A NATION OF LORDS.

By David G. Dawley'63. Anchor Paperback Original. 200 pages.$1.95.

It is no longer very important, at least to blacks, whether whites want to share in the "movement." If there is such a thing today, it has moved far beyond the stage where whites are needed or wanted by blacks to help officer the assault on the barriers that still block genuinely equal opportunity for all Americans. Even when whites were an accepted, if not always welcome, part of the civil rights revolution, few were able or willing to integrate themselves into the black community or to subordinate themselves to black leadership. Still fewer were prepared to commit themselves to the long haul, to spending years of unremarked toil in the tenement and tarpaper vineyards of deprivation.

These few are the "white niggers." One of them was Dave Dawley. After a Peace Corps stint in Honduras and a master's in social work at the University of Michigan, Dawley found himself in 1967 in Chicago interviewing the "beneficiaries" of federal summer programs to learn how much they had indeed benefited. The turf he covered was Lawndale, home of the Conservative Vice Lords, for years the city's most powerful street gang.

A Nation of Lords is not about Dave Dawley. It seldom offers glimpses of the unlikely honkey who became the gang's only white member, stayed on the street with the Lords for two years, and served as a sort of business adviser when it moved from gang warfare to economic development.

Instead of dwelling on his perceptions of Lord life and history, Dawley lets it unfold in the unvarnished vernacular of the street, woven tightly from taped recollections of several leading Lords. They trace the growth of the gang from its rumbling origins in the late 1950s through years of selfdestructive violence and finally to its tenacious but disillusioning attempts at entrepreneurship.

The book is aptly titled, for the Lords inhabit a separate nation, a world so remote from general public understanding that one asks inevitably whether it is necessary to know what goes down in Lawndale, Watts, or Harlem. They speak to us through Dawley, but sadly it is likely that this account of self-hate, of suppressed fury and hopelessness, and of the fragile grandeur of newly found pride will only flash to the alert reader the depressing signs of a new cycle of rising expectations that are not being fulfilled.

A Nation of Lords does not have a happy ending that suggests progress and pacifism have arrived in Lawndale. As Dawley writes in his introduction, despite years of struggle "to learn the white man's paper game, the Vice Lords are still fighting for survival and there is doubt that they will have the opportunity to achieve the potential they have as individuals and inheritors of a nation with liberty and justice for all."

Goat, a Vice Lord, says the same thing with rougher edges: "White people are probably not ready to hear what has to be done.... They gonna wake up one morning and there gonna stand the dragon. You know, spittin' that fire, and they gonna be throwin' the buckets of water, but it's gonna be too late."

Mr. Lowther, also an alumnus of the PeaceCorps, is on the editorial staff of the Keene (N.H.) Sentinel.