertising agency, Caraway hosted eight "teen summits" to provide teenagers with information about drugs, pregnancy and careers. He has championed the use of so-called "gunshot detection systems," now under study by the police department, to monitor random outdoor gunfire. And Caraway has pressed relentlessly for clean-up campaigns in which cross-departmental teams of city employees comb areas and write tickets for a variety of property maintenance and safety violations.

In addition to several office visits and countless phone calls, I spent an entire day with Councilman Caraway last February—the one that started off with Dooney and the buttocks issue. I think it was a fairly typical day, which in itself is amazing.

We're in his car, a large black Mercedes. Driving with two fingers, Caraway plucks through coat and pants pockets for two cell phones and a BlackBerry, all of which are ringing. His sidekick Davis, formerly in the real estate and Web design business, is in the backseat, taking calls for Caraway on his own cell phone.

District 4 is shaped in a crescent, midway between the city's southern border and downtown. Splayed across the poverty-stricken southern sector, the district contains a few middle-class areas such as Singing Hills and the neighborhoods surrounding the Cedar Crest Municipal Golf Course.

Caraway pulls the Benz to the curb on Ewing Street in Oak Cliff at a sad, slump-shouldered little bungalow with ragged patches of plywood boarded over its eyes and mouth. Three television crews have set up their equipment out front amid a small army of police and city employees, one of whom is handing out handsome green binders containing a media kit. A press release inside explains that this event is an official city action to shut down a crack house that has afflicted its neighbors.

Davis says this kind of action—not unheard of but rare in District 4 before Caraway's election—is what Caraway is all about. "Dallas has never seen a deputy mayor pro tem like this," he says.

It's true. I know that Dr. Maxine Thornton-Reese, who preceded Caraway in the District 4 chair, was famously uninterested in humdrum constituency work but very attentive to the back-corridor power politics of City Hall. Davis says Caraway's approach is a process of jump-starting hope and activism in the neighborhoods by showing people results on the ground.

"When you don't have the leadership, then things get stagnant, and people turn off and figure this is the way it is," Davis adds. The kinds of results he and Caraway pursue, though small when taken one by one, are elements in a sort of chemistry. "Then you have excitement, because people think, 'Now we have leadership that we voted for that has our best interests at heart.'"

Caraway has lived in District 4 most of his life. It's hard to assign mainstream class distinctions to 20th-century black Dallas, because of the skewing effect of racism, but the family in which Caraway grew up was at least middle-class. His father was the longtime manager of the locker room at an all-white country club.

Caraway graduated from Lincoln High School, then attended but did not graduate from Texas Southern University, where he met his wife, Barbara, also a politician. She is a former Dallas City Council member, elected to the Texas House of Representatives from District 110 in 2006.

His mother's 12 brothers and sisters and their offspring have produced more Caraway relatives and presumable voters in District 4 than the city councilman can count or even knows by name.

He has earned his living as a radio personality and as owner of his own small advertising agency. Caraway and I have discussed a list of legal actions filed against him, all having to do with business debts and a 1999 bankruptcy. In the bankruptcy, Caraway defaulted on a $25,000 loan from the Southern Dallas Development Corporation, a nonprofit that receives grant money from the city for helping stimulate the southern sector's economy.

In the 1990s he owned a number of billboards in Southern Dallas and was doing a lucrative trade with tobacco companies. In 1998, after he expanded his billboard business, Caraway's tobacco clients dried up and blew away.

That same year, his father suffered a crippling stroke at a 50th wedding anniversary in New Orleans. Caraway stayed with his father in the hospital in New Orleans and away from his company in Dallas for 33 consecutive days, which wasn't good for business either.

"Circumstances pile on and pile on," he says. "When you're not here, and there's not enough coming in from the beginning, your kneecap gets busted."

The lesson of his life, he says, is that perseverance is everything. "People always quit," he says. "I just don't quit."

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