GHETTO CRISIS: Integration or Riots?

by Henry & Gerald M. Schaflander Etzkowitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 1969

This is a very special book about the dilemmas of social power. It is a report, half documentary, half narrative, by two white sociologists on how they moved to Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant (the nation's largest black ghetto) to build, with other residents, an integrated co-op. Schaflander and Etzkowitz stayed nine months. In that time their Community Co-op Center (CCC) ran a daycare center that was cheap and efficient and a gas station and a pharmacy that undersold all competitors. The CCC's directors included black militants, a storefront minister, students, and the two sociologists. Thus they implemented their idea of integration--but not without a fight. CORE tried to run them out, the associated co-operative movement snubbed them, only the gas station made money, and during the 1967 spate of urban riots, they only narrowly averted having a riot on their premises. Throughout, everything was taped, much was filmed, but no one was ever cautioned against becoming emotionally involved. This, then, is ""involved-observer sociology."" It is also a chapter in institution-formation sociology--an attempt simultaneously to initiate and to research a socio-economic project. Etzkowitz and Schaflander are outspoken, occasionally even harsh (particularly in remarks about the More-Militant-Than-Thou factions in the ghetto). Their book seems calculated to stimulate controversy among both sociologists and civil rightists.

Pub Date: April 3, 1969

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1969

Categories: NONFICTION