CLASSMATES BY REQUEST

When ten white teen-agers decide to promote integration in an Eastern Pennsylvania city by requesting transfer to a newly-built Negro high school, they give added impetus to the movement toward desegregation of the entire school system. Carla Monroe, whose high-principled father becomes head of a city commission for slum clearance and desegregation, learns, as does Ellen Randall, daughter of a Negro schoolteacher, that in politics and civil rights, the machinery of change moves slowly. The fact that the future need not repeat the wrongs of the past is well-handled. Except for a complete absence of violence, this otherwise realistic portrayal of the reactions and emotions involved in the promotion of civil rights is thought-provoking.