zation and bureaucratization of American life. The radicals' critique of open housing foreshadowed a line of analysis that led, shortly after King's death, to various attempts to institutionalize local control of the school system and to shape the schools more closely to the needs of the black community. Nothing came of these experiments in decentralization, notably the one in the Ocean Hill—Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The idea behind them, however, made a good deal of sense. It made more sense, that is, to strengthen the black community than to attempt its dispersal by integrating white neighborhoods and their schools.

Whereas King's "bill of rights for the disadvantaged" included, among other things, a "social-work apparatus on a large scale," Leslie Dunbar asked whether the black community needed "another white social worker as much as it needs, as a small business loan, the money his or her education would cost." "Since community strength is so necessary," he argued, the civil rights movement should be willing to ask "unpleasant questions" of this kind. Should the government build public housing projects in black neighborhoods, "knowing in advance that [they] would [weaken] community cohesiveness"? Should it bus children away from black neighborhoods, "thus weakening the influence of the school as a community center"? "Should there be any white policemen in Negro neighborhoods? (How many Italian policemen ever patrolled the Irish beats?)" This line of speculation seemed to lead to the conclusion that the advantages of community cohesion (necessarily underwritten, of course, by large amounts of federal aid) outweighed the dangers of racial separation that haunted liberals.

King himself conceded, in the last weeks of his life, that it might be necessary to accept "temporary separation as a way-station to a truly integrated society." Reflection on his Chicago campaign, he said, had convinced him that "we must seek to enrich the ghetto immediately in the sense of improving the housing conditions, improving the schools in the ghetto, improving the economic conditions." His attempt to reconcile this approach with a continuing effort to "disperse the ghetto" was not very convincing, but his second thoughts about the possibility of working "on two levels" at least suggested that he had not been altogether inattentive to the implications of the movement's failure in Chicago. Not only his distaste for anything smacking of separatism but a growing interest in social democracy, however, prevented him from developing his ideas

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