Chapter 2

FINDING CAPITAL IN DIVERSITY

The Creation of Racially Integrated Space

In May 1967, George Schermer came to Philadelphia to participate in a panel discussion on the future of racial integration. The trip took the Washington, DC-based consultant back to the place he had called home for more than ten years. Schermer had moved to West Mount Airy in 1953, just as the integration efforts were gaining steam, and he became one of the most influential forces in the creation of an economically stable, racially integrated community. Reflecting on the success of that integration project that they had embarked on nearly fifteen years earlier, he spoke of the way his community elected to allocate financial resources and residential muscle. “The amount of busing it would take would be beyond belief,” Schermer said of the prospect of integration. “Instead, we did it with moving vans.”1

When African American buyers began to make their way to West Mount Airy, Schermer and his neighbors organized grassroots efforts to welcome them into the community. Throughout the 1950s, integrationist leaders guided residents through the complicated process of developing an experiment in interracial living in northwest Philadelphia. At first, the community relied on a Myrdalian vision of postwar racial justice, grounding their efforts in the belief that with individual moral suasion, organizers could successfully coax their neighbors into working toward integration.2 As they moved forward, though, activists worked to bridge their emotional pleas with the growing governmental push toward racial liberalism in public and professional worlds. By the end of the decade, through this fusion of moral appeal with a concerted interventionist effort toward concrete legal and economic change, Mount Airy residents created a reform movement predicated on a strategy of grassroots moral liberalism that relied upon both individual persuasion and structural accountability. Schermer’s 1967 invocation of moving vans, then, implied a rather simplified tale of intentional integration. Most glaringly, his association of vans with school buses conflated residential and educational integration, two distinct processes that—despite, at times, West Mount Airy residents’ efforts to the contrary—required markedly different tactics for implementation and maintenance.3 But more fundamentally, Schermer’s celebration of moving vans belied the significance of this innovative two-tiered approach through which residents worked to stabilize their community in the face of rapid transition and, in the process, created a model of neighborhood organizing and social change.

In early 1953, a group of white residents in West Mount Airy came together to discuss their growing concerns over the changing face of their community. Two years earlier, upwardly mobile black families had begun to move into the homes along the neighborhood’s Lincoln Drive corridor.4 The large thoroughfare—the only north-south thruway without shopping districts or trolley tracks to connect Center City (the central business-residential district in Philadelphia) with northwest Philadelphia and the suburbs beyond—–was by the postwar years cluttered with traffic, as automobiles encroached on the residential character of Lincoln Drive. At the same time, some homeowners were beginning to see the large turn-of-the-century single and twin houses lining the street as architecturally passé. As those white families left for the modern homes of the contiguous suburbs, black home buyers began to move in. The neighborhood’s Pelham section, just east of Lincoln and south of Greene Street, experienced the change particularly acutely.5

Realtors saw their chance. In a familiar pattern that played out in communities across the country, agents steered prospective black buyers to the Pelham pocket and solicited sales from the area’s white residents, seeking to capitalize on the growing demographic and economic instability.6 The white homeowners that remained were becoming nervous about the very real possibility that, spurred by these unseemly real estate practices, the projections of swift demographic turnover would become a reality. They did not want to leave Mount Airy, with its old stone houses, its sidewalk-lined streets and vast network of parks and trails, its well-regarded elementary schools and well-established religious institutions. But they had to find a way to ensure that the neighborhood would remain a stable and, indeed, vibrant urban community. All around them they saw evidence of transition, of resistance and flight giving way to turnover and decline. They knew they needed a new approach.7

That spring, a group of Mount Airy homeowners, led by clergy from four area religious institutions—the Germantown Jewish Centre, the Epiphany Episcopal Church, the Unitarian Church of Germantown, and Summit Presbyterian Church—set out to learn all they could about local and national trends in housing and race relations. For months, they studied census data, city charters, religious texts, sociological studies, real estate appraisals, state, federal, and international constitutions, and human relations literature. By the end of the summer, they were convinced: their research, the group maintained, provided ample evidence to support the idea that a racially mixed neighborhood was both sustainable and, just maybe, desirable.8

Clergy members and lay leaders from each institution approved the report that October and presented the findings to focus groups from their congregations. These groups, too, lauded the results and decided to bring the material to the larger communities, giving congregants an opportunity to adopt, reject, or revise a proposal for a coordinated effort toward effecting interracial stability in the neighborhood.9 Still uncertain of the planned objectives, the membership of Summit Presbyterian Church voted by a slim majority to withdraw from the burgeoning organization. The Jewish, Unitarian, and Episcopal congregations all passed the proposal. Under the plan, the institutions appointed a steering committee composed of the head clergy member and three parishioners from each congregation. On February 18, 1954, the group, adopting the name Church Community Relations Council of Pelham (CCRC), held its first meeting.10

Following the stalled campaign at Summit, a number of parishioners came together to voice concern over the church’s unwillingness to join the local efforts. Though they remained unsure of the focus of the budding CCRC, congregants saw the need for a community group to take on the unseemly realtors that were invading the neighborhood.11 If they were unable to coordinate through the religious organization, they decided, they would create a secular space to address the growing unease over potential blockbusting and redlining efforts. During the fall of 1953, the Summit Church group gathered several Mount Airy residents to carry on the research that the Council had collected that summer. Meeting in the home of Summit congregant Alan Mann, George Schermer of the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission, Jane Reinheimer of the American Friends Service Committee, and Kay Briner and William Cannaday of the Germantown Human Relations Committee continued to scrutinize the literature on race relations, seeking to understand how to create an integrated community. On February 3, 1954, weeks before the first meeting of the CCRC, the group issued its findings to an audience of forty-seven homeowners at the Unitarian Church.12 A month later, following the selection of officers and the appointment of a steering committee, the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association (WMAN) was born. The new organization concentrated on building like-minded coalitions on individual blocks in an attempt to stave off rapid transition, with particular emphasis on the small area bounded by Lincoln Drive, Ellet Street, Wayne Avenue, and the Pennsylvania Railroad.13

Though the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association was originally founded as an alternative to the church-based organizing of the CCRC, board members quite consciously invoked a religious ethic in their publications and communications.14 In the middle of the 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War and the domestic Red Scare, many Americans pitted a sense of pious democracy against godless Communism.15 The fear of being branded a Communist was powerful. At the very first meeting of WMAN, members of the temporary steering committee expressed concerns over residents’ willingness to join a left-leaning organization operating without the backing of religious authority. “People might hesitate to commit themselves,” one board member warned, “because…of present fears regarding involvement in organizations…. [They] might be suspicious.”16 Without the institutional support that benefited the Church Community Relations Council, WMAN was careful in its literature to establish itself as a liberal prodemocracy organization. Before long, the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association and the CCRC realized that they were working toward similar goals. The two groups held joint meetings and organized collaborative interracial committees.17

In its statement of principles, “This We Believe About Our Neighborhood,” the Church Community Relations Council set the tone for Mount Airy’s integration efforts for decades to come: we want to remain in our community, and we’ll welcome others in. “Gradually, Negro families of means are buying homes in the better neighborhoods,” the statement said:

Those that are moving into our neighborhood show every evidence of being good neighbors and of keeping their property up to standard. However, because of the myths and legends of race, the history of segregation and some of the traditional practices of the real estate market, a spirit of fear and panic often seeps into the hearts and minds of many people, causing them to list their houses for sale and run away. This running away is detrimental to the community. It forces too many sales in too short a time. It sometimes depreciates market values and disrupts patterns of community leadership and neighborhood acquaintance. People who love good homes, gracious living, a cultural atmosphere, should be encouraged to stay. People who appreciate and can contribute to such an environment should be encouraged to buy or rent in the neighborhood.18

Not wanting to give in to the idea that the American Dream had been relocated to newly forming suburbs, the CCRC presented a message of an elite liberal cosmopolitan identity; it was out of this desire to maintain their urban liberalness that community leaders created an affirmative civil rights duty.

Their comments played on the economic sensibilities of the northwest Philadelphia community. The CCRC evoked a dignified middle-class character not as something that West Mount Airy homeowners should seek to attain but rather as a truism. “The residents of the neighborhood are known to be people of refinement and culture,” the statement of principles said. “Philadelphia, and Germantown in particular, has traditionally been a community in which democracy, human dignity, and respect for all people have been held in high esteem. The citizens of Germantown are known for their mature, unhurried exercise of good judgment in meeting social issues.”19 In linking the historic commitment to democratic ideals with the contemporary residential self-interest of maintaining the viability of the neighborhood, the CCRC sought to convince Mount Airy homeowners of the social and cultural value of an integrated community. The Council’s vision of interracial living was, in a sense, performative, an outward manifestation of both economic status and liberal politics.20 Whereas middle-class families across the nation were seeking refuge in newly constructed homogeneous suburbs, the CCRC attempted to convince its constituents that it was their very financial and social stature that made such a commitment to integration their providence.

At the same time, the CCRC aligned this middle-class economic sensibility with the country’s Cold War agenda, outlining an international responsibility to uphold the principles of democracy, racial equality, and human dignity. “Today,” it said, “from all over the world comes a challenge. ‘Show us that democracy in America means dignity and respect for every person regardless of his color, his ancestry, or the manner of his worship. Show us that under your system, people…can live together in peace and mutual respect without boundary lines that segregate them by race, color, or religious creed.’ ”21 The integrationists of the CCRC, well educated and well versed in contemporary political and social ideologies, justified their actions by grounding them in a policy-driven imperative to herald racial justice domestically in order to bolster the image of American democracy around the globe. As community leaders spoke of a democratic impulse and a drive toward the fulfillment of the American Dream, they employed this Cold War-infused language to attract the attention of mainstream white homeowners. According to the Council, residential integration lay at the core of American democracy. By working toward that ideal, they implied, Mount Airy residents were not only preserving their community; they were becoming better Americans.

The CCRC also worked to place local efforts within the larger movement toward residential integration across the United States. “The challenge is being met by many people of good will in neighborhoods throughout the country,” the statement continued. “From San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Connecticut, and New York come stories of people who do not want to resist and run away when people of a different group become their neighbors.”22 Mount Airy’s religious leaders sought to show their congregants that they were not alone in their integrationist approach to racial transition, that they were a part of a network of liberal Americans, all working toward creating genuine interracial communities.

By the middle of the 1950s, across the nation, city planners and community organizations were embarking on experimental projects to recast residential integration as both financially viable and morally compelling.23 In Shaker Heights, Ohio, community leaders responded to the influx of black neighbors by working to redefine the character of their neighborhood from one advocating racial homogeneity to one that promoted class-based exclusivity. The suburban Shaker Heights had been founded in the first decades of the twentieth century as a retreat from the perceived harsh streets of Cleveland. The community was able to maintain that identity in the late 1950s and beyond by invoking a liberal agenda toward equality and marketing itself as a haven for the middle and upper classes regardless of race.24

City planner Morris Milgram saw the greatest potential for integration in the construction of entirely new neighborhoods. Beginning in the early 1950s, Milgram, who was born and raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, built planned communities in urban and suburban spaces around the country. A pioneer of the open housing movement, the innovative businessman conceived of whole neighborhoods with controlled demographics. Between 1945 and 1960, the United States saw the construction of approximately fifty such private interracial housing developments, nearly eight thousand units in total. Roughly 40 percent of them were located in the mid-Atlantic region.25 Although Milgram was reportedly ideologically opposed to racial quotas in his communities, he adopted the system to avoid the creation of all-black neighborhoods.26 He mandated that his properties reflect the racial demographics of the region. In one of his northeast Philadelphia developments, Milgram sought an 80–20 percent, white-to-black ratio. Though he confronted challenges in securing funding and enticing white families to purchase homes, in total he developed integrated housing for more than twenty thousand people in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, Maryland, Illinois, California, Texas, and Washington, DC. Milgram went on to become the first recipient of the National Human Rights Award of the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1968.27

In West Mount Airy, following the CCRC’s summer of research and the subsequent formation of WMAN, neighborhood integrationists saw promise in a different model of integration, one that stalled transition by highlighting mutual benefit and community involvement. George Schermer, who knew Milgram through his work in race relations, was one of the most vocal advocates for such an approach. When Schermer and his wife, Bernice, first began exploring neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Milgram tried to convince them to purchase a home in Greenbelt Knoll, one of his earliest planned communities, constructed in the far northeast reaches of the city. Milgram, himself, lived there for much of his adult life. But Schermer was not persuaded that the future of integration lay in new development. Instead, he said, the hope for creating racially integrated space rested in the areas experiencing demographic shifts; he believed that there was potential “in the process of a racially changing neighborhood, to slow down [that] process of transition.”28 Schermer moved his family to West Mount Airy because he believed that residential integration was the pathway to better race relations. He and his wife made their home in the neighborhood at the same time that residents of Mount Airy were trying to reconstitute their community to create a stable integrated neighborhood. He did not introduce the idea of intentional integration to local homeowners, but he quickly became integral to the success of the movement.

Born in Wright County, Minnesota, in 1910, Schermer found his way to race relations activism through local New Deal initiatives in Chicago in the 1930s. After graduating from high school in 1927, he spent eleven years working his way through various colleges around the Midwest. He briefly attended the University of Minnesota before enrolling in 1931 at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. The following year, he transferred to George Williams College in Chicago, and ultimately graduated from the University of Chicago in 1937.29 To earn money for school, Schermer took odd jobs, first working for a local 4-H organization, then with the Service for Unattached Men, developing group activities for men living in shelters. Eventually, he found himself at the Abraham Lincoln Center, a settlement house specializing in interracial programming. He was hired as the activities director and quickly became immersed in the divisive racial climate of Chicago’s South Side. “That’s where I received my initial orientation toward race relations,” Schermer later reflected. The center was located on Cottage Avenue, the dividing line between a white and a black community. Hostilities were intense, Schermer recalled; they had “minor race riots” every few weeks.30

Working at the center offered him a staging ground for his early activism. A few nights each week, guests would come for dinner, political and civic and academic elites from around the nation who brought with them new and innovative ideas about the future of race relations in the United States. One of the greatest thrills of Schermer’s young life was the night that A. Philip Randolph, acclaimed civil rights and labor activist and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, arrived as a guest at the Settlement House: “I remember him talking about his hopes that someday he would stage a march on Washington. This was in the 1930s. He had great faith in the basic decency of the American people…and believed that by staging such a march, the plight of the American Negro would be brought to the attention of the American people and that good things would happen.” Randolph later helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which brought more than two hundred thousand people to the Washington Mall to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. Schermer sat quietly during the meal, watching, listening, and learning all he could from the civil rights leader.31

In 1938, Schermer moved on from the Abraham Lincoln Center. He worked for two years in tenant services with the Chicago Housing Authority and then headed to Detroit to serve as the assistant director for management of the Detroit Housing Commission. He spent the next twelve years there, with the city’s Housing Commission, the Federal Public Housing Authority, and, finally, the Mayor’s Interracial Committee. Even as he struggled to combat unfriendly mayoral administrations and city officials, he worked hard to put into practice the abstract ideas that he had been mulling over ever since those settlement house dinners.32 When Mayor Clark wooed him to Philadelphia in the early 1950s, Schermer brought with him the expertise that came from close to twenty years of working in the realm of race relations.

Schermer believed that if a community could come together with an intentional mandate toward integration, it could stave off the economic downturn traditionally associated with racial change. He and his wife, Bernice, moved to Philadelphia with their three children, intent on finding such a neighborhood. His work at city hall connected him with tight-knit communities around the city, bastions of liberalism that were intent on putting the interracial ideologies of Clark’s reform government into practice. Schermer’s colleagues immediately guided him to West Mount Airy, and upon visiting the neighborhood and talking to local residents and community leaders, he came away with the conviction that if any place could be intentionally integrated, it was this one. The Schermers moved to the 6700 block of McCallum Street and quickly settled in.33 Though Schermer’s professional life was dictated by the demands of his new position, in the evenings and on weekends he offered his time and expertise to the Mount Airy community.

Schermer’s plans for reform—both in West Mount Airy and across the city—were clearly informed by the recent postwar turn in the philosophy of government liberalism. Whereas, during the 1930s, President Roosevelt’s New Deal administration offered a widespread critique of unfettered capitalism and pursued an agenda of redistributive economic policies, by the World War II era the federal government had moved away from such class-oriented initiatives.34 Postwar liberal reformers turned from economic transformation to rights-based politics, placing race relations and equality of opportunity at the center of the national agenda. Schermer considered his middle-class reform mandate a plausible goal for the city as a whole and for his own community of Mount Airy.35

As Schermer pursued an agenda grounded in reform-minded government liberalism, other community leaders in Mount Airy continued to focus their energy on faith-based organizing. In 1954, the Church Community Relations Council crafted a comprehensive approach for putting the integration project into action. The organization articulated a clear plan to educate residents and build understanding across racial lines, so as to counterbalance fear and panic.36 Through the early years of stabilization, this ethos of individual change held strong. The CCRC initiative implored current homeowners to remain active members of the community and called on them to participate in “sell your neighborhood” campaigns, encouraging prospective buyers of “high standard” to purchase homes in the area.37 Through public sermons, focus groups, and informal gatherings, the Council promoted a positive attitude about the racial change that was occurring in the neighborhood. These religious leaders, capitalizing on their esteem in the community, crafted a series of guidelines for how Mount Airy residents should react to their incoming black neighbors.

Mount Airy’s religious organizing took place amid national conversations among faith-based communities over how best to respond to racial transition. Catholic neighborhoods often saw antagonism mount as white residents waged aggressive campaigns against African Americans moving onto their blocks. Many Jewish enclaves, where rabbis preached accommodation over resistance, experienced profound flight as congregations moved en masse from city neighborhoods to suburbs.38 Jewish homeowners in West Mount Airy watched fellow Jews across Philadelphia rush to flee as African Americans began to move into their communities. To prevent a similar mass exodus, clergy members pushed hard to maintain an active and vibrant Jewish presence in the neighborhood.

Though small pockets of Jews had been living in historic Germantown since the colonial era, in the early twentieth century upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants began purchasing homes in the area, in search of a change from their North Philadelphia ethnic neighborhoods.39 This demographic shift provided the impetus for an increasing Jewish cultural presence in the area and a growing desire for a formalized Jewish community. By the early 1930s, more than five hundred Jewish families were scattered throughout northwest Philadelphia, yet there were still no synagogues in the region and, as such, no cohesive Jewish identity. Some families joined congregations in other parts of the city and the surrounding suburbs, and many remained unaffiliated. As the Jewish population grew, though, and younger families began to move into the neighborhood, the community experienced a marked shift. Suddenly, Jewish residents in Germantown and Mount Airy articulated a pressing need for a Jewish space for their children. It was not that these American-born Jews necessarily wanted a religious presence in their lives; rather, they sought the social and cultural connectedness that a synagogue could provide. In 1934, Beth Israel, a Strawberry Mansion congregation, supervised Hebrew school programming for Jewish youth in the Germantown area. Two years later, the Germantown Jewish Centre began to take shape.40

During the summer of 1936, Philadelphia Jewish leaders held public and private meetings throughout the region, garnering support for the new institution. By early fall, nearly one hundred families had signed on. On September 28, at a dinner at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel in downtown Philadelphia, the burgeoning congregation elected its board of directors. One of the first orders of business was to determine the name of the new institution. After much deliberation, the board settled on the Germantown Jewish Centre, asserting that the Anglicized spelling would imply a secular connotation. Their decision was part of a larger recognition that the institution would serve as more than a synagogue; it would be a communal gathering space, grounded as much in ethnic identity as in religious adherence. It was the first step toward the formation of a cohesive Jewish community center in West Mount Airy, made up of a diverse group of families, many of whom were unfamiliar with traditional Jewish practices, customs, and observances.41

Two weeks later, the group signed a lease to rent the Georgian Hall Annex of the Pelham Club for $200 a month. On November 11, the congregants, under the leadership of interim rabbi Solomon Grayzel, formally dedicated their new institution.42 The Germantown Jewish Centre had become a reality. By June 1942, when Elias Charry of Indianapolis took over as head rabbi, the congregation was home to more than three hundred families. They held services and lectures several times each week, and two hundred children were enrolled in religious school. The community was overflowing the small space it occupied at the corner of Emlen and Carpenter. It was time to look for a new home. After an exhaustive search of the region, GJC settled on a large tract of land at the corner of Lincoln Drive and Ellet Street in West Mount Airy. Contractors broke ground on June 8, 1946. Fifteen months later, the expanded Hebrew school was completed; on May 21, 1954, the community finally gathered to dedicate their new synagogue.43

Though the land had cost a mere $10,500, over the course of construction the building budget ballooned to nearly $1 million.44 As the numbers continued to climb, Rabbi Charry noted hints of the changing composition of the neighborhood. Having worked closely with civic and governmental organizations throughout the Midwest, he was well aware of the national trends toward Jewish flight.45 The rabbi realized that he would have to take quick, affirmative steps to convince Mount Airy Jews to remain in the neighborhood, and to entice new Jewish families to move in. Having made the fiscal investment in the community, Charry’s commitment to the integration efforts of the Church Community Relations Council came as much out of economic necessity as it did out of liberal ideological fervor.

In the early 1950s, with Charry at the helm, GJC began a proactive campaign to retain and expand its membership base. The rabbi and the board of directors contacted new Jewish residents in the neighborhood, welcoming them to the community and inviting them to attend events and services at the synagogue. At times, they called upon the rhetoric of other religious practices to drive their message home. In a 1954 set of letters that went out to new homeowners, Charry wrote, “Since you have moved into our neighborhood, let me extend to you a warm welcome to the Germantown community. We consider Germantown, Mount Airy, and Chestnut Hill our ‘parish.’ ”46 Familiar with the trends against dislocation among Catholic neighborhoods in the United States, in evoking the imagery of the neighborhood parish Charry may well have been highlighting the geographic parameters that bound Catholic homeowners to their local churches, in the hopes that his constituents would make the same connection.

Charry and the board sent dozens of these letters each month, adhering to a detailed protocol designed to personalize the mailings as much as the mass appeal would allow. Handwritten revisions to an early draft mandated that all further letters be typed, not mimeographed, and that each be hand-signed by the rabbi himself—stamped signatures were not acceptable—and addressed to an individual family.47 Charry relied on established members of the congregation to be the eyes and ears of the neighborhood, alerting him of Jewish families moving into Mount Airy. On August 28, 1951, he received a letter from long-standing GJC member Leo Dushoff. “Mr. Benjamin Zieve, one of the founders of the Diamond Paper Box Company…decided to move to the new Presidential Apartments,” the letter read. “He is a man of means, interested in synagogues, and would be a welcome addition to our membership.”48 Charry promptly followed up on Dushoff’s referral, writing a personal letter to Mr. Zieve, inviting him to visit the congregation. “It would delight us greatly,” he wrote, “if, after you have moved in, you would come to the Centre for religious services…. I have heard many nice things about you from Mr. Dushoff and would personally deem it an honor to greet you.”49 The GJC rabbi sought to build personal connections with his constituents in order to foster a sense of commitment both to the synagogue and to the larger neighborhood. By developing these relationships, he created a sense of accountability among his parishioners to support the viability of the community.

As Charry reached out to new residents in the Germantown area, he also worked to restructure the curriculum of the school and reorient religious services to liberalize congregational practices, in an effort to draw in a more diverse Jewish clientele. He hosted movie nights to attract younger, newly married couples to the Centre, in hopes that they would make a long-term commitment to the neighborhood and the congregation.50 He spoke to senior groups, men’s clubs, and women’s organizations, doing all he could to spread the word about the benefits not only of a Jewish community but of this Jewish community. Rarely mentioning racial transition, he offered sermons that spoke to the liberal ideals of justice and liberty.51 Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, working as much within his own community as with the larger religious council in the neighborhood, Charry provided the key link, maintaining a Jewish institutional presence in northwest Philadelphia and expanding the Jewish (and consequently white) population in Mount Airy.

While religious institutions laid the foundation for residential integration in West Mount Airy, other organizers came together independently to try to foster a sense of social integration. Though many of these residents had worked for years in race relations in Philadelphia’s political, educational, and business worlds, their efforts in the mid-1950s centered on bringing community members together in ways that, in a sense, transcended race. In this early period of integration in the neighborhood, activists built their campaigns on a platform of individual choice.52

The Allens Lane Arts Center, founded in 1953, was one of the most prolific organizations to emerge from this initial wave of reform. That year, the Henry Home and School Association (HHSA)—the parent-teacher organization at C. W. Henry School, the public elementary school at the geographic center of the neighborhood’s integration efforts—joined together with a group of committed neighborhood residents to create a community space that would use the arts as a vehicle through which like-minded people of different races and creeds could come together.53

Marjorie Kopeland, who presided over the HHSA and spearheaded the project, came to neighborhood organizing by way of her work with the Fellowship Commission. Founded in 1941 as the Young People’s Interracial Fellowship of Philadelphia, the Commission would become the nation’s oldest private human rights organization. Though it originated as a series of disparate groups responding to the institutionalized anti-Semitism in the city, by the middle of the decade the association had expanded its agenda to include race-based discrimination. Bringing together such groups as the local NAACP chapter, the International Institute, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Society of Friends, and, ultimately, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Commission worked both to educate the public on issues of tolerance and to implement initiatives to combat concrete racial discrimination.54 “My roots were really in Fellowship House,” Kopeland later reflected. “That is where I got my orientation about group relations.”55 She worked on the organization’s “Units for Unity” campaign, teaming up individuals of different faiths and races to lead intergroup dialogues throughout the city.

Kopeland joined the HHSA when her children entered elementary school, and in 1952, when her oldest daughter was getting set to graduate, she became the organization’s president. At the beginning of the fall semester that year, the new leader brought together more than a dozen fathers from the neighborhood to discuss how to put Henry School’s annual theme, Living Together in the Community, into practice. “I invited men to that meeting instead of mothers,” Kopeland later said, “[because] I was aware that we as mothers were very active during the day at the HHSA, and I was very interested in involving more fathers in their children’s activities.” Sitting in Kopeland’s Mount Pleasant Avenue living room that evening were two members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, as well as several accomplished artists and well-connected art supporters. By the end of that night, the group had conceived of a community center that would bring people together around a common interest in the arts.56

Though community energy was critical to the formation of the new arts center, the group quickly saw the need for external support to create a sustainable presence in the neighborhood. The new organization solicited the financial support of the Ford Foundation’s “Living Together through the Arts” fund. Founded in 1936 with the mandate to offer support “for scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare,” the Ford Foundation emerged in the years following World War II as a national resource for domestic and global nonprofit organizations working toward community betterment.57 As part of the early Cold War rights-based agenda, the foundation provided support to local institutions that were advancing the goals of postwar liberalism.

According to a public report disseminated in 1950, the Ford Foundation, evoking familiar Cold War era democratic principles, was working to support organizations that would contribute to global peace and justice. Their mission statement employed the rhetoric of freedom and equality in highlighting the need for technological, educational, and cultural innovation in order to “increase knowledge of factors that influence or determine human conduct, and extend such conduct for the maximum benefit of individuals and society.”58 The Ford Foundation provided key resources for fostering both individual commitment and organizational capacity at the local level, and the founders of the Allens Lane Arts Center, by positioning their integration efforts within this larger movement toward fulfilling American ideals on a global scale, found the institutional support they needed to develop long-term infrastructure and programming. With the backing of Ford, Kopeland and her associates successfully petitioned the Fairmount Park Commission to lease them public parklands at the corner of McCallum Street and Allens Lane for one dollar annually.59 On June 29, 1953, the Allens Lane Arts Center was officially incorporated as a nonprofit organization.60

As they waited for the Park Commission to refurbish the small guard station on the property, the group held its first classes at Henry School and Summit Church. And though it was the fathers who Kopeland initially called together to craft a plan for the organization, it was the mothers who went on to run the board and coordinate staff and volunteers.61 At its inception, Kopeland was elected the center’s first president. Shirley Melvin, who went on to cofound one of the first all-female real estate agencies in the city, joined the executive committee, and Bernice Schermer, wife of the ever-present Human Relations Commission director, signed on as vice president.62

When the Schermers first moved into the neighborhood, George had thrown himself into his work with the Commission and Bernice joined in neighborhood activities. She quickly formed a network of friends, a combination of members of the Unitarian Church, which the couple joined as soon as they arrived to the area; the wives of George’s colleagues in the city government; and the mothers of their children’s classmates. As she familiarized herself with the neighborhood efforts, she involved herself in community organizing.63 “There were a number of us,” Bernice later recalled, “who were willing to work at making life richer. [We were] willing to roll up our sleeves and really work at making this happens. We wanted to be integrated. We formed committees, within the school, within the church, within the synagogue. Everyone seemed to pitch in…there was a groundswell of activity.”64 Their early meetings lasted long into the night. Often, the women would plan and organize and corral support until two and three o’clock in the morning.65 “Everybody is nervous…when you start something as big [and] brand new as that,” Shirley Melvin remembered, “and it was a huge amount of work.”66

Though artistic expression was central to the art center’s mandate on paper, it was clear that the organization sought to use the arts as a vehicle through which to unite Mount Airy residents of all races, ages, and religions. The center offered ballroom dance lessons and watercolor classes. It housed spaces for music and ceramics and drama. And neighbors flocked to its doors.67 “I wish I could say…we had some high, lofty aesthetic reasons for wanting to bring people to the arts,” Kopeland later reflected, “but we felt we could bring people together through the arts.”68 One of the center’s early initiatives was a community nursery school. For some of the women on the board, it served as an alternative to the religious institutions around the neighborhood. “Lots of people were going to the synagogues and the churches,” Shirley Melvin later recalled, “but most of my friends wanted their kids to have an art background rather than a religious background.”69 The nursery school, Melvin believed, could offer neighborhood families an art-oriented early childhood experience instead. Shortly after its founding, the program expanded to include one of the city’s first integrated summer day camps as well.70

Figure 3. Children dance at Allens Lane Arts Center, Philadelphia Bulletin, 1957. Used with permission from Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.

The arts center offered a shared experience to disparate groups of individuals. The goal of social integration required organizers to bring people together under a set of common interests, breaking down identity barriers. In that way, Allens Lane became an outlet for neighbors to foster relationships that went beyond race. These communal gathering grounds—the religious institutions, the HHSA, and the arts center—served the neighborhood well. The everyday interactions that grew out of them bolstered the emotional appeals toward morality that organizations such as the Church Community Relations Council and the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association espoused at meetings, giving residents the space to put their integrationist philosophies into action.

The neighborhood began to see concrete results from community efforts within the first few years of transition. By 1955, West Mount Airy’s black population had expanded to 6.4 percent, distributed over 45 percent of the area’s geographic reach. Though 50 percent of the black families that had moved to the area in the first years of integration settled along the Lincoln-Pelham corridor, by the middle of the decade new African American transplants were living on eighteen of the neighborhood’s forty-one residential blocks.71 These blocks made up the physical and organizational center of the integration efforts, bound by Johnson Street, Germantown Avenue, Wissahickon Avenue, and Allens Lane. Even as the densely populated Sharpnack area remained overwhelming black, African American families were buying homes across the community, and while some white homeowners were leaving, the overall transition left little cause for concern; West Mount Airy saw turnover through the decade settle at 8 percent to 10 percent annually, in line with estimates for the normal rate of turnover, defined by the American Institute of Planners as 8 percent to 12 percent.72

Still, the stability that neighborhood activists created was precarious. In 1953, housing prices in this integrated center began to decline.73 Further, community leaders believed that realtors were continuing to direct most prospective black home buyers to the region’s south-central Pelham section, the same area where black families first began to congregate at the beginning of the decade. White families in Pelham started to panic at the new cries of instability.74 Though these early efforts had the effect of slowing down the rate of change, by the late 1950s George Schermer and other Mount Airy leaders had come to believe that in order to create long-term stability and, indeed, social capital in integrated space, community initiatives would have to be consolidated.

These discrete organizations, said Schermer, were able to effect change in localized regions around the community. They brought people together and encouraged one-on-one interactions that started to break down some of the racial barriers that were so deeply entrenched in the larger American society. But, he said, such ad hoc, singularly focused groups could only go so far in creating long-term stabilization. Schermer had learned from his work in Detroit that the only way to create sustainable change was to develop a larger infrastructure, bridging individual responsibility with institutional authority.75

By the late 1950s, under Schermer’s leadership, the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association was beginning to position itself as both neighborhood clearinghouse and voice of the community. The group worked to serve as a filter, gathering and disseminating information and facilitating communication between city and state government officials and Mount Airy residents. Schermer believed that the group could function as a localized version of an urban renewal corporation, a civic organization designed to rehabilitate the neighborhood and offer a sense of stability in an era of social, residential, and cultural transformation.76

With the reconstitution of West Mount Airy Neighbors as this larger umbrella institution, Schermer believed that his vision could become a reality. In 1958, he issued a call to a cadre of the Mount Airy citizenry, those he thought had both the means and the influence to serve as the building blocks for such an organization. Several residents heeded Schermer’s call. After a series of planning meetings, they founded the Neighbors League of West Mount Airy. Their statement of intent, issued on November 18, 1958, described the group as a collaboration of more than fifty Mount Airy families seeking to create a formal organization, incorporated as a nonprofit civic group, with the goal of maintaining and improving the quality of life in Mount Airy. Specifically, the Neighbors’ League perceived itself as an organization to unite all those who lived in or had an interest in the neighborhood. While never mentioning race or racial transition, the statement of intent called for a solution to problems with an eye toward the greatest mutual benefit, including real estate and zoning initiatives, schools and education, public relations and information, membership, and finance.77 With careful scripting, the League was speaking to the quiet majority of West Mount Airy residents, those who simply wanted to go about their day-to-day lives and feel assured that their community would remain stable. In addressing these mutual benefits and highlighting the services and institutions that attracted families to the area, Schermer’s group worked to allay the concerns of many in the neighborhood who did not consider themselves to be integrationists, not the few who were actively pushing for integrated living.

Two months later, the organization renamed itself West Mount Airy Neighbors (WMAN), but the objectives remained the same. On January 13, 1959, the new community group held its first public meeting at the recently constructed Lingelbach Elementary School. More than three hundred Mount Airy residents attended.78 The flyers advertising the event, distributed by the Germantown Jewish Centre, the Unitarian Church, and local Boy Scout troops 187 and 188, called on local residents to take a proactive role in shaping the identity of the community. “Protect your property and its surroundings through community organizing,” the call read.79 Like the original Neighbors’ League platform, the WMAN advertisements did not mention the movement of African Americans into the community; they simply invited residents to discuss what makes—and how to achieve—a “good community.”80 By not calling attention to race or integrated living, organizers hoped to avoid the residential panic that so often characterized periods of racial transition.

In an early WMAN brochure, disseminated to more than seven hundred households in the neighborhood, the organization described the changes taking place in the community. “Americans are the moving-est people,” it said. “We move an average of once every five years. So all kinds of Americans are moving out of our neighborhood and all kinds of Americans are moving in.”81 The brochure went on to explain that West Mount Airy Neighbors would provide a venue for residents to think and talk about these changes. It said that the organization was dedicated to “seeking solutions to our neighborhood problems and encouraging changes that [would] lead to an even better place to live.”82 The group promised to ensure that the school would meet the educational needs of local children; that they would hold accountable real estate brokers who were pushing for panic selling; that they would provide services for the neighborhood youth; and that they would foster communication to relieve the inevitable misunderstandings that arise when five thousand families live in close proximity to one another. Finally, it called on residents to actively involve themselves in the community.83

Quickly, the organization gained momentum. In March 1959, WMAN had 180 members, with a hundred more new membership forms to process. By December of that year, membership had grown to 335, and six months later, 500 residents had signed on.84 Many of the group’s earliest members were clustered along the neighborhood’s northwestern borders. These blocks were generally home to wealthier white families, many of whom would not see their first black neighbors until the late 1960s. With much invested in the stability and status of the neighborhood, these residents likely joined West Mount Airy Neighbors not out of a commitment to interracial living but out of a desire to preserve the economic, social, and cultural viability of the community.85

From WMAN’s inception, though, both the membership and the leadership of the group were interracial. Although the organization never set a formal mandate for racial quotas, believing that it was antithetical to its egalitarian mission, the demographics of the group quickly stabilized to mirror the racial composition of the neighborhood—by the late 1950s, roughly 15 percent of West Mount Airy residents were African American, as were 15 percent of the WMAN membership and leadership. By 1965, the neighborhood was 36 percent black and 64 percent white, and by 1970 the breakdown stabilized at 42 percent black and 58 percent white.86 As part of its central mission, West Mount Airy Neighbors, in fact, insisted on interracial participation and collaboration. Although such an objective made initial meetings a bit awkward, leaders believed that it was essential to the organization’s desire to offer a model for genuine interracial living. Just two years after its founding, in 1961, WMAN elected its first black president, Matthew J. Bullock.87

At the organization’s first official meeting on February 19, 1959, the Real Estate Practices Committee laid out a plan for dismantling local steering, redlining, and blockbusting efforts. Like the Church Community Relations Council before it, WMAN’s early efforts focused on eliminating these unsavory real estate practices that were still beleaguering the neighborhood.88 But unlike the CCRC, the 1959 incarnation of WMAN sought to effect structural change, to move beyond the notion of individual moral suasion and challenge the deeply enmeshed political and economic practices that perpetuated residential segregation. The group wanted to attack racism at an institutional level. First, the WMAN board worked to establish relationships with local realtors, demanding that both black and white potential buyers be shown houses on every block. They called on local brokers to sign on to their newly passed Real Estate Code of Ethics. They sought to minimize the presence of sale-related notices by calling for the abolition of “For Sale” signs throughout the community.89 To provide incentives for compliance, WMAN directed prospective sellers and buyers to conforming brokers. The organization worked with local newspapers, including the city’s paper of record at that time, the Philadelphia Bulletin, to publish the names of ethical realtors in the neighborhood.90 They sent out brochures to residents with lists of the region’s principled agents and urged them to consider using their services if they were considering a move. At the same time, the organization collected information about offending realtors. With each blockbusting effort, WMAN contacted the soliciting broker and threatened him with loss of business. Later, WMAN took its mission a step further, issuing a plan to bar realtors from the neighborhood who had induced panic selling in other areas of the city.91

Month after month, the committee addressed residents’ complaints about real estate practices. Board members would speak to offending agents, asking them to reconsider their efforts and sign on to the neighborhood’s code. In January 1962, the committee reviewed the case of realtor Thomas J. McCarthy, who had left in place a “Sold” sign on the 600 block of West Hortter Street. The secretary of WMAN called McCarthy personally and alerted him to the new real estate ethics campaign. After reading the materials sent to him, McCarthy signed on to the statement and removed the “Sold” sign from in front of the house. McCarthy became the twenty-third realtor in the area to meet the organization’s requirements.92

WMAN employed similar techniques to curtail the practice of redlining. The board solicited local banks and lending institutions to offer favorable mortgages to all financially secure prospective buyers, regardless of race.93 Board members met individually with bank managers and representatives for the city’s Mortgage Bankers Association to explain their neighborhood efforts. They believed that “if mortgage lenders [knew] how many people [were] working actively to maintain and improve [the] area, they [would] feel secure in their loans to the community.”94 In the early 1960s, some area banks also joined the effort to highlight the neighborhood as a stable, integrated community. Following WMAN’s 1962 marketing campaign, the local branch of Hamilton Savings and Loan Association displayed brochures in its lobby for interested clients.95 At the same time, the group worked to ensure long-term stability, by petitioning the city council and the local and state planning commissions to create and enforce fair housing laws.96

Gradually, these efforts began to pay off. The neighborhood saw rates of unwanted solicitations drop dramatically and housing turnover begin to slow. Even in the most affected sections of the neighborhood along the Lincoln Drive corridor, where annual rates of change had reached 14.3 percent in the first years of transition, by the early 1960s turnover had stabilized to a 5.65 percent annual average.97 A 1959 report by the Church Community Relations Council noted that in a 1,000-home section of the neighborhood, only 80 properties had changed hands in the previous twelve months; 52 to white home buyers, 26 to African Americans, one to a Chinese American, and one to someone of “undetermined race.” “Nearly all new buyers are business and professional people,” noted the report, and “the physical appearance of the neighborhood has maintained at the same high standard.”98

Of course, the process of integrating was not without disruption. Throughout this first decade of community efforts, the neighborhood did see isolated instances of racial discrimination, hostility, and outright ignorance. A white woman on Washington Lane had all of her windows changed because she believed that her black neighbors were listening through the metallic putty on her well-worn panes. There was the black man on Walnut Lane who was resting in his backyard after surgery. His neighbor, a white woman, jumped over the fence and hit the man in the leg with one of his own crutches. And there was the time that an African American man, angered by the remarks of his white neighbor, put a garden hose through the neighbor’s mail slot and turned on the water.99

Ernestine Thornton, who moved to Mount Airy in 1957, felt unwelcomed by the community at the outset. “I have lived on Sedgwick Street two days,” she said at a September meeting of the Sedgwick Neighbors Association. “I don’t like my neighbors and I’m thinking seriously about moving again.” Thornton, who the Philadelphia Tribune described as a well-dressed, attractive Negro woman, implied that she had experienced racially motivated antagonism after moving to Mount Airy. “My children attend a private interracial school and although they know the differences in the color, they have never felt that difference to be shameful,” she said. “I have never been made to feel that I was a problem, and I don’t want to be a problem.”100 African American resident Don Black, who moved to Mount Airy with his family in 1955, experienced occasional instances of racialized aggression toward his children. One afternoon, Black’s son, Donald Jr., came home from school distraught, wondering why his last name was Black. “The kids at school were kidding him,” the elder Black later recalled.101 In 1958, when stones shattered the windows of a neighbor’s home, Black’s children were blamed. As Black later recounted, the neighbor received an anonymous postcard, suggesting that his two children were responsible, though the kids were too small even to throw the stones that far. The events followed on the heels of the brutal gang murder of In-Ho Oh, a Korean graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.102 Soon after the windows were broken, Black remembered, his family received a threatening postcard of their own. “If you don’t watch your children and stop them from throwing stones,” he recalled it saying, “they’re going to end up like In-Ho Oh.”103

Still, by the end of the decade West Mount Airy seemed to be beginning to resemble Schermer’s vision of an intentionally integrated residential community. The Allens Lane Arts Center was thriving. WMAN’s membership rolls were growing weekly. Blockbusting realtors were abandoning their efforts and house prices were beginning to stabilize.104 Organizers believed that they had successfully stemmed the movement of white residents out of the community and laid the groundwork for a stable integrated neighborhood. In the early 1960s, West Mount Airy Neighbors began to look outward. Recognizing that sustainable interracial living would require both ongoing vigilance and a widespread creative marketing campaign, community leaders sought to bring their message to a wider audience, proclaiming racial integration as the new American Dream.