THE DEERFIELD FOLLY

...A poll on the integrated development showed Deerfield residents were opposed to it—eight to one...

...The individuals opposed to the new housing gave a variety of reasons for their position: falling property values, a desire to retain a harmonious community, the builder's failure to disclose his intent to sell to Negroes when he received permission to build, or a dislike of "compulsion" to integrate...

...Reviewed by Ernest Dunbar Deerfield, Illinois, is a Chicago suburb whose chief fame, like that of Little Rock, Arkansas, Levit-town, Pennsylvania, or Chicago's Trumbull Park, rests on the unhappy history of its inhabitants' response to the prospect of racial integration...

...The events described by the Rosens, disturbing and tragic as they are, could be duplicated in virtually any Northern suburb, and that, perhaps, is the real tragedy...

...The battle of Deerfield moved from the ballot box to the courtroom as PCD contested the township's actions, and both sides have won favorable verdicts only to have them set aside by appellate courts...

...Their book is drawn from newspaper accounts, town records, court proceedings, and interviews with the townspeople of Deerfield...

...The vote was two to one for condemnation...

...The case is still in the courts...

...But Not Next Door is the blow-by-blow story of the crisis which erupted when the town's citizens learned that the builders of a new, fifty-one-unit development of $30,000 homes planned to sell "ten or twelve" to Negroes...

...Every resident was suddenly confronted with the challenge of acting on his professed ideals—under the searching glare of the nation's news media...

...The authors, brothers, are both engaged in social work and one, David Rosen, is a resident of Deerfield...

...The events in the Deerfield story are presented in documentary fashion, but the authors have added three fictional characters, composites "created out of the feelings and actions of the people of Deerfield, most of whom prefer to remain anonymous...

...But Not Next Door is a book which deserves to be read by all Americans, North and South...

...Said one resident: "I came here to get away from niggers, not to live with them...

...The township held a referendum enabling it to condemn the land occupied by the development and to convert the property to use as a park...

...As the controversy reached a crescendo, the backers and opponents of the new development found leaders and created organizations to fight their causes...

...But when news of the project broke in Deerfield, panic followed consternation, and neighbor turned against neighbor...

...The township's building inspectors found that portions of the construction in the two model houses being built did not meet the local construction code, though one inspector was later to admit in court that the beams in question exceeded the code's requirement for strength...

...What the builder, Progress Development Corporation, was attempting in Deerfield—a small, private development of one-family houses which would be open to limited and controlled Negro occupancy—had already been successfully done in other Northern communities by Modern Community Developers of which PCD was a subsidiary...

...During the growing furor, some of the resentment against the builder and Morris Milgram, president of MCD, took on the form of anti-Semitic attacks which made the position of the 250 Jewish families in Protestant Deerfield even more sensitive than normally...

...Privately, and in some cases publicly, the reason was more vigorously stated: there were no Negroes in Deerfield, and Deerfield wanted to keep it that way...

...The folly of a Deerfield, like that of a Little Rock, is a luxury which America can no longer afford...