ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In August of 1986, a local news crew came to Kiley Guyton’s fifth birthday party to film a story about the child of a white mother and a black father. Karen and Odell Guyton had chosen to raise their family in West Mount Airy, a nationally acclaimed model of an integrated community. Kiley and I had met as toddlers at a Mount Airy daycare center, housed at the Summit Presbyterian Church. Our class was a rough reflection of the demographics of the neighborhood itself. Three years later, many of us attended that birthday party. That was the day I learned that race matters.
I lived in West Mount Airy until I was nine years old. The white child of two progressive Jews, I grew up with an emerging consciousness that my daily life experience could and should serve as a reflection of my own ideas and values. Growing up, I took part in community events, participated in neighborhood activities, and through second grade, attended local schools. But I was also a product of Philadelphia in the 1980s, and as the city experienced the effects of widespread deindustrialization and waning federal and state resources, local institutions suffered, crime rates increased, and houses went up for sale. My parents—like the parents of many of my classmates and friends—pulled me from the neighborhood elementary school and then, a year later, relocated to Elkins Park, an inner-ring suburb just across the city border in Montgomery County.
In 2005, I returned to West Mount Airy. As a twenty four-year-old graduate student, I chose the community for the same reasons my parents had more than two decades earlier: the legacy of tolerance and activism and the intentionality with which many residents continue to negotiate the world. But as I settled into life there as an adult, I began to move past my own romanticized vision of the neighborhood I had left as a child. Through the lens of my doctoral studies in history, I listened to homeowners discuss (and dance around) contemporary questions of racial politics and residential cohesion, and I found myself compelled to explore the complicated roots of the integration project that had emerged and evolved in the wake of the Second World War, as communities around the country worked to contend with rapidly changing demographics and shifting notions of race and urban space.
Writing about the neighborhood in which I grew up and currently live has presented an interesting challenge, but it has also provided remarkable opportunities. Thank you to the current and former residents of West Mount Airy, for sharing your stories with me, for offering insights while waiting in line at the co-op, sitting in local coffeeshops, or running alongside me at the gym. Thank you to my neighbors and friends, for letting me think critically about our community, and for allowing me to complicate and challenge the historical ideal of integration that has led so many to this space.
Over the course of the development of this book I have had the opportunity to work with and learn from a diverse group of scholars and teachers, all of whom have shaped this project in profound ways. Thank you to David Farber, who challenged me daily and supported me when it mattered most, who let me figure out my own process, while holding me accountable to his high standards. You pushed me to slow down and think about the big questions; you have taught me how to be a historian. To Beth Bailey, who reminded me to pay attention to contingency, and to always think about what’s at stake. To Bryant Simon, for forcing me to see what wasn’t yet there. To Kevin Kruse, whose own work showed me that the study of space could be a vehicle for so much more. To Richard Immerman and Marylouise Esten, for helping me to navigate the bureaucratic waters of two large university programs with (relative) ease. To Susan DeJarnatt, David Hoffman, Nancy Knauer, and Kathy Stanchi, for pushing me to think about the legal construction of the social world and the social construction of the legal system. And to Bruce Lenthall, who nurtured my curiosity and showed me what it meant to do history. You helped me understand why the past matters.
To my colleagues and friends, who made writing this book an engaging and exciting and even fun process. You have offered someone who gains energy from the people around her an intellectual and social community in what otherwise could have been a very isolating experience. Thanks, in particular, to Jeff Barg, Polly Bennell, Christina Cooke, Terry Farish, Donna Galluzzo, Paul Hendrickson, Brendan Hughes, Mira Ptacin, Teya Sepinuck, Kate Walker, and the rest of my collaborators at Penn’s Kelly Writers House and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, for turning me on to the art of a good story, and to Ben Brandenberg, Tim Cole, Lindsay Helfman, Zach Lechner, Michele Louro, Roberta Meek, Steve Nepa, Dan Royles, and Kelly Shannon, for challenging me to think about why this story matters. To my colleagues in the Kean University History Department, who have shown me the true model of a teacher-scholar. And a special note of gratitude to Kate Scott for our many caffeine-fueled collaborative writing sessions, and to Matt Johnson and Sarah Johnson (no relation) for reading multiple drafts of sections of the manuscript and pushing me toward a more precise analysis of postwar race relations.
Over the course of this project, I have also had the opportunity to learn from and trade ideas with a generous and supportive community of scholars—at conferences, through e-mail, and in quiet corners of coffeeshops. Thanks to Alan Braddock, Lila Corwin Berman, Matthew Countryman, Natanya Duncan, David Grazian, Cheryl Greenberg, Brenna Greer, Leonard Heumann, Amy Hillier, Lauren Kientz Anderson, Stephanie Kohlberg, Amy Phillips, Amy Scott, Tom Sugrue, Heather Thompson, and James Wolfinger. Thanks to the members of the Urban History Association, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Organization of American Historians, the Oral History Association, and the Oral History Association in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Thanks to the external reviewers and the editorial and faculty boards at Cornell University Press, who offered both encouragement and constructive feedback on two versions of this manuscript. And many, many thanks to Michael McGandy and the editorial team at Cornell for their patience, attentiveness, and care in guiding me through the editing process.
Portions of chapters 1 and 2 were previously published in “Northwest Philadelphia,” Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia (http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/northwest-philadelphia/); portions of chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6 were previously published in “Managed Diversity: Contested Meanings of Integration in Post-WWII Philadelphia,” Journal of Urban History 38, no. 3 (2012): 410–49, doi: 10.1177/0096144212445451.
This work also benefited immensely from the support of the archivists and librarians around Philadelphia and throughout the country, who have helped me piece together and contextualize the story of the Mount Airy integration efforts. Thanks to the Special Collections Research Center at Temple University, the Germantown Historical Association Archives, the Philadelphia City Archives, the American Friends Service Committee Archives, the Philadelphia Jewish Archives (now under the auspices of Temple’s Special Collections Research Center), the Fairmount Park Commission Archives, the Amistad Archives at Tulane University, the Library of Congress, and the archival collections at the Weavers Way Co-op and the University of Pennsylvania. As well, thanks to Temple University and Kean University, for their generous support of the project, and to all the local coffeeshops where I “rented space” over the past four years as this manuscript was taking shape: High Point Cafe, Chestnut Hill Coffee Company, Mugshots Coffeehouse, and in particular Infusion Coffee and Tea, with its bottomless mugs and ample workspace.
Finally, to my family and friends outside of the academic world: thank you for your guidance and support, for the coffee and brunch dates, the long runs and longer races, and the cross-time-zone phone calls and marathon movie sessions. Thank you for helping me to get outside my own head. To my parents, Steve and Cindy Perkiss, who have shown me the value of boundless energy, who each, in their own way, has an uncanny ability to make the big picture clearer, and who both have instilled in me a deep pull to make sense of the world around me. To Marta Perkiss, for allowing me to see that world through a different set of eyes. And to Brent Freedland, who came into my life just as this project was taking shape and with whom I’ve built a new community in Mount Airy. My world is far better with you in it.
Joan Didion once said “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Thank you all for teaching me to tell stories.