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On The Bookshelf

In a compelling
new book,
journalist
Tamar
Jacoby
chronicles
events in
New York,
Detroit and
Atlanta
to tell the
larger story
of race relations
in America.

9/4
1998

82 Detroit Jewish News

LONNY S. ZIMMERMAN
Special to The Jewish News

B

lack power, white liberals,
school busing and affirma-
tive action. These are some
of. the terms the American
populace has become familiar with in
the 35 years since Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. led the
1963 March on
Washington for
civil rights.
Tamar Jacoby's
new book,
Someone Else's
House: America's .
Unfinished
Struggle for
Integration (The
Free Press; $30),
puts these con-
cepts under a
microscope to
Tamar Jacoby:
examine how
"Where do we go
three cities —
from here?"
New York,
Detroit and Atlanta — have struggled,
but failed, to achieve Dr. King's dream.
Jacoby, a senior fellow at the
Manhattan Institute for Policy
Research, currently writes for the Wall
Street Journal, Commentary and other
publications. She is a former staff
writer for Newsweek and a former edi-
tor at the New York Times.
Her point of view is clear from the
outset. "For all the progress made, the
crusade [for integration] has failed,"
she writes. It failed "because we as a
nation went about it wrong — and if
we could learn from these years of
mistakes, we could still, I believe,
achieve real integration."
Her book begins with a study of
New York in the 1960s and 1970s,
with a particular emphasis on how
Mayor John Lindsay and Ford .
Foundation head McGeorge Bundy,
both devout liberals, reacted to the
emergence of black power.
Lindsay's social and economic pro-
grams and Bundy's Ford Foundation
grants funneled funds to black
activists to create programs and imple-
,
Lonny Zimmerman is an area archi-
tect and former lecturer in the depart-
ment of urban planning at Wayne State
University.

ment community control of them.

But some of these black leaders, asserts
Jacoby, spoke only for themselves and
not for their communities. Many of
these programs were of dubious value,
she adds, and Lindsay and Bundy
were too easily manipulated.
The author particularly criticizes
the decentralization of New York
City's school system, which led to
conflicts between the heavily Jewish
teachers union; its chief, Albert
Shanker; and the black activists who
had their own agenda for the schools.
The events in Ocean Hill-

Brownsville in 1968 — including the
hurling of racial epithets — were a
watershed for black-Jewish relations,
said Jacoby in a recent interview in
The Jewish Week, creating a legacy of
mistrust and hatred for a generation of
Jews and blacks.
When she asked Al Sharpton, who
was a student in.1968, about the
lessons of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, he
told her that he learned that "con-
frontation works."
Jacoby disagrees: "The best way for
blacks to move ahead is the way every-
one else moves ahead, through school-
ing and work."

T

he second section of the
book examines Detroit.
Jacoby takes the reader
back to the post-World

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