Chapter 3
MARKETING INTEGRATION
Interracial Living in the White Imagination
On May 13, 1962, two hundred individuals from thirty-one United Nations member countries came to West Mount Airy to, as WMAN described it, see how Americans lived. As the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin reported, “They [saw] Americans from a grass roots level: eating typical meals, enjoying a get-together, watching TV, seeing historical sites—finding out what [made] the average family tick.”1 West Mount Airy Neighbors had organized the event to “[sell] the neighborhood through creative marketing.”2 Seeking to offer an example of a thriving interracial community, residents invited UN delegates and employees to stay in their homes and live with their families, and they compelled local and national media outlets to report on it. With these efforts, leaders in the fight for residential integration encouraged the rest of the world to witness their conception of democracy in action.
The United Nations Delegates Weekend marked a critical moment in the life of West Mount Airy Neighbors. The event was part of the organization’s first widespread publicity campaign; through a comprehensive regional and national media push, neighborhood leaders set out to sell the Mount Airy integration project. Capitalizing on the success of early efforts to drive out blockbusting realtors and stem the flight of white families from the neighborhood, the WMAN board saw an opportunity to take their message beyond the confines of the area to try to attract new prospective home buyers and to spread the virtues of integration across the nation. In presenting West Mount Airy as a model postwar American neighborhood, leaders worked to craft a vision of a new urban ideal: an economically stable, liberally minded, racially integrated space.
This innovative marketing came to play a vital role in the organization’s long-term goals of preserving the neighborhood as a vibrant, open community through the remainder of the twentieth century. But even as the efforts had the effect of maintaining interracial living, it also highlighted the limitations of the neighborhood’s collaborative vision. WMAN’s 1962 campaign was fundamentally grounded in the meaning of integration as it lived in the white imagination. For the white homeowners of West Mount Airy, the integrated community functioned because of a careful balance between economic preservation and democratic ideal. The WMAN integration project at once allowed residents to protect their homes and their quality of life in the Philadelphia neighborhood and to live out their vision of manifested racial justice.3 In the postwar conception of liberalism, where economic welfare had given way to a rights-based agenda and middle-class identity had become the focal point of race-based reform, integration in Mount Airy, for the area’s white homeowners, was grounded in notions of middle-class access and equality of opportunity.4 Even as this conception of integration complemented the motivations of many black families moving into the area—as the class-based exclusivity critical for white residents allowed for the economic security that so many black home buyers sought—the West Mount Airy Neighbors publicity campaign of the early 1960s revealed a profound disconnect in the meaning of integration. The experience of interracial living in northwest Philadelphia had become bound by racial identity.5
By the early 1960s, West Mount Airy Neighbors had begun to experience a degree of success in their efforts to drive out blockbusting realtors and stem the flight of white families from the community. Though the organization continued to serve as a watchdog group, involving itself in situations that required institutional attention, WMAN shifted its focus toward the larger goal of maintaining and fostering integration. To manage the character of the neighborhood, organizers saw the need to expand localized networks, to bring the story of integration into broader conversations about racial justice and the viability of postwar American cities. In order to sustain their newfound residential integration, community leaders believed, they had to craft an image of the neighborhood as an ideal blend of racial liberalism, cosmopolitan urbanity, and middle-class respectability.6
A decade earlier, in the wake of the Second World War and amid growing Cold War tensions, the United States saw the emergence of a new middle-class orientation that heralded home ownership, the primacy of the nuclear family, and a rising consumer culture. For many, this new American ideal existed in the modern housing stock of the recently forming homogeneous suburbs. These homes offered a postwar baby-boom generation more room for their expanding families and more space for their new consumer goods, as wartime restrictions on production lifted and the economy expanded rapidly.7 The federal government incentivized suburban relocation, with subsidized loans through the Federal Housing Administration and new road construction under the Federal Highway Act, which made travel around urban centers easier than ever before. By 1960, more than 40 percent of Americans were living in suburban communities; the rates had doubled in twenty years.8
In addition to new construction, these developing neighborhoods offered families larger plots of land and manicured green spaces. For many Americans, cities came to be seen as overcrowded, industrial landscapes; they believed that the suburbs could offer them more room, bigger yards, and tree-lined streets. According to sociologist Herbert Gans in his 1967 study of Levittown (one of the first postwar suburban developments), 34 percent of individuals moving to the planned community in suburban Philadelphia cited lack of playgrounds and “urban dirt, noise, and traffic” as key reasons for leaving the city.9 Neighborhoods such as Levittown were carefully constructed to offer the feeling of a garden community. Architects of the planned suburb included fruit trees and evergreens on each plot of land, working to integrate a park-like atmosphere into the residential landscape.10 These managed green spaces were meant to highlight those amenities that older, industrialized cities could not offer.
With such emphasis on the merits of suburban development, in northwest Philadelphia integrationist leaders recognized that to retain current residents and attract new buyers, they needed to craft an image of the neighborhood that at once capitalized on the physical values of the suburban ideal and extolled the virtues of city living. In the early 1960s, organizers worked to reorient the contemporary American Dream away from newly erected communities, and instead position it within West Mount Airy. By creating a nexus between race, class, and respectability, they sought to challenge the suburban ideal by depicting interracial communities as both models of consumer-oriented middle-class culture and havens for liberal race relations.11
In 1962, WMAN published its first brochure to be disseminated to a citywide audience. Titled West Mount Airy: Green Country Town in Philadelphia Welcomes You, the advertisement touted the neighborhood as “a beautiful green community in northwest Philadelphia [that] has in abundance the serene, satisfying atmosphere that many families want.” Offering all of the city’s advantages, the publication said, “West Mount Airy proves that you need not move to the suburbs to enjoy the peaceful, relaxed tempo of living with nature. Here, twenty minutes from City Hall, is a truly green country town in Philadelphia.”12 WMAN’s allusion to the region as a “green country town” referenced one of William Penn’s early descriptions of Philadelphia. On September 30, 1681, Penn relayed to his commissioners his vision for the city: “Let every house be placed, if the person pleases, in the middle of its plat, as to the breadthway of it, so that there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards, or fields, that it may be greene country towne, which will never be burnt and always wholesome.”13 By evoking green space as a hallmark of Mount Airy, organizers sought at once to link the neighborhood to the city’s historic heritage and to challenge the apparent conflict between urban space and the natural world, to bridge the desire for trees and parks with the liberal ethos of urbanity. Residents did not need to leave the city, WMAN implied; they could find in the northwest Philadelphia neighborhood a lush physical landscape and a cosmopolitan culture. In a sense, the organization was offering a model for an alternative urbanism. In an era when the American ideal was quickly becoming synonymous with a suburban utopia, WMAN set out to sell the integrated community by recasting urbanity as a beacon for middle-class liberalism. Although crime and disinvestment still existed in the slums of North Philadelphia, in West Mount Airy, neighborhood activists maintained, residents could attain an identity of urbane refinement that combined middle-class propriety with social liberalism.
At the same time, integrationists in Mount Airy worked to redefine the meaning of modernity within the context of their integrationist ideal. Because the neighborhood could not compete with suburban communities for new housing stock and amenities, leaders tried to separate the material conditions of the region from the ideological.14 In selling the physical landscape of the area, they relied on the language of refinement over trend-setting, of a natural ideal over a suburban homogeneity. Even the title of the 1962 brochure, referencing Penn’s 1681 vision of Philadelphia as a “greene country town,” highlighted the historic roots of the city, focusing on celebrated tradition over contemporary style. In casting the character of the community, however, organizers showcased notions of progress, of worldliness, of advancement. Working against powerful cultural trends, WMAN sought to reshape the image of the “modern” from material to philosophical.
Journalist Kenneth Gehret, special contributor to the Christian Science Monitor, offered such a description in assessing the viability of Mount Airy as a stable integrated community in postwar America. “Can a neighborhood maintain its attractiveness as a place to live,” wondered Gehret, “as its houses and other structures age and its population changes?” The writer equated the outdated stone architecture with the community’s push back against the realtor-driven panic and suburban flight in the early 1950s. But, Gehret went on, this stasis was not simply a reaction against progress. “The purpose was not to stand pat on tradition or in some contrived way to ‘control’ the influx of Negroes,” he wrote. “Traditions, [the community] said, are only the foundation for the future. WMAN was formed not only to maintain but also to improve the community as a place to live.”15 Gehret made clear that the organization strived not just to preserve the neighborhood as it existed in the years following World War II but to serve as a model for a liberal, urban space in the latter half of the twentieth century.
This image of integration that West Mount Airy Neighbors put forth in its early publicity efforts focused primarily on the would-be white residents of the neighborhood, and tended to minimize the experience of the African American families moving in.16 Those working on the marketing campaign were largely white and middle class, and they were selling integration to a decidedly white middle-class audience. They painted a picture of natural traditionalism, economic stability, social liberalism, cultural vibrancy, and ideological modernism; this, the predominantly white leadership of WMAN claimed in 1962, was what integration could provide.
This integrationist model that West Mount Airy Neighbors asserted was a part of a developing national movement aimed at celebrating the economic and cultural virtues of interracial living. In 1957, for instance, filmmaker Lee Bobker directed All the Way Home, a thirty-seven-minute fictional account of a black family moving into a white neighborhood. Bobker’s work took on a definitively documentary style in promoting the trends toward residential integration. Though the project was commissioned by the NAACP, Bobker, by telling the story of open housing from the perspective of white middle-class suburbanites, allowed white viewers to see the world from the fictional residents’ perspective. They expressed fears over threats to safety and economic instability. They worried that their property values would fall, that their daughters would fall victim to racially motivated crimes, that the quality of their schools would decline.17 Bobker’s film gave voice to the very same fears expressed by white residents of transitioning neighborhoods around the country, both in heated community conversations and in the privacy of their own homes.
But Bobker did not stop there. Rather, the filmmaker responded to these concerns with images and voice-over commentary of the well-dressed, well-behaved black family moving in. The African Americans seeking to gain entry into the neighborhood are just like the whites who already live there, Bobker seemed to be saying. “A man is a desirable neighbor if he’s alright financially and he doesn’t throw beer cans all over his front lawn,” one resident in the film proclaimed.18 It was not skin color that created community cohesion; it was common values, similar goals, and comparable bank accounts. Films like Bobker’s made their way to Mount Airy for Rabbi Charry’s popular Movie Nights at the Germantown Jewish Centre.19
Two years later, the Saturday Evening Post published a seven-page spread titled “When a Negro Moves Next Door.” The 1959 piece chronicled the experience of a Baltimore neighborhood as the first African American family moved into the community. According to Ellsworth Rosen, Ashburton, Maryland, resident and the author of the article, “the color of my neighbor’s skin does not bother me at all. His income and behavior are just about the same as mine.” Rosen went on to decry the unsavory real estate tactics designed to drive out white homeowners.20 Throughout the article, his message was clear: integrated neighborhoods are not only inevitable but also beneficial to the larger society when those working toward integration possess a common conception of community. These depictions of residential integration in the national media evidenced the way in which many white liberals conceived of integrated space. Underlying the necessary political orientation toward race relations was the notion that for interracial living to work, all residents had to subscribe to the ideals of middle-class respectability.21
Such a conception of common values was fundamental to the success of integration in West Mount Airy. Long-time residents articulated a clear focus on the economic standing of black residents moving into the community during the early years of transition. “The people I knew…, their values were so stable,” Marjorie Kopeland, cofounder of the Allens Lane Arts Center, remembered. “They were values that I reflected, that I found in my own family. [The Black families moving in placed an] emphasis upon family, an emphasis upon education.”22 “The people who came in were just as professional as the people who were leaving…, as the white people who lived there,” Doris Polsky, who moved to the neighborhood as a teenager in 1942, recalled.23 It was this economic equilibrium that allowed for the initial sense of stability on the blocks and in the homes; for these white homeowners, the professional status of incoming African American buyers was paramount to the success of peaceful, stable integration. It was a necessary precursor to the liberal politics that residents came to stress in their public pronouncements of the neighborhood.
When West Mount Airy Neighbors began to plan the 1962 United Nations Delegates Weekend, community leaders highlighted this white-centric vision of integration to the two hundred representatives from thirty-one U.N. member countries coming to visit. They welcomed their guests to the neighborhood and drew their attention to virtues of interracial living. But even as the event focused on the international visitors, Mount Airy activists, through a carefully coordinated media campaign, used the weekend to showcase for the nation their vision of a reconceived American ideal, manifested in the form of an economically stable, racially integrated city neighborhood.24
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, communities across the country came together to host United Nations delegates. The goal of these events was simple: to bring the international community into the American home, to offer foreign dignitaries a glimpse into the life of the American family. Echoing the ideas of the nation’s Cold War prodemocracy agenda, these weekends were meant to showcase American virtue, to sway representatives from nonaligned nations around the world toward the benefits of the democratic system.25 The UN was not directly involved in such efforts. Rather, the company Private Entertainment for UN Delegations, Inc. served as the liaison for all coordination.26 Typically planned for the spring or summer, when the General Assembly was not in session, these weekends gave delegates the chance to relax and enjoy the comforts that the democratic system could afford.
One such event took place in the Philadelphia area in 1959, when the Swarthmore Committee for the United Nations hosted sixty delegates in the small college town twenty miles south of the city.27 Nearly one hundred UN representatives came to Swarthmore in May of that year to spend the weekend with host families from the community, visiting local sites and attending dinners and dances.28 When West Mount Airy Neighbors learned of the festivities in Swarthmore, the organization decided to host its own UN Delegates Weekend. Working with the UN’s private entertainment affiliate, the board sent personal notes to each delegate, inviting them to spend a spring weekend in the community.29
In conceiving of the weekend, however, WMAN made one notable change from the model that Swarthmore had put forth three years earlier: rather than offering their guests a quiet weekend away from the frenzy of New York City, the group sought to provide delegates with a glimpse into the experience of an integrated America. As the Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin reported during the event, “important and inherent in the plan for this visit is that they will see an integrated neighborhood. Delegates from white nations are staying with American Negroes and African statesmen are the welcome guests of white hosts.”30 Community leaders in Mount Airy viewed the weekend as an opportunity, once again, to position the neighborhood’s integration project within the context of the nation’s Cold War agenda. Just as the CCRC had, nearly a decade earlier, linked civil rights progress to the international image of democracy, WMAN saw potential in the UN Delegates Weekend to highlight their experiment in interracial living.31 As the federal government crafted policy initiatives to highlight for the world the nation’s progress in civil rights, West Mount Airy Neighbors worked to draw attention to a community putting these integrationist sensibilities into practice; by connecting their own efforts to the international fight for democracy, they were able to gain exposure in front a national audience.
Armed with funding from the Germantown Savings Fund, the Broad Street Trust, Liberty Real Estate Bank and Trust, First Pennsylvania Banking and Trust, and the Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank, the organization focused in on the weekend of May 12–13, 1962. By selecting this date, the board believed, they could coordinate with the annual Germantown Week celebration, a local festival that commemorated northwest Philadelphia’s history and community, and thereby increase their visibility.32 WMAN established a Delegates Weekend subcommittee, led largely by women who were charged with coordinating housing, food, and entertainment.33 As was true with efforts toward social change around the country, Mount Airy wives and mothers made up one of the largest organizing forces for the neighborhood’s integrationist initiatives.34 On April 29, 1962, WMAN executive director Anita Schiff sent a press release to regional newspapers and radio and television stations, as well as the Associated Press, UPI, CBS News, and the Voice of America.35 Through this carefully orchestrated media campaign running alongside the festivities, the organization worked to invite the rest of the country to experience the weekend as well.
All told, sixty-nine delegates and their families visited West Mount Airy that May weekend. Four UN representatives in attendance held ambassadorial rank, those from the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Madagascar, and Yemen. Four nations from the Soviet bloc participated in the events, as did several from newly independent postcolonial nations in Africa.36 Local newspapers followed the delegation closely, chronicling the weekend’s schedule and echoing the neighborhood’s vision of the American democratic ideal that WMAN highlighted in its April press release. “Visitors partook in that old-fashioned American custom, the covered dish luncheon,” the Philadelphia Bulletin reported, “and at the end of the reception…they heard no speeches, political or propaganda, but merely good American folk music. Today, they are lazing through a typical American Sunday. They are likely to see that it’s a pretty good life.”37 The Germantown Courier noted that the guests were presented with souvenirs, including a charm emblazoned with the Philadelphia seal and a parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence. Above all, the Courier said, the weekend was “meant to demonstrate to other countries how people in an urban integrated community live.”38 Indeed, it was this model of interracial city living that West Mount Airy Neighbors sought to present to residents of the Philadelphia region, at a moment when many such homeowners were considering a move to the suburbs.
Responding to WMAN’s press release, several national media outlets ran stories about the weekend’s festivities. The New York Times, in an article printed two weeks before the event took place, touted West Mount Airy Neighbors as “an organization of more than six hundred residents interested in promoting a racially balanced community and integrated schools.” The paper gave a rundown of the schedule for the weekend, highlighting a stroll along the Wissahickon Creek and attendance at local religious services.39 The Christian Science Monitor, too, in a larger series on West Mount Airy that was published in the weeks surrounding the UN visit, used the weekend as a lens through which to explore the process of residential integration.40 Journalist Kenneth Gehret wrote of the early years of transition and the initial efforts to stave off decline and preserve the viability of the community. He highlighted the liberal ethos of race relations and the collective buy-in from residents that created the possibility of stabilization, and he noted the efforts to spread the virtues of interracial living to a larger audience: “So effective has this integration project been, in the eyes of WMAN leaders, that they believe it has value as a model of democratic American life.”41 As he lauded the community for its efforts toward interracial living, he also noted the underlying economic currents that created the conditions for integration to occur. “The people moving into the neighborhood,” he wrote, “are very much like those already there. Education and economic backgrounds are similar, although both Negroes and whites are represented. The high level of homeownership has not changed. Properties are well maintained, and an active interest in community affairs is evidence [sic] among the newcomers.”42
Echoing the importance of economic homogeneity in fostering racial harmony, Gehret’s depiction of the neighborhood fell in line with the white liberal sensibility of intentional integration that WMAN had worked to invoke throughout their 1962 publicity campaign. In making deliberate decisions about which elements of the Mount Airy narrative to include and to whom to assign the agency in the story, Gehret contributed to a coalescing national image of the neighborhood, one predicated on the combined ideals of racial integration, urban sustainability, economic stability, and lived American democracy. Even as West Mount Airy Neighbors’ UN Delegates Weekend offered international visitors a window into the experience of interracial living, the presence of the American press and their coverage of the events brought these idealized images of an integrated, middle-class city neighborhood to a larger national audience.
The United Nations Delegates Weekend and the “Green Country Towne” brochure marked the beginning of a widespread media campaign that highlighted the white-middle-class experience of West Mount Airy’s integration project. Through the 1960s, WMAN continued to offer press releases on the community’s efforts, and editors around the nation responded, printing stories on the neighborhood and lauding it as an example of what the country could be. The Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, Women’s Day, Jewish Digest, and McCall’s all published stories on West Mount Airy. Many were written by neighborhood residents themselves, uncritically underscoring the democratic ideal that WMAN put forth and applauding the residents for their efforts in the pursuit of racial justice.43 The founding principles of West Mount Airy Neighbors—the calculated balance between interracial liberalism and economic exclusivity—remained central to the neighborhood agenda.
As white residents saw their vision of the community reflected in the regional and national spotlight, African American homeowners found in the neighborhood the personal security that stable integration could provide. Whereas they certainly valued the inclusion that WMAN’s vision of intentional integration espoused, more often than not black buyers made their way to the neighborhood in search of the tangible opportunities that living among whites afforded. Their interest in interracial living came with the dual recognition of civil rights progress and material advancement.
At first, these subtle distinctions between the white and black experiences of integration may in fact have served to foster the economic and social stability that all residents of West Mount Airy so desired. The white-centric push for a common class-based sense of identity complemented well the goals of the professional and upwardly mobile black buyers moving in, who sought the very economic conditions that this class-based exclusivity required. White families, proudly displaying their liberal politics by remaining committed to interracial neighborhoods, welcomed their new black neighbors based on a common socioeconomic identity. According to one African American resident, a white neighbor greeted her for the first time, exclaiming, “I’m very happy to see some nice blacks moving in to get rid of some of these poor whites.”44 And African Americans believed that this economic exclusivity would function to keep their own property investments secure. Mount Airy’s residents—black and white alike—overwhelmingly saw their neighbors as similarly situated socially and economically, and they believed that these attributes were an intrinsic part of successful residential integration. Within a decade, however, these ideological differences in the value of integration that were so crucial to the neighborhood’s early successes would give way to a heated battle over the experience of daily living in West Mount Airy.