Chapter 6

CONFRONTATIONS IN BLACK AND WHITE

The Crisis of Integration

On June 9, 1975, George Schermer once again addressed the WMAN board at its seventeenth annual meeting. In recent years, the organization had found itself in the midst of an institutional crisis. The rising culture of black power and the growing hostilities in area schools were, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, also giving way to racial clashes within the West Mount Airy community. At the same time, the city of Philadelphia was experiencing a political and economic crisis as deindustrialization drew resources away from the northern urban center, resulting in intensifying decline and increasing incidents of crime. As West Mount Airy Neighbors struggled to reorient its institutional mission to negotiate this growing racial divide, the crisis of crime became the battleground on which racial strife in the neighborhood was fought. “Some groups still resist change,” Schermer told the crowd, “but change is an inherent part of the life process. Racial change is just one example…. We must now focus on conservation and preservation. We now must deal with the problems of our community. A degree of disagreement is a good thing, but we must be able to deal creatively with change” (emphasis in original).1

Map 3. Map of West Mount Airy by percentage of black residents, 1970 census data. Prepared by David Ford, assistant director, Temple University Social Science Data Library.

After a decade of vigilance to protect and preserve the neighborhood’s residential, educational, and economic stability, WMAN was, by the late 1960s, experiencing a sense of organizational fatigue. Throughout the community, homeowners were growing frustrated with what they saw as the association’s stale organizing tactics and a sense of virtuous self-righteousness. In an editorial published in the WMAN newsletter, one resident wrote:

West Mount Airy Neighbors is now nine years old, and our community has gained national recognition for its work in the areas of integration, zoning, housing, and schools, but has it gone to our heads? Are we still the leading community organization in Philadelphia? I question…what we are doing to alleviate overcrowding in our schools and to improve the quality of education?…Isn’t it about time we all took steps to make this the community we will continue to be proud of?2

“I feel that WMAN once had a goal,” wrote another member, “to bring together all sorts of people and to help them live harmoniously. Now that this end has been achieved, WMAN tends to rest on its laurels.”3 For many homeowners in Mount Airy, the long-standing clearinghouse seemed to be struggling to remain relevant in the face of broader changes in the fight for racial justice and new challenges to urban America. WMAN, critics seemed to be saying, was not keeping up with the realities facing the nation’s cities.

African American residents in the neighborhood expressed more pointed concerns over a perceived racial hierarchy that was beginning to emerge in the community. Black homeowners of the eastern section of West Mount Airy—the area between Lincoln Drive and Germantown Avenue—hinted at feelings of alienation, a sense of frustration that WMAN was not paying attention to their interests in its programming initiatives.4 As Don Black later recalled:

It seemed…to me and [several] of the black people [in the neighborhood]…that the focus changed…. White members began to say, “Let’s keep that side [west of Lincoln Drive]. It was almost like, ‘we are going to keep this thing the way we want it….’ But they didn’t really work hard to keep it the way Schermer…and some of the earlier members had, and some of us openly accused West Mount Airy Neighbors of forgetting that there [were] twos side to Lincoln Drive.5

Another black resident, a WMAN board member, later remembered a community meeting where a neighbor cried, “We need to have two West Mount Airy Neighbors…because there is a differentiation in the way we are treated.”6 Whether because institutional shifts in WMAN resulted in a sense of marginalization or because the rising emphasis on racial consciousness and racial pride brought into focus a new recognition of existing unequal practices and policies, by the late 1960s many of Mount Airy’s African American residents began voicing protests over WMAN’s emphasis on the wealthier, less populated area near Wissahickon Park.

In the summer of 1968, the WMAN board sat down to address these emerging tensions in the neighborhood and to breathe life back into the organization. At a June 8 executive committee meeting, President Jerry Balka spoke of the need for fundamental changes in the organization’s vision of community organizing. WMAN, said Balka, needed to move away from the “nitty-gritty of making the community a better place to live…to think of the larger picture.”7 That evening, the board agreed on a new long-term goal for the organization: for perhaps the first time, community leaders sought to move beyond the Myrdalian vision of white-centric racial liberalism to examine cultural and institutional racial prejudice in the region. “We need to see ourselves before we [can] try to change attitudes in the white communities,” said one member.8 Through open dialogue and discussion, the group determined, they could work to unearth the problems of racism that existed both within the organization and throughout the larger West Mount Airy community.

WMAN, in consultation with the Wellsprings Ecumenical Center, planned a series of workshops for that fall, events that would bring together white and black Mount Airy residents to discuss the growing racial divide in the community. Wellsprings, located at the southeastern edge of the Germantown/West Mount Airy border, had been working throughout Philadelphia for a number of years to promote a program of guided intervention, “[bringing] various groups into meaningful contact with each other.”9 The organization promoted itself as “an ecumenical group of laymen” and “a community—open to persons from all religious, racial, ethnic, political, and economic groups—which establishes relationships of mutual respect and trust enough to permit and quest for personal and spiritual renewal.”10 By bringing the group in to facilitate conversation among Mount Airy residents, community leaders believed they could create a culture of meaningful communication and collaborative change within the neighborhood.

Though Wellsprings presented itself as an open, community-based organization that ground its teachings in religious liberalism, a number of WMAN board members expressed unease over a perceived undercurrent of radicalism in the group’s mission. As one person asked, “Would the course be slanted in one direction—favoring ‘black militancy’ over ‘moderation’?” The questions may have been warranted. For an event that the organization cosponsored with the Junior League of Philadelphia, participants were encouraged to read, among others, the Autobiography of Malcolm X; Black Power, by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton; Black Power and Urban Unrest, by Nathan Wright; The Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders; Black Rage, by Price Cobb; and The Race War, by Donald Segal.11 Still, other WMAN members gave assurances that Wellsprings had “made a fair representation and kept tight control over the discussions to prevent them from becoming one-sided.” The debate prompted one WMAN member to pose what he called “the unanswerable question:” Were the residents of West Mount Airy moderate? Did WMAN serve as a moderating force in the community?12 With local tensions intensifying and broader changes emerging in the nature of racial justice and activism, residents were beginning to question what role the longtime clearinghouse should have in the community.

Ultimately, the board concluded that in order to serve the residents of Mount Airy, in order to foster genuine community cohesion, the group needed to challenge the racial prejudice within the neighborhood. WMAN, in concert with Wellsprings, set up a six-session course titled “Face to Face: Black-White Confrontation.” Wellsprings promised to adapt their offerings to the needs of the West Mount Airy community. The organization would offer a list of suggested readings and provide carefully chosen moderators to facilitate each session.13

That fall, WMAN sent out letters to area residents, inviting them to the upcoming workshops:

Behind the stones and bricks of the houses in West Mount Airy live your neighbors. Many of them have harsh, racially hypocritical feelings toward others in the community. Black and white, none of us is above such feelings. Worst of all, few of us admit that we feel this way…. You might be surprised how many people share your view of others. Perhaps you should talk about them…openly. Talk about what you really think about your neighbors and your neighborhood…. Come to talk, come to listen. We’re not sure you’ll enjoy it; but we’re not sure that you’re supposed to.14

The letter hinted at Balka’s efforts to reshape the conversations surrounding race relations and community cohesion. The increasingly complex urban environment in which they lived necessitated a reorientation of WMAN’s goals and strategies; the organization was moving into a new era, one that Balka hoped could abandon colorblind liberalism in favor of race-consciousness and open dialogue.

The organization also signaled this evolving ideology in the corresponding press release that WMAN issued to regional media outlets. “Confrontation in Black and White,” the publication read. “West Mount Airy is integrated, but is it stable? Could there be civil disorder here? What can a neighborhood do to lessen the potential for racial explosion within it? These are among the sensitive questions that a progressive community must ask itself today, and it must be prepared to act on the answers—whether it likes it or not.”15 Through direct mailing and media publicity, WMAN had issued a challenge to the residents of West Mount Airy. The organization was imploring homeowners to admit to their own racial biases, to acknowledge their deep-seated prejudices.

In response, several homeowners affirmed their commitment to liberal race relations, returning their invitations to the Face to Face classes with accountings of interracial friendships and professional relationships. Their replies implied a subtle defensiveness, challenging the need for such conversations in the community. “I am very happy being among both my white and colored neighbors,” wrote Lillian Williams in a letter to WMAN. “I feel just as kindly to the colored people as I do the white folks, and anywhere that I can convey this message to my friends and associations, I do so with all my heart.”16 Sybil Watson, who noted that she was unable to attend the series because of her shift work as a nurse, wrote:

I am returning the enclosed literature in order that it may be used for someone else. I want to state that the only reason I am still working at this business of bedside nursing…is because I like people and am concerned for their welfare…. I have never in my life entertained any form of racial prejudice, and do not now. As a child in school, the only one I attended school with, over fifty years ago, was a Negro named Hilda Carter and I’d love to know what became of her. I have nothing but complete respect for the numbers of Negro nurses with whom I work and am always happy when I am fortunate enough to have anyone of several of them, working for me. (emphasis in original)17

Other residents expressed fear that the Wellsprings workshops would have the effect of exacerbating racial tensions within the neighborhood. As Helen Worfman wrote:

I can think of no better way to stir up trouble than this that you are preparing to do…. Why not leave well enough alone? I know enough of Wellsprings to know that it is a biased group, bent on presenting one side of a question. If WMAN is launching into this kind of trouble making, please remove my name from your membership list…. I’m convinced that the more you talk about race relations, the more intolerant each race becomes. If you can live peacefully in an integrated neighborhood, that does more good than all the words in the world. I shudder to think what these six evenings will produce. (emphasis in original)18

Such responses hinted at a push back against WMAN’s new agenda; even as some in the community were agitating for institutional change, there were others who expressed wariness over the prospect of a race-conscious orientation. This growing divide in West Mount Airy cast in sharp relief conversations taking place across the nation about the evolving nature of racial justice and the potential limitations of civil rights liberalism to effect meaningful change.

For others still, WMAN’s public challenge offered the opportunity to air feelings of hostility. Said one resident, who wrote that she was withholding her name out of fear, “I don’t think it is any good to try to talk about some of those people…. There are a few of those people [who are] alright, but I think the community should divide the neighbors—divide and see what it is like. We have some ghettoes and those are the people that are making them, so I don’t think it would do any good to attend those meetings” (emphasis in original).19 A West Upsal Street homeowner wrote, “Kindly do NOT send me any literature from your group” (emphasis in original). The woman described in detail her experiences during the six years that she had lived in West Mount Airy—rape, robbery, assault, and theft—noting that each crime had been committed “by NEGROES.” “I have had Negroes up to my teeth,” she continued, “and I am afraid to sign my name because of Blackie…. I was very tolerant until I experienced your conduct, which is SAVAGE. So be SAVAGES—we are going to pay plenty of taxes in support of your SAVAGES. It will take another hundred years to civilize you and then you MONKIES will still want more” (emphasis in original).20 Though such responses were rare, they served as a reminder of the diversity of thought and interest within the neighborhood; while the loudest voices in West Mount Airy continued to affirm a zeitgeist of interracial living, there were many for whom racial justice played no role in their choice to move into the community. The increasing focus on race-consciousness may have unwittingly alienated those homeowners who lived in Mount Airy simply because of the amenities and resources the neighborhood offered.

Still, even with these condemnations, tickets for the Face to Face program quickly sold out.21 Through November and December 1968, Mount Airy residents attended evening workshops on topics including “white racism in an integrated community,” “institutional racism,” “urban poverty,” “black humanism,” and “where do we go from here?”22 Some sessions were moderated by race relations experts from the neighborhood, and others by representatives from city organizations and community groups. After each meeting, participants were encouraged to continue their conversations over a “relaxing coffee hour,” which Wellsprings maintained was “an integral part of the program.”23

Following the third session, WMAN board member and past president Matthew Bullock approached current president Balka with a proposal. “I personally feel it is very important that the Face-to-Face audience at the conclusion of the present association adopt some kind of statement that could serve as a rallying point for ‘liberal’ groups,” he wrote. Bullock went on to offer a six-pronged statement, which he believed could serve as a starting point for thinking about such an institutional mandate. The draft articulated a mission for the future of West Mount Airy Neighbors, one that supported the possibility of a harmonious interracial society and placed the primary responsibility of eliminating racism within white America. “Their basic responsibility is not to ‘help’ black people,” he wrote, “but to reexamine themselves and the organizations and institutions they control with the object of purging themselves of racism and seeking its elimination in institutionalized form.” The proposal spoke of the principles of the “Black Revolution” and expressed support for notions of intraracial cohesion and empowerment while maintaining the necessity of interracial collaboration. Bullock advocated both nonviolence and active resistance as he highlighted the link between racial and economic inequality. “We believe,” he concluded, “that racism is a convenient tool for the exercise of economic discrimination in an economic system which does not afford at least a minimum standard of living for all its citizens.”24 With this proposed institutional commitment toward a race-conscious agenda and an acknowledgement of a clear link between race and class, Bullock attempted to push Balka’s vision of WMAN’s mission further. He sought to use Face to Face as a platform to reinvigorate West Mount Airy Neighbors and to push the organization, and the neighborhood it served, to play a role in the new culture of racial justice in the late 1960s.

It seemed that many residents, however, were not ready for such radical transformation. When the organization held its postworkshop evaluation, many participants focused on the problems they experienced with the program, leaving little room to contemplate WMAN’s future. Though some participants expressed appreciation for the opportunity to learn about one another through personal interaction and human contact, many more voiced frustration over the trajectory of the conversations. Some believed that Wellsprings had been unable to manage the group effectively. “There was no dialogue,” one participant said in the postworkshop debriefing. “The moderator was so aggressive and antagonistic that no one could express his opinion.” “The group [was] too diverse for Wellsprings to handle,” said another. “They did not know who they were talking to.” One attendee noted, “At the first session I was astounded at the moderator…. I came to learn and update my understanding of the black-white relationship. It was impossible to learn in an atmosphere of such hostility.”25 Other white participants felt as though they had not been heard, that their experiences had been minimized. “I went to the first session only and found that the course wasn’t designed for me,” said one homeowner. “It was designed to get Whitey…. It gave whites a chance to hear how a large majority of black people feel and think…. I didn’t hear anything new, anything I don’t hear everyday, things whites don’t hear.” “My black friends delight in taking off on me,” said another, “saying it is impossible for me to understand the black situation and acting as if I were a stupid white person. They discard a lifetime commitment to equality.”26

Above all, there emerged a consensus among participants that Face to Face unearthed a fundamental disconnect within West Mount Airy. “[The workshops] show we don’t know about our own community,” one resident reflected, “and what our people are thinking.”27 Rather than conceiving of the moment as an opportunity to reorient the focus of WMAN, to follow Matthew Bullock’s challenge to make the organization relevant to the changing aims of racial justice, many homeowners believed that the group simply could no longer function as a community association, that it had lost its ability to bring the people of Mount Airy together. Residents, it seemed, were not interested in reshaping the institutional aims of the community clearinghouse. Even as the original goals of the integration project, first articulated in the postwar culture of possibility and optimism, faced becoming antiquated as the neighborhood entered the 1970s, many white residents resisted WMAN’s attempts to recast the organization’s mission. They perhaps failed to see that the early efforts to stave off transition and protect the viability of the historically wealthy enclave in northwest Philadelphia were no longer relevant in a city facing rapid economic transformation.

Across the nation, urban centers were in crisis. Deindustrialization redirected millions of jobs to the American South, and then out of the country altogether.28 Chicago lost one-third of its manufacturing capacity between 1967 and 1977.29 The growth of suburbia and the trends toward white flight were depleting urban centers of thriving tax bases. In 1970, for the first time in the nation’s history, more Americans were living in suburbs than in cities.30 Shopping districts closed and crime rates swelled as gang activity intensified. In Baltimore, downtown retail sales dropped 48 percent; in Boston, 38 percent. In Detroit, homicide rates rose 345 percent between 1965 and 1974, stabilizing at these heightened levels.31

In Philadelphia, particularly in the industrial districts at the north and south end of the city, factories shut their doors, leaving thousands of residents out of work. The middle-class exodus sent public schools into crisis as funding dipped to record lows. Though Frank Rizzo, the nation’s most infamous law-and-order police commissioner turned law-and-order mayor, kept the area from following in the riotous footsteps of such deindustrializing cities as Detroit and Newark, New Jersey, crime rates soared as the economy plummeted and discontent surged. Even the liberal enclave in northwest Philadelphia experienced the effects of such turmoil.

In the early 1970s, West Mount Airy began to see an upsurge in dilapidated homes, abandoned cars, gang-related violence, and criminal activity.32 WMAN leaders worked to issue a response, wanting at once to protect their community and to minimize the possibility of panic and further instability. In 1971, the organization canceled a series of planned open house tours, out of fear that would-be burglars might use the event to scope out properties. A year later, the Chestnut Hill Local reported that the neighborhood was “locking up.”33 These growing concerns about upheaval, combined with the unresolved racial tensions in the community, prompted more families to leave the area. By 1970, West Mount Airy had shrunk to 15,365 residents, losing approximately one-sixth of its population over the previous twenty years. Though the neighborhood had settled at a near even racial balance in population, only 58 percent of residents lived in the same home in 1970 that they had owned in 1965.34 As incoming WMAN president Edwin Wolf said at a 1971 board meeting:

I think West Mount Airy is in trouble. It is beginning to be beset by those marks of urban decay—the slackening of city services; growing tension between police and community; intensifying conflicts, including the use of arms, between groups of our young people; deterioration of our schools; and overall, a slow decline in the confidence we all have in our public institutions to do the job we require of them.35

Wolf’s critique brought into focus a broader crisis of confidence in the ability of government to alleviate the effects of deindustrialization on the nation’s cities. Across the country, neighborhoods saw a renewed interest in the creation of local centers of control. Cooperatives, collectives, and community centers served to bolster neighborhood autonomy and decrease reliance on state institutions.36 In West Mount Airy, it seemed like a moment in which WMAN would flourish; however, the resistance toward the proposed institutional shift three years earlier meant that for the group to reemerge as a stabilizing force in the neighborhood, leaders needed to return to early organizing tactics and the historic colorblind integrationist mission.

In another attempt to promote community cohesion, WMAN set out to revitalize its then-defunct Block Captain Program. The initiative was modeled after a 1969 effort that appointed organizers for each of the area’s two hundred residential streets. Block captains were to act as the neighborhood’s cheerleaders, the town watch, the cleanup crew, and the educators.37 Though the program saw initial interest, just as in 1969, residents soon tired of the commitment required to sustain the effort. As WMAN settled into its second decade, more and more families were moving to the area not to be activists but simply because they wanted to live among like-minded neighbors.38 These incoming residents had not experienced the instability of the 1950s and were unfamiliar with the number of hours that earlier integrationists had dedicated toward building and stabilizing the community. Thus, at the same time that West Mount Airy Neighbors needed more institutional support to carry on as a community clearinghouse, there were fewer people who wanted to serve in such a capacity. The requirements of the Block Captain Program were cumbersome, and they quickly took their toll. Many who signed on as block leaders chose not to continue to serve, and even fewer volunteered to replace them.39

Still, community leaders in Mount Airy believed that, with this increased attention to crime and its attendant causes, they could stave off the problems of urban decay that were devastating cities across the country. In addition to the Block Captain Program, organizers embarked on a neighborhood beautification project and began to focus their energies on engaging neighborhood youth.40 WMAN member Len Persley led a camping trip for local teens. The Allens Lane Arts Center offered use of its facilities, and boys flocked to the basketball courts. A group of high schoolers held bake sales to raise funds for a block newspaper.41

But these efforts were not enough to protect the community from the effects of citywide deindustrialization and to heal the growing racial divide within the neighborhood. Over the next two years, Mount Airy saw petty and violent crime continue to creep up. Residents remained uncertain of the viability of the area, and WMAN struggled to maintain a sense of stability for the community and utility for the organization. By the middle of the decade, the neighborhood had reached a point of crisis. According to figures from the Mayor’s Criminal Justice Improvement Team, during the first six months of 1974, incidents of larceny in the Fourteenth Police District, of which West Mount Airy is a part, rose from 499 to 630; homicide, from 9 to 12; and aggravated assault, from 89 to 140. Reports of rape climbed from 18 to 34. The percent increases from the first six months of the previous year were dramatic: accounts of larceny had risen 26.3 percent; homicide, 33.3 percent; aggravated assault, 57.3 percent; and rape, 88.9 percent. Rates of robbery, burglary, and car theft were up as well, though less acutely.42 The escalation throughout the region, particularly of violent crime, sent residents into a panic.

Echoing recent concerns over the responsiveness of West Mount Airy Neighbors, some residents called into question the organization’s historic approach to crime prevention. Their long-standing tactics had become inappropriate, WMAN past president Oliver Lancaster later reflected, for the current problems the community was facing. Over the previous decade, the organization had worked to craft a calculated balance, trying to address internal problems of increased criminal activity while at the same time condemning the erosion of police-community relations.43 In 1972, the Philadelphia Police Department had come under the leadership of Frank Rizzo, and his tough-on-crime agenda and bullish bravado struck many in the city, particularly African Americans and white liberals, as both inhumane and counterproductive. But in 1974, with the growing fear in the neighborhood, a group of homeowners asserted that the organization’s recent response to the practices of the Philadelphia police force was confounding its agenda and hindering efforts geared toward increasing street safety.

Born October 23, 1920, Francis Lazarro Rizzo became a proud member of the Philadelphia Police Department just before his twenty-third birthday. One of the few Italian officers in an outfit dominated by second-generation Irish and Germans, Rizzo quickly earned a reputation as a public servant who would take extraordinary measures to help someone in danger. On April 22, 1944, the Philadelphia Bulletin first introduced the city to the new officer. “Frank Rizzo,” the one paragraph blurb reported, “a patrolman attached to the 22nd and Hunting Park Avenue Station, was burned on the hands last night when he tried to extinguish a fire in an awning of the drug store of I.M. Ostrum at Tulpehocken and Baynton Streets.” According to the report, someone had thrown a lit cigarette into the drugstore overhang. The off-duty Rizzo, who was a few blocks away at his father’s house, put out the fire with his bare hands.44

Rizzo approached disorder with the same fervor. Cutting his teeth in the northeast Philadelphia neighborhood of Tioga, he routinely charged into buildings unannounced, breaking windows and crashing through doors and knocking around his targets before taking them into custody. When he was named acting captain in 1952, he was reassigned to the Sixteenth District at the corner of 39th Street and Lancaster Avenue, on the border of the city’s Powelton and Mantua neighborhoods. It was the first time he had worked in a predominantly black area, and within weeks the police commissioner was fielding complaints about the young captain’s harsh tactics. Cecil Moore, prior to his rise to power in Philadelphia’s NAACP, was an active member of the Young Independent Political Action Committee, the legal team representing African American community members in complaints against Rizzo. As fellow YIPAC attorney Harvey Schmidt later recalled, “The reports we kept getting was that [he] was using strong-arm tactics,…breaking doors down and being extra tough because ours was a black neighborhood.”45

Still, throughout the city, Rizzo’s popularity grew. Many white homeowners, anxious about the rising postwar neighborhood instability and the increasing black expansion into their communities, lauded the captain’s efforts to maintain a sense of order. Local media outlets nicknamed him the Cisco Kid, referencing the popular 1950s television vigilante who brought his own brand of justice to the Old West.46 While white liberals and African Americans assailed the gunslinging officer, no one in city government would touch him.

By the early 1960s, Captain Rizzo had become a national advocate for this law-and-order approach. In 1962, he was invited to address the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Speaking before presiding Senator John McClellan, Rizzo condemned liberal advocacy groups for their soft-on-crime philosophies. The Philadelphia officer believed that safeguarding civil liberties should not come at the expense of personal and community security. It was the victims of crime that needed protection, he testified, not the criminals. “The [ACLU] should become as concerned with the good people of the community,” Rizzo said. “Their constant scream is police brutality. When they cannot reach the top police officials, when they cannot get them under their wing in other ways…there is only one other way they can reach us, and that is to scream police brutality against minority groups.”47 It was the first time that Rizzo had publicly linked the rhetoric of race with the rising crime rates and growing allegations of police mistreatment. As Rizzo biographer S. A. Paolantonio writes, “Frank Rizzo instinctively understood what was happening out on the streets: from a political standpoint, skin color was the dividing line in America’s cities, especially on the issue of crime.”48

These tactics, of course, proved contentious, particularly to those working toward racial justice. Though many believed him to be impartial in his actions as an officer—“he was an equal opportunity tough guy,” Cecil Moore was once quoted as saying—by the time he rose to the rank of commissioner, Rizzo had made no secret of his disdain for black agitators.49 He believed that the civil rights struggle was slowly killing American cities, and he sought to do everything in his power to stanch the bleeding.

Rizzo’s rise to prominence paralleled a broader shift in Philadelphia, away from the liberal agenda of the city’s postwar reform-minded politicians. Democrat Richardson Dilworth succeeded Democrat Joseph Clark as mayor of Philadelphia in 1955, and both the policies and the administration that Clark had established in the early 1950s remained in place until 1962. When Dilworth resigned as mayor that year to run for Pennsylvania governor, however, city council president James Tate stepped in as acting mayor, and the political climate in Philadelphia changed at once. As Tate worked closely with city unions to create jobs and secure safe working conditions, the civil rights agenda of the previous decade quickly lost favor. In March 1963, following Tate’s close electoral victory, both the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the NAACP held rallies at schools and work sites, protesting what they saw as systemic discrimination that kept black workers off construction crews.50

Then, in June of that year, George Schermer stepped down as director of the city’s Human Relations Commission. According to Schermer, Tate’s administration had weakened the commission by undermining its authority and engaging in backroom deals.51 Schermer charged that the mayor was holding meetings with the NAACP and CORE one day and the labor unions the next, without ever informing the Human Relations Commission. “We had the best operation of its kind in this country,” Schermer told the Detroit News. “But we reached the point where we were being so badly undercut that if I hadn’t taken some dramatic move, we’d have been squeezed out into a little complaint bureau.”52 For Mount Airy residents in particular, Schermer’s threatened departure drove home the sharp break in city politics and prompted widespread unease over the city’s evolving approach to race relations.

Hundreds petitioned Mayor Tate, imploring him not to accept the Human Relations Commission director’s resignation. Writing on behalf of 748 Henry School parents, West Mount Airy’s Philip Turner, president of the HHSA, issued a public statement to Tate through the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Philadelphia is entering a period of crisis in human relations, which reflects critical changes throughout all of America,” he wrote. “George Schermer’s outstanding skill, judgment, and leadership is needed here as ever before.”53 The ACLU called the resignation “an ominous signal that the city government is losing its leadership in civil rights.” The organization declared Schermer’s exit a “tragedy” that had the effect of placing the onus of action on private groups rather than the city government. “We rejoice, of course, that thanks to private efforts the walls of prejudice are tumbling down,” the group continued, “but we think the mayor should be out there blowing the trumpet, instead of stuffing cotton in his ears.”54 The letter-writing campaign did little to sway the mayor’s response; that June, Tate accepted Schermer’s resignation. The exiting director left his post in city government and worked as a freelance expert on race relations. In 1965, he and his family moved from West Mount Airy to Washington, D.C., where Schermer opened his own consulting firm. The mayor appointed Clarence Farmer to head the Human Relations Commission, and Tate and Rizzo continued to run the city with a heavy hand.

When demonstrations broke out in the city in 1967, following riots in Newark and Washington, D.C., Rizzo quickly rounded up the protestors. That summer, Philadelphia police arrested 328 demonstrators. Mayor Tate called for the city council to pass an emergency proclamation prohibiting residents from gathering in groups of twelve or more. With the support of Rizzo and Human Relations Commission director Farmer, the council passed the ordinance.55 Rizzo and his cadre broke the will of the protestors that summer, and in the process they broke heads as well. That fall, Rizzo once again entered the public spotlight, this time following the violent clashes during the November protests at the Philadelphia School Board offices. The aggressive force that Rizzo had authorized caused an uproar across the city, as community leaders and residents alike levied charges of police brutality at Rizzo and cries of incompetent, soft leadership at Shedd and Dilworth.56

It was in the context of these 1967 conflicts that Rizzo’s reputation as a racist reactionary began to coalesce. Over the next few years, the commissioner’s officers attacked black student protesters in the city’s Fairmount neighborhood. They raided the home of several members of the black power organization, the Revolutionary Action Movement, and infiltrated the group. Finally, in 1970, in perhaps the most divisive incident of his long career as both police officer and politician, Rizzo ordered the arrest and public strip search of several members of the local Black Panther Party, following a bloody week that had seen the killing or wounding of six police officers and a number of black activists.57

Integrationists in West Mount Airy repeatedly condemned Rizzo’s tactics, asserting that the commissioner’s brand of leadership threatened to disrupt decades of efforts on the part of city government and neighborhood institutions to foster mutual respect and general order throughout Philadelphia. Beyond the outcry over his systematic targeting of African American agitators and violation of their civil rights, WMAN board members believed that Rizzo’s approach was further exacerbating the growing crisis of crime across the city. Police brutality, they argued, served to alienate its victims, making them more suspicious of authority and increasingly frustrated by the established social channels.58 And within West Mount Airy, WMAN said, that suspicion was pitting neighbor against neighbor. “There are incidents by police that are undermining community relations,” said one board member at a June 1969 meeting. “Neighbors that were once friends are having neighborhood problems…. The forced pressure and violence of the people has changed the attitudes of many people. On the job, in the schools, in the stores, in business, your neighbors, friends, and even relations. The warm feeling is gone.”59 Rizzo’s style of leadership, they believed, was threatening the very foundation of community on which the neighborhood was built fifteen years earlier.

While WMAN’s statements served to align the organization with a liberal coalition across the city and reaffirm the community’s commitment to racial justice, some Mount Airy residents believed that the agenda was subverting local efforts to protect the neighborhood. In January 1974, a splinter group began to emerge. That month, several homeowners came together at the Germantown Jewish Centre to organize volunteer auto patrols to survey the area and report suspicious activity to the police. Though local business owners at first reported progress, by summer the volunteer structure of the new group had weakened, and the leaders of the effort believed that a formal organization was necessary to move forward.60 Described by the Chestnut Hill Local as a group of black men seeking to “give the community, particularly its youth, some attention,” West Mount Airy Action, Inc. (WMAA) quickly focused in on the problem of increased crime in the neighborhood.61

In reality, WMAA did have some white members. But the predominantly black-led organization evidenced a continuing and evolving divide in the experience of living in the interracial community. In the mid-1970s, the issue of crime brought together the cultural turn toward racial pride and self-help of the 1960s with the long-standing disconnect between many of Mount Airy’s white and black residents over the meaning of integrated space. Some upwardly mobile African American homeowners in the neighborhood made the decision to organize on their own behalf, to attempt to achieve through their own innovation what integrationist community activists had not been able to through more formalized channels. They saw the need for a new type of leadership in the community and a new approach toward preserving the viability of the neighborhood.

These black leaders had not moved to Mount Airy simply to live out an abstract sense of justice. They believed that the integrated community could offer them stability and safety, protection from the problems associated with the decay of the Philadelphia’s black inner-city areas. If liberal white community leaders were more focused on fighting police brutality than on preserving the neighborhood, these black residents believed, then they would fill the void by safeguarding against criminal activity. In this way, the crisis of crime in the region became a lens through which local black residents could assert their own autonomy; the creation of a crime prevention program became the terrain on which the battle over local control and racial representation was fought in West Mount Airy.62 For the largely black membership of West Mount Airy Action, by working toward crime prevention, they sought to challenge what many perceived as the obsolete tactics of West Mount Airy Neighbors and present an alternative vision of race-conscious community control.

With WMAN past president Oliver Lancaster at the helm, WMAA wasted little time in making its presence known in the neighborhood. Lancaster, a longtime Philadelphia educator, brought to the new organization a well-documented history of pushing for integrationist reform. Serving in the school district’s Office of Integration and Intergroup Education before being appointed in 1970 as director of the Office of Community Affairs for the school board, Lancaster believed in the goal of an integrated society. However, the Temple- and Yale-educated leader argued that integration for the sake of integration could not solve the problems of racism in the United States. Interracialism alone would not ameliorate the structural economic and racial inequity that had besieged American cities, Lancaster said; the nation needs fundamental, systemic change in order to break the historic patterns of injustice. In a 1969 discussion on school desegregation, Lancaster advocated for curricular changes over bussing. “Bussing is an incidental thing,” he told the Philadelphia Bulletin. “All it does is provide a physical mixing of blacks and whites. If we focus only on…bussing, then we miss what is real.”63 By adopting a more comprehensive and community-oriented approach to intergroup dynamics, Lancaster said a year later, “We’re getting to the core of the problems. We’re treating diseases now and not just the symptoms.”64

By the mid-1970s, Lancaster seemed to believe that social dislocation was the root cause of the increase in crime throughout the country, and he felt that a concerted and focused effort toward alleviating those issues was the key to finding a community solution. Highlighting police relations only confounded the issues and made finding solutions all the more challenging.65 It was with this in mind that he signed on as president of West Mount Airy Action. “There are presently growing problems in West Mount Airy of increasing crime and disruptive youth,” WMAA leaders said in an early report. “Our goal of community crime prevention, in cooperation with existing city and private agencies, will be to reduce the number of active anti-social gangs, and gang members, and to help reverse the rising crime rate in our area.” The fledgling community organization, incorporated as a not-for-profit in October 1974, gained the support of the Philadelphia Police Department as the board developed a town watch program to patrol the streets and alert officers at any sign of disturbance.66

As official policy, West Mount Airy Neighbors endorsed the new organization. On November 27, the WMAN board adopted a statement of support for the goals and programs set forth in WMAA’s mission. “While we [WMAN] have had many successes in dealing with community problems,” the declaration read, “the problems of anti-social juveniles and an increasing crime rate have frustrated our entire community. We have spent a great deal of time and effort working on the problem and have realized that our organizational resources are insufficient.”67 WMAN pledged ongoing support and collaboration with West Mount Airy Action. Within six months, though, some members of the WMAN board began to fear that their authority within the neighborhood was coming undone. Concerned that they were losing their place as the voice of the community, that spring a group came together to stage a covert takeover of the burgeoning crime-fighting group.

In early April 1975, WMAA peppered the neighborhood with a flyer publicizing an upcoming meeting. “Don’t Be a Victim!” the announcement read. “Because we believe you love your family, home, and neighborhood and are concerned about their safety, we are asking you to join us in a well-organized massive and sustaining effort to make our streets safe from the destructive and terrorizing activities of misdirected youth.” The meeting was to be held at the Germantown Jewish Centre on April 7.68 The day before the scheduled event, four members of WMAN, acting independently of the organization and without any institutional authority, printed their own flyer, on WMAN letterhead, and distributed it in the affected area:

Don’t Be a Victim of Scare Tactics. West Mount Airy Action tells us we are in the heart of a high crime area. But are we? The Fourteenth Police District doesn’t think so. WMAA claims to have an answer on April 7. But will they? Are vigilante patrols and funding of repressive programs the answer? West Mount Airy Neighbors thinks not. There are better ways to deal rationally with community concerns of all kinds. WMAN urges you to attend the meeting and counteract this negative approach to our neighborhood.

The flyer was signed by the renegade WMAN board members, which included former executive secretary Ruth Steele and current board president Douglas Gaston III.69 The following night, a large group of Mount Airy residents gathered at the Germantown Jewish Centre for the WMAA meeting. While the meeting began peacefully, by the end any sense of order had broken down, with representatives of the two dissenting factions screaming at each other from across the room. Community members, unaware of the rising tensions, were alarmed by the display of aggression, and many left believing that the two organizations were butting heads at an institutional level.70

On April 8, WMAN executive secretary Flora Wolf issued an internal memo to all board members, calling for an emergency meeting. She described the events that had transpired over the previous two days, leading up to the confrontation at the WMAA meeting. “The quarrel between the two organizations was aired in a noisy, public way that cannot fail to lessen our image in the community,” she wrote.71 According to Wolf, this misguided conduct by four rogue board members was threatening to break the organization apart. WMAN had to form a united front to maintain its position as a viable community clearinghouse, she continued. The board had adopted a policy of support with regard to WMAA and nothing had changed to mitigate that pledge. The rest of the West Mount Airy Neighbors board met on April 14 to issue a unanimous reprimand to President Gaston and the three other offending members.72 But the incident, and the attendant fallout, continued to follow the organization.

That spring, WMAA applied to the Governor’s Justice Committee for the disbursement of $24,906 in federal funds to help implement its community initiatives. According to the grant proposal, the organization was seeking support to develop programming geared toward educating residents on security; implementing a comprehensive town watch program; developing a properly trained, unarmed patrol team equipped with two-way radios; promoting police-community relations; and offering counseling and referral services to young people with drug, family, or peer problems.73 Individual residents of the neighborhood—many with ties to WMAN but acting outside of the bounds of the organization—mounted a campaign to oppose the governmental support, reportedly declaring that WMAA was invoking “unnecessary emotionalism on the issue of public safety in [the] neighborhood.”74 The critics submitted a petition to the Governor’s Justice Committee on April 24, at which point Judge Harvey Schmidt, a champion of civil rights and chair of the state’s Community Crime Prevention Committee, called for a community-wide effort to resolve the tension before the funding body would consider the request.

Once again, on an institutional level, WMAN and WMAA worked together to craft a series of guidelines for a collaborative relationship between the organizations. But still, individual members of WMAN protested. On May 8, the Regional Council of the Governor’s Justice Committee announced an unprecedented public hearing to allow both sides to defend their positions. President Lancaster began his testimony by addressing the discord in the neighborhood. “Unanimity in a community of 7,000 people is not going to be possible,” he said, “but West Mount Airy Action, Inc. and West Mount Airy Neighbors are growing together.”75 He went on to describe the ongoing efforts by the two organizations to reach a collaborative coexistence. They had agreed to exchange board representatives, to develop mutual block associations, to coordinate meeting and event calendars, and to review each other’s work, he told the committee. Having two community organizations could rip the neighborhood apart, said Lancaster. Or, through mutual exchange and innovative partnership, it could make it stronger.

Opponents of the funding laid out three critiques. First, they said, WMAA had not articulated a concrete strategy with regard to the problems of youth of the neighborhood. Second, they argued, the organization could not provide the necessary matching funds. Finally, they maintained, the roving WMAA volunteers would cause hostility between police and teenagers. “I have no personal hang-ups about the people in WMAA,” testified WMAN member Edward Simms, “but they’re going to put people in cars driving around and they’re going to see kids—my kids—and think they’re acting suspiciously.”76 The new organization, Simms and others maintained, would create a culture of fear in the community. Even as his remarks hinted at a sort of institutional turf war between the two organizations—with some members of WMAN bristling at the prospect of having their authority tempered—Simms’s invocation of fear called to mind the apprehension that many white Americans felt toward black militancy, a sense of unease over the concentration of black control. In linking the largely black-led WMAA to a growing anxiety throughout the neighborhood, then, his comment implied a patently racialized conception of local control.77

At the end of the May 8 meeting, the state provisionally approved WMAA’s request for funding, pending the mending of relationships within the neighborhood. Residents feared the fallout from the confrontation. In an anonymous editorial published in the May 22 Germantown Courier, one community member called for an end to the hostility:

The bonds between neighbors that made West Mount Airy a vital community must not be allowed to dissolve as a result of recent controversy that divided the neighborhood. The people of both factions and all groups must wipe the slate clean and rationally discuss the direction West Mount Airy is to take. It will take all the resources of the community to heal the wounds and find the best answers for everyone concerned. The people of West Mount Airy have worked too hard at making their community a healthy place to live, to let their efforts go down the drain in the wake of a single dispute. The fight must be forgotten and brotherhood remembered.78

Though such comments did not overtly mention racial strife, the invocation of a sense of “brotherhood” hinted at the desire for a return to the postwar integrationist ethos on which the community was originally built. The speaker may have been calling on the black leadership of WMAA to temper their perceived militancy in the interest of restoring a sense of stability to the neighborhood.

On May 23, West Mount Airy Action surprised residents by withdrawing its request for funding. “With 7,000 people living in Mount Airy,” said President Lancaster, “it’s going to be very difficult to stop them from raising objections or circulating petitions. We’re going to dissolve the corporation and let it go.”79 The next day, Lancaster issued a public letter to the community, formally declaring the end of WMAA. “In spite of West Mount Airy Neighbors’ enthusiastic expression and actions of support as an organization,” he wrote, “several of our neighbors and members have been very successful in their strategies to destroy the formalizing of the fifteen months’ efforts to more ably serve our community with a positive thrust at crime prevention.” Lancaster went on to name individually the WMAN members who had derailed the organization. “Our board does not wish to be a party to the extension of the disruption and destruction of our community that has been so carefully orchestrated,” he continued. “We love West Mount Airy and because we do, we take immediate steps to de-escalate our efforts, fulfill our contracted obligations, and fade quietly into the night.”80 The dissolution of WMAA effectively put an end to the institutional struggle for control in West Mount Airy. For WMAN leaders, the episode appeared to legitimate their rightful place as the official voice of the community, and to prove that their time-honored integrationist agenda and governing principles could effectively lead the neighborhood into the waning years of the twentieth century.

Throughout the country, once-integrated communities were beginning to tip. Shaker Heights, Ohio; Takoma Park in Washington, D.C.; and Oak Park, Chicago, were all witnessing creeping population changes.81 Whereas half a decade earlier the integration movement had seen the formation of National Neighbors, a broad-based umbrella organization to coordinate localized efforts to monitor open housing and fair housing policies, neighborhood trends around the country evidenced that many such areas were experiencing shifts from intentionally integrated toward middle-class black enclaves.82 West Mount Airy, though, had managed to avoid such a fate and was maintaining its role as a national example of interracial living. WMAN believed that the defeat of WMAA proved the success of their own continued vigilance in maintaining community cohesion and racial and economic stability.

Tensions within West Mount Airy, however, were not as quick to abate. In June 1975, Doug Gaston, who had been at the center of the WMAA debacle, stepped down as WMAN president, following the completion of his term. Chris Van de Velde, a member of the organization since 1972, was elected to fill the position. “I wasn’t planning to run for public office,” Van de Velde later recalled, “but then there I was [at the meeting when Gaston stepped down]…Sometime during the evening’s discussion, someone decided to nominate me as a compromise alternative to the divisiveness of the previous administration.”83 The new president had served for two years as the director of field operations in the New York regional office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Prior to that, he had worked under New York mayor John Lindsay as deputy commissioner of the Department of Rent Control and Housing Maintenance, and while in graduate school he had interned at the Philadelphia office of the Housing and Urban Development Department.84 When he returned to the city in 1970, he and his new wife chose to live in West Mount Airy because of the community’s reputed commitment to racial integration, and he brought with him a belief that community groups like WMAN could serve as a solution to the problems facing America’s cities.85

Many, it seemed, hoped that he would be able to bring closure to the events of the previous spring. “The time has come to mend the differences that have tested the West Mount Airy community,” wrote a Germantown Courier reporter. “The election of Van de Velde…is an encouraging beginning, but he can only be effective with the cooperation of all concerned.”86 The new president, who arrived with a demonstrated commitment to urban sustainability, sought to usher West Mount Airy into a new era, but first he had to restabilize the community. As his first official act, he set out to bring together for the first time the three opposing parties to the recent controversy—WMAN, WMAA, and the renegade WMAN board members—to try to find a common ground from which to move forward.

To many residents, the election of Van de Velde seemed to evidence a recalibration of the long-standing community organization and a welcome reprise of its earliest integrationist mission. The new president’s résumé looked strikingly similarly to that of WMAN cofounder George Schermer, and, like Schermer before him, Van de Velde’s election coincided with a pressing need to create stability out of upheaval. But Van de Velde inherited a fractured community, a vastly depleted Philadelphia, and a much-evolved movement for racial justice, and he was aware that West Mount Airy Neighbors required a new model of organizing if the neighborhood was to maintain a sense of economic and communal stability and a reputation for interracial tolerance and liberal politics. The new president set out to reframe community conversations, to move away from the rhetoric of integration and bring homeowners back together through concrete projects geared toward cohesion and improvement. “Integration had been a very conscious effort in West Mount Airy,” Van de Velde later reflected, “but by this point, it was a fact. It had happened. We were all there, so now it was a question of, how are we all going to get along?”87 As one of his early acts as president, Van de Velde initiated a series of neighborhood beautification projects. Under his leadership, WMAN worked to plant trees, to clean up Germantown Avenue, to refurbish the Allens Lane Train Station, and to bring residents out of their homes with the idea that “when you have projects and things for people to do, they stop arguing.”88 The organization believed that they could heal the wounds of the previous year through concrete, collaborative community projects that transcended questions of race.

In place of the decades-old interracial mission of the neighborhood integration project, during the later years of the 1970s, WMAN under Val de Velde’s leadership worked to recast West Mount Airy from a site of interracial living to a model of alternative urbanity, a deracialized compromise toward diversity.89 The new manifestation of WMAN heralded the community as a place for liberal- and progressive-minded families to live intentionally. It did not focus on repairing racial hostilities, nor did it minimize racial differences. As Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Howard Shapiro wrote in 1979, “If neighboring Chestnut Hill is home for the well-to-do, then West Mount Airy is the home of those who could be and, in many ways are, but choose to live differently.”90