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Across the great divide (Part 3)

"A DREAM DEFERRED" | "SOMEBODY ELSE'S HOUSE" | "WE HAD A DREAM"

"We Had a Dream: A Tale of the Struggle for Integration in America" By Howard Kohn, Simon & Schuster, 366 pages

"We Had a Dream" is a one-of-a-kind book, a work of journalism that's written like a novel, an engaged and passionate book about race relations in Maryland's Prince George's county -- "a capital of the Civil Rights Dream" -- by an ardent integrationist who doesn't try to sanitize any of his characters, black or white. Kohn is a talented journalist, a former investigative reporter for Rolling Stone who authored "Who Killed Karen Silkwood" as well as a beautifully elegiac memoir about his father, "The Last Farmer," that was a Pulitzer finalist. "We Had a Dream" is a marvelous feat of reporting and a complicated story that, like life, doesn't mean any more or less than what it is. Kohn's main characters are not "types," not representative of anything but themselves -- in fact, they are probably more eccentric than most people, certainly in their attitudes to race. But their very individuality, and Kohn's integrity in presenting it, gives "We Had a Dream" its value. After all, much of what really matters, in racial affairs as in all others, takes place far below the official realm of ideologies and politics, in the day-to-day encounters between people, in their likes and dislikes, their half-conscious choices. The subject of affirmative action never comes up once in this book about race, and you don't miss it.

But "We Had a Dream" also addresses race more explicitly. With considerable narrative skill, Kohn cuts back and forth between two main stories -- stories that happen to touch on the most inflammatory and controversial racial issues in America. His purpose is to illuminate larger social issues by focusing in on small stories. As he writes in his introduction, "I began this book with two biases. One is that good people matter. Fever and adrenaline aren't always on the side of the people with guns ... My second bias is that individual actions coalesce into social change."

The first story is about the love affair between Bruce Gordon, the Jewish son of a hard-headed doctor who grew up in Hillcrest Heights, Prince George's County, and Camilla Brown, the black daughter of a theater director who also grew up in Hillcrest Heights. Bruce and Camilla are both endearing oddballs -- especially Bruce. A 250-pound. martial-arts specialist and banker, a peculiar combination of racial idealism, naiveté, fearlessness, Big Lebowski-style flakiness and machismo, Bruce revels in his outsider status to the point where the personal and the political become blurred: At times, one can hardly tell if he is drawn to black women out of rebelliousness or just because that's the way his taste runs. Camilla is a free-spirited doctor, a hippified city girl with spiritual interests. Sweethearts at Potomac High, where they were the first interracial couple in the school's history, they broke up in college when "the Pink Floyd in (Bruce) sprang out full grown -- a wild, party-boy disdain for the settled life." Before they broke up, Bruce sent Camilla a letter in which he muses about something his father told him: "Why do you have to marry her? Why can't she just be your mistress?" The letter seared itself into her brain; it still bothered her even 15 years later when, out of the blue, Bruce reentered her life.

The story of Bruce and Camilla doesn't have a fairy-tale ending -- they try to get back together, but he ends up falling in love with another black woman named Pat Ford -- but it's still a happy one. And although they're subject to the usual indignities and odd looks -- and the explicit disapproval of Bruce's crotchety dad, who has had a stroke -- race doesn't seem to be a factor in their eventual split. Their relationship works according to its own weird and wonderful logic, in which race is just one strand among countless others. One of the inspiring incidents in the book -- more inspiring because it is so simply described -- is the enlightenment of Dr. Gordon, an enlightenment that begins with a wonderful scene in which he yucks it up with Pat's father, another tough old coot, a retired major also dealing with the effects of a stroke.

Woven into Kohn's meandering, satisfyingly shapeless story is the tale of Elvira White, a fiercely outspoken, enigmatic, remarkable black attorney whose career is spiraling downwards just at the moment when she is applying to be a judge. White's downfall is set in motion when she insists on the suspension of a white public defender who reacted to harsh taunts by black prisoners by yelling, "You're nothing but a bunch of black Sambos." The defender ends up being fired (apparently to prevent the head of the state public defender's office from being embarrassed), which leads to bad feelings in the office against White. Then White has an argument with her longtime secretary about the "righteousness" of the Los Angeles riots over the acquittal of the policemen who beat Rodney King (White said she could "understand the frustration of the people in Los Angeles"). The argument ended up being written down, and the document fell into the hands of the Judicial Nominating Commission, which was deciding whether she would be placed on the judges-in-waiting list.

White is the most complicated and unfathomable character in the book, a mixture of idealism and resentment, wisdom and hotheadedness. And complicating matters even more is her peculiar involvement with the bizarre trial of Amy Smith, a white teenager arrested after she and her black boyfriend either did or did not plot to rob and kill her father and stepmother. Smith's alleged co-conspirator, Derrick Jones, was killed by her father, a policeman, during the course of the armed robbery. As Smith's attorney, White investigated the controversial case and decided that Derrick Jones could not have plotted to kill two people he hardly knew. She pursued a defense strategy of blaming Jones' death on Amy Smith's father, Dennis -- asserting, with no insignificant amount of evidence, that the policeman murdered Jones to teach his daughter a lesson. But the judge, although noting that Dennis Smith's testimony did not add up, found Amy guilty. After the case, attorneys in White's office, who all along had thought she should have hung more of the blame on Derrick Jones, began to consider reopening the trial -- by blaming Elvira White for having committed reversible errors.

If nothing else, White's saga reveals how complicated and murky highly charged racial matters can be -- how rarely there are heroes or villains. Just what happened that night at Amy Smith's house is never made clear, although Kohn argues that most likely all three people -- Amy, Derrick and Dennis -- were guilty. White's refusal to make Derrick Jones a scapegoat could be seen as a principled defense of a dead man's honor -- or as a betrayal of a client for purposes of race solidarity.

And the book as a whole leaves one with an equally cloudy picture. Two of the most admirable people in Kohn's chronicle are an older white couple, Merv and Dell Strickland, courageous lifelong fighters for integration -- but they begin to grow fearful when their beloved neighborhood, now predominantly black, is beset by an increasing number of burglaries, some violent. Even Bruce, the ultimate racial idealist, explodes in rage and anguished confusion after being intimidated by a gang of hostile, middle-class black kids at the mall. "Who were these little terrorists? And what was their excuse? They had no claim to deprivation and suffering of the type that was said to cause so many kids to go wrong ... They had no excuse!"

Wisely, Kohn doesn't presume to say what any of this means. In his afterword, about as much of a moral as he is willing to draw is that interracial romance is the one sure way of breaking down racial boundaries. "Acceptance has to come from the heart, a heart willing to be exploratory ... Sentimentality may propel you toward the corny proposition that racial separatism will be solved by the good will of individuals, but what else has ever worked?" It seems as good a place as any to start.

Gary Kamiya is executive editor of Salon Magazine.

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