In this detailed history of race relations between blacks and whites in the post-civil rights era, Tamar Jacoby looks at how the ideal of integration has fared since it was first advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr. Blacks have made enormous economic, political, and social progress, and yet integration remains an elusive goal. Jacoby, an experienced journalist whose narrative is well-written and easy to follow, examines the experiences of three cities: Atlanta, Detroit, and New York. She looks at how each has dealt with major racial controversies since the 1960s, including Black Power, racial preferences, and busing. Jacoby considers integration a worthy goal, but criticizes many of the means society has used to reach it. "Devising new strategies will not be easy, but history can guide us, if we know how to listen," she writes. Someone Else's House is perhaps the finest historical account of race relations in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. --John J. Miller
From Publishers Weekly
This is a well-documented but gloomy tale of three citiesANew York, Detroit and AtlantaAand their unsuccessful struggle to realize Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of an integrated society. Jacoby, a former editor at the New York Times, puts a great deal of the blame on Mayors John Lindsay, Coleman Young, Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young for what she sees as their faulty though well-intentioned leadership. She argues that Lindsay, a charismatic liberal, thought he could turn New York City in the 1960s into an experimental laboratory for decentralized government, neighborhood empowerment and community control of the public schools. He disappointed the rising expectations of the ghetto poor while antagonizing ethnic whites. Coleman Young, a militant African American, took over in Detroit in the wake of an urban riot, seeking to make the city a working example of black power but increased white flight to the suburbs while leaving a residue of alienated inner-city blacks. In Atlanta, Maynard Jackson took office in the same week in 1973 as Coleman Young, emphasizing "set asides" for black entrepreneurs seeking a share of the white economic pie. Charges of corruption in a process that failed to train rank-and-file minorities to achieve mainstream success along with a rising crime rate and continuing segregation marred the record of the South's first African American big-city mayor. The legacy proved more than his successor, Andrew Young, could overcome. Young's run for governor went down to humiliating defeat, the victim of black indifference as well as white hostility. Jacoby counsels a long road of acculturation rather than short-term government policies, which, she claims, have only exacerbated the situation.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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