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Many proponents of open housing say that its goal is to break up the slums by dispersing Negroes more evenly throughout the population, but the low-income slum dweller is actually least likely to be affected. He is too often psychologically reluctant to forsake the emotional security of the ghetto and financially incapable of doing so. It is the educated Negro with a middle or upper income who is most eager—and able—to get out of the ghetto and explore the society around him. Actor-Comic Bill Cosby (costar of TV's / Spy) lives in a $70,000 Beverly Hills spread, for example, and Federal Reserve Board Governor Andrew Brimmer in a $55,000 home in Washington's Forest Hills.
Despite the fact that the Negro who does vault from slum to suburb is likely to be the economic and educational peer of his new neighbors, many whites react with unreasoning fear or hostility to the idea of having a Negro next door. Few things have done more to create this attitude than the high incidence of crime and violence in the black ghettos. Moreover, the swift deterioration of some public housing projects occupied by Negroes leads many whites to believe that the arrival of a Negro family is the certain prelude to garbage in the streets, broken windows, cockroaches and rats—even though these conditions are unheard of in such carefully maintained middle-class Negro areas as Chicago's Kingston Green.
"Nigger, Get Out!" Among whites, the fiercest prejudice is found in the lower-income ethnic enclaves where jobs and homes are most immediately threatened by the Negro trying to break out of the ghetto. "We have our own section here," said a storekeeper in South Boston. "Why can't the Negroes be happy in their own area?" Chicago's "white riots" against Negroes who were demonstrating for open housing were fomented largely by first-and second-generation Americans—mostly of Irish, Italian, Swedish and Eastern European ancestry—who have a long history of ethnic animosity.
Distrust and fear are by no means limited to the lower-income groups. As Brooklyn's Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler, long a champion of civil rights, sees it, the chief problem is "a dislike of the unlike." Says Celler: "The Irish don't like to live among the Poles. It's the same situation." Last month, when A. Gordon Wright, Midwest director of the Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration and the son of a millionaire, moved into exclusive Grosse Pointe, Mich. (median income: $11,200), whites drove past his house screaming, "Nigger, get out!" When Massachusetts' Attorney General and G.O.P. Senatorial Candidate Edward Brooke tried recently to move to Milton, a wealthy suburb of Boston, he was peremptorily turned away; now he lives in Newton, an equally swank suburb.
Often, the opposition to integrated neighborhoods comes from women—particularly in blue-collar areas. While their husbands worry about property devaluation, the women, who must spend most of their time at home, are more concerned with the schooling and safety of their children—and with their own safety. Besides, says Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Katie Louchheim, a former vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, "Women want a cause."