It is hard to think of another narrative so comprehensive even though it focuses on just three cities, New York, Detroit and Atlanta so intelligent and so fair. Ms. Jacoby, a journalist who has written for a wide range of publications, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal and from the New York Review of Books to Commentary, believes there is ultimately no alternative to integration.
Some whites are tired of the issue.
Others, black and white, think of integration as sentimental and irrelevant. In New York, the new militancy of the late 1960s and the ideal of black power produced the disastrous conflict over community control , especially in schools. With the best of motives, they threw a bucket of sand into the delicate machinery of New York's ethnic and class politics. Although she admires Lindsay's courage, she is severe about the consequences. Detroit, after the 1967 riots, was simply a disaster.