EPILOGUE

West Mount Airy and the Legacy of Integration

In 1975, Christie Balka graduated from Germantown Friends School and left her childhood home in Mount Airy to begin her freshman year at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. When she arrived, the white, Jewish woman was appalled by the endemic racism that she encountered. “I was furious with my parents for giving me the impression that our society had overcome this,” she recalled. The daughter of former WMAN president Jerry Balka, Christie had experienced racial difference throughout her life—when faculty laughed as she and her best friend, a black student, dressed as twins during the Henry School Halloween parade, when teachers disciplined her African American peers for skipping school as she went unpunished—but she felt unprepared for the level of intolerance that she witnessed when she left the protective bubble of Mount Airy. “My friends and I thought our values had been a wave that happened everywhere but Iowa and Mississippi,” she said. “We were stunned at how unprepared we were to go into the ‘real world.’ ”1

As West Mount Airy entered the new millennium, the neighborhood proudly brandished its reputation as one of the first and most successful models of economically stable racial integration in the United States. Local and national publications lauded the community’s success as a symbol of tolerance and diversity. In 2004, Mount Airy was among the city’s highest ranking neighborhoods in terms of community cohesion. “In a city of neighborhoods,” the Inquirer reported, “West Mount Airy stands out in Philadelphia as one of diversity, artistic inclination, and, well, neighborliness.”2 Two years later, O, the Oprah Magazine, published a spread on the community. “Welcome to a neighborhood where people of just about every race, religion, class, belief system, and sexual orientation come together and play very nicely,” wrote freelance journalist Lise Fundeberg. “In Mt. Airy, like almost nowhere else in the country, you can’t generalize about the inhabitants’ ethnicities, incomes, religions, sexual orientations, preferences in music, or even likelihood of shoveling when it snows.” Fundeberg, the biracial product of a white mother and a black father, had moved to the neighborhood in 1996.3 “Living in Mount Airy,” she wrote, “is like having been dropped onto a stage set that matches my internal landscape. Living the inside out. It’s not perfect, but it’s alive and mostly well intentioned. And because of the effort people make, their willingness to partake in the process of becoming, their intentional wakefulness, this much is true: it is always a beautiful day in my neighborhood.”4 Once again, community efforts toward creative marketing had given way to a national reputation of the area as a vibrant, diverse neighborhood.

And indeed, in these early years of the twenty-first century, Mount Airy remains one of the most economically stable and diverse areas in Philadelphia. According to 2010 census data, the neighborhood is approximately 41 percent African American, 54 percent white, and 5 percent Asian or Latino, with roughly 3 percent of residents self-identifying as multiracial.5 Between 2005–2009, the median household income in West Mount Airy was $84,593, nearly sixty percent higher than the national median for the same period, with more than a third of residents having earned graduate degrees, reflecting the neighborhood’s reputation as a “PhD ghetto.”6 In March 2013, the Pew Charitable Trust named the 19119 zip code, which encompasses both East and West Mount Airy, the seventh-wealthiest zip code in Philadelphia.7 The community also continues to serve as a haven for alternative families and progressive politics. Hybrid cars marked with bumper stickers proclaiming “Support Organic Farmers” and “Keep Abortion Legal” sit at the corner of Carpenter Lane and Green Street, the center of the original “integrated core,” now marked by the Weaver’s Way Food Cooperative, the Blue Marble Bookstore, and the High Point Cafe. Taken in aggregate, the picture evidences a thriving, open community.

A more nuanced evaluation of the region, though, reveals that racial isolation is increasing and that the class-based exclusivity so critical to the neighborhood’s early success toward interracial living continues to pervade local housing patterns. In the last twenty years, the overall population of West Mount Airy has decreased from 17,434 in 1990 to 9,892 in 2010, with black residents accounting for 70 percent of that loss. In that same period, block-by-block integration saw a sharp decline. In 1990, the average black resident lived on a block comprised of approximately 75 percent of African Americans; by 2010, the same blocks had become almost entirely black. Further, whereas in 1990, African Americans were dispersed relatively evenly throughout the neighborhood, by 2000, they were disproportionately clustered in the southern and eastern regions of the community, adjacent to the poorer and blacker East Mount Airy and East Germantown. In 2009, in census tracts 234 and 236, which roughly approximate the neighborhood’s “integrated core,” the average household income was $128,491. Here, the population was approximately one-third black and two-thirds white.8 It was in these pockets, in the late 1960s, where African American residents began to express discontent over the perceived isolation and alienation from West Mount Airy Neighbors’ organizing efforts.9 These numbers indicate a continuing and growing economic divide across the neighborhood, where true residential integration is predicated on a common fiscal and educational experience. In the twenty-first century, de facto economic restriction remains a key factor in predicting the success of residential integration and cultural diversity.

This demographic profile of West Mount Airy is set against a growing national critique of the goals of integration. In 1998, the left-leaning magazine, the Nation, published a special series examining the state of civil rights progress in the United States. The contributors, acclaimed scholars and journalists, sought to find meaning of the postwar efforts toward integration, and to apply that meaning to the current state of race relations at the turn of the century.10 “Integration,” wrote historian Eric Foner and legal scholar Randall Kennedy, “the ideal that once inspired an interracial mass movement to dream for a better America, has lately fallen into…disfavor…. Many leftists feel that as a political goal, integration fails to address deeply rooted economic inequalities. Many African Americans criticize it for implying the dismantling of a distinctive black culture and identity. Those who still favor the idea of integration often reduce it to a matter of ‘color-blind’ law and social practice.”11 According to Foner and Kennedy, the integrationist orientation was a flawed but well-intentioned movement for racial justice; it offered progress in the realm of American race relations, but it fell short of a full reorientation of the nation’s racial hierarchy. As historian Judith Stein argued in the same series, racial integration was a postwar construction crafted by liberal elites seeking to heal American race relations. These efforts were rooted in Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, but where Myrdal’s work focused on the reallocation of resources—according to Stein, “bringing rural blacks into the industrial economy and providing them with decent housing [and]…assum[ing] that a higher standard of living would then promote integration”—by placing the onus for racial progress on white Americans, the Swedish economist inadvertently established a class-blind ethos of racial justice.12

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, integration became the mainstream rallying cry of the civil rights movement, a tangible goal in which middle-class white liberals and African Americans could ground their efforts. As Foner and Kennedy wrote, “The demand for integration proved a potent weapon for mobilizing Americans of all races to break down the walls of legalized segregation.”13 Activists made great strides in the larger struggle for racial justice, eroding barriers in employment, education, and even housing. But in subtle ways, the Nation collection suggests, each of these triumphs revealed the limits of integration. “During the post-war period,” wrote scholar Robin D. G. Kelley, “the term [integration] was associated with liberals who conceived of integration as a means of creating racial harmony without a fundamental transformation of the social and economic order. In most white liberal circles…the goal was to produce fully assimilated black people devoted to the American dream. Sharing power was rarely part of the equation.”14 Integration, echoed Kennedy and Foner, “tended to encourage a view of race relations as a matter of interpersonal dynamics, and to identify the main problem facing African Americans as segregation—often understood as an abstraction—rather than emphasizing deprivations such as inadequate jobs, housing, and education.”15 The goal of integration, these scholars wrote, subverted efforts to reorient the material conditions of American society.

These larger critiques are manifested in the history of West Mount Airy itself. The neighborhood’s integration efforts allowed long-standing residents to maintain the integrity of their region by welcoming in similarly situated African Americans. Together, they created a community grounded in the ideals of postwar racial liberalism, and they fought hard to maintain that ideal amid shifting economic and political pressures and evolving notions of racial justice. But the Mount Airy integration project never sought to be transformative; at its core, the neighborhood efforts were grounded in a desire to preserve their community, to retain its viability through celebrating interracial living.

For those who came of age in West Mount Airy in the decades following World War II, these efforts were at once empowering and dispiriting. “[The neighborhood] was full of people who in some cases broke with families and succeeded in creating something different,” recalled Christie Balka. “That lesson of being able to make change because you believe it’s right is really powerful. Mount Airy offered me a strong foundation. But it was an imperfect one…. None of us were prepared for the limits of this, to run into a brick wall [when we left the neighborhood]…. I didn’t know racism. When that rug was pulled out from under me, I never wanted to come back.” But even amid these limitations, the process of integration resonated loudly. “Something happened that was successful to a point,” reflected Balka. “I grew up with a sense that if I didn’t like something, I could succeed in changing it. That was, of course, both tinged by and reinforced by class, but all around me there were examples of people who saw things they didn’t like and took steps to change them on a community level.”16

The ethos of intentionality and activism in West Mount Airy—and the methods of organizing that community leaders developed—offered both residents and onlookers a framework for mobilizing in the decades following the Second World War. The neighborhood was able to effect sustainable change because it developed a sense of institutional accountability through meaningful partnerships, both within the community and outside of it. The creation of West Mount Airy Neighbors and the relationships between WMAN and governmental agencies throughout the city created a powerful structure for change-making within the neighborhood. “West Mount Airy succeeded…because of the public institutions it developed, organizations that made it their mission to be accountable to the neighborhood,” reflected Balka, who made a career in community development and advocacy and ultimately returned to northwest Philadelphia, making a home in East Mount Airy with her partner, Rabbi Rebecca Alpert. “The lesson in West Mount Airy is that public institutions in a community can bring people together in sustained ways…. Not every neighborhood can support a Weaver’s Way Co-op, but they can take these public institutions to scale to create sustainable change.”17

Mount Airy’s efforts toward intentional integration were a part of a small movement around the country to create stable interracial communities. These neighborhoods are not utopias, nor are they blueprints for achieved racial justice. But even if, as some scholars have noted, these integrated spaces serve as little more than a footnote in the larger narrative of racial struggle in the United States, they offer unique insight into the historic process of community-making in postwar American cities. As Balka suggests, throughout the latter half of the twentieth century community leaders in West Mount Airy developed and honed a model of neighborhood organizing that, when deployed effectively, fostered both racial tolerance and economic viability. The innovation of grassroots liberalism, the recognition of the bilateral need for structural accountability and individual action and responsibility, allowed residents to sustain a stable, open community in the midst of vast political, economic, and cultural change.