Someone else's house: America's unfinished struggle for integration

Abstract

Thirty-five years after the 1963 March on Washington, blacks and whites are still trying to achieve Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic dream of racial inclusion. What ever happened to integration? What happened to the vision of a single, shared community in which both blacks and whites would feel they belong? Barriers have fallen; prejudice is abating. Blacks have made astonishing progress in many areas. Yet if anything, King's vision seems more remote than ever, and most Americans, black and white, remain divided by anger and mistrust. In Someone Else's House, Tamar Jacoby asks what happened to the King dream, calling the nation back to its most hopeful and promising ideal of race relations. Moving beyond the stale blame game of left and right, Jacoby uses history to show what's worked and what hasn't. Her story of the unfinished struggle for integration leads through the volatile worlds of New York in the 1960s, the center of liberal idealism about race; Detroit in the 1970s, under the city's first black mayor, Coleman Young; and Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s, ruled by a coalition of white businessmen and black politicians. Based on extensive local research and reporting, her vivid, dramatic account evokes the specific flavor of each city and gives voice to a host of ordinary individuals, black and white, caught up in the frustrations of trying to translate a vision into reality. Someone Else's House is a story of strong emotions and bitter conflict-- over Black Power, busing, ghetto policing and affirmative action. There are occasional heroes and some villains, but very few conventional morality tales. In Jacoby's view, the recent history of race relations is more often a story of blindness and tragic mistakes-- of blacks caught between their racial resentment and their yearning for integration, of whites led to do the wrong thing less by prejudice than by good intentions. Jacoby's conclusions are as straightforward and clear as her history is nuanced. Most of the means we've used to achieve integration haven't worked. Our growing preoccupation with color consciousness leaves little room for the communality King dreamed of. The ideals of the early civil rights movement-integration, forgiveness and a sense of one community based not on color but on shared national purposes-- remain the only possible American answer for race relations. But if we can only listen to history, Jacoby tells us, we can still find our way back to that path.