Success Stories Personalize Court Ruling : CHILDREN OF THE DREAM: The Psychology of Black Success, <i> by Audrey Edwards and Dr. Craig K. Polite,</i> Doubleday, $21.50; 287 pages

Mrs. Hitchcock, my high school history teacher, asked the class what was meant, exactly, by “All men are created equal.” After we floundered around for a while, she explained that it doesn’t mean that everyone is the same. It doesn’t mean that every American is equally intelligent or talented. It means--she said in this 1962 class at a private school that would not admit a black student until 1977--that every American is equal in opportunity.

The message of “Children of the Dream,” a readable and truly heartening book, is that there has been a stunning expansion of opportunity for African-Americans since school integration was set in motion in 1954. The Supreme Court ruled that year that “separate but equal” was not good enough when a state such as South Carolina could spend 10 times more money educating white children than black ones.

But even with expanded opportunity, the authors caution, race still matters. Don’t hold your breath waiting for complete integration, Audrey Edwards and Dr. Craig K. Polite write, and, in the meantime, don’t let the bastards get you down.

“Children of the Dream” begins with a salute to the nine black teen-agers who walked through a mob to Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957, putting their lives on the line to end “separate but equal.” Melba Beals, now a radio talk-show host in the Bay Area, summed it up at the 30th reunion of the Little Rock Nine: “The bottom line for us is that every morning for nine months we got up, polished our saddle shoes--and went to war.”

While we hardly have achieved perfect equality in our schools, the opening up of public education in the 1950s did make a difference. In 1967, fewer than 5% of the black families in America could be counted in the middle class; by 1987, the figure had grown to 36%. Between 1970 and 1989, the number of blacks who had annual household incomes of $50,000 or more grew 182%.

The core of Edwards and Polite’s work is interviews with successful black women and men who were born between 1935 and 1965. Many were born poor, but all have reached the upper middle class, and all are working in professions that had been closed to most blacks.

Many of the 43 interviews are with firsts and onlys--the only black in a business school class, the first to be vice president of a certain company, the first black managing editor of a major newspaper. The selection is not meant to be scientific. All the same, Edwards and Polite shouldn’t have included the editor of Essence, the black women’s magazine, when Edwards still works there, and is highly likely to be her friend. I wish they’d interviewed Justice Clarence Thomas instead.

Some of those featured turned their lives around in midstream. Before he was 21, Kweisi Mfume (Swahili for “conquering son of kings”), now a member of U.S. Congress from Maryland, fathered five children out of wedlock.

Ramon Hervey, a Los Angeles public relations executive, has a unique angle on black success. He’s married to former Miss America Vanessa Williams, and has Richard Pryor as a client. Hervey observes, “Blacks rise and fall much faster and are more susceptible because there is always that element of people either target-shooting or trying to make blacks live super lives.”

Chris Edley is a Harvard Law School professor, but he says he still feels that whenever he walks into a meeting with white men, there’s always “a presumption against my competence.”

Opportunity comes with special drawbacks for African-Americans.

“The snag,” Edwards and Polite write, “is that blacks find themselves perpetually in the position of having to prove that they . . . do indeed qualify for opportunity. Of course, African-Americans are the only ethnic group that has ever been saddled with bearing this particular burden of proof.” This depends, of course, on how you define that “particular burden.”

Edwards and Polite end by enumerating the qualities shared by the people interviewed. The successful African-Americans in their sample don’t assume that racism is behind every negative reaction from a white person. When confronting real racism, the authors suggest, the best attitude to have is “That’s their problem, not mine.”

But, they counsel, you must be flexible, and develop the social skills to put whites at ease, While being proud of your African-American heritage. It’s all good advice, but it sounds very hard.

The most haunting story from “Children of the Dream” is about a successful young woman the authors didn’t interview. They tell the story of Leanita McClain, who left the projects on Chicago’s South Side, earned a master’s degree at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and became the first black member of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board.

In a 1980 Newsweek column McClain wrote, “I am a member of the black middle class who has had it with being patted on the head by white hands and slapped in the face by black hands for my success. . . .” Four years later, at 32, she killed herself.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Bull’s Eye” by James Adams (Times Books).