Mr. Mellow

That particular quote earned Price days of front-page, above-the-fold stories in The Dallas Morning News and the old Dallas Times Herald, as well as national media coverage.

For many black Dallas residents, however, Price is "Our Man Downtown." They can turn to the local black-oriented radio station, KKDA-AM, and hear Price every weekday night invoking the old days of civil rights activism, praising Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and "all those freedom fighters." They have seen him raising hell at Dallas school board meetings, holding the white-dominated board accountable--for something.

Like his martyred heroes--the uninitiated will soon hear--Price, too, has taken risks and served jail time. Dallas County's white district attorney spent years nipping at Price's heels and ultimately charged him only with misdemeanors--for whitewashing billboards that advertised tobacco and alcohol products in poor neighborhoods in 1990 and damaging someone's windshield wipers while on a protest line in 1991. For those offenses, Price served 25 days in the county jail, according to his office manager, Joyce Ann Brown.

But both common perceptions of Price--the black and white versions--are inaccurate. Neither captures the political balancing act that Price, the first and only African-American to serve as a commissioner, performs every day.

For years now, Price, showing up for citywide protests with his small band of "warriors," has managed to maintain his image as a firebrand who represents the disenfranchised. He has served this mostly black constituency with tireless zeal from his commissioner's seat.

With several inch-tall stacks of message slips bearing witness, officer manager Brown seems to hear from every individual in Dallas who's ever entertained a thought that he's suffered racial discrimination at work or abuse within the prison system, as well as a good chunk of the people having trouble paying their overdue utility bills.

Brown and the rest of the commissioner's staff claim they follow up on all of these complaints, no matter how little they relate to county business. "If they are a constituent," Brown says, "it is county business. The door here is not closed."

By mid-morning one day last week, two women had called in to complain about child protective services. "One woman told us two white men had taken her children," Brown says. Another mother had called because she believed her son was unfairly convicted. "You're calling us after the fact," Brown told the woman, advising her how to go about initiating an appeal.

While running his clearinghouse for complaints, Price has, at the same time, much more quietly established himself as an astute county commissioner who favors big business just as much as his conservative colleagues. Price, indeed, has cultivated several alliances in the white-dominated business community and attracted financial support for his campaigns from an unlikely array of establishment players. The late Jack Evans, former mayor of Dallas; James Bankston, the car dealer; and Robert Shaw, the real estate developer, to name a few, have all contributed thousands of dollars to Price's campaigns. "He's a friend," says Shaw about Price, whom he meets for lunch about four times a year.

With his controversial endorsement of the Trinity River bond issue, Price's two worlds crossed. The result: friction.

"I don't want a public fight with him," says Roy Williams, a black activist who vehemently opposed the Trinity plan. "But I have concerns. How can a black politician support this?"

Less than two weeks before Price orchestrated the commissioners' press conference, NAACP chief Lee Alcorn and other Trinity plan opponents had announced their objections to the bond proposal not so much for what it did but for what it didn't do. The package provided no buy-outs--as other cities had offered--for the poor, wretchedly decrepit minority communities in the river's floodplain. Instead, it proposed levees that would protect the crumbling neighborhoods of Cadillac Heights and Joppa in Price's district, some of Dallas' poorest locales.

"How come they could not get something to buy these people out? Why did he sacrifice the people in his constituency?" Williams asks about Price. He ends with a warning: "There will be a backlash against this."

Alcorn is more diplomatic. "I cannot really question his motives," he says of Price. "He is a roads-and-bridges person. That is what he stated."

Questions nonetheless remain. Why has Price changed his story on whether he supported the Trinity plan? In an interview with Wade Goodwyn, a reporter for National Public Radio, Price mentioned a deal he'd cut with University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center leaders: He'd back the Trinity project if they would build a biotech research center in his district.

But in an earlier, tape-recorded interview, Price told Goodwyn that the Trinity River package was "not part of our agenda. We are not land owners along the Trinity. There is nothing in that that builds infrastructure in the historically African-American communities. If you don't built infrastructure, you don't build community."

A few weeks after making that statement, Price issued his endorsement. Asked about the flip-flop, Price first denied it--telling the Dallas Observer that Goodwyn "never got me on tape."

When told that he was, indeed, caught on tape, Price responded vaguely. "I don't think it was ever opposition," he said. "There are a whole number of issues out there." In a later Observer interview, he insisted, "I took only one official position."