Several of the respondents argued that other ethnic groups, such as the Jews and the Italians and the Irish, had had it rough when they came to New York. A typical response was: “We did it. They can, too.”

In a crowded apartment in a tenment on West 49th Street, a 43-year‐old woman put her children to bed and continued chain‐smoking at the kitchen table. Her surroundings showed that she had difficulty making ends meet. “No one wants to be forced,” she said. “Nobody likes to feel they have their back against a wall and someone is coming at them with a bayonet.”

A retired secretary of Irish ancestry, now a housewife in a middle‐class family on Riverside Drive, said that many groups were doing a lot for Negroes, “but Negroes are asking for the whole world on a silver platter.”

“They don’t know what civil rights is,” said a Manhattan woman in her sixties, a Roman Catholic whose husband works as a clerk in an educational institution. “They want to overpower us.”

“They bite the hand that helps them,” said a middle‐class woman who once was an actress.

A short, solid‐looking truck driver who lives in South Brooklyn expressed similar resentment. “We have to swallow more today to try to keep peace,” he said. “They curse on subways and we don’t say anything. They don’t appreciate it. They make dumps out of the new housing projects. They ride around in Cadillacs and I haven’t got a car.”

Others repeated part of what the man had said: “They don’t appreciate what we’re doing for them.”

When they looked to the future of race relations, the whites were not very optimistic. Seventy per cent said they believed it would be more than 10 years before whites and Negroes would be able to live together without friction or that this would never happen.

Seventeen per cent said either that such a time is already here or that it would come within the next 10 years.