When I was in high school, my father developed the first integrated housing project in New York State. It was in north White Plains, in an area called Hillside Ridge, and I remember it well because I worked as a day laborer on that project in the summer between my junior and senior years. The houses were upper middle class, but the fact that black and white families of any class would buy in the same housing development was a big deal in 1954. My father was an idealist entrepreneur – an immigrant from Nazi-decimated Poland who was scandalized by racial prejudice because he had seen its results in Europe. He used home ownership successfully as a tool to change the racial composition of a north White Plains school and then built the integrated development where I worked. He did not wait for racial integration to be “stylish”; he did what he thought was right, even when it seemed to almost everyone else that he was committing economic suicide.

My experiences in those far-off 1950s were an important part of my writing this difficult book. So my greatest debt of gratitude is to my father, who taught me not only to be scandalized by racial prejudice, but to try to do something about it. I only hope that numbers and reasoning are as effective as homes.

I also owe a great deal to those who, many years later, were so helpful to me in my research for the book.