We Had a Dream

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Kohn's (Who Killed Karen Silkwood?) examination of the fruits of the civil rights struggle in one community has produced a narrative that's as provocative as it is powerful. Although it reads like fiction, it is filled with real-life ironies. The subject is Prince George's County, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C., and its fascinating, but less than idyllic, transformation from a white working-class haven into what the New York Times Magazine called "the closest thing to utopia that black, middle-class families can find in America." Neighbors live the contradiction of a new order. Bruce and Camilla are teenagers who grow to adulthood and come to terms with their interracial love relationship. Political boss Mike Miller dukes it out with Sue Mills, an anti-busing champion, and Gloria Lawlah, a NAACP veteran, for the heart and soul of the changing community and a static Democratic Party. The Stricklers, a white couple, spend a lifetime tweaking racial barriers and welcoming black neighbors to the community while raising a color-blind daughter. Dr. Gordon, Bruce's father, treats wounded blacks, but doesn't necessarily like them, even while they deal with him fondly. Well-to-do black teenagers mimic gangsta dress and attitude. Kohn brilliantly weaves together these many divergent stories into one larger narrative that is more about social "integration" than about political "desegregation." What happens, he asks, when we're forced together in the confines of a community? There is no solution here; rather, Kohn gives us heady questions and unfinished answers, all beautifully recounted. (Sept.)

Library Journal

A major investigative journalist on integration's mixed success, focusing on Prince George's County, MD.

Kirkus Reviews

A tale of black and white relations in one American county 30 years after the modern civil rights movement. Thirty years on, how have we done? Are blacks and whites now being judged solely by the content of their character? Has integration succeeded? Investigative journalist and Rolling Stone contributor Kohn (The Last Farmer, 1988, etc.) finds that in Prince George's County, Md., the answers to these questions are complex and often perplexing. Once a poor and segregated place that twice voted for George Wallace for president, the county has experienced a heavy influx of successful and affluent blacks. Together with their equally successful and affluent white neighbors, they have made Prince George's County the ideal of integration. Yet much remains beneath the surface. In Rashomon-like fashion, various residents describe the county and what happens there in very different ways, depending on the color of their skin. A white police officer kills a black male teenager in his, the officer's, home. Is it murder, precipitated by the officer's rage at this black teenager being his daughter's boyfriend? Or had the teenager, fulfilling the stereotype of the dangerous black male, invaded the home and threatened to kill the officer and his wife? A black woman lawyer has her career in the county public defenderþs office ruined. Was she too proud, too loud for a black woman in the white-controlled office? Or was she incompetent and dishonest? The county elects its first black county commissioner. Is this a fulfillment of Martin Luther Kingþs dream, or is it the end of white position and power in the county? Kohn records the actions and thoughts of a large number of characters, and thismay be the book's only problem. Itþs too long, too often depicting events in too much detail, to no clear purpose. This is, nevertheless, a disturbing if tenuously hopeful look at how "we" get along in the postcivil rights era.