The middle-class white liberals of Sausalito, California, were proud of the integrated schools where their own children could grow up side by side with black children of the nearby ghetto of Marin City. Then a black militant, Sidney Walton, was appointed principal of the local junior high school. He distributed his own book with an opening picture of himself, guerrilla-clad, pointing a gun over a pile of schoolbooks and captioned 'books or guns?' Faced with the realities of black power, white parents feared for their children. Walton was fired. Liberal school-board members were forced to resign, parents withdrew children from school. A liberal showpiece experiment ended as a racial confrontation, bringing to the surface deep, fundamental fears in the white middle-class community. The row goes on. The mood is one of tension - and despair for the future.