Last Chance for Desegregation
Margolis, Richard J.
As soon as it is admitted that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two foreign communities, it will readily be understood that there...
...But such belligerent apologias, replete with their stereotypes, are not reassuring...
...Neither Mr...
...Taeuber used 1960 census figures to analyze the degree of racial segregation in 207 cities, placing them on a scale from zero (no segregation) to 100 (absolute segregation...
...The result is that many low- and moderateincome families are compelled to live in crowded, substandard housing...
...asked Clarence Darrow of a Detroit jury in 1925...
...Stamp out niggers...
...By creating artificial housing shortages for black families, landlords were able to charge outra 252 geous prices for shoddy housing...
...He was clearly under the impression that blacks blotted out the sun...
...Historically, the Northern white blue-collar worker has been among the first to insist on his racial prerogatives...
...is a relic of slavery...
...In Politics of Federal Housing (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1971), Harold Wolman cites results of interviews he conducted with 67 members of "the decision-making elite" in formulation of housing policy...
...From the moment the government entered the housing business, back in the early '30s, it also entered the segregation business...
...Many streets are unsafe, most parks are unsafe...
...A far more likely reason for the failure of legal reforms to produce fair housing is white ambivalence...
...Second, the establishment—especially the federal establishment— now tends to favor a certain amount of ghetto dispersion...
...See also A Report to the President: AFSC Experience and Recommendations re: Executive Order 11063 on Equal Opportunity in Housing (Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee, 1967...
...Similarly, when the sociologist Andrew M. Greeley, in Why Can't They Be Like Us...
...But surely the reader is familiar with this melancholy history...
...First, the laws of the land now explicitly forbid racial discrimination in housing...
...All the indices of recent years suggest that whites and blacks are more rigidly and irreversibly estranged from one another today than ever before...
...for white families with comparable incomes the figure is 6 percent...
...I concede, on the face of it, that we do not appear to be ready...
...Their gains were "hard-won" and are "in jeopardy...
...The force of these laws (and several Supreme Court decisions) does not ensure desegregation, but for the first time in history it offers fair housing supporters a legal base from which to operate...
...The indictments were later dropped...
...But in the '50s thousands of Chicago's Catholic and Jewish families, most of them only a few years and dollars removed from their blue-collar origins, had moved in...
...But the ghetto gates have remained closed...
...Close to half...
...On his first day at work, "I was told that every white man would leave the ship in her unfinished condition if I struck a blow at my trade upon her...
...A mob, aided by local police, started fires in the building and forced Clark to flee at gunpoint...
...Mainly, this boom is for the affluent...
...A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood...
...A nation that wants it both ways—to mingle and to part—has a tendency to make laws it will not enforce and promises it will not keep...
...He began with the usual pieties, deploring racial discrimination and extolling justice...
...And now look what's happening...
...When the citizens of Mobile decided to heed federal busing guidelines rather than the rantings of their governor, something fundamental, perhaps revolutionary, had occurred...
...The Urban League, for instance, has published results of a national survey claiming to prove that "white `native' Americans are more likely than Polish, Irish, or Italians to have antiblack attitudes...
...This cruel game is still being played...
...You know it is wrong...
...Then, for a variety of reasons, the logjam began to break up...
...These included HUD officials, White House officials, congressmen, state and municipal government leaders, home builders, bankers, labor leaders, and a few civil rights representatives...
...The new set of circumstances can be quickly summarized...
...A year later an investigating grand jury— with "a passion for irrelevancy," as the late Charles Abrams observed—indicted an NAACP attorney defending Clark as well as the owner of the apartment house, her lawyer and her rental agent, charging them all with conspiracy to injure property by causing "depreciation in the market selling price...
...People who suffer from such primal fears are likely to make the rest of us suffer, too...
...It is one thing," notes Gunnar Myrdal in the The American Dilemma, "when private tenants, property owners and financial institutions maintain and extend the patterns of racial segregation in housing...
...and, most significant of all, the federal government allied itself with the forces of segregation...
...Originally, Congress had intended this Bibliographical Note The best historical survey of segregated housing inthe U.S...
...Wallace has been able to alter that drift of affairs...
...In any event, America will soon learn whether the two races are fated to wholly mingle or wholly part...
...In general, one can conclude from Wolman's data that the people who make housing policy nowadays, while not exactly the avant garde of integration, are consider ably more sympathetic to notions of desegreLAST CHANCE FOR DESEGREGATION gallon than were their predecessors...
...So far the Nixon administration has done little to redress the housing inequity...
...it was assiduously planned, promoted, and pampered by those who had most to gain from it...
...They could as easily have been spoken by a Rosedale rioter as by a Baltimore orator...
...The mobile home industry is breaking all sales records, because mobile homes are the only dwellings most blue-collar families can afford to buy...
...The neighbors' reaction was conventional...
...absolves white ethnics from violent tendencies, one wonders at his grasp of history...
...The current vogue of glossing over historic conflicts between blue-collar blacks and blue-collar whites may undermine our last chance to form an effective coalition based on realities rather than myths...
...Today 26 states and more than 200 cities have such laws on their books...
...Oh, gentlemen, what is the use...
...Everything Greeley says about white ethnics could be said, mutatis mutandi, about blacks...
...Now the President was saying they need not listen...
...Twenty eight of the respondents favored more local control...
...see especially the issues of December 1970 and of September 1971...
...The reason most frequently advanced, both by the New Left and the old Right, is that blacks no longer wish to inte grate white neighborhoods (if, indeed, they ever did...
...It is all too easy to interpret these events fatalistically...
...The manual recommended use of restrictive covenants to keep out "inharmonious racial groups," and even provided a model restrictive covenant for readers too innocent to write their own...
...During the '60s antisegregationists pinned most of their hopes on federal reforms, beginning with President Kennedy's 1962 Executive Order, which barred discrimination in new housing that was federally financed or insured...
...Wolman asked them, among other things, whether they thought public policy should be directed more toward: (a) improving housing conditions within the ghetto...
...To be sure, the white ethnic is frequently a victim of class prejudice...
...and when that happens, the federal government will go into the housing business on a scale unprecedented, not only in central cities but in the suburbs as well...
...I have dredged up a bit of it here not to indict the past but to clarify the present...
...To many white people segregation has the force of natural law...
...It remains one of the toughest challenges in the '70s...
...Ultimately, it seems to me, we are more likely to "wholly mingle" than to "wholly part...
...The mobile-home boom is a function not of public preference but of public desperation...
...Furthermore, 23 of the "influentials" thought more federal control was needed in forming low-income housing policies, thus appearing to embrace President Nixon's nemesis—"forced integration...
...Accordingly, fair housing enthusiasts preached tolerance to real estate brokers and signed RICHARD J. MARGOLIS petitions pledging to welcome black neighbors, provided those black neighbors had a suitable income...
...The federal government's role in segregation is documented by Gunnar Myrdal, Richard Sterner, and Arnold Rose, in An American Dilemma (New York: Harper & Bros., 1944), and more recently by Richard and Diane Margolis in a pamphlet, "How the Federal Government Builds Ghettos" (New York: National Committee Against Dis crimination in Housing, 1967...
...White ethnics are afraid of violence," Greeley assures us...
...A 1969 Fortune survey, for instance, indicates that 93 percent of the nation's blacks favor desegregation in housing...
...These goals, in the opinion of many observers (including Mr...
...In fact, in 1971 the President released $2 billion in previously impounded "Special Assistance" money to keep the lid on the mortgage market for nonsubsidized, high-priced housing...
...Until 1949, when the U.S...
...The point to remember here is that segregation did not simply "happen...
...The colored people must 254 live somewhere," Darrow continued...
...money to aid low- and moderate-income housing...
...It seemed then to depend upon a "change of heart" among white residents, a sudden seizure of conscience that would magically open the ghetto gates...
...Then, in 1968, both Congress and the Supreme Court struck blows at segregation many observers at the time considered decisive...
...One need not look far to see what the Urban League is driving at...
...Nixon nor Mr...
...seealso, Stephen Clapp and Geno Baroni, "I'm a Pig, Too," in the Washingtonian, July 1970...
...The remainder either voiced a different opinion or no opinion...
...Romney), have been grossly understated...
...As recently as last summer, for example, an investigation by the U.S...
...The situation is roughly as follows: In 1968 the Congress committed the nation—in principle at least—to the "construction or rehabilitation of 26 million housing units" during the next ten years...
...If the two can work together, they will hasten the day when the Congress must act...
...It soon became clear that many whites were capable of deploring neighborhood segregation without necessarily abolishing it...
...The best continuing source of information on thenational housing shortage and federal nonsolutionsis The Low-Income Housing Bulletin, a monthlypublished by the Rural Housing Alliance, Washington, D.C...
...Early last June a rumor spread through Rosedale, Queens—a blue-collar community of Irish, Jews, and Italians—that a black man had bought a two-family house there and planned to move in with his white wife, his black brother and sister-in-law, and ten black children...
...Dooley's dictum: "Life'd not be worth livin' if we didn't keep our inimies...
...And the present "housing boom," which will probably produce more than 2 million new units, has done little to relieve the pinch...
...That fight, as we shall see, has yet to be waged...
...But after Emancipation, as blacks began coming North in greater numbers, the residential neighborhood became a symbol of white supremacy...
...that is, as the inevitable product of powerful and impersonal forces that sweep all before them...
...but now it is sancitified by the mass media as "lovable" and adverstised by academics and others as harmless, or even healthy...
...All this was naive but understandable...
...Supreme Court struck down restrictive covenants, Skokie had been almost exelusively a wasp suburb...
...The rumor proved unfounded...
...But 31 wanted "both in about equal proportions...
...At this point the emphasis switched from conscience to legislation, and during the '50s many states and cities passed laws banning discrimination in various types of housing...
...Other federal agencies were behaving no better...
...the fallacy lies in the assumption that a coalition can be easily achieved, that white ethnics are psychologically "ripe" for it...
...The public, meanwhile, may also be adjusting gradually to a desegregated future, but the transformation is no more inevitable than was segregation 50 years ago...
...Few suburban land developers would disagree with Mr...
...Douglass, a skilled calker and copperer, had to settle for common, unskilled labor at half the pay...
...Most authorities, of course, attribute these twin migrations to industrialization—that is, to the new farm machinery that drove people off the land, and to the automobile that allowed others to move out to the suburbs...
...Now they were frightened...
...The threat of RICHARD J. MARGOLIS violence implies that their efforts may have been in vain, and that their hard-won gains are in jeopardy...
...of all households of Irish, Polish, or Italian origin are in manual occupations, or in so-called blue-collar work," notes the League...
...The rhetoric of this new movement often has a familiar aura...
...Yet, most blacks seem to recognize the theoretical truth that the road to better housing usually leads to neighborhoods beyond the ghetto...
...The depth of white panic should not be underestimated (although that is precisely what some leaders of the latest "white ethnic" renaissance—of which more later—seem to be doing...
...The least segregated city, San Jose, California, had an index rating of 60.4...
...Yet when Greeley discusses the blacks, he chooses to see them through the eyes of his white ethnics: "I must still insist that violence in American cities is real...
...Yet even they are not LAST CHANCE FOR DESEGREGATION 255 being met...
...can be found in Charles Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors (New York: Harper & Row, 1955...
...In a study on Protest and Prejudice (Harper & Row, 1967), Gary T. Marx notes that less than a third of the urban blacks he interviewed preferred to live in racially mixed neighborhoods and only 4 percent would choose neighborhoods that were "mostly white...
...the law applied not only to landlords and sellers but also to banks, insurance companies, and real estate brokers...
...It warned valuators to beware of "adverse influences," such as "infiltration of business and industrial uses, lower-class occupancy and inharmonious racial groups...
...or (c) both in about equal proportions...
...The figure reflected official estimates of what America would require if every family were to be decently housed...
...Ossian Sweet, a black physician accused of committing murder while protecting his house against a white mob...
...Dutton, 1971...
...but then he proceeded to take a hard line against what he called "forced integration," by which he meant federally supported efforts to move black families out of urban tenements and into decent suburban dwellings...
...Not only did racism impel millions of black people northward, it also drove millions of white people outward to places like Garden City...
...For a look at blue-collar fears pertaining to interracial housing, see Forbidden Neighbors, op...
...We can cash them in whenever we're ready...
...In the years immediately following World War I, for example, dozens of blacks were killed for venturing across the community color line, and scores more were beaten and sent packing...
...When racial discrimination herds men into ghettos and makes their ability to buy property turn on the color of their skin," said the justices, "then it...
...The Home Owners Loan Corporation, for example, which was organized in 1933 to buy up and refinance delinquent mortgages, sold houses only to members of the dominant race in a given neighborhood...
...Romney's constant plea to suburban officials had been to loosen local zoning restrictions and accept their "fair share" of subsidized low- and moderate-income housing...
...It fixed segregationist patterns in thousands of new suburbs, where 80 percent of all new housing is now being built...
...But mobile homes are far from satisfactory: they provide less space for the money and tend to depreciate at a faster rate than does conventional housing...
...Through the years blue-collar families have gained nothing from this casual alliance, other than the consolation, perhaps, of social superiority over blacks...
...For it is clear that the Rosedale incident is but the latest footnote to a very old story...
...But it was not logic that moved populations...
...New York: E.P...
...Why not...
...During the same period Alexander T. Stewart, a New York department-store magnate, conceived the idea for a planned residential development in Garden City, Long Island, and thus inaugurated what might be called the Age of the Suburbs...
...As if the streets in Rosedale are any safer for blacks than the streets in Harlem for whites...
...But they do offer reasonable grounds for hope and action...
...Similarly, when school systems throughout the North started to desegregate—not because segregation was wrong but because it was illegal—we were getting very close to the heart of the matter...
...In fact, white working-class families have nearly always suffered from the segregating system...
...The two "statements" made that day last June—one by the man in the White House, the other by a mob in Queens—would seem to reflect America's continuing commitment to some form of apartheid, no matter what the social cost...
...Darrow was defending Dr...
...Less than 2 percent of it has been available to nonwhite families, and much of that on a strictly segregated basis...
...There is some truth in this...
...With picks and axes they rampaged through the house, shattering windows, ripping out fixtures, flooding the basement, and scrawling graffiti on the walls: "We hate niggers...
...Yet everything in our history suggests that a large portion of white America will try to secure better housing without paying the price of desegregation...
...Only 8 of the 67 favored dispersing the ghetto, while 19 favored improving it...
...And third, the current housing shortage, which for blue-collar workers will 250 get worse before it gets better, makes possible a grudging but useful coalition between white ethnics and blacks, both of whom seek better housing...
...Thus spoke the National Association of Real Estate Boards as late as 1957...
...but not always in the context of race relations, and hardly ever in the context of neighborhood segregation...
...He himself is the victim of class prejudice...
...Their terror seeps into the body politic, with the result that our leaders fail to pursue those policies which might deliver us from apartheid...
...If the trend continues for another decade, the 1980 census will list more than 50 cities with black majorities...
...Indeed, public policy seems now to be moving, albeit unenthusiastically, toward desegregation...
...It was the policy-makers of the '30s and '40s who laid the ghetto's cornerstone...
...members of any race or nationality . .. whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in the neighborhood...
...The Congress passed a fair housing law that banned discrimination in virtually all of the nation's 65 million housing units...
...It would have been more logical, after all, for blacks to have moved to suburbia, where land was cheaper and where the environment more closely resembled that of their rural origins...
...Nevertheless, the two segregating impulses mentioned above—blue-collar panic and white-collar profiteering—appear to be weakening...
...Thanks to sociologist Karl E. Taeuber we have a rough statistical index of our madness...
...No one called the police...
...It is the old dream of a blue-collar coalition between blacks and whites...
...As late as 1962 President Kennedy was capable, without irony, of telling a delegation of black leaders that he saw no need for new civil rights legislation...
...In fact, one could make a fairly strong case for neighborhood segregation as a pillar of the American economy...
...As soon as it is admitted that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two foreign communities, it will readily be understood that there are but two chances for the future: the Negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle...
...2. Current blue-collar, or "white ethnic" attitudes toward race are subject to debate...
...cit., as well as Kenneth G. Weinberg, A Man's Home, a Man's Castle (New York: McCall Publishing, 1971...
...Eventually, it came to be taken for granted, a fixed shadow on our social landscape...
...Tight money and inflated building and land costs are the reasons...
...Still, the ghetto gates have remained closed...
...Almost simultaneously the Supreme Court affirmed the old Civil Rights Act passed in 1866, which forbids racial discrimination in the sale or rental of all housing and land...
...The protesters deemed themselves lucky to finish their trial march alive...
...The migrations of the sixties have brought us still closer to total apartheid...
...In 1951, to cite a later instance, Harvey E. Clark, Jr., a black war veteran, tried to move his family into a $60 apartment in Cicero, Illinois...
...There was a time, not very long ago, when desegregation of our neighborhoods was viewed as a relatively simple matter by most of its supporters...
...There has always been a kind of Gresham's Law at work in the civil rights movement, in which the obvious issues have tended to drive out the more complicated ones...
...It is well to state this plainly, because white ethnics nowadays are getting more than their fair share of sentimental whitewash...
...None of these factors guarantees desegregation of our cities and towns...
...After all, the two great migrations— that of blacks from rural South to urban North, and that of whites from benighted cities to sunny suburbs—have been going on for generations...
...See also portions of Mike Royko's Boss (New York: E.P...
...In those days integrated employment seemed a more serious threat to whites in the North than did integrated housing...
...In general, and despite new pride and militancy among blacks, the main barrier to neighborhood desegregation remains white intransigence, not black clannishness...
...And the public housing agency early established a policy of "racial equity"—a polite way of saying separate but equal housing— which to this day is honored by a majority of local housing authorities...
...There was much violence "in their own past...
...Speaking at one of several recent conferences devoted to white ethnics, a Baltimore lady named Barbara Mikulski declared: "The ethnic American is sick of being stereotyped as a racist and dullard by phony white liberals, pseudo black militants and patronizing bureaucrats...
...Are you going to kill them...
...In another manual, not revised until 1949, FHA urged its mortgage valuators to consider whether "effective restrictive covenants against the entire tract are recorded, since these provide the surest protection against undesirable encroachment...
...Dutton, 1971), particularly chap...
...All this activity is prologue to the main event: the breaking up of our black ghettos and the concomitant integration of our white suburbs...
...the new attitude reflects a complete reversal of traditional federal thinking...
...They never moved in...
...Actually, the house had been bought by two Chinese brothers, one of whom was married to a white woman...
...Indeed, much of the segregation we now endure is a product of these two forces—upper-middle class manipulation of our land and our laws for political and financial profit, and ad hoc blue-collar violence...
...The neighborhood Sweet had moved into was a bastion of first-generation white ethnocentricity...
...A few years ago in Skokie, Illinois, about 85 white residents met to protest the presence of the town's first black family...
...Even that dubious advantage is disappearing...
...Their panicky reaction to black move-ins both lowers their property values and, as a rule, forces them to flee to newer, more expensive neighborhoods...
...Get out of Cicero," the police chief told him, "and don't come back to town or you'll get a bullet through you...
...Half the cities had segregation ratings above 87 and one-quarter exceeded 91...
...If we allow this to occur, then in a relatively short time the nation will proceed to subsidize total apartheid through the construction of some 30 million housing units, about half again the number of units now extant...
...Current attitudes toward segregation among the federal "elite" have been studied by Harold Wolman in The Politics o/ Federal Housing (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1971...
...National polls invariably indicate that at least half the white population "would not object" if a black family moved next door...
...For another viewpoint, see Timothy Lee's article, "Rosedale: Might Makes Right," in the New York Post, June 30, 1971...
...They therefore may identify with many of the problems of lower-income minority members...
...For desegregationists the key reality today is a cruel housing shortage that for decades has plagued blacks and white blue-collar families as well...
...It was clear from the start that "drawing the color line" was good business...
...and it is that cornerstone, at which some of their successors are now beginning to chip away...
...At least four cities already have black majorities...
...school systems quietly shifted their boundaries to arrange for what they would later call de facto segregation...
...Where will these people live...
...or, to put it more precisely, a new set of circumstances may be rendering segregation less interesting to the establishment and integration less odious to the public...
...Only eight cities were rated below 70...
...He thus threatened to snuff out the few embers of integration that his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development —Alexis de Tocqueville George W. Romney had bravely been fanning...
...and now we appear to be heading, with many painful detours, toward at least partial desegregation of our schools...
...Similarly, in Chicago almost half the black families earning $7,000 or more live in substandard dwellings...
...It is quite another when a Federal agency chooses to side with the segregationists...
...It is true, of course, that most white ethnics, like everyone else, are nonviolent in most contexts...
...Even then the ghetto gates did not open...
...A post-riot study of Watts, for example, revealed that greater congestion had led to higher rents this despite more than 100,000 housing vacancies in greater Los Angeles...
...Nor can anyone doubt that the white stampede to suburbia has filled the pockets of many a businessman—land speculators, realtors, bankers, home builders and road builders, to name a few...
...These are undeniable facts, yet they do not take into account the vital role racism played in the process...
...City planners with Ph.D.'s drew their blueprints for future communities in black and white...
...Since World War II the FHA and the Veterans' Administration together have financed more than $130 billionworth of new housing...
...Today only 7 percent of our suburban population is black, while more than half of all American LAST CHANCE FOR DESEGREGATION 251 blacks live in central cities...
...Somewhere they must live...
...In particular, desegregationists will have to find an accommodation with blue-collar families, who offer us the paradox of simultaneously being the most obdurate of segregationists and the most promising candidates for integration...
...I moved out here so my kids could have grass and trees and sunshine," a young father shouted...
...The government did its work well...
...Are you going to say they can work but cannot get a place to sleep...
...It is far from accidental that for generations real estate firms and lending institutions viewed racial segregation as axiomatic...
...For one pointof view see Andrew M. Greeley, Why Can't They Be Like Us...
...Everyone of you knows it is wrong...
...It will have to be planned and even popularized...
...Over the years a substantial segment of the white population has, in fact, undergone just such a change of heart...
...It seems likely, then, that the pressure for low-cost housing will continue to increase, and that this pressure will be generated at least as much by white ethnics as by blacks...
...When protesting blacks prepared to march through Cicero for the announced purpose of desegregating that town, the white residents were hardly "afraid of violence...
...When the television comedy All in the Family, about a "lovable bigot" who doesn't want any "coons" living next door to him, attracts 100 million weekly viewers and wins an Emmy, the cause of desegregation has not been served...
...Frederick Douglass found this out when as an escaped slave in 1838 he secured a job on a shipbuilder's wharf in New Bedford, Mass., the heart of abolitionist country...
...b) dispersing the ghetto...
...According to the 1970 census, 4.3 million of our dwelling units are "substandard...
...quiet residential neighborhoods are open to easy attack, and the threat of violent eruption hangs over the city each summer...
...On the same day, by coincidence, President Nixon issued a major policy statement on housing and race...
...In the last decade this migration has grown to such proportions that it is estimated that our Blacks have quite doubled in number since the Tenth Census...
...Liberals spent decades, for example, trying to abolish lynching and the poll tax, before making any serious effort to attack segregation per se...
...256 RICHARD J. MARGOLIS...
...Riis cites the maxim of New York City's landlords: "Once a colored house, always a colored house"—a sure sign of creeping segregation...
...Many of the white ethnics, in fact, work as peers with blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans...
...Some civil rights spokesmen who should know better have adopted a similar propaganda line...
...In 1938 the official Federal Housing AdminisRICHARD J. MARGOLIS tration (FHA) Underwriting Manual cautioned home buyers: "If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial group...
...Commission on Civil Rights revealed that federally subsidized houses—especially those subsidized by the Section 235 mortgage assistance program— were being sold along the same old segregated lines: inner-city houses to blacks and suburban houses to whites...
...It was meanly defended...
...On the other hand, if whites and blacks, liberals and trade unionists, make desegregation a nonnegotiable item, there may still be time to undo the work of the past hundred years—that is, to get ouselves together...
...But the Urban League does not say what proportion of those antiblack native Americans live in the South, where most whites are wnsrs...
...for more recent history, see James L. Hecht, Because It Is Right (Boston: Little Brown, 1970...
...The average new house today costs about 30 percent more than it cost in 1967, and payments have shot up 56 percent in that period...
...The fallacy in all this is not that such a coalition is impossible—it is possible, provided we do not confuse white ethnics with white knights...
...There was much of it in their past, both in this country and in Europe...
...It is already too late for Americans to slip through the horns of Tocquevilles's uncompromising dilemma...
...We will not seek to impose economic integration on existing local jurisdictions," the President reassured white suburbanites...
...They now have much more to lose than they did in the past...
...Back in 1890 Jacob Riis noted that "New York has been receiving the overflow of colored population from Southern cities...
...Others stood outside and cheered...
...What this amounts to, it seems to me, is old wine in new bottles...
...But segregation has become less fashionable within the establishment, with the result that the private prejudices of government and industry leaders are less frequently translated into public policy...
...In any case, the new laws are on the books and the new promises are on our conscience...
...There remains both within the federal government and the housing industry a considerable amount of segregationist sentiment...
...Once a colored house, always a colored house...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
