Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle For Integration

by Tamar Jacoby

In this detailed history of relations between blacks and whites in the post-civil rights era, journalist Tamar Jacoby looks at how the ideal of integration has fared since it was first advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr., arguing that though blacks have made enormous economic, political, and social progress, a true sense of community has remained elusive. Her story leads us through the volatile world of New York in the 1960s, the center of liberal idealism about race; Detroit in the 1970s, under its first black mayor, Coleman Young; and Atlanta in the 1980s and '90s, ruled by a coalition of white businessmen and black politicians. Based on extensive research and local reporting, her vivid, dramatic account evokes the special flavor of each city and decade, and gives voice to a host of ordinary individuals struggling to translate a vision into a reality.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction

624 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 1998

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part history, part sociology, Jacoby’s book analyzes the post-Civil Rights Act efforts to integrate white and black Americans in school, work and culture. She takes three particularly dramatic instance as case studies: New York City’s efforts under John Lindsay, culminating in the Ocean Heights-Brownsville school controversy in 1969; Detroit’s descent from idealism to corruption and economic destitution a decade later under Jerome Cavanagh and Coleman Young; and Andrew Young’s efforts to rebuild Atlanta into a “post-racial” city in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Jacoby’s approach is often fascinating, detailing the political calculations (whether sincere liberalism or cynical self-promotion) that drove these conflicts, the divides in the black community between integration and self-identity, and white America’s response to rapid changes in racial status. Her account of Coleman Young’s mayoralty is appropriately scathing, and she’s similarly good analyzing the failures of John Lindsay's overweening obsession with dialogue over action. She’s often quite good at noting the hypocrisy of white liberals, especially nationally, who endorsed desegregation in abstract while objecting to it in their own backyard. And at least some of her conclusions, namely that desegregation remains a thorny issue that neither African-Americans, torn between integrationist dreams and an assertion of black identity, nor whites, resentful about their nominal loss of racial supremacy, seem terribly interested in permanently resolving, are valid.

Yet Jacoby’s book often feels too balanced, or rather, too eager in particular not to offend or challenge its presumably white liberal audience. The chapters on Ocean Heights-Brownsville, for instance, focuses intensely on the black radicals advocating community control; their language was indeed often ugly and violent, from death threats to antisemitic slurs against Jewish teachers. It’s not unfair to discuss militancy in the black community, an issue which often hindered racial harmony; but it is unfair to present parallel, often violent white racism as merely reacting to black intransigence, as Jacoby does. And this thread runs throughout the book: Jacoby always finds away to portray blacks outside the mainstream as fanatics, reverse racists and “race men,” using language that National Review would find agreeable, while mitigating the similar extremism among whites. Here, Detroit’s embrace of its black majority status is decried as “identity politics”; there, an imprecation against “political correctness” from Andrew Young’s defenders, a bizarre praise of Rudy Giuliani’s crackdown on New York and refusal to engage black leaders, or invoking boogeymen like Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan to ridicule critics of mainstream liberalism. Meanwhile, any white person opposing integration, aside from cross-burning Klansmen or George Wallace, appears understandably aggrieved by their change in status and the violent words of those uppity blacks. No discussion of redlining in housing and real estate, little discussion of police brutality and racism (but plenty of time to excoriate black policemen in Detroit as incompetent), merely a passing acknowledgment of the role white flight played in wrecking urban economies. Ultimately, it’s an exercise in very ‘90s centrist liberalism, so calculated not to offend anyone that it ends passively endorsing the status quo, racism and all. Jacoby’s ambitions are much larger than J. Anthony Lukas’s brilliant Common Ground, an amazing portrait of Boston’s busing crisis in the ‘70s, but the result is much emptier, more problematic and far less satisfactory.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave this book away after not even finishing the first section, New York, despite my best intentions (over the course of months). I really do prefer non-fiction but I got turned off by the fact that EVERYTHING was about NYC before I realized that the book was divided into three sections, New York, Detroit, and Atlanta (I think?).

I really struggled with it, but it was just too long and complicated, too many names dropped all over the place who I couldn't remember for long enough to finish learning what they'd accomplished. It was too heavy to carry on the subway every day, especially for how captivating it wasn't. Dry/somewhat textbooky. Probably better used as a reference.

[Robin]

Tamar Jacoby: senior fellow, Manhattan Institute. Formerly, New York Times, Newsweek. Writes for The Weekly Standard, Commentary, WSJ.