Last Chance for Desegregation

As soon as it is admitted that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two foreign communities, it will readily be understood that there are but two chances for the future: the Negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle. —Alexis de Tocqueville

Early last June a rumor spread through Rosedale, Queens—a blue-collar community of Irish, Jews, and Italians—that a black man had bought a two-family house there and planned to move in with his white wife, his black brother and sister-in-law, and ten black children. The neighbors’ reaction was conventional. With picks and axes they rampaged through the house, shattering windows, ripping out fixtures, flood...