But advising one reporter on how to write up the story, he approached poetry. "Say it's a great new day for Birmingham," he declared. "Say we're anxious to have a fine city, and we're on the right road."

The mayor's assistant--he, rather than the mayor, briefs newsmen, but asks that nothing be attributed directly to either--said that the city would like to hire "many more" Negro police, that those who had been hired would be assigned to cars with white cops. "But don't print that," he added. "We'd lose our entire police force."

Peace Measure

City officials hoped aloud that the move would ensure racial peace. They said it would improve the law enforcement in Negro neighborhoods. It had certainly removed from the list of civil rights demands the most galling example of discrimination. Or had it?

To Negroes who had been in contact with downtown businessmen and city officials, the whites had finally come through. True, one of the Negroes commented later, "It just showed what we'd been saying all along: Once the white folks made up their minds that we would have Negro policemen, we'd have it." But many of the wealthier Negroes had talked at one time or another about what one called the "nagging thought in my mind that not enough people have gone down to take that exam." There was the feeling that they, as self-styled Negro leaders, were at leas tpartially to blame for the delay in hiring Negro cops.

For a good many Negroes in Birmingham, token integration of the police force simply had very little meaning. A lawyer who keeps in time with the grass-roots folks and frequently stops off at Ratkiller's on his way home from work remarked recently, "I see these Negro cops in there with whites. I doubt if any of them have any real authority to do anything."

There was some muttering that Negroes were just being used to rat on other Negroes (not entirely true: though the Negro cops were used initially for undercover work in Negro areas, the integrated squad cars patrol white as well as Negro neighborhoods). Still, one retired steelworker has not altered his opinion: "The police department here is rotten to the core."

The reason is simple. It is not just that the police are constantly in view ("They live out here," says an elderly housewife in one northside neighborhood) or that they try to enforce the white man's law ("There are too many instances where police here have been trying to teach manners instead of enforce the law," maintains one Negro lawyer). It is, as much as anything, that police behavior can be utterly capricious, that an officer can be brutal or civil, that it is impossible to predict which one he will be, that to his superiors, it is apparently all the same. In Birmingham, moreover, the predilection has too often been towards brutality; Negroes no longer wish to take chances.

Excessive police violence is by no means a thing of the past. No fewer than three Negroes were killed by police during the month of August. In no case was the victim said to be armed with more than a knife, or evne, where he did have a knife, to be close enough to the policeman to have used it. Some policemen have garnered reputations as slayers of Ne- groes, and one cop has placidly referred to a colleague as "Killer C--."

Birmingham is not likely to confront its police department and demand more cordial treatment of Negroes. It is, instead, likely to follow the lead of Atlanta, prodding to guarantee that Negroes trickle into the police department (there are 73 Negroes on Atlanta's 785-man force), and trying to warm up relationships with the Negro business leaders.

To a degree, that is fine with bootleggers and their customers, for whom, job opportunities and liquor prices being what they are, any major shake-up in the police force would be for a while, at any rate, a sobering catastrophe. But even the bootleggers are dissatisfied with the present state of affairs; some are murmuring vaguely to each other of forming a united front and simply cutting off payments to the police. They want the police to ignore bootlegging, but without being paid to do so.

The results of Birmingham's efforts will no doubt be less spectacular than Atlanta's. For one thing, Atlanta, which Birmingham still considers its chief rival, was becoming "the city too busy to hate" while Birmingham was re-electing Bull Connor. And even now, Birmingham officials will not be prone to make the sweeping statements of support for legislation that Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen proudly puts forth. The powerful Birmingham businessmen who got Negro police warns, "We've got some pretty tough whites in this town."

Even Atlanta found, however, that statements which won the hearts and minds of the Negro middle class had little effect on the most alienated members of the Negro community. And Atlanta still has not learned how to reach those people. Mayor Allen was no doubt surprised to learn from his chief poverty official in the riottorn neighborhood around the Boulevard that the all-Negro staff of the local poverty program could first start trying to find out who was involved in the riot and why "as soon as it's safe."

In Birmingham, as in Atlanta, the police force is the sole governmental agency having regular, direct contact with the very poor. It is contact that now produces a great deal of bitterness. During the second straight night of rioting in Atlanta, a Negro minster sadly shook his head as he watched heavily armed police confront small groups of jeering youths. "The cops just don't seem to realize that these kids aren't afraid of them. They're saying, 'You've done everything else to us. Now go ahead and shoot.'