In Pitchett's "Race and Community In Postwar Brooklyn," the various attempts of the Brownsville Neighborhood Council to try their hand at getting the community to be racial integrated garners admiration from readers. However, when placed in conjunction with Baldwin's article, "The Harlem Ghetto," one can easily see the attempts of the BNC would have inevitably proved futile. They were just dreams that were too far from reach, given the current American scene of that time.

At the end of the secondary source, Pitchett describes the majority view of the 1950s, that "integrated neighborhoods were an impossibility (466)." One reason for this is that even if an organization were to seriously attempt to instill racial integration, it was often half-hearted. Despite BNC's good intentions, their motives were less radical than at first seems. The BNC's reasons for setting up public housing in Brownsville included curing the problems of the decline of Brownsville as well as preventing blacks "from spreading into other (read white) areas" (449). In essence, they were creating the beginnings of another Harlem in Brooklyn. It must've appeared to be so, and thus virtually no Whites wanted to live there anymore. However, the most important reason for BNC's failure was that racial integration of neighborhoods was socially impossible, given the American beliefs in the mid 20th century.

As Baldwin describes in his narrative, the dominating theme in minority minds, like the Jews and the African American population, was upward mobility--to be accepted into the "White" race. The various black newspapers tried to appeal to the White race by writing to confirm what Americans already thought at the time: blacks were violent, unstable, and thus unfit to live in White neighborhoods. The Jews also did this by severing themselves from African Americans, adopting the American view of "Negro inferiority" (69). Thus, when BNC introduced African Americans into Brownsville, it is not at all startling that the Jews that had lived in this part of Brooklyn chose to move out, lest they also be grouped together with the minority that Americans loathed more than themselves.