3

GRASS, COLOR, SASS

How the Children Shaped Fresh Air

Sonia and Laelia had had enough. Fresh Air camp offered them none of the attractions they enjoyed back home in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Even though their counselors encouraged them to relish “the birds and plants, have scavenger hunts, and picnics, and go home with suitcases full of speckled rocks and swimming citations,” the girls would have none of it. They longed to watch movies and spin on merry-go-rounds in their home community. Rather than put up with a nature-filled environment they detested, the girls decided to catch a bus back to New York. Although foiled by a quick-acting counselor who spotted the girls as they scrambled through bushes in their bid for freedom, the girls acted anything but innocent. One counselor noted that campers like Sonia and Laelia were “more grown up … assertive … hostile … unsatisfied … hard to handle” and got into fights and caused trouble.¹ At the age of ten in the summer of 1971, the girls had—in the opinion of their minders—gotten sassy.

Fresh Air participants like Sonia and Laelia shaped Fresh Air programs as they dealt with adults focused on nature, race, and behavior. Even as Fresh Air boosters and administrators linked the children with grass in a bid to market carefree summer vacations, the children disrupted the adults’ promotional plans by expressing less enthusiasm for nature than their hosts desired. Those same Fresh Air promoters who described the children as blissfully ignorant of racial dynamics overlooked the sophisticated racial code of conduct practiced by the children in often racially hostile communities. In the midst of such unwelcoming environments, those children who made it through the strict vetting process meant to winnow out delinquents prompted their adult caretakers to expend as much energy on behavioral modification as relationship building. Thought only to be sassy—with all the racial baggage of the period attached to the term—the children responded with an often-uncredited complexity.

The children thus helped craft a hosting program that had become the dominant model of positive race relations in the country. Despite a history of overt prejudice and racism in Friendly Towns during the 1950s and 1960s, to host a black or brown Fresh Air child by the 1970s was to strike a blow against “racism,” “racial prejudice,” and “racial misunderstanding.”² Even as urbanization amplified the boosters’ rhetoric about the countryside restoring children to a state of uncorrupted naïveté, children of color from the city became instructors and teachers to the white hosts who took them into their homes. In the process, the children engaged in their own freedom struggle.

Grass

Fresh Air boosters loved grass. They used it in 1959 when they wrote of the children’s desire “to run in the grass, like angels with green footprints on the good earth.”³ They used it in 1962 to attract donors interested in supporting children who frolicked “in what they delight in calling their ‘running-around grass’” and left “symbolic little impressions of their bare feet as they run—green footprints of happiness.”⁴ Even when the word had taken on a double meaning, adult supporters still turned to grass in 1974 as the centerpiece of their development campaign. As a full-page ad in Forbes magazine declared, “This summer nice city kids will get into some really good grass.” After a visual space to let the pun sink in, the ad continued, “The kind that tickles your toes when you walk through it barefoot.” In a photo above the text, one white boy, one Latino boy, two Latina girls, two African American boys, and one African American girl run together in “the grass, the sun and fresh air.” This kind of restorative grass, the ad writers assured the wealthy Forbes readers, gave “a kid a clear head for the rest of the year.”⁵

Not every Fresh Air child shared the boosters’ enthusiasm. In 1956 one unnamed Fresh Air participant arrived at a camp run by Episcopalians from New York City. As he looked out at well-tended lawns, a lake large enough for boating, and tall trees next to “shimmering” waters, the “city boy” was not impressed. He declared, “So what’s the big deal, I’ve seen grass before.”⁶ Like many other Fresh Air children who played regularly in New York’s extensive park system, he knew what grass looked like. Regardless of what the Fresh Air promoters may have imagined, many of the children who came to the country knew of nature before they ever set foot off the bus, train, or plane.

The theme of grass reveals how children shaped the Fresh Air narrative. When describing the programs’ benefits, promoters used grass as a metonym for nature to cast the children as compliant recipients of the adults’ largesse. Many of the children did enjoy the freedom to roam among trees, lawns, and lakes. Yet others found their encounters with nature repellent rather than attractive. As Fresh Air guests both affirmed and countered pro-grass sentiment, they forced hosts and boosters to protect their turf. The adults responded to the children’s diverse opinions by increasing grassy promotions, disregarding the racial dynamics of lawn-centric enclaves, and intensifying their rhetoric about nature’s restorative capacity. Regardless of their intent, the children helped shaped the Fresh Air program simply by talking about sod.

The symbolic power of suburban lawns fertilized such grass-filled narratives. By the end of World War II, the modern lawn had taken on its familiar form, a carefully trimmed expanse of grassy green. With roots in the landed estates of English aristocracy, lawns marked class status as suburbs proliferated from the mid-nineteenth century onward.⁷ Homeowners demonstrated civic commitment by maintaining their lawns while at the same time offering proof of upright moral standing and commitment to the Protestant work ethic.⁸ Lawns came to carry even more symbolic freight in the post–World War II period as they signified retreat from the pressures and intrusions of the surrounding world.⁹

The weight of this symbolic significance led to the first of two ironies present in postwar lawn culture. A pristine lawn evoked nature’s romance even though suburbanites destroyed natural habitats to develop manicured greens.¹⁰ Homeowners invested time, energy, and money to avoid the social opprobrium visited on those who did not mow their grass.¹¹ There was nothing natural about it. In other words, the very sign of nature that would come to be valued by so many hosts and guests in the Fresh Air program actually represented a constructed artifice supported by mass-produced machines, petrochemicals, and urban industries.

Secondly, suburban homeowners invited African American and Latino children to frolic on lawns purchased with restrictive covenants. Such deeds of sale stipulated that a given property could be sold to or inhabited by white people only.¹² The provisions gained support from both private sellers and the U.S. government as the Federal Housing Administration sought to maintain racially homogenous communities in order to protect property values.¹³ Even though the Supreme Court outlawed the judicial enforcement of the practice with Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) and again in Barrows v. Jackson (1953), neither the courts nor the federal government sought to halt the actual practice of racially restrictive covenants until civil rights activists achieved legislative reforms in the 1960s.¹⁴ When black and brown Fresh Air children arrived to play on the grass, they entered territory from which they had been deliberately and intentionally barred.

Amid these unacknowledged ironies of nature and race, Fresh Air boosters and hosts exulted in claiming that the children had never before laid eyes on grass. For a span of forty years, host after host exclaimed that the children had “never seen” grass prior to arriving at their Fresh Air destination.¹⁵ Although the boosters moderated their claims upon occasion by noting it was “the first green grass” the child “may have ever seen” or “some of the youngsters had seen,” they repeated the assertion with impressive consistency.¹⁶ As late as 1979, a New York Times reporter again declared that many of the children on a country visit had “never seen a field of grass.”¹⁷ These recurrent claims of “firsts” likewise shared a common tone of awe and excitement in the children’s discovery. A 1943 report emphasized that watching children set eyes on grass for the first time “provided as much entertainment for the host as for the child.”¹⁸ Others were thrilled to offer children their first exposure to grass.¹⁹ As was the case with stories about the children’s first encounters with cows, boosters echoed one of the pre–World War II themes of natural wonder by underscoring how little knowledge the children had of the countryside.

Hosts waxed even more rhapsodic about the freedom and sensory immersion afforded by grass. A 1944 promotional film depicted a young girl turning cartwheels in a grassy field.²⁰ Reinforcing the nineteenth-century trope of children frolicking barefoot in nature, one host wrote a poem in 1955 about a guest who, “wondering at so much that grows, … scuffed the grass with his bare toes.”²¹ Another exclaimed in 1963 over the “abundance of clean, sweet grass in which to tumble and frolic.”²² Others noted that their guests asked permission to take off their shoes to walk in the grass, cavorted in lawns, and fondled blades of green.²³ A host from Vermont in 1961 described how Ruth, a six-year-old African American girl who purportedly had never before laid eyes on grass, would spend long hours lying prone in the yard caressing the grass with her fingers. The host’s children thought their guest “unbalanced to be so enthralled with green grass.”²⁴ A 1979 editorial in the New York Times captured the grassy rapture by quoting former Fresh Air child Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather. Puzo wrote that he “‘nearly went crazy’ with the joy of smelling the grass and flowers” while on a Fresh Air visit.²⁵

The hosts’ and boosters’ references to the children’s love of grass served as a metonym for nature as a whole. As was the case in other programs like the Boy Scouts and private summer camping programs, Fresh Air boosters waxed eloquent about the wonders of nature writ large, not just grassy plains.²⁶ Whether evoking burbling brooks, depicting summer breezes over a gleaming lake, or quoting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to describe whispering pines, promoters such as Fresh Air Fund public information director Richard Crandell saw only good in nature.²⁷ Here again Crandell and other professional Fresh Air promoters followed a script that reformers in the nineteenth century had used to romanticize the country amid the uncertainty of burgeoning industrialization.²⁸ Rather than curtailing their rhetoric in a purportedly less sentimental age, the Fresh Air boosters turned up the romantic tones. Nature had “eternal rhythms” that beat through “precious greenery” in, as New York governor Nelson A. Rockefeller claimed, a “wonderful and beautiful and wholesome” environment.²⁹ By the mid-1960s, the threat of a nature-consuming “megapolis … stretching from Boston to Richmond, Va.” prompted Fresh Air leaders to enlist children in conservation initiatives such as seeking out and destroying gypsy moths.³⁰ Such efforts only served to intensify the boosters’ praise of nature’s benefits.

Fresh Air guests in some cases confirmed claims made about them. One youngster started his description of a “wonderful” vacation by noting that “the grass was soft and clean.”³¹ Looking back on her experience as a child, a former Fresh Air participant recalled that the “most amazing thing” about being in the country was “being able to play in the grass and run outside.”³² Yet the children rarely claimed that they had never before seen grass. Like the boy at the Episcopal camp in 1956, Fresh Air visitors knew what grass looked like. None needed an explanation. They could exclaim, as one guest did in 1954, “Gee the grass is so green” without requiring anyone to point it out to them.³³ Their comments typically revolved around requesting permission to walk on the grass or exclaiming over the amount of grass rather than stating that they had never before laid eyes on it.³⁴

The children knew about grass because they came from cities that had well-developed park systems. According to the vast majority of the children’s hosts, the cities from which the children came had no discernible green space. As is explored in chapter 2, Fresh Air promoters prompted donations by creating a stark contrast between “garbage strewn alley[s]” and “the grassy green of a backyard.”³⁵ In the process of that comparison, they did not mention the green spaces available to many city children. Most major urban centers had park systems in place by 1920.³⁶ Initiated by Progressive Era reformers interested in establishing moral order in the face of what they deemed degeneracy and chaos in the city, the parks also served the purpose of exposing children and adults to nature in order to nourish the former and refresh the latter.³⁷ By the end of the 1900s, urban residents themselves celebrated parks where “the grass is always green” and frequented recreation areas filled with grass and trees.³⁸ Even though Judith Thiede, a Fresh Air organizer from Suffolk, New Jersey, may have meant well when she exclaimed in 1976, “The city is just not the place for children during the summer,” she ignored those children who were already feeling a “little grass under their feet” where they lived in the city.³⁹

The young urbanites further contested their hosts’ nature-centric claims by also letting their dislike of the country be known. Alternately annoyed and provoked by the deerflies and mosquitoes he encountered while visiting Pittsfield, Massachusetts, twelve-year-old Jack from New York City exclaimed in 1956, “Bugs…. Everywhere I go there’s bugs.”⁴⁰ Jack was not alone. Many children from the city complained about the insects they encountered in the country.⁴¹ Others were frightened by looming trees, a sight that caused one young girl to exclaim, “It’s so dark and scary here. Let’s go back!”⁴² Another young guest reported in 1961 of being frightened to walk barefoot on “dewy grass.”⁴³ A year later, still another ran frantic and breathless into his host’s kitchen and exclaimed, “A butterfly was chasing me!”⁴⁴ On the drive home from her pickup point in Connecticut in 1962, a young guest by the name of Ernestine confessed her fear of what might happen to her when first she encountered the unknown specter of fresh air. Referring to her host mother, she said, “Mommie, what do fresh air mean? I get kind of skeered.”⁴⁵ Although hosts often told such tales for humorous effect or to stress the children’s ignorance of rural life and their eventual acculturation to it, the children nonetheless expressed as much fear and dislike of nature as they did appreciation for it. At the very least, as in the case of the Fresh Air boy who wrinkled his nose at an odiferous cattle barn upon his arrival and wondered where all the fresh air had gone, guests found that their first encounter with nature—whether with grass or those that crawled between its blades—sometimes did not live up to its billing.⁴⁶

Reports of the children’s reaction to nature varied by race. Hosts attributed negative comments about trees, bugs, and farm odors almost exclusively to African American and Puerto Rican children. Of the negative comments featured thus far, all came from children of color except the anecdote about the butterfly in hot pursuit. Reports about white children’s encounters with nature invariably focused on the positive. In 1956, for example, a host mother in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, described how a New York City guest originally from Estonia would sit in the grass looking out at the “panorama of hills” for fifteen minutes at a time. When queried why he did so, he replied, “I like to look around at all the green stuff and thank God for letting me stay here a while.”⁴⁷ Hosts also reported on African American and Latino children who enjoyed picking blackberries, looking at the bright stars at night, and going on picnics.⁴⁸ However, the consistency with which the accounts centered on African American and Latino children pestered by bugs or afraid of looming trees suggests as much about racially selective reporting on the part of the hosts as it does about racially distinct reactions on the part of the children. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, as children of color came to dominate the Fresh Air guests and boosters sought to promote their programs in the midst of that racial sea change, stories about the children’s encounters with nature—both good and bad—proliferated. In the midst of that increase in nature-centric reporting, the hosts did lock on to dark-skinned city kids complaining about insects.

The children thus shaped Fresh Air by both reveling in nature and being revolted by it. Both responses provided program boosters with publicity material. When children delighted in all things natural, news reports, advertisements, and brochures teemed with their quotations; a donating public that grew every more nostalgic for rural Edens responded enthusiastically. When other children spoke their minds about the damp, buzzing, smelly, and grassy outdoors, publicity pieces suggested that the children would soon adapt and learn to appreciate green lawns and dense woods no matter how buggy. In both cases the adults returned to accounts of children enraptured with grass. The Fresh Air Fund even introduced a new logo in 1958 based on the impression of a child’s footprint in the grass.⁴⁹ The children had left footprints on the lawn, but some did so while running away from nature rather than toward it.

Those who developed the 1974 ad campaign that riffed on grass as marijuana appealed to rural nostalgia based on the assumption that the children would not get the joke. The children were, as the ad proclaimed, “nice city kids.”⁵⁰ The ad showed them in a classic stance of unburdened abandon running hand in hand across a grass-covered plain. It suggested that the grass would tickle their toes. It evoked them walking barefoot. Such children would be free of the knowledge that “pot,” “weed,” “reefer,” and “Mary Jane” also went by “grass.” The gift of a “clear head” from country exposure would, the ad suggested, keep them from the influences of real drugs. Evidently the ad designers either did not know about or chose to ignore the highly publicized drug raid of a Fresh Air camp in Baltimore two years previously in which state troopers arrested sixteen counselors and the camp director for “smoking marijuana all summer.”⁵¹ If the children knew about “really good grass” of the High Times kind, the ad would lose its appeal. The children needed to be presented as naïve for the humor to succeed.

Yet such naïveté was unlikely among the children but not among the adults. Children like those featured in the ad knew far more about urban realities than did their hosts. Few by the 1970s would have been ignorant of drug culture slang.⁵² Yet the boosters and program promoters—as well as the publicity team that crafted the Forbes ad—seem to have been convinced of the children’s ignorance. However, rural hosts knew far less about the city in this instance than did their urban guests. By sending the message that children vetted by the program would be naïve, unthreatening, and malleable, such ads obscured the adult hosts’ ignorance about the children’s world. As the following section will show, the young travelers from the city shaped the program that they loved not only by expressing both their enjoyment of and displeasure with nature but also by teaching their hosts about race and the urban worlds from which they came.

Color

Those who promoted Fresh Air programs had long taken pride in their race relations record. In 1954 Frederick Lewis shared a peer’s praise with his board members. The executive director of the New York Urban League had complimented the Fresh Air program for “doing the most outstanding job in the country” of integrating its camps. Lewis began his end-of-year report with that accolade.⁵³ Others joined Lewis in expressing confidence that Fresh Air exchanges could bring about racial change. An organizer for the Fresh Air program of the Community Renewal Society of Chicago claimed in 1968 that the program was the “best way to get to know the Negro.”⁵⁴ Others averred that the programs were “the most positive form of charity in this country [, in which] there are absolutely no barriers of race, color or creed,” and that they offered the “best possible experience” for blacks and whites “to live together and get to know one another.”⁵⁵

Such tributes rarely took into account what the African American, Latino, and Asian American children experienced when they arrived in white hosting communities. Gregory and William, ages nine and five, respectively, traveled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, from New York in 1963. While staying with their hosts, the Steger family, the two boys went shopping with their host mother and sister. At the store, they overheard two other shoppers exclaim, “I wonder if they’re her children—isn’t it terrible” and “I bet they are Fresh Air kids. I wouldn’t want them sleeping in my beds.” Others offered similar comments during visits to the local playground. As their host mother admitted, the two African American boys would not have been allowed to swim at the local Hershey Pool only a few years previously.⁵⁶

The adults’ claims and the children’s experiences together describe what supporters nonetheless insisted was the dominant race relations model of the civil rights era. To be certain, Fresh Air programs brought more white, rural people from the Northeast and Midwest into intimate contact with people of color than any other social organization, governmental program, or grassroots initiative. Although the largest of the Fresh Air programs prolonged the transition, once it made the shift the Fresh Air Fund joined the dozens of other programs that had focused on racial and ethnic exchange from their founding. Boosters took pride in a program that could accurately boast of being more intimate than schools, more far-reaching than the military, more integrated than churches, and more sustained than marches. Fresh Air boosters touted a model of one way that race relations could work.

Yet critics pointed out the limits on integration inherent in the Fresh Air model. They noted that even as it brought racial groups together, the programs required long-distance travel, set up power imbalances, and curtailed the length of interaction. Moreover, black social workers decried the psychological damage done by immersing children of color in white communities where they ended up with debilitating “white psyches.”⁵⁷ Despite acknowledging this criticism, as the programs became more integrated, administrators kept the same model in place. Although program promoters like Lewis touted their race relations record, they had much less to say about the complex, problematic, and contradictory process of black and brown children teaching white adults about racism in the midst of an often racially threatening environment.

A review of the history of interracial contact within the Fresh Air movement brings the dissatisfaction of Black Power activists into a new light. The children of color who began to populate the Fresh Air ranks at the onset of World War II entered a program dominated by white, impoverished children. In his original vision for the program, Willard Parsons emphasized the spiritual purity of the poor, malnourished immigrant children he sent to the country. Progressive Era reformers turned more toward civic instruction of untutored immigrants but continued to focus on the children’s virtue in the midst of a blighted, foreigner-infused city.⁵⁸ By contrast, African American, Latino, and Asian American children were an afterthought, a difficult but necessary demand of doing business in an increasingly multihued city. To be a Fresh Air child at the start of World War II was to be presented as spiritually and ethically faultless because of one’s prepubescence and openness to assimilation and instruction. The shift from this class- and ethnicity-based rhetoric of innocence to a race-based narrative would be decades in the making.

The transition to a program defined by black and brown children thus got off to a slow start. Under way already by the 1920s, the efforts of the historic black newspaper Amsterdam News to fund Fresh Air trips for the children of Harlem opened a limited number of pathways for African American children to spend time in the country at friendly facilities, but these efforts reached relatively few. Most white-run camps, with the exception of those “red” camps affiliated with communist and socialist groups, excluded black and brown children from joining their programs through the 1930s and beyond.⁵⁹ During the 1940s no significant Fresh Air programs existed in the Midwest, and the few programs active in the South served only white children.⁶⁰ By 1947, only 30 percent of the Fund’s 10,000 sponsored children were African American, with no mention made of Asian American or Latino children in the mix.⁶¹ Even though city-based recreation programs run by the National Council of Churches, the YMCA, and private organizations catered directly to African American and Latino youths, administrators at the Fresh Air Fund touted their race relations record only in the more controlled and less intimate campground programs.⁶² According to camp program directors and home-hosting organizers in 1948, “race, creed or color” was never a “matter of any moment.” In fact, despite the lower number of invitations for African American children, promoters still claimed “many whites prefer Negro children for these vacations.”⁶³

The social reality for people of color proved far harsher than the rosy picture painted by Fresh Air promoters. The tensions present from the ongoing influx of African American families from the South into major urban centers like New York and Detroit boiled over in riots and rebellions. Forty people died in Detroit in 1942 when a white mob attempted to take back housing set aside for black families.⁶⁴ Despite the release of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma in 1944, which asserted that the problem of race resided with white prejudice rather than black inferiority, and a growing consensus in the scientific community to expose the “evils of racism,” popular notions about black inferiority remained.⁶⁵ Even in the aftermath of the 1967 urban rebellions, when the Kerner Commission faulted governmental agencies for failing to provide adequate education, housing, and social services to urban populations, elected officials invested more in the police than in increasing economic opportunities.⁶⁶

The racial tensions present in northern urban centers sprang from major demographic shifts. Even as suburban developers used restrictive covenants to set up white enclaves, African Americans migrated to the city. From 1950 to 1970, five million African Americans moved into metropolitan neighborhoods at the same time that seven million white people left them. In the first ten years of that time, New York’s African American population increased by 46 percent while the white population dropped by 7 percent; Chicago’s black population skyrocketed by 65 percent while the white population plummeted by 13 percent. During the same time the Puerto Rican population climbed in Chicago and New York, and Asian Americans settled in large numbers in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.⁶⁷

The initial shift toward serving children of color began in the 1940s and 1950s, concurrent with changing urban demographics. In the broader camping community, some northern groups like the New York City YMCA founded interracial camps in 1944 while southern YMCA affiliates integrated their camps much later, in at least one instance not until the mid-1960s.⁶⁸ In the Herald Tribune camping program, participating partners signed a policy statement in 1950 indicating that they would help ensure that the Fund would not sponsor “either an all-white or all-Negro camp population at any camp at any time.”⁶⁹ Although staff abided by the integration policy through the period, in 1951 they considered establishing “Camp George Washington Carver” for black children but never realized the plan.⁷⁰ Even though African American children had fewer options for attending camp than did white children, the call for racial integration was too strong during the period for staff to create a separate facility.⁷¹ Other Fresh Air camping initiatives such as the Warrensdale program near Pittsburgh also integrated their facilities in the early 1950s.⁷²

However, staff at the Fresh Air Fund found it more difficult to integrate homes. Despite their efforts to “encourage invitations for Negroes and Puerto Ricans,” by 1953 the ratio of white to “dark skinned youngsters” was only five to one.⁷³ Through the decade, hosts could indicate their preference for a child’s race, a practice that, although discouraged by staff, hampered racial integration.⁷⁴ Other Fresh Air programs founded in the 1950s such as a program run by Mennonites in southeast Pennsylvania also had selection clauses and, as a result, transitioned slowly to an integrated service model. Interestingly, on a local basis enough children of color had begun to frequent white homes that by 1956 at least one reporter assumed that Fresh Air programs served “mostly Negro and Puerto Ricans,” an assertion that may have been true in a few communities but had not yet become the dominant reality by the end of the 1950s.⁷⁵

Many Fresh Air promoters lumped African American and Puerto Rican children together in the same way the reporter did in 1956. Although administrators kept track of four primary racial groups—white, black, Hispanic, and Asian—for statistical purposes, they wrote about and referred to essentially two groups: white and black. Frequently, hosts made little effort to distinguish the rich cultural diversity within black and Latino communities. The common practice of isolating single guests in host homes further racialized the children.

The slow move to integrate camps and homes matched national integration efforts. Following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, many white parents in the North and South opposed the racial integration of their children’s schools. Despite the success of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, positive media coverage, and northern political support, those white people required to integrate their social space did so reluctantly or not at all. A declaration of support for integrating a southern city’s public transportation system did not always translate into an invitation to dinner for an African American acquaintance.

Fresh Air hosts overcame their initial reluctance and helped transform the hosting programs into the primary site of intimate racial exchange by the end of the 1960s. In 1965 only a third of the children sponsored by the Herald Tribune Fund came from white families.⁷⁶ The following year Friendly Town coordinator Ralph B. Dwinell reported that the Herald Tribune had served more “non-white” children than ever before as he noted participation rates of “35 percent Negro; 28 percent Puerto Rican; … and 3 percent Chinese.”⁷⁷ Although the Herald Tribune kept the racial selection option in place through the 1960s, by 1968 enough adults had become convinced of the benefits of hosting African American and Latino children that staffers reported receiving “more invitations for blacks than for whites, except below the Mason and Dixon line”; most of their camps had also become dominated by “black and Puerto Rican children.”⁷⁸ Other Fresh Air programs founded in the 1960s focused exclusively or primarily on African American children. Programs in Chicago and Seattle joined programs such as the Ames, Iowa, effort that transported “Negro children from urban slums and place[d] them [for] two weeks with white families in other towns.”⁷⁹ By 1966, a reporter from the Amsterdam News thought it significant to mention only that the Herald Tribune Fund sent “over 17,000 Negro and Puerto Rican children” to the country.⁸⁰ Although the overwhelming majority of hosts continued to be white, middle-class, heterosexual, two-parent families located in racially homogenous suburbs and rural communities, in 1969 the Cleveland-based program featured an African American host of an African American child.⁸¹ No longer a Fresh Air sideline, race had become the programs’ cause célèbre.

So central had race relations become to the Fresh Air model that program promoters began to suggest that the rural hosting programs could calm racial foment. Urban dwellers in the Northeast, Midwest, and West witnessed large-scale racially motivated rebellions marked by destruction of both private and public property. Whether Cambridge in 1963, Watts in 1965, Newark in 1967, or Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City, Washington, D.C., and others in 1968, urban unrest rocked the nation. To stop the “racial violence,” those committed to the Fresh Air model such as Jonathan Dwyer of Bennington, Vermont, suggested in 1968 that “Negroes from New York and white Vermonters … live together and get to know one another.” According to Dwyer, such contact would end “blind prejudice” because Fresh Air children had never “tried to burn down any buildings in our fair state.”⁸² That same year, Herald Tribune Fresh Air president Blancke Noyes used the occasion of a fund-raising letter to assert that sending “Negro and Puerto Rican” children to the country could “prevent … pent-up frustrations from erupting during the hot summer months.”⁸³

The racial violence of the 1960s segued into a decade of normalizing home-based racial contact through Fresh Air ventures. During the 1970s, the term “Fresh Air child” became synonymous with a black or brown urban visitor in nearly every area of the country. By 1978, the Herald Tribune program reported that black and Puerto Rican children constituted 85 percent of its served population while programs in Seattle and Chicago focused exclusively on “minority” and “negro” children being hosted in white homes.⁸⁴ The Fresh Air movement had arrived at the racial paradigm that it would hold through the decade and beyond. Press accounts and accompanying photographs in Montana, New York, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Vermont focused on white host children and adults in proximity to dark-skinned children from the city.⁸⁵ Because of the legacy of racially segregated suburbs and white-dominated hosting committees, few African American or Latino hosts followed the example of the black Cleveland host in 1969. Whether displaying children in the act of fishing, eating food, or walking side by side through a parking lot, reporters and many cartoonists turned repeatedly to scenes of inoffensive integration in which African American children and white hosts figured prominently (see figure 5).⁸⁶

FIGURE 5. “At right, Melanie Hinkle of Penn Laird (right) shepherds her new friend Bernadette Dorsey toward the family car. Melanie is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Hinkle” (original caption). Used by permission of the Daily News-Record, Harrisonburg, VA (“Holiday Begins,” Daily News-Record, July 14, 1978, 13).

So intensely did promoters focus on racial integration that they appear to have forgotten their history. Although the Fresh Air Fund—no longer affiliated with the then defunct Herald Tribune—continued its practice of allowing hosts to designate the race of their prospective guests until 1971, five years later a reporter, clearly drawing on materials provided by the Fund’s publicity staff, claimed that the Fund had provided “one million vacations for boys and girls, based on need and without sectarian or racial restrictions.”⁸⁷ The claim disregarded the decades-long practice in which staff from the Fund had allowed hosts to restrict race and religion even though other programs had long discontinued or never instituted the practice. Despite efforts of administrators in cities like Cleveland and New York to recruit African American and interracial hosts to the program, throughout the 1970s the program remained committed to a white host/black or brown guest model.⁸⁸

The Fresh Air programs that became linked with white suburbanites hosting black and brown city children based their publicity on a string of heartwarming anecdotes. Consistent with the postwar celebration of liberal cultural pluralism that prompted white people to develop interracial relationships, by the middle of the 1950s Fresh Air publicists had begun to promote the racial benefits of their programs.⁸⁹ According to the accounts, African American and Latino children and their hosts shared playthings, held hands, and accepted each other without condescension or paternalism.⁹⁰ A 1956 host mother reported that her visitor’s “shy smile” immediately rid her of all race prejudice.⁹¹ Even as the 1960s push for school integration gave way before Supreme Court reversals in the 1970s, the signs of happy integration continued. Whether the children who won over a prejudiced neighbor in 1968, those who referred to their hosts as their “family” in 1973, or the guest named Flip Bailey who shared “secrets and stuff” with her host sister Lisa Cantella in 1977, these African American and Latino children righted racial wrongs, crossed racial boundaries, and solved racially tinged problems during two-week country visits.⁹²

Yet some children encountered a very different racial landscape through their participation in black-run summer camps. In the main, black families in the city expressed enthusiasm about camping yet had few options to offer their children.⁹³ Rather than spend time in a white suburbanite home or at a camp run by any one of the many white-dominated Fresh Air programs, a small selection of African American children attended one of the few camps run and funded by the black community. In New York, for example, wealthier black children visited exclusive health resorts such as the Perdeux Health Farm, Donhaven Country Club, and the Nungesser Chateau.⁹⁴ Those with fewer financial resources went to camps run or sponsored by the Harlem Children’s Fresh Air Fund or participated in camps sponsored by evangelical groups like Camp Pioneer in Pearl, Mississippi.⁹⁵ Although often similar in form to white-run camps, the black-run camps offered children a substantively different experience. Two camps—one that catered to wealthier black children and one that served African American children from middle- and lower-class homes—reveal the racial differences.

Camp Atwater in Brookfield, Massachusetts, accommodated the black elite. Founded in 1921 by Dr. William De Berry as St. John’s Camp, the retreat center changed names in 1926 to honor Dr. David Fisher Atwater, a highly respected physician in the Brookfield community and father of major donor Mary Atwater.⁹⁶ Through the 1960s, the camp offered elite children of lawyers, judges, and other black professionals a venue where they could socialize with their peers.⁹⁷ In 1954 a columnist described the cachet ascribed to Camp Atwater alums by asserting that “[b]eing a Camp Atwater alumnus is the equivalent of being a Harvard grad, a Yale grad and goodness knows what all rolled into one.”⁹⁸ Another reporter noted in 1961 that “a certain amount of distinction” afforded those who attended the camp.⁹⁹ A parent added in 1966 that Atwater campers represented the “cream of the crop” from the black community.¹⁰⁰ In addition to offering social connections for the youths, Camp Atwater staff provided recreation opportunities seldom seen at white-run Fresh Air camps, such as ballet, tennis, and horseback riding.¹⁰¹ Although staff at Atwater scheduled sex-segregated camp sessions and focused on outdoor activities as did Fresh Air staff, Atwater personnel allowed campers to attend until they turned eighteen, awarded “cultured” conduct, and organized camper alumni reunions.¹⁰² Atwater personnel focused on creating an environment in which black children felt at ease and where counselors from their communities who were themselves often Atwater alums provided positive role models.

Camp Bryton Rock in Allaben, New York, offered camping opportunities for middle- and low-income children in a similar African American enclave nestled in the Catskill Mountains. Founded and directed by Reginald and Lillybelle McHugh, the camp served as an extension of their ministry at First Emmanuel, a congregation that worshipped in nearby Kingston but had deep connections in Harlem.¹⁰³ Founded in the mid-1930s, the camp brought together children who could not otherwise afford to leave the city for a summer camp outing and also those whose parents had the resources to cover the summer fee. Like Camp Atwater, Camp Bryton Rock provided a similar array of outdoor activities, including swimming, baseball, camping, tennis, and horseback riding.¹⁰⁴ Although Bryton Rock staff did not segregate their camps by gender, like Atwater personnel they offered multiple-week stays and invited campers back through their teen years. Listed as a facility friendly to African American families in the Green Book guide for “Negro travelers,” Bryton Rock not only hired counselors who themselves came from Harlem—including several who would go on to distinguished careers such as Harry Belafonte and Cicely Tyson—but also took children on field trips to learn about black historical leaders such as abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth.¹⁰⁵ Beginning in the 1960s, Rev. and Mrs. McHugh also brought a smaller group of children from the camp to stay with them for a few weeks in the exclusive Martha’s Vineyard resort community.¹⁰⁶

The differences between black-run camps like Atwater and Bryton Rock and white-run facilities like the Fresh Air Fund’s Sharpe Reservation run deeper than racial demographics. At black-run camps, children and teenagers encountered adults who acknowledged, celebrated, and fostered their racial identities and who assumed they would succeed in life. Counselors and administrators at white-run camps also worked hard to foster positive self-images in their charges but usually did so while ignoring racial identities. Yet, in addition to providing an implicitly inclusive environment, black-run camps rarely debased the city. Promotional materials for Atwater and Bryton Rock touted the benefits of their respective natural settings but did not degrade the city in the process. Some African American leaders did engage in antiurban rhetoric, such as the Pittsburgh Courier columnist who in 1965 lauded rural communities with their “wide open spaces and fresh air not available in the slums.”¹⁰⁷ By contrast, a 1960 advertisement for Bryton Rock simply focused on the numerous activities offered by a “Camp That Inspires Youth.”¹⁰⁸ In the same way, promotional articles about Camp Atwater in both 1941 and 1961 made no mention of the city’s deficiencies but instead focused on a long list of the activities enjoyed by campers, including “tennis, archery, riflery, croquet, swimming, fencing, volleyball, baseball, folk dancing and other games.”¹⁰⁹

The small slice of Fresh Air children who attended black-run camps opens a window into a different racial camping experience. To be certain, only a fraction of the African American children who spent time in summer camps ended up in black-run programs. In 1965, for example, the Fresh Air Fund sent 4,000 African American children on home stays and another 800 to the Fund’s Sharpe Reservation campgrounds.¹¹⁰ Other Fresh Air groups sent thousands more black children to white homes that year.¹¹¹ By comparison, Camp Atwater averaged well under 500 campers in its entire season.¹¹² An even smaller percentage of African American children attended black-run camps after white-run facilities began to integrate in the 1950s and 1960s.¹¹³ Nonetheless, those who attended black-run camps faced far less racial discrimination and bias against the city than those who ventured into white-led space.

Given the relative lack of camps like Atwater and Bryton Rock, some African American families chose to support white-led Fresh Air efforts. Members of Antioch Baptist, one of the oldest African American Baptist congregations in Cleveland, contributed money and clothing to the Fresh Air program in 1967.¹¹⁴ In New York, the Amsterdam News, having long since discontinued its own Fresh Air project once the Herald Tribune began serving African American children in earnest, held fund-raisers for and helped publicize the programs of the Fresh Air Fund by the end of the 1960s.¹¹⁵ Other socialites from New York’s African American community participated in planning a Fresh Air fund-raiser in 1969 after the Fresh Air Fund board indicated its interest in “attaining funds from minority groups” three years previously.¹¹⁶ Although such overtly integrated fund-raising efforts appear to have peaked at the end of the 1960s, these fund-raising initiatives show that at least some adult members of the African American community cared enough about Fresh Air ventures to contribute both their children and their money. In the main, however, these more well-heeled African American boosters did not register their children for Fresh Air vacations.

Some mothers of Fresh Air children did join leaders from the African American and Latino communities in affirming the programs. Boosters touted their accolades with enthusiasm. The racially focused testimonies of mothers of Fresh Air children received some of the most sustained and positive coverage in Fresh Air press accounts from the middle of the 1960s onward. Following the urban street violence of the summer of 1964, several newspapers reprinted an article featuring excerpts of a letter from Marian Kirton of Brooklyn, New York, praising her son George’s hosts for opening their “door to Negro children” and, by doing so, demonstrating that “white people, like every other people on earth, are not all alike—there are good and there are bad.”¹¹⁷ Kirton’s commentary echoed many such post–World War II declarations of the need to help young people lose their prejudices.¹¹⁸ Other mothers of Fresh Air children in the late 1960s and 1970s acknowledged that they held doubts about “do gooder” programs run by white families in the suburbs but concluded in the end that the programs would be safe and beneficial for their children.¹¹⁹ Reports likewise mentioned mothers of Fresh Air children who commented on bursts of piety, improved manners, and general exclamations of delight from their children upon return from a Fresh Air visit in the country.¹²⁰ Although such positive testimonies from Fresh Air mothers appeared less frequently than did accounts from the host mothers, boosters widely distributed comments made by mothers of Fresh Air children. Notably, comments from fathers of Fresh Air children rarely if ever found their way into promotional pieces.

Yet the most effusive claims about the racial benefits of Fresh Air programs came not from the home-based initiatives but the white-led Fresh Air camps. Already in the 1940s, New York’s Union Settlement Association proudly documented the integration of its camps.¹²¹ In step with other white camps interested in integration at the time, the Fresh Air Fund received praise from the Anti-Defamation League in 1954 for the “absence of prejudice” in its staff and the ease with which its camps had become racially integrated.¹²² Not only did camp staff claim that they brought together “whites, Negroes, and Puerto Ricans” from an embattled Manhattan high school “without the slightest difficulty whatsoever,” they also asserted that they fostered positive relationships between Arab and Jewish staff members.¹²³ One year later, a report on a camp run by the United Neighborhood Houses of New York avowed that its interracial staff “worked together in friendship and warmth of inter-personal relations.”¹²⁴ Publicity materials from the camps provided ample evidence that white and black children did indeed dance, swim, ride horses, chase frogs, and practice archery together.¹²⁵ Although the assertions of interracial harmony among campers dropped off after the 1960s, when African American and Latino children had come to dominate most of the Fresh Air camps and “problems of the city [and] … of race” began to surface, publicists still lauded the positive relationships between white counselors and their black and brown charges.¹²⁶

Other evidence belies these testimonies about interracial bliss. Camps had long been sites of minstrel shows, segregation, and overt racism.¹²⁷ For example, a 1920 “Camp Standards” manual for the United Neighborhood Houses of New York included instructions on how to play a dodgeball variation in which “the person hit is the ‘nigger baby.’”¹²⁸ During the pre–World War II period, white camp children also played games such as “white man and Indian” and “nigger-in-the-hole.”¹²⁹ Although directors had discontinued some of the most overtly racist practices by the end of the 1940s, a 1953 study by the National Social Welfare Assembly’s Committee on Camping documented widespread ignorance and naïveté about interracial issues among white staff, underrepresentation of blacks and Jews in leadership positions, and overrepresentation of the same groups in food service jobs. Home visits often compounded the situation. In 1958 a social worker for the Hudson Guild commented, “In actuality, Herald Tribune Friendly Towns are not so friendly” because “most friendly town folk apparently prefer White children.” He went on to describe efforts to “pass off Spanish children as ‘white’” so that they could receive vacations.¹³⁰ More generally, through the 1970s people of color who visited rural white communities encountered widespread racial prejudice and ignorance.¹³¹

Despite publicity practices focused on filtering negative experiences before they appeared in print, some less than ideal references did make it into the public record. A few reports only hinted at troubles born of interracial contact. When pressed, hosts and administrators would occasionally admit to “problems.”¹³² Although rarely being specific, those who did expand on the nature of the difficulties prefaced their comments by noting that they were “very minor” or the “usual challenges” faced by young children.¹³³ In 1976 one reporter attributed the negative experiences of a few children to “a kind of cultural shock” triggered by displacement and exposure to an unfamiliar environment.¹³⁴ If more-entrenched issues remained after a child’s return home, the Cleveland-based program sought to bring host and guest families together for face-to-face conversation.¹³⁵ According to these accounts, interracial problems that emerged during Fresh Air visits barely deserved mention or could be easily managed.

Those who dismissed the racial issues as minor or irrelevant failed to grasp how often Fresh Air children encountered overt prejudice and racism during their visits. The children entered communities inundated with advertising images that depicted African American children as overly sexualized, vacuous, unintelligent, and suited only for menial labor.¹³⁶ On the virulent end of the spectrum, in 1961 one African American child listened at the pickup point as his assigned host in Plattsburgh, New York, exclaimed to the local Fresh Air organizer, “You didn’t tell us this kid was gonna be no nigger.”¹³⁷ Although another host intervened and brought the child to her home, the trauma remained. Oral histories from former Fresh Air children make clear that local residents frequently used racial epithets and hate speech in front of the visiting children.¹³⁸ Other incidents proved just as troubling. One resident from a small town in Michigan registered his opposition to a Fresh Air program in 1960 because he thought that the African American children visiting from New York might relocate to his neighborhood on a permanent basis. At the same location, the managers of a local beach banned an African American visitor from entering the water.¹³⁹ In New Jersey in 1964, the parents of neighborhood children prohibited them from playing with two Fresh Air visitors of “mixed Puerto Rican and Negro parentage” and declared that “under no circumstances” were the guests “to put as much as one foot” on their property.¹⁴⁰ At Hudson Guild Farm that same year, staff rued the racial animosity faced by African Americans from other Fresh Air participants.¹⁴¹ Children also encountered hostile stares while out in public, overheard crank calls by residents opposed to the program, suffered racist comments from adult neighbors, and listened to other children call them names.¹⁴² Although some guests did not report overt prejudice, the prevalence of accounts like these even in reports meant to promote the programs suggests that most children encountered racial animus at some point in their stay.¹⁴³

The children who faced overt prejudice also dealt with hosts who treated them as exotic. Whether commenting on a “mouthful of white, white teeth,” the visiting children’s use of “different expressions,” their musical talents, or their consumption of melons and corn on the cob, hosts frequently emphasized their Latino and African American guests’ otherness based on common racial stereotypes.¹⁴⁴ The few children of Chinese descent who participated in Fresh Air programs received extra attention throughout the 1950s and 1960s as promoters featured them prominently in articles and photos.¹⁴⁵

The Fresh Air guests who encountered overt racism, stereotypes, and paternalistic attitudes responded on their own terms. Rather than passive innocents unable to shape the environments in which they lived, the children appear as informed and often cagey actors who dealt with their hosts’ preconceptions by instructing the adults about the realities of race in America. In short, the children influenced those around them as much as they were themselves influenced. At a time when children had begun to resist adult supervision of their play and form strong peer groups, Fresh Air children from Latino and African American communities shared a common transcript in responding to the racism they encountered.¹⁴⁶

Most hosts incorrectly assumed that their guests knew little about life in general and the realities of race in particular. In a striking display of ignorance about racial identity development, one reporter claimed that a seven-year-old African American girl from the east side of Manhattan would have no awareness of “race tension, of sit-downs and wade-ins, of manifestations of prejudice.”¹⁴⁷ Contrary to the reporter’s assertions, children as young as three and four from all racial groups throughout the twentieth century learned to respond to racial, physical, and cultural markers, a skill far more developed and sophisticated in children of color than in white children.¹⁴⁸ While comments from white host children about the “nice tan” of their visiting guests ring true, the assertion that children of color who traveled to the suburbs knew little about the dynamics of race attests to host naïveté.¹⁴⁹ A more informed account comes from an unnamed Fresh Air girl who told her chaperone that the house she would be staying in was “white.” The chaperone at first queried if the girl referred to paint color. “No, that’s not what I mean,” she replied. “The family I’m going to is white.”¹⁵⁰

Such racially aware children countered racial stereotypes by first and foremost modeling the respectable behavior taught them by their parents. During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some African American families resisted the effects of Jim Crow and racial prejudice by embracing white, middle-class standards of propriety.¹⁵¹ In this way, proponents of “proper” conduct claimed that those who embodied respectability thwarted racial stereotypes that described African Americans and Latinos as lazy, unkempt, undereducated, and ill mannered (see figure 6).¹⁵² A majority of the Fresh Air children selected for the country visits had imbibed the ethic of respectability and demonstrated it during their home visits. Prior to departure, the children’s parents gave final instructions on good manners and made sure that the children arrived on site wearing their best outfits.¹⁵³ Photos from the era show African American children greeting their hosts while wearing their “Sunday suit” or dress.¹⁵⁴

One Fresh Air registrar speculated that some African American parents sent their children to relatives in the South rather than white suburbs in the North because it required less money to be spent on clothing.¹⁵⁵ Those who found their way into white homes took their parents’ instructions seriously as hosts and counselors commented on how clean, neat, “well mannered,” “obedient,” “considerate,” and “extremely polite” the children were, comments that recurred in every Fresh Air location from the onset of World War II through the end of the 1970s.¹⁵⁶

FIGURE 6. In 1960 Fresh Air host Mark Stucky of the Newton, Kansas, community shakes hands with Thomas Flowers from Gulfport, Mississippi, as Doris Zerger Stucky—Mark’s mother—watches. Used by permission of the Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, KS (Mennonite Library & Archives, Bethel, Kansas: Photo collection; folder: “Mississippi—Gulfport”).

The children’s careful conduct changed many of the hosts’ perceptions. For example, one Iowan host parent admitted in 1968 to thinking that “all children from slum areas had no manners” and “were all gangster types” but found that her Fresh Air guest was “better behaved than our own children.”¹⁵⁷ Other hosts expressed similar surprise that their guests did not exhibit “ignorance, resentment, or sloth” but rather “faultless manners” and a “passion for cleanliness.”¹⁵⁸ Another host mother testified that the children’s “manners are unbelievable” given the context of their upbringing and, as a result, other hosts should not “be afraid their children will be ‘polluted’” by the Fresh Air visitors.¹⁵⁹

The children maintained their polite demeanor even when refusing to reveal details of their home environment. In the main, hosts rarely had direct contact with Fresh Air parents. As a result, the children fielded multiple queries, many of them quite pointed, as hosts attempted to glean information about the children’s home life. For the most part, the children politely refused to answer, a decision that hosts interpreted as stubbornness, mistrust, or introversion.¹⁶⁰ In their silence, the children again followed their parents’ instructions. As one former Fresh Air child later revealed, “Our parents had prepared us for the questions: ‘Any questions they ask you about your home life, don’t answer them. If they persist, tell them what goes on in our house stays in our house.’”¹⁶¹ Given that many of the children’s parents had to negotiate the often dehumanizing and frequently racist demands of the social service system, they knew that a stray word about a detail of home life could have direct financial ramifications if a social worker overheard it.¹⁶² The children recognized that they needed to keep quiet about what happened at home, a pattern that continued at least into the 1980s.¹⁶³

Such circumspection could also be found in the Fresh Air children’s response to local law enforcement officials. Hilton Cobb Jr., a seven-year-old African American Brooklynite visiting Syracuse, New York, in 1965, lost his way while bike riding. Having observed Cobb’s confusion, adult onlookers flagged down a police cruiser. Despite the officers’ willingness to escort him around the neighborhood, Cobb “refused to go with [the] police,” opting instead to drive through the neighborhood with an adult who had earned his trust.¹⁶⁴ Cobb and others like him knew that law enforcement officials regularly harassed, intimidated, and used violence against African American and Latino residents in their home communities.¹⁶⁵

Fresh Air guests further challenged their hosts’ preconceived notions by adhering to their own ethical framework. One host summed up the differing worldviews when she noted that her guests “had very different ideas about the meaning of words such as ‘cheat’ and ‘fair’ and ‘share’ and ‘lie.’”¹⁶⁶ Those differing ideas showed up most often around notions of private property. One family accused a Fresh Air guest of having stolen a tie clasp even though the boy asserted that he had only borrowed it and had not taken it home.¹⁶⁷ After they found the tie clasp, the family later admitted that their guest had been telling the truth.¹⁶⁸ The children in these instances knew about theft: Although a few admitted to pilfering an item of sentimental value, more commonly the children had themselves been robbed.¹⁶⁹ One girl brought home a bicycle given to her by her hosts only to have it stolen three days after she returned to the city.¹⁷⁰ Other Fresh Air children expressed amazement that their hosts left toys and other personal possessions outside at night with no fear that someone would steal them.¹⁷¹ Here again, the children held their ground when accused of theft and attempted to instruct their hosts on how to take better care of personal property.

Taken together, the children’s respectable behavior, refusal to share information about their home environments, mistrust of police, and defense of their ideas about personal property constituted a racial code of conduct. Under this code, children from African American and Latino communities responded to the racial prejudice and naïveté of their white rural and suburban hosts by being polite, withholding information, mistrusting the police, and thwarting theft. By contrast, white guests—regardless of their economic class—exhibited a wider spread of manners, shared more information about their home lives, trusted the police more consistently, and seldom discussed personal property. Although neither written nor formalized, this code among children of color remained remarkably consistent during the height of the civil rights movement. The children further refined their conduct through a robust rumor network built up by returning children sharing their experiences with those not yet departed for the country.¹⁷² The children cooperated when asked to do so but also knew when to stand their ground, draw back, or remain silent. As they spoke with older children who had experience with Fresh Air vacations, listened to their parents give them instructions about how to relate to white people, and talked with one another about what had transpired in these strange, white, rural homes, they responded with a consistency across region and time all the more remarkable for the generally chaotic and unorganized nature of children’s interactions with adults.

This racial code of conduct often prompted the children to become teachers for their adult hosts. For much of the twentieth century, white novelists, reporters, and advertisers portrayed African American children as impish tricksters impervious to pain, adorable playmates devoid of intelligence, or simply as passive receptacles, waiting to receive charity.¹⁷³ The shift to viewing black children as instructors to white adults departed from this prior practice. By the 1950s, hosts had begun to reference the racial lessons they learned from their guests, a pattern that continued through the 1970s. Whether offering glowing testimony about how much they gained from hosting a child of a different race or simply stating that their children’s worldviews had been stretched, host after host noted that bringing African American and Latino children into their homes changed their perspective.¹⁷⁴ As one organizer declared, changes in the hosts’ “narrow point of view” took place because “the [Fresh Air] children are doing it.”¹⁷⁵ Some hosts said that they became color-blind; others said that they recognized the universality of the human condition; still others said that they learned about their own prejudice and that of other white people.¹⁷⁶ A group of white suburbanites even traveled to Harlem in 1968 to see if they could recruit African American members to relocate to their community in Long Island. The African American Fresh Air children who had visited them had helped them realize that they and their children “were being deprived of black culture” and therefore were “impoverished, culturally.”¹⁷⁷

The shift toward white host education corresponded with a growing awareness of white complicity in racial oppression. Stemming from the decades-long struggle of African American organizers and educators like Mary McCleod Bethune, W. E. B. DuBois, and Carter G. Woodson, recognition of white responsibility for racism intensified during the 1950s, and Fresh Air advocates began to echo the sentiment that whites in the suburbs were “the ones with much to learn” by the 1960s.¹⁷⁸ The programs soon centered on white-black exchanges and offered glowing reports in which hosts wept at the children’s departures, neighbors welcomed dark-skinned guests, and the children lessened “bigotry, prejudice and deprivation in the country” in order to “bring the dawn.”¹⁷⁹ By 1965, as white resistance to housing rights and affirmative action picked up steam, many Fresh Air initiatives focused on educating the white hosts as much as on improving the children.

Organizers first isolated the guests. Most Fresh Air programs cautioned against sending multiple guests to the same home. As one promoter noted, “Two children often invited to one family is not advisable.” Although intended to increase host involvement and keep guests from “cling[ing] together,” the policy isolated African American and Latino children in settings where they alone represented their community.¹⁸⁰ A 1949 children’s story referred to Fresh Air children as goodwill ambassadors who represented “the thirteen million colored people of America.”¹⁸¹ Publicity materials furthermore emphasized the bridge-building capacity of these solo ambassadors. From the mid-1960s onward, promoters promised that the programs would foster friendships, develop relationships, and, as asserted by a local organizer in Illinois in 1969, “bridge many of the false notions about persons of different ethnic and racial backgrounds.”¹⁸² In return, the hosts reiterated the Fresh Air bromide that “people are just people.”¹⁸³ Yet it fell to the children to “foster a better understanding of attitudes and beliefs of inner-city people by their hosts.”¹⁸⁴ The children could rely on no one else when separated from their friends and family.

Across the country, children also offered much more practical instruction. In 1961 Isla, a Fresh Air child visiting Moundridge, Kansas, from Gulfport, Mississippi, taught her hosts several household cleaning tricks.¹⁸⁵ Another child in Pennsylvania helped her host overcome an aversion to touching the child’s dark, thickly textured hair.¹⁸⁶ Although some guests like Bronx resident Lauren “Flip” Baily suffered her Connecticut host mother’s inept attempt at hair braiding, other guests like a girl from Harlem named Wendy taught her northern Michigan hosts how to care for her hair.¹⁸⁷ In 1967 a seven-year-old girl from Cleveland staying with the Rauschenberg family in Athens, Ohio, shared with her hosts what she knew about fending off potential burglars.¹⁸⁸ Ten years later, Theresa, a seven-year-old New Yorker, likewise told her suburban hosts that they would “probably be all right” if they looked straight ahead when followed by teenage boys while walking home late one evening.¹⁸⁹ Whether offering instruction on the rudiments of race relations or more practical matters, the children took on the role of teacher, one that many seemed to enjoy. As one Fresh Air child declared proudly upon her return home to Mississippi in 1963, “I taught them to cook red beans and corn bread.”¹⁹⁰ In few other settings could African American and Latino children instruct white adults in an area of their own expertise.

A few children took their teaching responsibilities to another level during the foment of the later half of the 1960s, when Black Nationalist and La Raza rhetoric captured the imagination of many urban residents. As adults criticized “discriminatory” practices of sponsoring organizations like New York’s Hudson Guild and demanded that “neighborhood youth be regularly consulted and involved in their own program planning,” the children also spoke out.¹⁹¹ In 1966 an Episcopalian Fresh Air summer day camper asserted that rather than being “culturally deprived,” the campers had their own culture replete with “soul music” and “Spanish slang.”¹⁹² Two years later, a participant in a Fresh Air Fund camp informed her two counselors, one of whom was white and the other black, that she would “get the NAACP” after them if they disciplined her. That same year, a seven-year-old boy informed his host father, “I don’t like white people.”¹⁹³ Although the intensity of the rhetoric waned in the following decade and some of the children dropped their bluster once they learned to know their hosts, Fresh Air children contributed their voices to the persistent critique of white liberal paternalism typically associated with much older racial activists.

The long-term effects on children who educated their hosts after traveling far and facing racism remained mixed. Through the 1970s, critics continued to emphasize the harm done to the children by exposing them to rural comforts and then returning them to urban confines.¹⁹⁴ At the same time, some Fresh Air alumni did leave the city; Cindy Vanderkodde, a former participant in a Fresh Air program run by a Christian Reformed congregation in New York City, moved to the same Michigan community that had hosted her as a child.¹⁹⁵ Still more critics asserted that “real education” would take place only when white suburban youths stayed with urban African American and Latino families.¹⁹⁶ Proponents countered that Fresh Air did far more to “inspire than to hinder” the children and, again, that urban hosting was not financially practical.¹⁹⁷ Other boosters emphasized that Fresh Air alumni went on to accomplished careers as social workers, lawyers, corporate CEOs, doctors, and artists.¹⁹⁸ Some of the former Fresh Air guests credited the programs for giving them a sense that “there could be something better out there.”¹⁹⁹

In the end, the racial legacy of the Fresh Air program is unclear. To be certain, children educated their hosts and resisted the paternalism of the era and, by doing so, initiated some of the few conversations about racism that white rural residents ever had. By 1967, Philip Chinn, a member of the Wheaton (Illinois) Human Relations Council, claimed that visits by Fresh Air children made racial integration in their community possible.²⁰⁰ At the same time, only a few Fresh Air programs responded to the 1971 suggestion by John Powell, a Black Nationalist religious leader, to set up “stale air” vacations in which white kids from the suburbs spent time with African American and Latino families in the inner city.²⁰¹ From the 1950s onward, the internal conflict between the efforts of the children and initiatives of the adults suffused the Fresh Air movement, a process supported by equally tension-filled concerns about the children’s behavior.

Sass

Sonia and Laelia, the two girls thwarted in their attempt to run away from camp, fit the profile of uncooperative, ill-behaved guests. They took no pleasure in nature, despised the activities prepared for them, and resented the authority of their hosts. At ten years old in 1971, they had one desire while visiting the Fresh Air Fund’s Sharpe Reservation. According to Laelia, they wanted to get “back on the street.” By contrast, cooperative guests loved to hike, relished swimming, and adored their hosts. Rather than pine for cityscapes, well-behaved guests grew “tearful at the thought of returning to New York.” Whether the two girls eventually found some measure of fulfillment amid the camp regimen, whether they grew to appreciate their counselors, or whether they came to find nature attractive remains unknown. We have only the image of them sitting on the ground, bereft, “defeated,” still longing for the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan.²⁰²

The girls could, in this instance, be described as sassy. In contrast to the black middle-class strategy of cooperation and polite behavior, an equally robust tradition of resistance to white authority through deliberate insolence had also shaped members of the African American community. Labeled “sass” by slave owners and white southerners intent on maintaining white hegemony in the aftermath of the Civil War, the behavior encompassed intentional disrespect, refusal to act in a subservient manner, and an unbowed, intransigent demeanor. African Americans took risks to establish their humanity and equality through disrespectful behavior as well.²⁰³ Misbehaving children like Sonia and Laelia reflected this less accommodating tradition of resistance to white authority.

The girls’ apparent failure to escape nonetheless shaped Fresh Air. Like many other girls and boys sent to homes and camps outside the city, Sonia and Laelia forced their hosts to invest time and energy on disciplinary matters. The same program promoters who claimed that Fresh Air held the key to solving the country’s race relations problems made similar claims about the program’s efficacy in addressing juvenile delinquency. However, strict vetting procedures kept those deemed intractable in the city, unable to access Fresh Air’s resources. Those who made it through the screens created enough problems that Fresh Air still had to find ways to deal with uncooperative children, a challenge that increased over time.

Concerns about juvenile delinquency among the entire youth population, boys and girls alike, intensified following World War II.²⁰⁴ In the first decades of the twentieth century, pundits claimed that wayward youths’ delinquency stemmed from low intelligence, familial neglect, and inadequate education. As juvenile court cases tripled in the twelve years prior to 1962, however, adults began to recognize that youths, regardless of their IQs, family situation, or level of ignorance, could still become delinquent as a result of psychological disorders.²⁰⁵ Explanations eventually focused on economic, social, and political deprivation as the root cause of juvenile delinquency.²⁰⁶ The unrest and disruption born of efforts to desegregate schools and oppose the Vietnam War further created fear and uncertainty among adults troubled about unruly youths.²⁰⁷ By 1961, the Kennedy Administration acted on the growing concern and passed legislation to address the issue.²⁰⁸ In keeping with a long-term pattern of adults focusing their anxiety on children when social changes erupt, Fresh Air organizers joined the chorus of adults lamenting the wayward state of the next generation.²⁰⁹

Fresh Air program administrators followed and in some cases led efforts to combat juvenile delinquency as part of their effort to manage youthful passage to suburban retreats. They did so by first assuring hosts that they had screened out both delinquent and emotionally troubled young people. In their rush to assuage potential fears, the boosters employed at times jarring terminology. In 1948 one press release declared that referring agencies screened out all “delinquent, psychopathic … [and] intellectually sub-normal” children.²¹⁰ By the 1960s, as youths became even more antagonistic toward adult authority, the description had changed only slightly with the assurance that “[n]one of the children are emotionally disturbed or delinquent.”²¹¹ Exercising more moderate language, by 1979 administrators noted that the children “are screened very carefully” so that none arrived with “emotional or behavioral problems.”²¹² Although their rhetoric shifted somewhat over time, the social workers and church volunteers tasked with selecting children continued to screen out “real delinquents” from the eager children waiting to participate.²¹³

The very program administrators who invested so much time and energy in eliminating troublemakers during the screening process also sought to curtail juvenile delinquency through their efforts. Rather than deal with youths actually involved in crime, drug dealing, or other illicit behavior, the programs intervened before children turned to such activity. In 1950 the Fresh Air program of the Episcopal Diocese of New York aimed to work with “children of trouble … ready for a turn toward delinquency” but not yet walking down that path.²¹⁴ That same year, a Mennonite group that sponsored Fresh Air programs evoked FBI director J. Edgar Hoover by claiming that he said, “Boys and girls who go to Bible school [and, by doing so, go on Fresh Air vacations] DO NOT GO TO JAIL!”²¹⁵ In addition to religious figures, politicians also used Fresh Air programs to make points about juvenile delinquency. New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey asserted in 1953 that the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund deterred “juvenile unrest,” an issue that his secretary of health, education, and welfare said was “one of the nation’s most urgent problems.”²¹⁶ Fresh Air Fund director Frederick Lewis joined the politicians by announcing two years later that “[e]very newspaper deplores youthful delinquency. The Tribune not only writes about it but does something about it.”²¹⁷

Claims about countering juvenile delinquency continued for the next two decades. Whether professing to save children from “juvenile gang-infested sections” of the city in 1960 or, one year later, “to prevent juvenile delinquency by showing the children another side of life and offering them the security of a real home,” Fresh Air organizers rarely nuanced their assertions.²¹⁸ But they did contradict themselves. In a bid to tailor his message to fit his audience, Lewis first touted his organization’s efforts to solve the “complicated problem” of juvenile delinquency in 1962 only to report to a funder several months later that his organization had never considered itself an “anti juvenile delinquency” program.²¹⁹ Subsequent reports at the Herald Tribune Fund and in other programs through the 1960s repeated claims that they prevented juvenile delinquency by removing youths from bad influences in their home communities.²²⁰

Promoters expanded and intensified their claims in the 1970s. In sync with the cultural and political backlash against the freewheeling excesses of the 1960s, they maintained that juvenile delinquency programming also improved manners and, in some cases, rescued children from lives already gone bad. Because of the love and attention heaped upon him, an eleven-year-old Fresh Air camper stopped verbally harassing his fellow campers in 1972 as he discovered a “newfound incentive to behave.” That same year Frederick Gibson, a New York City police detective volunteering at a Fresh Air camp, added that the program not only prevented children from joining gangs in the first place but also allowed some to “break away” after they had become members.²²¹ Lisa Pulling, the Fresh Air Fund’s director in 1975, highlighted the “preventative aspect” of keeping “16,000 children off the street each summer,” a theme repeated throughout the decade.²²² In addition, at least one parent mentioned in 1977 that her child learned “table manners while he was away” and started teaching his sisters and brothers when he returned home.²²³

Yet the bulk of the children who went on Fresh Air trips had already proven their ability to play by the rules. As already noted, the children had often been taught to behave in a respectful manner by their parents.²²⁴ Representing the ethic of respectability that had been a pillar of middle- and upper-class blacks’ bid for racial equality at least since the end of the nineteenth century, they came prepared to be polite and impressed many a host with their “faultless” manners, “passion for cleanliness,” and “unconscious, easy courtesy.”²²⁵ In particular, many African American children understood that polite behavior towards white people could reap certain rewards. Well-behaved children stood the best chance of passing the multiple vetting screens maintained by Fresh Air programs.

Fresh Air connections with well-mannered children buttressed city-based efforts to reduce the threat of juvenile delinquency but did less substantive work of their own. Given the careful parenting evidenced by the children’s behavior, many had strong familial support. Likewise, only those children already connected to sponsoring agencies passed the vetting screens. The majority of those sponsors, groups like urban churches, social service agencies, and boys and girls clubs, offered their own programs designed to keep children out of trouble. Unlike the Fresh Air ventures, the city-based programs usually ran year round. At best, Fresh Air initiatives augmented the efforts of the churches and agencies that partnered with them but—given their vigorous vetting and short-term design—seldom dealt with the children most likely to end up on a juvenile court docket.

The disobedience that did take place received little public scrutiny. As can be expected, promoters preferred to keep such stories quiet. They did not publicize camp counselors’ reports about infighting, cursing, aggression, or disruptive behavior.²²⁶ The girl who claimed in 1956 that her counselor slapped her for misbehaving received no public redress.²²⁷ Boosters did not publicize the antics of a child who repeatedly put kittens in his hosts’ mailbox or accounts of “fighting, yelling, and biting” at home and during vacation bible school.²²⁸ Descriptions of campers who refused to kiss their counselor good night, swore in Spanish, and “wanted to do everything” by themselves did not compel donors.²²⁹ Although children in both homes and camps had long tested adult authority through small acts of rebellion, publicists included only the most general of references to misbehavior.²³⁰ As one host wrote in 1961, “We understand there were a few isolated cases where problems arose” but had no specifics to offer.²³¹ In 1976 another host mentioned that she had “heard people have problems” but again did not add any detail.²³² Otherwise, reports simply informed hosts that they should contact local organizers or the national office if problems arose.²³³

Once contacted, Fresh Air staff used a variety of strategies to deal with discipline issues, beginning with sending the children home. As a 1954 report assured potential hosts, “any child who misbehaves is sent back to New York immediately at the expense of the Fresh Air Fund.”²³⁴ Seven years later a pair of girls hosted by a family in Michigan found the same policy in effect in a program sponsored by the Christian Reformed Church. The girls traveled home early because they could not get along with each other or their hosts.²³⁵ Although staff rarely made such statistics public, a Reader’s Digest article did mention that staff in the Herald Tribune’s Friendly Town program sent home 75 children out of the 9,000 they served in 1962.²³⁶ As in the case of homesickness, the additional expense and logistical challenge of sending disobedient children home early made this option the least desirable of all those available.

Discipline problems also prompted hosts to stop re-inviting guests. After Luis Diaz got into a “little tiff” with his host mother over a religious matter, he stopped coming to the home of the Cooley family even though he had traveled from New York to New Jersey every summer for almost ten years.²³⁷ A Fresh Air program run out of Gulfport, Mississippi, had to find new hosting communities in Kansas, Michigan, and South Dakota every couple of years because the organizers found it difficult to recruit hosts willing to re-invite guests. (See figure 7.)

FIGURE 7. In 1960 a group of children from Gulfport, Mississippi, prepares to travel twenty-four hours to rural homes in Kansas for two--week Fresh Air stays. Used by permission of the Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, KS (Mennonite Library & Archives, Bethel, Kansas: Photo collection; folder: “Mississippi—Gulfport”).

Rumors about purported theft and misbehavior caused hosts to withdraw.²³⁸ Although those hosts who did not extend re-invitations—usually about 50 percent of the participants each year—left little record of their reasons for declining, the experience of Diaz and the Gulfport children suggests that problems related to disobedience played a major role.

Program administrators used camps as a repository for misbehaving children. Frederick Lewis explained the process in 1963. In hopes of avoiding “a black eye” and “ruin[ing] for a decade” future Fresh Air placements by sending a “difficult child” to a host home, Fund staff sent children with “strong anti-social tendencies” to one of their camps.²³⁹ In that setting, as another administrator in the program later explained, “unruly” children “buckled under the camp’s discipline requirements.” Disciplinary practices ranged from simply removing dangerous items from campers—such as the meat cleaver and switchblades that showed up in the luggage of one camping group—to withholding swimming privileges.²⁴⁰ Although in some instances, such as at a camp run by the New York Episcopal diocese in 1971, staff admitted to taking “a switch to boys” who were not cooperating, in the main Fresh Air camp staff enforced strict policies against corporal punishment.²⁴¹ In order to manage the disciplinary challenge, some camps segregated their programming so as to hold a week of camp for urban Fresh Air children and another week for children from the country.²⁴² By default, this practice also kept racial groups from extended contact.

Policies that concentrated unruly children in the camps created problems unanticipated by Fresh Air staff. When compounded with the unrest and Black Nationalist foment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the disciplinary policy resulted in staff like Fresh Air Fund camp manager Larry Mickolic complaining about “hostile and unsatisfied” campers who fought, caused trouble, and proved “hard to handle.”²⁴³ A college-age camp counselor by the name of Thomas David added in 1971 that black and brown urban Fresh Air campers, unlike cooperative white children from the suburbs, challenged and resented the counselors’ authority.²⁴⁴

Administrators responded by hiring former campers familiar with such impudence. In 1969 the Fresh Air Fund hired twenty-six former campers for its two-hundred-member counseling corps.²⁴⁵ By 1973, the same organization had hired a former camper by the name of Tom Palmgren as the director of Camp Pioneer, a site focused on immersing “boys from slum areas in New York City” in nature. A self-described “bad camper” who had “created a lot of problems,” Palmgren knew how to manage his charges.²⁴⁶ Here again the campers had shaped the program by requiring administrators to change how they hired staff.

Because of their purportedly sassy disposition, Fresh Air participants like Sonia, Laelia, and even Palmgren in his day forced the hand of the adult programmers. Although declarations about ending juvenile delinquency continued, children from the middle of the 1960s onward nonetheless challenged the authority figures around them. Some did cooperate at the behest of parents concerned about respectability. However, others did not. Even when confined to camps, those who misbehaved and tried to run away prompted new hiring patterns and disciplinary techniques. Entire programs had to relocate in order to find hosts willing to bring unruly children into their homes. Willard Parsons may have been the architect of Fresh Air, but through actions like these the children became its builders.

Other Kinds of Activists

Sonia, Laelia, and the hundreds of thousands like them who traveled to suburban and rural homes become civil rights activists in the midst of their Fresh Air activity. The African American and Latino/a children who spent time in white homes educated their hosts and ventured into communities where racial epithets, prejudice, and negative assumptions proliferated. If nothing else, the hosts’ ignorance about the extent of prejudice in their own communities made the children all the more vulnerable because the hosts rarely protected their guests. Simply by braving these racist conditions, the children challenged the assumptions of the adults around them. If anything, the demands placed upon black and brown children became more intense from the 1940s through the 1970s as the various Fresh Air initiatives focused attention on the value of racial exchange. Although earlier organizers had called the children ambassadors of their race, by the 1970s they called them bridge builders.²⁴⁷ The expectation in the 1940s was that the children represent their entire racial community, an onerous burden in itself. In the 1970s the rhetoric employed by promoters demanded that the children not only represent their race but shoulder the responsibility of bringing together racial groups separated by physical, economic, and cultural distance. Some cooperated and others did not, but, simply by making the choice to participate, they earned the name of activists.

White children also became activists but of a different sort. In the programs’ earliest years, they arrived at host homes where messages about their malnutrition, stunted development, and poverty had preceded them. When they did not give sufficient evidence of their impoverishment, hosts protested that the children in their care needed to be needier. The dignity displayed by children who stayed and won over their hosts despite doubts about them speaks of the deliberation and courage that such actions required. As white children became the minority of those sent out each summer by the 1970s, they countered the ever-growing assumption that all Fresh Air children were black and brown. In essence, the white children took steps as activists by staying in a program that quickly became associated with children of color alone. Indeed, some programs, such as the Chicago-based Missionary Society program, served children only from African American and Latino communities. By showing up and participating, the white children challenged the assumption that poverty had a dark face.

These young activists and their adult hosts together inhabited a rare if short-lived space in the middle of the twentieth century. In pursuit of adventure and the oft-repeated value of friendship, guests and hosts lived in intimate contact across both class and race lines. Although some African American and Latino domestics lived with their white employers in the South and the West, white rural families in the Midwest and the Northeast had little to no contact with those from other racial or economic groups. All the problems evident in southern domestic arrangements, including but not limited to paternalism, unequal power relationships, and the danger and actuality of sexual abuse, showed up in critics’ comments about Fresh Air hosting ventures as well. At the same time, children did challenge assumptions, especially those based in ignorance about other racial groups, when they dressed better, worked harder, and proved smarter than their hosts expected. Whether such challenges resulted in substantive change in the hosts’ attitudes remains somewhat doubtful. As social contact theorists have shown, greater proximity does not lead automatically to a reduction in prejudice.²⁴⁸ The very rarity of the intimate spaces opened up by the Fresh Air movement helped sustain interest in them and, because so few had experience in translating short-term visits into long-term change, kept them relatively nonthreatening. White adults hosting black and brown children may have drawn thousands of headlines but brought about only the most modest of changes in the racial and class order.

The children in the end shaped Fresh Air most foundationally by contradicting adult claims about them. Many children already had knowledge of grass, both the mowing and the smoking kind, and did not always find nature as blissfully welcoming as their benefactors claimed. The majority of African American and Latino children knew much more about racial dynamics than did their hosts, practiced their own racial code of conduct, and frequently taught the adults important lessons about prejudice, racism, and urban life. Even the children deemed well enough behaved to earn a summer vacation to the country sassed counselors, ran away, and got into fights with their host siblings.

Nestled among the themes of grass, color, and sass lay another triad: sex, seven, and sick. As chapter 4 shows, in response to children shaping the Fresh Air movement, adults kept boys and girls separate, set strict age caps, and instituted rigorous medical screening practices. Through these actions the adults protected the public image they had worked so hard to develop. They polished the Fresh Air reputation to perfection. Although largely successful in doing so, they also ended up limiting the very opportunities they sought to give the children.