The issue of increasing segregation was raised forcefully by the much-quoted 1968 Kerner Commission, which sought to explain three years of terrible urban riots that began in 1965. The United States was moving towards two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal, the report concluded.

The Kerner report captured headlines, and in succeeding years its central finding has become a civil rights mantra. And yet the picture it drew -- never subject to critical scrutiny -- was quite wrong.

Perhaps its authors were traumatized by the ghetto riots; whatever the reason, they deluded themselves into believing that the condition of African-Americans had been deteriorating rather than improving since World War II.

To have argued that the overall direction of racial change was toward greater separation and heightened inequality was to ignore an altered racial landscape. The authors were blind to two decades of amazing, unprecedented change.

They overlooked:

The abolition of segregation in the armed forces in the late 1940s, during the administration of President Truman.

The revolution in the legal landscape that was the consequence of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court's 1954 decision outlawing state-imposed separation of the races in public schools, and other landmark constitutional rulings.

The astonishing effectiveness of the mass movement on behalf of civil rights that swept the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The movement began with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955, gathered steam with the sit-ins at restaurant counters and other private and public facilities, and culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, outlawing discrimination in education, employment, public accommodations, and voting.

A dramatic rise in the educational level of the African-American population, a steep decline in black poverty, and a surge in black home ownership rates.

No ethnic group in American history had ever improved its position so dramatically in so short a period (although admittedly none had so far to go).

The Kerner report had depicted a nation experiencing deepening racial division. Its pessimism was largely derived from a misreading of the urban scene. The commission saw a growing racial gulf on the metropolitan map -- one society (black) in the central city, and another (white) outside the core. The accelerating segregation of low-income, disadvantaged Negroes within the ghettos of the largest American cities, the report noted ominously, was the most basic of the underlying forces that menaced the nation's future. The black urban concentration might well blow the country apart, it warned.

That menacing future never came to pass. Most of the very large American cities in the 1960s did not become mainly black within two decades, as predicted. Moreover, San Diego (California), Phoenix (Arizona), and San Antonio (Texas) are among a crop of new urban giants, but the black population in these booming western cities has remained a healthy mix of whites, blacks and other minorities.

In fact, in the more dynamic corners of urban America, the Kerner Commission's simple two-tone black-and-white portrait is as outmoded as an old-fashioned black-and-white movie. The report somehow overlooked the Immigration Act of 1965, the result of which was a flood of newcomers -- now chiefly from Asia and Latin America -- into the nation's central cities. Today, a city like Los Angeles is a metropolis that has acquired a multiracial complexity of which the Kerner Commission never dreamed. Hispanics outnumber African- Americans in five other major Sunbelt cities as well.

The 1968 report was wrong on two other counts. It never envisioned the black suburbanization that would outpace that of whites in the coming decades. In the last quarter century the proportion of African-Americans living in suburban communities nearly doubled, with the change in some cities even greater. An astonishing 64 percent of metropolitan Atlanta's black population lives outside the central city. The figure for Washington, D.C., is almost as high; by 1990, 61 percent of the African-American population in the D.C. metropolitan area were suburbanites.

The Kerner Commission envisioned blacks not only trapped in cities but confined to all-black neighborhoods. But here, too, it was wrong. By 1994, five out of six African- Americans said they had white neighbors, and three out of five whites reported having blacks living nearby. That makes sense. Neighborhoods have become more racially mixed in recent decades in most of the 15 metropolitan areas with the largest black populations. And the drop has been even more pronounced in smaller cities. In fact, between 1970 and 1980, the level of segregation dropped in 90 percent of the metropolitan areas recognized by the Census Bureau. In subsequent years the trend has continued. Moreover, if we ask what proportion of African-Americans in major metropolitan centers live in a true ghetto -- clusters of city blocks that are at least 90 percent black -- the answer is only a minority.

Residential patterns are only one aspect of a larger picture of heartening change that began to take shape in the immediate post-World War II years, before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That process of change was in part the result of key decisions made by President Truman and other political and legal authorities, but more fundamental were the impersonal economic and demographic forces that transferred so many blacks from the southern countryside to northern cities in which racial prejudice was much weaker. Furthermore, white attitudes were gradually becoming more tolerant and liberal throughout American society, in the South as well as the North.

As a consequence, almost three-quarters of African-American families today have incomes above the poverty line. The black college population has grown from 45,000 in 1940 to more than 1.4 million today. Sixty percent of employed black women were domestic servants in 1940; today a majority hold white-collar jobs. The number of African-Americans in the professions has also risen impressively.

Indeed, one of the best kept secrets of American life today is that more than 40 percent of the nation's black citizens consider themselves members of the middle class. The black unemployment rate has gotten much publicity, but of those who are in the labor force (defined by the Department of Labor as working or looking for work), 93 percent of those aged 25 to 64 had jobs in 1995. Too many journalists and scholars have let the underclass define black America; it is a very misleading picture.

In addition, contact between the races has increased enormously. By 1989, five out of six African-Americans could name a white person whom they considered a friend, while two out of three whites said their social circle included someone who was black. By 1994, it had become not the least bit unusual for blacks and whites to visit each other's homes on social occasions and even increasingly attend the same church.

That's some of the good news -- too little acknowledged or even understood. But there is bad news as well -- evident, for instance, when one compares African-Americans and whites either living in poverty or unemployed, or when one looks at the homicide rate. On the educational front, too, there are troubling signs. Black students are now as likely to graduate from high school as whites, but, on average, they are four years behind whites in reading skills and 3.4 years behind in math. This is a major barrier in the way of the black quest for greater economic equality.

The quest continues -- and should continue. In fact, it is now joined by civil rights activists among Asians and Hispanics as well. But if the drive for equality among members of all racial and ethnic groups does not acknowledge the remarkable degree to which citizens of every color have come to realize the American dream, future efforts are likely to fail. The pessimistic stress on ongoing exclusion so often expressed by the civil rights community is a self-fulfilling prophecy: The picture of helplessness encourages paralysis. If blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics all think nothing has changed, then the hard work yet needed will be stymied. The American dream has not been for whites only. That should be a matter of deep national pride.

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Abigail Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in New York City. Stephan Thernstrom is Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They are co-authors of American in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (Simon & Schuster, September 1997).