Leaders participated as little as possible. The situation forced members of the group to create a flexible "society" of their own. Certain individuals naturally began to guide the discussion. Others questioned why certain group members "never opened their mouths."

The leader's refusing to dominate the situation caused the group members to learn to live and function together peaceably without outside guidance. They knew they were responsible for their acts. They realized they wouldn't be able to blame the leader if conflicts arose.

"We're just like the United Nations and he [the leader] is like a silent Secretary-General. What could happen if he weren't here? There would be anarchy," a girl in an integrated group commented in one of the first sessions.

Most of their talks had racial significance, although the students did not usually realize this when they began discussing various issues. They learned, for example, that their views on Vietnam and lunar exploration had racially symbolic as well as literal content.

"The war in Vietnam," Cottle has concluded, "is somewhere in the American consciousness, a racial struggle. We would not be so ready to use napalm on whites as we are on the 'yellow' Vietnamese."

In almost all the groups, the students, themselves, chose Vietnam for the first discussion. Many students saw the struggle in terms of the problems of racial conflict:

"It's the good white against the bad colored. It's the pure and powerful . . . against the vile and unclean troublemakers. It's racial violence," one student said.

In general, Negroes viewed the war as simply an extension of domestic racial prejudice to an international level. Each time these Negro students heard reports of large numbers of Viet Cong killed, they identified not with the American soldier but with the "enemy."

Exploration of the moon also provided a good topic for discussion ultimately connected with integration. One Negro boy said, "Aliens probably look like us, but maybe they're a bit bigger, with an extra finger ... maybe just a glob of air."

In this situation, through the articulation of previously hidden fantasies, whites had the opportunity to learn that, on another planet, they might be the aliens, the intruders, the "Negroes." With no aid from the leader, the group members saw this implication from the boy's speculations about moon creatures.

In addition, whites learned that there is nothing intrinsically superior about having any particular skin color. And Negroes expressed the opinion that, somewhere else in the Universe, black skins might be more desirable than white ones.

PERSONAL relationships among group members, apparently aided by the leader's staying in the background, developed differently in the various groups.

Two boys, Negro and white, slowly fashioned a friendship deep and open enough to bring together an entire integrated group, according to Cottle. The mere presence of girls kept their closeness safe from the difficulties related to homosexual anxieties, which arose among the Negro and white gang boys.

Cottle has recently published a complete report on the experiment in Psychology Today. He drew five main conclusions from the data:

First, the self-analytic group, to some extent, is able to cut through the defenses created when Negro and white students meet in an integrated school situation for the first time. The almost immediate realization that they were "like the U.N." by the students supports this. This point seems to indicate that both the September and June plans inadequately prepare students for integration, though the second plan is the better of the two.