THE RETURN OF SEGREGATION

...mission's vice chairman, New York mayor John Lindsay, warned that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal...

...In addition, the New Bethel incident demoralized Detroit police at just the time crime rates were beginning to skyrocket...

...Early the next morning, Judge Crockett arrived at the jail, set up an impromptu court, and released all the prisoners...

...The result of this alliance of white liberals and black radicals was dismal everywhere...

...Detroit judge (and later congressman) George Crockett...

...Whites not only saw a racial double standard, but were deemed racists for objecting...

...The dream of integration was lost, according to Jacoby, when Mau-Mau-ing black militants with separatist dreams and incendiary rhetoric obtained the support of wealthy white liberals...

...If steps weren't taken, we would see "the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values...

...Frustration at the intractability of race in America sometimes leads Jacoby from uneasiness to downright pessimism...

...A journalist and former editor of the New York Times op-ed page who has written for Dissent and Newsweek, Jacoby is now a fellow at New York's Manhattan Institute...

...Wholesale social engineering, color-coded double standards, forced interaction between people who are not social or economic equals...

...Though the controversy eventually subsided, the incident had wide repercussions...

...So many of the mistakes of the past," she argues, "can be traced to feckless leadership, race-mongering demagogues, patronizing civic elites, would-be racial healers who confused compromise with appeasement and ended up creating standoffs instead of helping people listen and reach out...

...When more police responded to the shooting and entered the church, more shots were fired...

...The Kern^r Report's introduction, written by aides to the comVincent J. Cannato, who lives in Wee-hawken, New Jersey, is writing a book about New York mayor John Lindsay...

...If only "we could learn from these years of mistakes," Jaco-by believes, we could still "achieve real integration...

...One example from Jacoby's narrative sums up the attitudes and policies that helped poison American race relations...

...By the 1970s, race relations were worse than ever...

...If the Kerner Report represented an era of racial mistrust and separation, Jacoby's book embodies the kind of moral and intellectual honesty necessary for us to begin seeking new solutions...

...Jacoby takes seriously America's uneasiness with the current state of race relations, arguing that the nation has lost the integrationist moorings that informed the early civil-rights movement...

...In each of her three case studies, she examines how political, business, and community leaders handled the growing demands for equality from the black communi-ty—from the early days of the civil-rights movement with its narrow window of racial goodwill, through the age of Black Power, and on to the confused situation of today...

...New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has made the slogan "One City, One Standard," his rallying cry...

...Thirty years later, Tamar Jacoby has written a new study, Someone Else's H^-use: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration, with a similar observation of the polarization of the races...

...Interaction between the races is more frequent and closer to equal than at any other time in our history...

...and Atlanta's business community...

...And she names names, taking to task liberal elites in each city: Mayor Lindsay and the Ford Foundation's McGeorge Bundy in New York...

...Members of the New Detroit Committee were understandably fearful of another riot like the one that devastated the city in 1967...

...Jacoby describes how these men, listening earnestly to black militants, poured money into the inner city to support affirmative action, create experiments in the schools, and build white-elephant projects like the Renaissance Center in Detroit—all in the name of racial healing...

...In many cities, political and business leaders put a premium on mollifying the black community in order to prevent further riots...

...and Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, who pursued the same course as Young, though with greater subtlety...

...Blue-collar white ethnics, long the core of the Democrats' New Deal coalition, bore the brunt of the social engineering of the liberal elite and grew embittered at the charge of racism hurled at them from their social betters...

...In her concluding chapter, she is torn between grudgingly recognizing the progress made over the last thirty-five years and ruefully noting that "the more things change, the more familiar they seem...

...Many of the programs Jacoby rightly con-demns—busing, affirmative action, placing low-income housing in middle-class neighborhoods—were not originally the work of racial separatists but genuine attempts at integration...

...Detroit mayor Coleman Young, who built a political career playing on the mistrust of black Detroit towards the white suburbs...

...They ended up, however, having the debilitating effect of color-coding...

...And there is even another positive though insufficiently appreciated sign in race relations: the existence of books like Jacoby's...

...She occupies a narrow strip of intellectual terrain in the race debate with such like-minded contrarians, black and white, as Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, Stanley Crouch, Fred Siegel, Orlando Patterson, Jim Sleeper, and Shelby Steele...

...The report's implication of white society in the plight of the ghetto and its recommendations for massive federal action to redress racial inequality have formed the core of liberal thinking ever since...

...Yet her explanation of how we arrived at our predicament and her prescriptions for how to escape are exactly the opposite of the Kerner Report...

...With its extensive research and measured prose, Someone Else's House shows that it is possible to reject in an intelligent way the destructive policies of the last thirty years—without succumbing either to the racist practices of the distant past or the threat of being called a racist by today's racial activists...

...Public schools declined, crime increased, and the fiscal health of cities faltered...

...In each case, men with little knowledge of the local black situation set out with the best of intentions to atone for America's racist past...

...No one knows exactly what happened next, but when the dust settled one officer was shot dead (with his revolver still in his holster) and the other seriously wounded...

...The white middle class continued to leave the city for the suburbs...

...Detroit, the most desperate of the three cities, now has a moderate, pro-business mayor in Dennis Archer...

...So, bedeviled by visions of burning and looting, Max Fisher publicly condoned Crockett's action and threw the weight of Detroit's business community behind the judge...

...And while some segregation in housing and jobs still exists in Atlanta, many black Atlantans enjoy freedom and prosperity of which their parents and grandparents living under Jim Crow could only have dreamed...

...one after the other, the old stratagems have proved bankrupt or worse...

...what began as genuine attempts at integration produced the dismal effect of color-coding...

...Late one night in 1969, two white policemen approached a group of armed blacks outside the New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit...

...Eventually 142 people were arrested...

...What makes her book so novel and valuable in the present discourse on race is that she dissents from the conventional morality tale, represented by the Kerner Report, that blames white racism exclusively for our racial ills...

...And yet, despite such contemporary phenomena as the O. J. Simpson trial and Louis Farrakhan, there are reasons for hope...

...THE RETURN OF SEGRECANON How the Civil Rights M^'vement Lost Its Way BY VINCENT J. CANNATO In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, released its report on the race riots plaguing American cities during the 1960s...

...The reader who follows Jacoby to the conclusion of her analysis may finally doubt that there is any remedy in a free society...

...An uproar ensued over this extra-legal maneuver, splitting apart black and white Detroiters...

...Cities across the nation have begun to reverse their decline...

...They excused often inexcusable behavior by blacks, and when they were finished, they found to their astonishment that things had gotten only worse...

...What she finds is that for many years we have pursued integration with flawed means...

...the New Detroit Committee founded by businessman Max Fisher, Henry Ford II, and department-store owner Joseph Hudson...

...Each city's tale is distressingly similar in Jacoby's account...

...Recent Supreme Court decisions and California's Proposition 209 have begun to weaken the hold of affirmative action...

...But rather than simply rehash the tired litany of recent racial controversies, she takes the reader on a journey through the tortured history of race relations over the last thirty-five years in three cities: New York, Detroit, and Atlanta...

...Jacoby also criticizes the blacks who rejected integration: Brooklyn core's Sonny Carson...