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so. Crime. Unemployment. Increased welfare. These are indices of non-improvement, if not stark deterioration. Now we rationalize this by saying the anti-poverty program didn't work, public housing didn't work. We have a whole new bunch of rationalizations for the government's present refusal to try to remedy these remediable problems. It may be that one of the rationalizations is that the civil rights movement has caused some blacks to escape. I repeat: I think this is a rationalization. A number of whites escaped from early white ghetto situations, and the only thing that I saw resulting from the mobility of whites over the last few generations is that the areas that they were ghettoized in or concentrated in, are areas that are now for the most part being taken over by minorities. The more that happens, the more those areas will become more obviously deteriorated. And by the way, it's minimal mobility for blacks compared to other ethnic groups. But I just wouldn't explain the deterioration of the black ghettoes in terms of the mobility of relatively few blacks.

Is it your sense, then, that still relatively few blacks have been able to move into true decision-making positions? I don't mean necessarily the very top, but even the middle.

I think that's pretty obvious. I think, even--and I may have said this to you before--that the increase in the number of black elected officials is not necessarily associated with an increase in decision-making power.