INTRODUCTION

Civil Rights’ Stepchild

On June 20, 1975, at the sixth annual meeting of National Neighbors, an initiative bringing together racially integrated communities from across the country, Eleanor Holmes Norton took the podium as the keynote speaker. In front of a crowded ballroom filled with representatives from dozens of interracial community organizations, the New York commissioner of human rights spoke on the state of racial justice in the United States. “There is a special urgency attached to housing discrimination in America today,” said Norton, “more special than continuing discrimination in unemployment and, despite the harangue and failure of busing in some cities, more special than school desegregation. For housing is the stepchild of civil rights progress in America.”1

Norton’s plea for open housing came on the heels of decades of work to bring neighborhood integration onto the national civil rights agenda. This struggle over residential space lay at the center of America’s fight for racial justice in the latter half of the twentieth century. While activists made great strides in effecting change in the arenas of politics and business, swift demographic changes in the years following World War II remade neighborhoods into tense battlegrounds. Middle-class African Americans, capitalizing on new economic opportunities and legal reforms, had for the first time in large numbers fled the overcrowding of the inner cities and tried to make their homes in previously all-white areas. In some of these transitioning neighborhoods, residents responded with campaigns to “protect” their homes from black infiltration, transforming their blocks into sites of hostility and violence. In other neighborhoods, integration became defined as the period between the first black family moving into a community and the last white family moving out. To many, this racial transition in northern cities appeared to have exposed the limits of postwar civil rights progress. Patterns of resistance and flight fostered a new sense of instability that set off still more resistance and flight. It seemed an unbreakable cycle. Deep-seated hostilities were breaking America’s neighborhoods apart.2

Some communities, though, took a different approach. Around the country, small groups of homeowners opted not to give in to the belief that racial transition necessarily brought about neighborhood decline. Instead of meeting would-be black buyers with antagonism or acquiescing to the efforts of blockbusting realtors, these residents, largely white and middle class, decided to welcome their new neighbors. Community leaders attempted to create and manage integration in the face of the same tensions that existed in cities across the country. In the midst of deeply entrenched cultural racism and formal legal and governmental policies that promoted segregated housing, these innovative homeowners came together to save their neighborhoods with a coordinated drive toward residential integration.3

This is the story of northwest Philadelphia’s West Mount Airy, one of the first neighborhoods in the nation to embrace this integrationist mission. Though Philadelphia is home to the neighborhoods of both East Mount Airy and West Mount Airy, for the purposes of this book, Mount Airy and West Mount Airy are used interchangeably, as community leaders, residents, and journalists are quoted as using them as such. Here, organizers worked to understand and put into practice the ideals of an integrated society. Beginning with a coordinated pledge in the mid-1950s, homeowners in Mount Airy waged a community-wide battle toward intentional integration. Through innovative real-estate efforts, creative marketing techniques, religious activism, and institutional partnerships, residents worked to preserve the viability of their community. By replacing residential segregation with residential integration, they sought to disrupt a system of separation and infuse their day-to-day lives with the experience of interracial living.4

Accounts of postwar neighborhood racial struggles are not new. Historians, sociologists, and urban planners have written at length about the contentious relationship between race and urban space in the middle of the twentieth century. When taken together, these scholars have established a dominant narrative in which the movement of African American home buyers into previously all-white enclaves prompted aggressive clashes over the historical primacy of private property and individual freedom, the threat of instability and criminality, and the quest for racial equality. The long-standing focus on structural racism, economic volatility, community antagonism, and white flight has offered important challenges to the historical assumptions about the relationship between racial justice, black power, and urban space. Segregation and racial inequity in American cities, these works have ably revealed, were not the inevitable outcome of postwar race relations, nor were they a reaction against 1960s radical racial power movements. The racial composition of neighborhoods in the latter half of the twentieth century was the result of intentional political, legal, and economic initiatives that fostered residential separation.5

But just as neighborhood segregation was not inevitable, neither was it the only possible consequence of these deliberate legal and governmental reforms. West Mount Airy’s integration efforts offer insight into the decisions that individual homeowners had to make as they negotiated the racial landscape of postwar American cities. When community members came together to change the patterns of transition that they were witnessing all around them, integration was not a foregone conclusion. Here, people who loved their neighborhood worked to examine what many believed to be diametric polarities—racial transition and economic stability—in the hope of finding a way to preserve the integrity of their community. In this book I reveal that complicated process of residential racial integration in the decades following World War II. The book works to, in the words of sociologist Mario Luis Small, open the “black box” of interracial living.6

This is the story of a community wrestling with questions of social capital and identity politics, of liberalism and individual choice, of urban sustainability and racial justice; it is a story of a small group of committed homeowners stuck in a moment of deep political and cultural change, and it is a story of how they negotiated that change. From the early 1950s onward, residents of West Mount Airy encountered and were forced to contend with questions of what it meant to live in an interracial community. Homeowners fought economic practices that incentivized moves to the suburbs and city- and statewide policies that redrew school district catchment areas and withdrew resources from neighborhood schools. They struggled to adapt to changing notions of racial justice and shifting political agendas throughout the city and across the nation. African American and white residents conflicted over racial representation within the community, and black homeowners withstood charges of racial betrayal from Philadelphia’s larger black population. Ultimately, these conflicts and contours of interracial living gave way to a compromise turn toward diversity, as the neighborhood—and the nation—negotiated new notions of racial justice and race relations in the waning decades of the twentieth century. As historian Thomas Sugrue wrote in his 2008 book, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, “all the trends that have reshaped the experiences of blacks and whites in the north are visible in microcosm in West Mount Airy.”7 Taken together, what residents and civic leaders experienced here mirrored the struggles that neighborhoods were facing in cities across the country, amid rapidly transitioning demographics and widespread cultural transformation.

These Mount Airy integrationists, well educated and historically minded, believed that their work was reshaping the experience of race relations in the United States. As such, involved individuals and the organizations they created retained extensive records detailing their efforts as they unfolded. This book was born out of the vast archival collections that have preserved the story of the Mount Airy integration project, the widespread journalistic and scholarly accounts that have chronicled, assessed, and critiqued these efforts toward interracial living, and the lived memory of integration in the community.8 Over the course of this project, I collected interviews from close to fifty current and former residents of West Mount Airy and the surrounding neighborhoods. Through the process of snowball sampling, I began with a small group of subjects and followed the names that emerged from those conversations to create a temporal and spatial map of the Mount Airy integration experience. Local institutions, specifically the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association (WMAN) and the Germantown Jewish Centre (GJC), offered their support for the project. GJC hosted an evening of guided conversation on the historical and contemporary experience of integration in the community; more than twenty people attended and shared their stories. In each instance, I interrogated these oral history narratives as artifacts of historical memory, evaluating them with a critical eye toward the time, place, and context in which each interview was conducted. Though by no means comprehensive, these interviews, evaluated in tandem with a collection of oral histories housed at the Germantown Historical Society of several of the neighborhood’s earliest integrationists, served to flesh out the archive-based narrative of West Mount Airy that emerged and add both nuance and texture to the institutional history of the neighborhood’s integration project.

On one level, the story of West Mount Airy is highly particularized; this liberal middle-class community in northwestern Philadelphia was born out of a specific set of physical, economic, religious, and ideological circumstances. Integration in Mount Airy was possible because a unique group of people with a distinctive set of resources came together with a new vision of what a community could be. More broadly, though, Mount Airy’s integration project reveals a carefully calibrated formula for community development in postwar America. In an era of Cold War liberalism, which privileged rights-based politics over economic transformation, the implementation and maintenance of integration in the neighborhood was successful because community organizers adopted a practice of leadership predicated on a balance between local control and government support.9 Leaders of the Mount Airy integration project developed a model for organizing that blended individual responsibility and persuasion with structural accountability: a system of grassroots moral liberalism. When these two forces worked in tandem, Mount Airy functioned as a vibrant, economically stable, racially integrated neighborhood. When internal pressures or external influences altered that balance, the community experienced waves of tension and volatility. In this way, the process of integration—the strategies and tactics that neighborhood leaders employed—situate the story of West Mount Airy within broader national conversations about community organizing and activism in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Over the next seven chapters, I will show how integration happened, at board meetings and in classrooms, in living rooms and during religious services, on street corners and across fences. I will describe the individual decisions and deliberate actions taken by community leaders and the intended and unintended consequences that reverberated throughout the neighborhood. This book, organized both thematically and chronologically, offers a broad assessment of the movement toward intentional residential integration: the motivations and tactics, the goals and effects, the accomplishments and the challenges.

Chapter 1, “ ‘A Home of One’s Own’: The Battle over Residential Space in Twentieth-Century America,” traces the historical relationship between race and property in American cities, culminating in a profound clash, in the middle of the twentieth century, as the movement of upwardly mobile black families into previously all-white communities prompted a racialized struggle over space. Here, while many white homeowners throughout northeastern and midwestern cities responded with either hostility and violence or widespread flight, in a small corner of northwest Philadelphia residents came to believe that the secret to preserving their homes and their quality of life lay in welcoming their new neighbors into the community.

Chapter 2, “Finding Capital in Diversity: The Creation of Racially Integrated Space,” chronicles the on-the-ground efforts in West Mount Airy to create a racially integrated, economically stable community. Whereas at first integrationists grounded their efforts in the belief that individual moral suasion would be sufficient to successfully preserve the viability of the neighborhood, by the end of the 1950s community leaders had shifted their tactics toward a concerted interventionist push to effect concrete legal and social change. Through this fusion of emotional appeal and structural reform, Mount Airy residents created a system of grassroots moral liberalism, working to stabilize the community in the face of rapid transition and to position themselves as a model of racial justice in the urban North.

Chapter 3, “Marketing Integration: Interracial Living in the White Imagination,” steps back from this historical account of the integrating process to examine how middle-class white liberals interpreted the meaning of integration. For many of Mount Airy’s white residents, living in an integrated community served to legitimate their identities as liberal, urban Americans. At the same time, though, this white conception of integration was grounded in a sense of de facto economic exclusivity attached to middle-class notions of postwar liberalism. In 1962, community leaders embarked on a widespread publicity campaign, presenting this white-centric image of integration to a regional, national, and even international audience and claiming a place for the neighborhood at the forefront of the fight for racial integration.

Chapter 4, “Integration, Separation, and the Fight for Black Identity,” explores the varying meanings of integration for Philadelphia’s black residents. For African American homeowners in Mount Airy, the prospect of integration brought with it a set of very material conditions—more secure investments, better schools, safer streets, more reliable municipal services—and a window into a professional culture with which they were trying to engage. Although the neighborhood’s black residents certainly believed in the democratic ideal of an integrated community, their interest in living among whites often stemmed as much from these tangible opportunities as it did from an abstract sense of justice. At the same time, around the city, other black voices emerged condemning the integrationist African Americans of Mount Airy for having abandoned the “true” black community. By the mid-1960s, Cecil Moore, president of the local branch of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), had painted the neighborhood’s black homeowners as symbols of the cultural and spatial abandonment of black America by African American elites.

Chapter 5, “ ‘Well-Trained Citizens and Good Neighbors’: Educating an Integrated America,” assesses how the fight for integrated education fits into the larger integration project in West Mount Airy. In many ways, the early movement toward residential and social integration in the neighborhood was successful in spite of larger economic pressures and formal policy directives aimed at segregation on a systemic level. Integrationists had embarked on a grassroots campaign designed to overcome what many viewed as the natural tendency toward separation in the private sphere. When West Mount Airy leaders expanded their scope beyond residential integration to work toward educational integration, residents were forced to contend with conflicting ideas over the value of education and city, state, and national policies that often undermined local efforts.

Chapter 6, “Confrontations in Black and White: The Crisis of Integration,” reveals rising tensions within Mount Airy as an ethos of black cultural empowerment spread through the neighborhood’s African American community. Amid a backdrop of urban deindustrialization and within the context of changing conceptions of racial justice in the United States, white and black residents of West Mount Airy found themselves at odds over the problem of rising crime rates in the region. White community leaders, still committed to integration as a visible representation of liberal politics, criticized city policies that sought to stanch criminal activity by targeting black youth. For African American residents, however, recently infused with a sense of cultural nationalism and self-help but still seeking to protect the material advantages that came with interracial living, this crisis over crime became the terrain on which the battle over local control and racial representation was fought in West Mount Airy.

Chapter 7, “The Choice to Live Differently: Reimagining Integration at Century’s End,” explores the causes and consequences of Mount Airy’s shifting reputation, from integration to diversity. For local homeowners, the need to come together and rebuild after the conflict of the mid-1970s prompted an institutional push to bring residents together in ways that transcended racial identity and racial politics. Through these efforts, WMAN worked to shift the focus of both rhetoric and action away from the historical paradigm of black-white interracialism and toward a more generalized liberal ethos of tolerance and diversity. This movement coincided with demographic and cultural shifts that crafted Mount Airy as a haven for a countercultural coming of age. By the mid-1980s, the neighborhood was home to an emerging cohort of lesbian families, progressive Jewish scholars and activists, and, ultimately, young professionals. Although these new residents invigorated the community, their arrival also inevitably replaced, and displaced, prior residents, resulting in a loss of local memory surrounding the early years of conscious organizing. When national and regional economic volatility threatened the economic stability of the neighborhood, WMAN embarked on a comprehensive oral history project to document and present the stories of some of the area’s earliest integrationists. In facilitating these public remembrances of the history of Mount Airy, neighborhood leaders worked to create a new collective consciousness about the past, through which they worked to negotiate the present, and shape the future, of the community.

Finally, the epilogue, “West Mount Airy and the Legacy of Integration,” assesses the state of the neighborhood at the turn of the twenty-first century. In the early years of the new millennium, stories of the acclaimed community continued to filter through the local, regional, and national imagination, even as the goals of integration had become increasingly outmoded in contemporary American society. This final section is a meditation on the significance of Mount Airy’s integration project and on the varied experiences of intentional residential integration and the values, costs, and consequences of growing up in a community steeped in an activist ethos toward interracial living.

This book is not meant to serve as a blueprint for interracial living, nor is it a predictor of success or failure. It will not describe a utopian version of integration, nor offer a polemical critique of an idealized conception of American liberal democracy. Rather, readers will encounter the process by which a group of committed homeowners set out to break the seemingly inevitable cycle of antagonism, hostility, and flight in their own postwar American city. Here, a community in transition came together to find an alternative to racial separation, without knowing what they would create in its place.