It’s a paradox that would have made Martin Luther King Jr. laugh — or perhaps wince. After the decades the previous generations spent battering down the doors to segregated institutions, the first generation of those civil rights beneficiaries — us — has grown up, and we now have children of our own. Per the plan, we are living lives that are extremely integrated. Maybe (and here’s where the wincing comes in) too integrated.

“She talks like a little white girl,” one friend complained of her adolescent daughter. “She assumes that everyone lives the way we do. I’ve got to get her more grounded.” The daughter in question attends an expensive private school, vacations abroad and swims in the family’s backyard pool in a suburban neighborhood heavy on the standard accouterments of the upper middle class and light on minorities.

Another friend regaled us with a recent scene from her dinner table: “My husband and I were talking about corporate politics — he’s the only black partner in his law firm — and concluding that race might have had something to do with what had gone on in the office that day. Our 14-year-old daughter just exploded. ‘You people — you think everything is about race! You should just get a grip! People are not prejudiced like that anymore!’” My friend paused. “She was just screaming at us, and she was serious. She thinks racism is kaput. We didn’t know whether to burst her bubble right then or let her find out later, on her own.” (They decided to let her make this discovery on her own.)

The irony, of course, is this: A whole raft of us — black, gifted, ambitious — did what the architects of the civil rights movement would have wished. We stormed the bastions, convinced (or at least impressed) the skeptics and performed competitively in educational venues that had not long before been forbidden to us. We went on to be the Lonely Onlies, many of us in workplaces that had heretofore been white — or that had never had a black manager, editor, head resident, faculty member. We married, usually to people who had had experiences much like our own, and had children. And thanks to the slow death of restrictive residential covenants, overall increased interest in multicultural living and the expanded incomes that those good jobs afforded us, we sent our children to elite schools or moved to affluent, often suburban neighborhoods that were Safer, with More Advantages.

And then we began to notice that our kids weren’t, well, as black as we had been. Whether we’d grown up in the ‘hood or had integrated suburbs, we had been grounded, if not in black neighborhoods, then by the black churches to which most of us returned every Sunday. If the schools we were integrating didn’t teach black history and culture, our Sunday school teachers made sure those critical gaps were filled — packed to bursting, in fact. So along with the proverbs and parables, we learned about how the DAR refused to let Miss Anderson sing in its old building, and how her friend Eleanor Roosevelt hooked her up for a milestone concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday. We learned about the contributions of Charles Drew and Paul Robeson and Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Constance Baker Motley. If our hometown papers politely neglected to mention the war against segregation being waged in the South, our Sunday school teachers kept us current and passed the felt-bottomed plate so we could contribute to the struggle too. (“Those little children in Mississippi and Alabama are fighting for your freedom too,” they would tell us. “Don’t you think you could give up your candy money to help out?” Out would come the coins, bound for freedom schools.)

If Sunday school gave us a sense of community and history, Jack and Jill gave us a sense of place. There was a hidden agenda when we nice Negro children got together once a month for fun and fellowship. Even as we took our monthly excursions, the cultural message was hammered into us: Black is not just ghetto. Black is not socially or aesthetically inferior. Black is vital to American culture. In addition to picnics, movies and parties, we visited museums to admire works by black artists and dutifully trooped to hear Andre Watts in concert — “one of ours,” a supervising mother would gently but unfailingly point out.

Initially started almost 60 years ago by 20 black mothers in Philadelphia who were anxious that their privileged children have black playmates, the organization quickly blossomed. Today it embraces 216 chapters across the nation, in 35 states and the District of Columbia. There is even an international chapter in Germany. Then, as now, mothers gathered monthly to plan activities for their age-grouped children. The charter requires that these activities be educational, fun and/or culturally uplifting — but they also had the unstated purpose of making sure that these children teetering on the edge of Total Integration would not fall and be lost, perhaps forever. “We are sending you out into Their World,” was the message, “but we want you to remember where Home is too.”

It worked. For children fighting their way
through the pressure cooker of educational integration, Jack and Jill was a godsend. I spent my days playing field hockey, conjugating French verbs, reading Wordsworth and Tennyson (never Hurston and Ellison), the Only One in my class at a prim girls’ day school. I had friendly relationships with many girls, but no truly good friends. My good friends came from the neighborhood, and from Jack and Jill. And because of that, I remembered where Home was.

I am not so sure my child will — or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I don’t want to chance that he won’t. Given the state of Los Angeles public schools and the impossibility of decoding what needs to be done to gain entry into the fully subscribed magnet system, it’s likely that he’ll spend his entire pre-college years in nominally integrated private schools, because the choice is that stark. I want him to have experiences that are self-affirming, and even the most liberal private schools cannot protect against the assumptions of superiority that are sometimes voiced by white students and their parents.

It was the stories told in muffled voices by parents saddened but not shocked to find that their children aren’t being judged solely by the content of their character that made me decide. The one black boy in his circle who did not get invited to his “best friend’s” birthday party. (And whose mother, when confronted about the exclusion, could only stammer, “I’m sure race didn’t have anything to do with it.” Uh-huh.) The 8-year-old who agonizes over her dark skin because it’s different from that of “the pretty girls” in her class. The white child from a liberal, wealthy family who thought he was complimenting a black honor student when he asked, “Why is it black people never say anything intelligent? Except for you, of course; you’re different.”

It’s because we know these slings and arrows are going to whiz at our children, no matter how we try to protect them, that Jack and Jill is becoming fashionable again. Once it was seen as an exclusionary bastion of the Negro elite, to the point that admitting to membership was considered certifiably counterrevolutionary in the late ’60s and early ’70s. (This even though some of the most avid revolutionaries on Ivy League campuses were Jack and Jill alumni — although they’d rather be shot than ‘fess up.) Now it’s viewed as just another tool, another safeguard, to keep black children with more and more options outside the black community culturally grounded.

“My child is 14,” confided the woman sitting next to me. She was slim and elegant in a navy pantsuit and queenly cornrows. “His school is fairly integrated — I mean, he’s not the only one — but I want him to have other children as friends too. Right now, his best friend is white, and I’m fine with that. But I worry about the future.” She means when her son is dating age and all of a sudden, the groupings get to be more homogenous and the kids who are “different” find themselves excluded, or included as cultural mascots, badges of white hipness.

A neighbor whose child is in a Hollywood-heavy school empathizes with the Jack and Jill initiate’s worry: “Here I’ve been, Afrocentric all his life, pointing out the beauty of black women, the importance of black culture. We vacation in Africa and the Caribbean, in part so he can go somewhere and feel what it’s like to be the majority culture. And after all that, who does he bring home as a steady girlfriend? Some little blond girl! I don’t want to be prejudiced, and I’m trying to live with it, but it’s hard.”

Although Jack and Jill is the oldest and most established of the social organizations for children, it’s not the only one. A rival, Hansel and Gretel, has several chapters nationwide. And across the country, black parents are struggling to establish informal, local groups that address the same need. Here in Los Angeles, a group of concerned parents got together to found Onyx Village. Many of the parent members are in the entertainment industry — LaTonya Richardson Jackson, actress and wife of Samuel L., is one of the founders. They live incontestably affluent lives, often in neighborhoods where black children have to be ferried to visit one another. The group meets monthly to inculcate children with black culture and history, and to provide them with an additional circle of friends who just happen to be, in the words of poet Lorraine Hansberry, young, gifted and black.

It’s for those same reasons that many of my friends hasten back to Martha’s Vineyard every summer. One lifelong summer resident confided as we sat on the beach several summers ago: “It’s important for our kids to have some time where they can all run around together and see that black is many things — not just what they see in the movies or on TV. Black Ph.D.s, M.D.s, artists, bankers — all those folk are just as real and just as black as rap stars and professional athletes. Is it convenient to come here? No. Is it essential? Yes.”

Which brings me back to why I was dressed in stockings and silk on a beautiful day when I could have been doing something else. Was it convenient for me to join Jack and Jill, with its labor-intensive mother’s committees and onerous dues? No. Is it essential? That answer is still, I’m afraid, yes.

That day I had appeared at a ladies’ brunch and several radio shows, and at noon I sat beside the anchorwoman of the local TV news. Three stories fell into the Noon News “local interest” category: (1) “Buy a New Mailbox Day” sponsored by the local postmaster, who furnished film footage of rusty and decrepit mailboxes likely to cause injury. “They do look dangerous,” enthused the anchorwoman, in a voice-over. (2) The Beanie Baby craze among schoolchildren; and (3) my appearance in town. A clockwise-rotating logo was created in a musical lead-in to the news program, consisting of a photo of a mailbox, a group portrait of Beanie Babies and the cover of the paperback version of “The Temple Bombing.” All circling. Clockwise. To music.

Still, I felt up to the challenge that night and gave the library audience some of my best material. I talked about the mayhem and violence convulsing the South in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision outlawing school desegregation. “It was as if Newton’s laws had been overturned,” I said, describing the shock and disbelief gripping much of the white South. I talked about what many of its denizens believed: That the Jews were behind the civil rights movement, in order to weaken America and pave the way for a Jewish takeover of the world. And I talked about this mind-set as the forerunner to modern American terrorism.

“Perhaps altogether half-a-million white Southerners enlisted in some form of the white resistance to the school desegregation decision,” I said, “joining Ku Klux Klans, white citizens councils and states rights parties. At their most civilized, they held potluck suppers, listened to speakers and subscribed to newsletters like ‘The Thunderbolt: The White Man’s Viewpoint’; at their least civilized, they opened their meetings with Nazi salutes, harassed African-Americans and planted bombs.” In essence, my message to the audience was for normal citizens like ourselves, those once called “the silent majority,” not to fall silent, not to be intimidated, but to stand together and publicly defy the lunacy and violence. “It’s an old, old story,” Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, wrote at the time, “when the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, no one is safe.”

Questions? The young woman in the front row. “I’ve been studying the Federalist Papers,” she began, and my heart sank, knowing the sort of thing that was coming next. “You’re talking about nothing but hatred,” she said. “You’re full of hatred. We believe in brotherhood. But you’re going around the city demonizing Christians.” I had heard variations on this theme a lot from Americans who were revisiting the U.S. Constitution and finding modern interpretations of it sorely flawed. Some saw themselves, the white Christians, as “Constitutional citizens,” the rest of the population as a lower form of “Amendment citizens.” On radio talk shows — at least the ones I had been booked on during my 40-city tour — “mongrelization” and “miscegenation” seemed to be on the mind of a great many callers.

“I know something about what you believe in,” I interrupted, “and ‘brotherhood’ isn’t even on the list.’” About the “demonizing Christians” charge to which she returned again and again, I was perplexed, since such a large part of my story is the collaboration of Christian and Jew, black and white in Atlanta to lower the volume on the era’s racist rhetoric and to outlaw the violence. But later I thought, “She identifies with the characters in my book and in my talk who speak of ‘niggers’ and assemble bombs — and she’s calling them ‘Christian.’”

There was more the next day. “Jews aren’t white, you know,” said a caller to a radio show. “If you like niggers so much, why don’t you marry one?” came in a letter. No dialogue here, no real conversation, only declarations. Their listening to me was not about admitting new data into a closed-off system, but about planning strategically the best moment to interrupt. And it all seemed exceedingly strange, since I’d hit the book trail with a book brimming — to my mind — not only with the “wolves of hate” but with heroes of justice.

I came home to Atlanta between cities, called the New York publicist and begged, “no more call-in shows.”

“They want callers like these,” I said. “When they say they screen the callers, they mean they’re screening FOR these callers: ‘Ms. Greene? Lunatic on Line 3.’”

“You’ve only got a few more to do,” she replied.

“It’s like a moderator inviting an audience to throw things at the speaker. ‘And what do you think about … hey! DUCK!!!’”

“Just a few more,” said the publicist.

A newspaper arrived in the mail from Kansas: “WHITE MAN, WAKE UP!” said the headline. “Fight Crime, Deport Niggers.” “White Man Under Seige.” It offered some convenient mail-order opportunities: “Swastika stickers are effective and low-cost!” read an ad. “Ideal for ‘lone wolf’ activists who prefer to remain anonymous … Fight back! Order today!” Elsewhere, in bold print, the words: “‘Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnate.’ — William Shakespeare, 16th-17th century British dramatist.”

“You see there?” I told my teenage daughter, who’d unfortunately brought in the mail that day. “This is the level of intelligence at work here. They hear Shakespeare and think, ‘Shakespeare, Shakespeare, the name rings a bell. Oh, here it is right here: ‘British dramatist.’”

In California, I appeared one night on an African-American call-in television show. I went happily. I’d been warmly received by black audiences and black programs in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Dayton, Birmingham and Washington. I felt on safe ground, on friendly turf. The host was informed and cordial. Then the calls began. A few were lovely — “Thanks for writing that book, Miss Greene. Where can I get a copy of it?”

A few inquired more sharply. “Yes, that’s all well and good,” said one, “but why did the ADL [the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith] get Arsenio Hall fired? Minister Farrakhan appeared on his show and then the Jews who run Hollywood fired him.”

“I’m sure there are people out there who know the answer to this but I’m not one of them,” I replied meekly.

“The ADL,” said another caller, “got the Nation of Islam fired from their job policing a housing project in Chicago.” The Jews run the country, was the gist of a few more calls; they manipulate the nation’s wealth to keep blacks impoverished. “The Jews aren’t white, you know,” said one. Where had I just heard that? Oh yeah, from the other side. “Thanks for coming,” said the host with warm feeling. “Before you run, here’s one more question: What about Jewish slave owners?”

I went back to my hotel room and collapsed, feeling shot at from both sides out there. Here, at the tail end of the bloody 20th century (why folks are planning to feel nostalgic at the passing of this century I’m sure I don’t know), how many tens of thousands of us huddle inside our racial and ethnic enclaves, taking in only the worst of the available misinformation about one another?

Another gig the next day: the Commonwealth Club, in San Francisco. Before my talk, a member of the audience introduced herself to me as an ADL attorney. I drew in close. “Tell me,” I whispered, “did we get Arsenio Hall fired?”

“Nope,” she replied, “his ratings were down.”

“Did we get the NOI fired from a housing project in Chicago?”

“I don’t know whether we did or not but they should not have been receiving HUD money,” the ADL woman said sharply.

“OK, OK,” I said, “one for two then. If I’m going to be on the front lines like this, I just need to know.”

Home now, done with travels, both humbled and frightened, I huddle in my own little mid-town, poplar-shaded enclave. It feels more than ever like a cocoon; only this one includes neighbors of all faiths and colors. Two blocks away, the elementary school my kids attend is about 60-to-40 white/black, with a sprinkling of Asian and Hispanic students. Not bad for the Deep South. The integrated faculty and parent body work harmoniously together. The children grow up — as much as possible in our race-obsessed society — tolerant, appreciative, culturally multilingual. Is this a well-kept secret? Do most folks believe this doesn’t work?

I still believe in integration. Are these fighting words? Let the hate mail come.