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Changing the Patterns. Negroes themselves have mixed feelings about living alongside whites. "The hell with integration," says former Cleveland Browns Fullback Jimmy Brown, who lives in a largely Negro middle-class Cleveland neighborhood. "Just don't segregate me." But many find decent housing so scarce in Negro neighborhoods that the only choice is to look in white areas, and often they do so with trepidation. A well-to-do Detroit Negro who thought of moving to Grosse Pointe decided against it because "I didn't want garbage on my porch, and I didn't want my children to be called niggers."
Despite all the mistrust, hostility and open hatred that scar relations between white and black, a July Gallup poll showed that only 34% of the whites questioned would consider moving out if Negroes moved next door. Three years ago the figure was 45%. The fact is that few whites are likely to face the problem for years. "If there were open housing all over the nation tomorrow," says Chicago Sociologist Philip Hauser, "it would still take over a generation for the present housing pattern to change. The majority of Negroes don't want to live in white areas, don't want to face the hostility and can't afford higher-income housing."
President Johnson described the truncated housing bill that came out of the House last week as "an important new milestone" toward racial justice. In a sense, that is so. Even though the measure is far less stringent than many state laws, a federal law naturally has far more impact. Nevertheless, the bill is at best a modest milestone, a halting start toward ending what Housing and Urban Development Secretary Robert C. Weaver rightly calls the "most stubborn and universal of the Negro's disadvantages."