Chapter 1

“A HOME OF ONE’S OWN”

The Battle over Residential Space in Twentieth-Century America

In 1945, the 4600 block of Labadie Avenue was a quiet street in a residential St. Louis neighborhood. In the thirty-nine homes between Taylor Avenue and Cora Avenue, there lived thirty-nine white families.1 Though houses turned over, as houses do, the community remained relatively cohesive with stable demographics and little outside pressure and no national attention. And residents liked it that way.

In September of that year, though, everything changed. Louis and Fern Kraemer decided it was time for a move, and they put their Labadie Avenue home on the market. The duplex, selling for $5,700, attracted a fair number of potential buyers, including J. D. and Ethel Shelley, a black couple who had moved from Mississippi to Missouri a few years earlier. J. D. worked for a small-arms ammunition plant during the war, and Ethel had a job in childcare. Week after week, they put part of their paychecks aside and, though he wanted to purchase a new car, Ethel convinced J. D. that they should move out of their North Ninth Street rental and look for a home of their own. They spoke to Elder Robert Bishop, their pastor at the Church of God in Christ, and learned that he also worked in real estate. Bishop showed the couple the Kraemer’s Labadie Avenue property. They made an offer, and it was accepted. The pastor secured the home on behalf of the Shelleys, placing it in the name of his wife, Josephine Fitzgerald Bishop.2

Map 1. Map of Philadelphia neighborhoods. Prepared by David Ford, assistant director, Temple University Social Science Data Library.

Unknown to both the Shelleys and the Kraemers, the home was subject to a restrictive covenant dating back to 1911 that precluded the use of the property by “any person not of the Caucasian race.”3 According to the deed, “people of the Negro or Mongolian race” were forbidden from using or occupying the property, or contracting to purchase the property, for a period of fifty years after the original covenant had gone into effect.4

Although neither party wanted to rescind the agreement, the Marcus Avenue Improvement Association, a local homeowners’ group, filed suit in municipal court demanding that the contract for sale be terminated. George Vaughan, attorney for the Shelleys, succeeded in convincing the trial court that the restrictive term in the deed was unenforceable. On appeal, though, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the decision and ordered the couple to vacate the premises. In 1947, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case, consolidating the Shelleys’ dispute with three others that raised questions about the constitutionality of restrictive covenants.5 The court sought to determine the scope of an individual’s right to control his or her private property.

Shelley v. Kraemer, the 1948 Supreme Court case that arose out of the Labadie Avenue dispute, took its place in a long line of political and legal decisions that set the standard for how communities could use racial identity in managing the residential landscape of the United States. Private property had been central to American law and life since the nation’s founding, built in to its legal and political structure.6 Beginning with the early constitutional debates, Americans have wrestled with the relationship between race and property, most strikingly regarding the institution of slavery. With emancipation in 1865, white Americans began to reinvent racialized property laws. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, politicians, policymakers, and businessmen worked to create a system of residential separation predicated on the belief that black infiltration of white space would pollute neighborhoods and depreciate property values. These practices had the effect of markedly restricting African Americans’ access to private property and, consequently, constraining their residential mobility.

By the middle of the twentieth century, after two hundred years of uneven progress in the realm of race relations, the United States had reached a crossroads. A heightened sense of the need for racial justice in the wake of the Second World War and an international imperative directed by the nation’s burgeoning Cold War agenda brought to fruition the modern civil rights struggle, where the abstract ideal of equality gave way to a concrete movement toward genuine racial integration.7 But this push toward civil rights in public spaces clashed almost immediately with these racialized notions of private property, situating America’s neighborhoods at the center of the struggle for racial justice in the latter half of the twentieth century.8

In the wake of the Civil War, the United States experienced a residential crisis. As newly emancipated African Americans began the long migration from southern towns to northern cities, white homeowners struggled with how to manage these changes.9 Between 1860 and 1900, the percentage of the nation’s African Americans residing in urban centers swelled from 4.2 percent to nearly 20 percent.10 Deeply rooted racial prejudices, combined with the realities of a growing population of poor and often illiterate black residents, prompted whites to create restrictions to limit access to their neighborhoods. In Philadelphia, for instance, the first major wave of black migrants came in the years surrounding World War I. From 1910 to 1930, more than 140,000 African Americans arrived in the city. Philadelphia had the third largest black community in the nation among industrial centers, behind only New York and Chicago.11 Though the area had long been home to an established black elite, most of these new arrivals were still working to overcome the devastating conditions they had experienced in the rural South.12 Housing opportunities for these new residents were scarce. Most had little choice but to settle along the banks of the Delaware River in South Philadelphia or to push their way into the already overcrowded tenements a few miles north of City Hall.13

This same demographic concentration was taking place throughout the urban North. At first, some cities attempted to pass formal legislation restricting the access of these new black immigrants to private property. In 1910, Baltimore, Maryland’s city council enacted a residential segregation ordinance designed to cluster the black poor into the city’s most desolate regions. Like Philadelphia, the region had seen a sharp rise in its African American population during the Great Migration; between 1880 and 1900, the city’s black community grew from fifty-four thousand to seventy-nine thousand, an increase of 47 percent.14 Most of these new residents had gathered in the cheapest housing in southwest Baltimore, prompting the area’s small but established black middle class to relocate to the city’s northwestern neighborhoods. A group of Progressive Era leaders, backed by a Social Darwinist agenda that espoused the belief that African Americans were a source of contamination for the larger population, set about to isolate the black population in slum conditions, in order to safeguard against disease and social unrest throughout the rest of the city. The law, first proposed by petition, called for “measures to restrain the colored people locating in the white community, and proscribe a limit beyond which it shall be unlawful for them to go.”15 Reformers believed that by separating people according to race, the ordinance would prevent conflict and unrest between the region’s white and black residents and “promot[e] the general welfare of the city.”16 There is no evidence that the law achieved these aims; instead, it had the effect of restricting the mobility of African American residents across the city and increasing rates of crime and violence in the poorest communities in the southwest.

Baltimore’s segregation ordinance was short-lived. In 1913, local pressure from realtors and white property owners living in middle-class mixed-race neighborhoods forced extensive revisions to the law. That year, the city passed a second bill confining the scope of the legislation to already segregated areas.17 Four years later, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue of legalized residential segregation in the case of Buchanan v. Warley, where a unanimous bench held that such ordinances are unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment.18 Still, the Baltimore controversy evidenced a fundamental belief in intrinsic racial difference. During the early years of the twentieth century, white Americans overwhelmingly subscribed to the idea that their black counterparts were inherently inferior, and as such could not occupy the same geographic space.19 When this legal segregation in northern cities failed to create physical separation between blacks and whites, policymakers, businessmen, and property owners worked to construct new mechanisms for managing and restricting black access to residential neighborhoods.

In some areas, public-private partnerships in housing reform became an obvious solution to the problems of racial mixing. Though public housing had originally grown out of a Progressive Era impulse that highlighted bureaucratic responses to social and economic problems, by the early 1930s many policymakers saw low-income housing as a means to geographically constrain black workers. In Philadelphia, by 1930 the African American population had risen to 219,599, a 63.5 percent increase over 1920.20 Black Americans now made up more than 11 percent of the total population of the city.21 Most of these new residents, relatively poor and uneducated, were consigned to the least desirable housing in the region. As European immigrant groups relocated to the neighborhoods along the outer reaches of the city and in the expanding inner-ring suburbs, African Americans crowded into the abandoned areas. Philadelphia officials worked hard to maintain these boundaries. In 1935, Walter Thomas of the City Planning Commission argued that containing the region’s black population would serve to uplift the rest of the city. The area east of Broad Street near Girard Avenue, wrote Thomas, was “heavily negro, and should remain so.”22 Philadelphia, he said, should develop “a negro area having a physical outlet into Fairmount Avenue and Girard Avenue, and Broad Street, and Girard Avenue business area. Such a defined negro area [would] contribute to the stabilization of the area [and would] have a wholesome effect on the values of Girard Avenue west of Broad Street.”23 A year later, more than one-third of the residents of these North Philadelphia neighborhoods designated by Thomas were African American.24

Even though low-income-housing policies in Philadelphia worked well to confine the city’s black poor, property owners had to find new strategies to contend with the region’s established and growing middle-income and elite black communities. By the early years of the twentieth century, the city had long been home to a small group of well-to-do African Americans, those whom scholar and activist Sadie Tanner Mossell called in 1921 “Negroes of culture, education, and some financial means.”25 With the Great Migration and the gradual expansion of employment opportunities, though, the population of financially stable blacks grew steadily, and more upwardly mobile black families began to look beyond the confines of the low-income pockets that Thomas’s City Planning Commission had developed.26

In order to restrain this movement and to preserve the established white culture of their residential communities, developers and homeowners throughout northern cities crafted contractually mandated restrictions on property. At first designed to control how land was used, by the 1920s these provisions served to constrain who could use or occupy the land as well.27 Fearful that the influx of black residents into all-white communities would prompt a decline in property values, developers and realtors attached these provisions to deeds in order to achieve through private agreement what they could not through legal manipulation. Through such contractual stipulations as defeasible fees, negative easements, equitable servitudes, and restrictive covenants, contracting parties were able to prevent African Americans from purchasing or renting homes in their neighborhoods, protecting the whiteness of their communities.28 Most of these provisions were conveyed with sale, so the restrictions carried over from one homeowner to the next. Nearly every housing development constructed from the 1920s through the 1940s included these restrictive provisions in their deeds.29

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, policymakers developed an awkward marriage between a conception of private property as a right of exclusion and the common understanding of inherent black inferiority in order to craft a firm system of residential separation. As realtors ascribed contractual limitations to deeds, municipal governments utilized exclusionary zoning tactics to exercise control over the use of land and property. Such policies, ostensibly predicated on notions of self-protection from the perceived problems associated with urbanization, were initially affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1926, in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company, the court held that zoning—the practice of allowing city governments to designate areas for particular uses—was a valid exercise of municipal police power.30 Even though the Court declared race-based zoning unconstitutional two years later in Nectow v. City of Cambridge, such practices continued to persist in less official capacities for the next half century.31 The so-called neutral zoning policies of the post-Nectow era utilized seemingly race-blind variables such as property status and land use restrictions to model how a community could be organized. These practices often had the desired effect of maintaining the regional status quo, where wealthy white enclaves attracted wealthy white families, and urban blight produced further economic devastation. It was not until 1977, in Moore v. City of East Cleveland, that the U.S. Supreme Court began to step in to restrict these apparently neutral zoning practices.32

At the federal level, in 1934 President Franklin Roosevelt called on Congress to create the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), a New Deal era institution that, among its many other functions, served to provide racial assessments for mortgages.33 The FHA and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, established a year earlier, developed a system of redlining, which categorized neighborhoods based on such factors as residents’ occupation, income status, and ethnicity, in an effort to eliminate subjectivity in home appraisals. The policy ranked loan candidates from A through D, “most favorable” to “least favorable,” and used race as a primary indicator for determining the validity of a loan request. Whereas blocks populated with middle-class white residents received an A rating, neighborhoods made up largely of recent immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities earned a C or a D.34 In 1940, for instance, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation assigned one St. Louis suburb an A ranking based, in part, on the absence of “foreigner[s] or Negro[s]” in the community.35 Housing conditions and relative congestion did serve as an indicator for FHA ratings in some neighborhoods, particularly in communities composed largely of poor whites or immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. However, predominantly African American and mixed-race neighborhoods overwhelmingly earned a D ranking, regardless of economic status or physical conditions.36

These ratings had the effect of markedly constricting black mobility. As the FHA’s Underwriting Manual mandated, if an African American homebuyer sought entry into a white neighborhood, absent extenuating circumstances “the valuator must not hesitate to make a reject ranking.”37 If a community was to maintain a stable environment, the manual stated, “[it was] necessary that properties…continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” According to Leslie S. Perry of the NAACP, the FHA “[did] more than any other single instrumentality to force nonwhite citizens into substandard houses and neighborhoods.”38

These policies and practices by local, state, and federal governments came together to effectively create a system of residential separation in the United States, with far-reaching repercussions. But in the middle of the twentieth century, such efforts to preserve restrictions on private property were coming up against a growing liberalization of public space. In 1941, U.S. entry into World War II prompted a fundamental reimagination of race relations. The battle against fascism abroad forced many in the United States to confront the nation’s own legacy of racial discrimination.39 Around the country, Americans started to question the long-standing belief in the fundamental differences between blacks and whites. Rather than conceiving of racial categories as a system of hierarchy, some communities began to consider the possibility that black and white Americans could work together toward the creation of an interracial nation.

In 1944, Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma, a meditation on race relations in the United States that brought into focus this growing consciousness about racial discrimination and offered liberal Americans a new language for addressing issues of race throughout the country. Laid out in 1,024 pages of text and 258 pages of citations, Myrdal’s work called on Americans to redeem the character of the country by repairing the disconnect between the American Dream and the reality of race relations. According to Myrdal, this break between the historical ideals of the nation and the reality of racial prejudice was creating a pervasive moral angst in American society. Although much of the study was directed toward racial injustice in the South, the scholar noted that the absence of legal barriers to equality sheltered northern whites from the realities of racial inequity in U.S. cities. According to Myrdal, herein lay the hope for a national reconciliation of race relations. Once white liberals understood the problem of discrimination, he believed, they would work to reshape the hearts and minds of the American public. The solution to race relations in the United States, said the economist, lay not in a dramatic reconfiguration of the nation’s political and economic systems, but in a small but persistent group of whites promoting individual change grounded in the historic ideals of American democracy.40 In the years to follow, housing activists relied on Myrdal’s rhetoric of moral persuasion in developing their integrationist agenda.

Myrdal’s ideas and the call for racial equality gained further traction with the emergence of the Cold War, as the status of American race relations became a critical question in the international battle between communism and democracy. If the nation was to maintain its image as a bastion of tolerance and equality, the president and State Department officials believed, the country needed to solve its race problem. As Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote to the chairman of the Fair Employment Practices Commission in 1947:

The existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. We are reminded over and over by some foreign newspapers and spokesmen, that our treatment of various minorities leaves much to be desired…. An atmosphere of suspicion and resentment in a country over the way a minority is being treated in the United States is a formidable obstacle to the development of mutual understanding and trust between the two countries. We will have better international relations when these reasons for suspicion and resentment have been removed.41

In the years following the Second World War, the United States employed the language of civil rights reform in order to bolster its reputation in the global fight against communism.42

This notion of liberal race reform quickly began to spread to all corners of public life, from popular culture and law enforcement to politics and academia. Reformers saw the opportunity in the postwar years to instruct the American people on changing race relations. Hundreds of interracial agencies were founded in the late 1940s. Police departments hired race specialists to educate officers on prejudice and discrimination. Within the business world, corporate elites commissioned focus groups to reconsider racist hiring practices and reeducate their workers on intergroup relations. In colleges and universities, students employed social science methodologies to understand the dynamics of race and human interaction.43

The federal government, too, brought its strategic policies of liberal racial reform into its public message on race relations during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1946, President Harry Truman created the first-ever biracial committee to study the role of the government in American race relations. The following year, the committee published its landmark report, To Secure These Rights. The group called for an executive and legislative push toward the creation of permanent government initiatives designed to safeguard the fundamental rights of American citizens. The report evidenced a growing sense of optimism concerning the power of education, reform, and government intervention to combat discrimination and prejudice.44 This agenda created an institutional mandate for racial integration and privileged change backed by social science rigor. And as community organizations, the business world, and government agencies heeded this call, it did not take long for efforts to reach into the legal sector.

In 1948, the conflict surrounding the Kraemer property on Labadie Avenue in Saint Louis reached the U.S. Supreme Court. At oral argument, NAACP attorneys led by Thurgood Marshall launched a two-pronged legal and policy attack. First, they argued that by enforcing the restrictive covenants, the lower courts were in breach of the due process clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Though the covenant was part of a private agreement for sale, by upholding or enforcing it, the NAACP argued, the courts were intervening and thereby creating a situation where the state action doctrine would apply.45 Second, Marshall and cocounsel Charles Hamilton Houston asserted that it was critical to present a racially just democratic nation to the rest of the world. Playing on the sensibilities of Cold War era culture and politics, they insisted that restrictive covenants were an example of the failure of the United States to live up to its own promise of equality under the law. These discriminatory stipulations, the attorneys maintained, were both morally wrong and strategically dangerous in a time when projecting an image of a unified, democratic nation was crucial to furthering the country’s anti-Soviet agenda.46

As a marker of just how pervasive restrictive covenants had become, three justices were forced to recuse themselves when they learned that their own deeds included such a provision. On January 16, 1948, though, the remaining six justices issued a unanimous opinion vindicating the Shelleys’ struggles.47

When news of the Shelley opinion reached the streets, African Americans rejoiced in the victory. “The ruling by the courts gives thousands of prospective home buyers throughout the United States new courage and hope in the American form of government,” Thurgood Marshall exclaimed in an NAACP press release.48 “Live Anywhere,” proclaimed the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s premier black newspapers.49 Civil rights advocates saw the decision as a green light toward a race-blind, reform-minded agenda, where racial integration could become the practical manifestation of the abstract idea of the American creed.

Shelley v. Kraemer was the first case in American legal history to formally begin to undo the generations of legally prescribed residential segregation in the United States. The decision evidenced a tangible shift in the culture of race relations in the United States, and it laid the groundwork for a legal strategy toward desegregation at the federal level that both activists and courts came to employ throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.50

In the years to follow, cities across the United States ushered in new municipal governments asserting platforms of equality of opportunity and interracial collaboration. These reform-minded administrations saw the expansion of African Americans’ rights as a state imperative. In the realm of employment, local, state, and the federal administrations created a widely accepted mandate for integration of the workplace. Such a protocol could be implemented relatively seamlessly from a policy level, by revamping hiring practices and wage and benefit structures. In the public domain, the nation saw great strides in legislative civil rights reform and grassroots efforts to break down the structural barriers toward integrated space.51

In Philadelphia, after decades of Republican control and several years of pervasive governmental corruption, residents elected Democratic candidate Joseph Clark, running on a platform of broad liberal reform, to the office of mayor in 1951. A year earlier, Philadelphians had passed a new city charter, which included a widespread ban on discriminatory practices based on race and religion in public employment.52 The legislation evidenced a fundamental change in the power structure of a city with a deep history of racist and anti-Semitic practices and policies.

Philadelphia had been home to a permanent population of Jews since before the American Revolution. In 1848, there were roughly four thousand Jews in the city, and by the middle of the nineteenth century an established Jewish community had been largely integrated into the power structure of Philadelphia’s elite institutions and organizations. With mass Jewish immigration beginning in the 1880s, the city saw its Jewish population expand precipitously. By 1904, there were 75,000 Jews in Philadelphia. By 1915, there were 200,000 Jews across the city; twenty years later, the number had risen to 250,000. Most were recent immigrants from eastern Europe, settling in small clusters in North and South Philadelphia, even as the existing small elite population of Jewish industrialists and lawyers maintained an active presence in city business and political life through the 1920s.53

With the rise of anti-Jewish fervor throughout Europe in the 1930s, however, Philadelphia saw a marked increase in religious discrimination. The city had long been home to a sizeable German American population with deep roots in Germanic culture and heritage, and it became one of the central hubs for German propaganda in the United States. The city saw a strong and visible presence of the German Bund, an American Nazi organization led locally by Gerhardt Wilhelm Kunze. Kunze published acerbic condemnations of American Jews in the Philadelphia Weckrug and Beobachter, the city’s bilingual German–English newspaper, and WDAS, one of the region’s preeminent radio stations, aired the sermons of Father Charles Coughlin, a Detroit-based Catholic priest whose vitriolic attacks on American Jews were broadcast across the nation. By the end of the decade, sociologist Digby Baltzell observed that the city that had once opened up to American Jewish elites had become divided into a rigid parallel social hierarchy, where Jews were systemically locked out of the city’s power structure.54

Just as the Second World War had brought into focus the deep racial inequity in American society, so, too, did it underscore the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the United States. The fight against Nazism abroad prompted many to question discriminatory practices across the nation. Though intolerance persisted, reforms at all levels of government served to ameliorate formal anti-Semitic directives and integrate Jews into contemporary American public life. Philadelphia mayor Joseph Clark’s new charter was one of the first such documents to recast the status of Jews across the city. The new legislation also established the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission. With this provision, Philadelphia became the first city in the country to provide for a human relations agency in its charter. Taking over from the city’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, established in 1948, the new organization expanded both the capacity and the power of the previous commission. It had a larger budget and more employees; it provided for additional commissioners and sought to assert a comprehensive overhaul of current practices.55

Clark wasted little time in implementing policies that he believed would result in a new culture of race relations. In his first year in office, he recruited analysts and policymakers from around the nation to join his administration and put into practice those liberal reforms on which he ran. In 1953, he wooed George Schermer away from his post as director of the Detroit Mayor’s Interracial Committee to lead the burgeoning Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations. Schermer had gone to Detroit twelve years earlier to serve as the assistant director for management of the Detroit Housing Commission, and after several years of combating unfriendly mayoral administrations, he was relieved to come in as one of Clark’s “carpetbaggers.”56

Schermer and Clark created a new culture of liberal racial reform in Philadelphia. Through comprehensive education campaigns and policy initiatives, the new administration set out to reorient the city’s long-standing reputation for racial antagonism, once so pervasive that it had caused W. E. B. Dubois in 1927 to remark that “[Philadelphia is] the best place to discuss race relations because there is more race prejudice here than any other city in the United States.”57 Clark believed that continued racial segregation threatened to undermine the city’s urban industrial development, and his reformers worked to pave the way for a more racially inclusive society.58

As Philadelphia and other northern cities moved toward an ethos of racial equality in public life, however, the push for racial inclusion in the residential sphere was met with increasing ferocity.59 Though the movement toward racial reform was shifting American conceptions of equality, the historic primacy of private property held strong. As the dynamics of race relations in government and employment liberalized and the legal restrictions of residential exclusion lifted, these conflicting ideals and the tangible results they produced brought the issue of housing into the center of the struggle for racial justice in northern cities.

Critical to this postwar residential crisis was the simultaneous expansion of the black middle class throughout the urban North and the wartime creation of a pronounced housing shortage. Spurred by New Deal and wartime economic opportunities, blacks once again flocked to America’s cities, in what has been called the Second Great Migration. In Philadelphia, nearly fifty thousand African Americans moved to the city between 1941 and 1943. Even after the war ended, black families continued to arrive. Philadelphia’s black population swelled, from nearly 251,000 in 1940 to more than 376,000 in 1950. Because the number of whites remained relatively stagnant at 1.7 million, the percentage of African Americans rose from 13 percent of the city’s overall population to 18 percent.60

At first, most of these newcomers concentrated in North Philadelphia. But this influx of people, combined with a wartime reallocation of resources that halted residential construction, quickly created an acute housing shortage. At the same time that these fifty thousand new black residents settled into the city in the early 1940s, property developers built only twenty-four thousand new homes, public and private alike.61 Once production restarted after the war, the housing market was unable to keep up with increased demand. By 1946, 17 percent of the city’s residential units were in deteriorating condition, with sixty-five thousand families living communally in units meant for single-family occupancy. The vacancy rate in the city was near nonexistent, hovering between 0.5 percent and 1 percent.62 Old city neighborhoods were ready to burst.

Furthermore, with expanded job opportunity and those postwar legal reforms, a new black middle class began to emerge. These upwardly mobile African Americans began to push outward, seeking to escape the overcrowded pockets of North Philadelphia. The swift demographic changes created intense anxieties within neighborhoods, where white homeowners believed that both their property values and their ways of life were being jeopardized by the influx of black residents.63

Across the nation’s urban centers, the prospect of black families moving into previously all-white enclaves created intense hostility. The situation seemed dire, particularly for economically stable working-class homeowners, those who could not afford to buy new homes when their current property values diminished but who were not so poor as to be lifelong renters who could abandon their units in search of new communities. Desperate to uphold their single most valuable investment—their homes—these blue-collar families came together to wage often-violent campaigns against new black families seeking to purchase homes.64

Prospective African American homebuyers often found themselves met with harassment and threats when they tried to move into such a community. When Luther and Juanita Green moved onto North Philadelphia’s North Thirteenth Street in the 1940s, white homeowners on the block mounted an unyielding attack. Longtime resident William Seymour grabbed Mrs. Green as she walked down the street, threatening that he would make her life miserable so long as she remained in the neighborhood. Later, as the Greens sat in their new dining room with friends, white residents threw full paint cans through the front window and fired shots at the home. Even those white neighbors who might have befriended the Green family, or at least tolerated them, maintained their distance and their silence in order to preserve their own safety and security.65

For many such white residents, the underlying rationale for this aggressive defense of their neighborhoods related directly to the historic importance of private property. Homeowners believed that protecting their blocks against the influx of black buyers was not only a means to preserve the value of their neighborhoods; it was fundamentally about their rights to make choices about their own lives. Property ownership meant independence and autonomy, a sense of freedom from government intervention in their private space. In this way, these homeowners developed a new political rhetoric, a model of resistance that pitted their right to control their property against the right of African Americans to choose where to live.66

In contrast to this active resistance emblematic of the experience of white blue-collar property owners, middle-class white urban homeowners often responded to these demographic shifts by fleeing their transitioning neighborhoods for the expanding all-white suburbs. Once viewed as second-class entities, home to the poor and dispossessed, by the 1940s and 1950s these suburban areas began to gain esteem as alternative spaces to build communities.67 After more than a decade of Depression era want and wartime sacrifice, an emerging American middle class was eager to buy.68 In the five years after the Second World War, consumer spending rose 60 percent, with the dollar total spent on household products and consumer goods climbing 240 percent.69 The postwar housing shortage in the nation’s cities, combined with this burgeoning consumer-driven culture that could draw on significant household savings, provided new opportunities for land developers.

Beginning in the late 1940s, communities along the city borders saw their underdeveloped green spaces quickly fill with new housing stock. Inner-ring suburban development proliferated as well. Residents were on the move, from neighborhood to neighborhood, from city to suburb. The rate of transition was overwhelming. In Philadelphia, between 1950 and 1960, 700,000 white homebuyers moved from the city into the surrounding suburbs.70 These suburbs became, for many, a spatial manifestation of the American Dream. They came to represent a sense of safety, stability, modernity, and autonomy; in a sense, they became the fulfillment of that consumer-oriented postwar culture.71 But these new suburban communities represented something insidious as well: a new incarnation of residential exclusion. With race-based legal ordinances unconstitutional and contractually mandated racial restrictions unenforceable, the suburbs became the postwar embodiment of managed racial separation.

Real estate agents were quick to capitalize on white fears of instability. When a black family attempted to purchase a house in a previously all-white area, “blockbusting” realtors worked to instill a sense of panic in the community by warning homeowners of the risk of property depreciation and violence. These techniques had the effect of encouraging massive white flight, as entire neighborhoods sold their homes to incoming black families. Corrupt real estate agents profited from the transition by undervaluing the original sales and then marking up prices for the prospective black homebuyers. Often, these areas tipped from exclusively white to predominantly black in a period of just a few years.72 These extreme racial and residential shifts in the postwar years were threatening the very livelihood of some of the nation’s oldest and most established urban centers. Cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest were experiencing the early warning signs of crisis. The future of the American city was in jeopardy, and, for many, resegregation seemed inevitable.

Some communities around the country, though, began to think about alternate ways to respond to the rising influx of African Americans to their neighborhoods. In such communities as Oak Park, in Chicago; West Mount Airy, in Philadelphia; and Shaker Heights, outside of Cleveland, residents saw the growing instability around them and decided to try something different.73 Instead of meeting would-be black homebuyers with antagonism or flight, these small pockets of middle-class white liberals resolved to welcome their new neighbors. Rather than face the prospect of relocation with declining property values, these innovative homeowners worked to save their neighborhoods by making interracial living a marketable commodity, by creating capital in integrated spaces.

Philadelphia’s West Mount Airy was one of the first in the nation to embrace this integrationist agenda. Beginning with a moral pledge in the mid-1950s, neighborhood residents waged a community-wide campaign for intentional integration. The historically wealthy enclave in the city’s northwest reaches was uniquely positioned to spearhead this integrationist crusade. Founded in 1683 by a community of Dutch Mennonite immigrants, southeast Pennsylvania’s Germantown region had gained its identity as a wealthy white enclave by the early eighteenth century. The area’s relatively high elevation (at 336 feet) offered scenic views and lazy breezes, making it a desirable respite from the frenzy of the city for Philadelphia’s elite.74 In 1750, William Allen, who went on to become chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, built a country estate at what is now Germantown Avenue and Allens Lane, and called the home Mount Airy.75

This Germantown Borough remained a quiet retreat for well-to-do Philadelphians until 1854, when the city passed the Consolidation Act, dissolving the townships, boroughs, and districts surrounding it and incorporating the entirety of Philadelphia County under the authority of the Philadelphia municipal government. As this legislative action brought the region under the auspices of city institutions and services, the expansion of the railways made the region more accessible to the city center. The earliest trains had arrived in Germantown in 1832, and the community soon developed into one of the nation’s first railroad suburbs. Two decades later, steam rail service came to the region, carrying multipassenger vehicles along the iron rails. In Chestnut Hill, the wealthy enclave occupying the northernmost section of Germantown, local commuters raised funds for a permanent railroad connecting the southern and northern ends of the region. The new terminal opened at Chestnut Hill and Bethlehem Pike on July 3, 1854. By 1859, more than forty trains were making commuter stops along the Germantown lines.76

With these political and technological changes, the population growth expanded rapidly. By the 1870s, the once-isolated enclave was experiencing high-percentage growth.77 The arrival of city residents prompted new housing development throughout northwest Philadelphia, but residents held strongly to the community’s wealthy, independent roots even as the population surged. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, property developers and realtors attached restrictive covenants to deeds, seeking to maintain control over incoming homebuyers. Within a few decades, as members of the city’s black elite began to slowly migrate to the area, these contractual mandates gave way to a sense of a de facto exclusivity by class.78 The high cost of living meant that only the most financially stable buyers were able to purchase homes in Mount Airy. The neighborhood promised to provide the ideal escape for wealthy black families from the crowded inner-city neighborhoods, just as it had for generations of wealthy whites. By the 1940s, these early black settlers had gradually opened northwest Philadelphia to upwardly mobile African American families, who were just as invested as the existing white community in maintaining the economic and social status of the neighborhood.79

At first, many of the area’s white homeowners articulated concerns over the oncoming transition. In 1950, West Mount Airy was home to 18,462 residents.80 Outside of the neighborhood’s Sharpnack section, an industrial village that had sprung up in the eighteenth century as a home for domestic workers and was, by the 1890s, known for its densely populated blocks of narrow two-story stucco homes, 98.6 percent of the community’s residents were white.81 As in urban neighborhoods throughout the northern United States, West Mount Airy residents experienced deep racial anxieties and worked hard to preserve what they saw as the integrity of their community. With the sudden influx of African American buyers, they worried that their property values would diminish, that the instability would breed volatility and crime, and that their neighborhood institutions would fall apart. Enterprising realtors quickly stepped in, spreading rumors of mass home sales and projecting intense instability and a pronounced decline in housing values.82 But many residents of West Mount Airy saw the possibility of something different. Well versed in the postwar liberalism that had prompted reform in governance and employment, and not wanting to give in to the belief that racial transition necessarily brought about neighborhood decline, white homeowners set out to maintain their place in the community, while welcoming the new African American families seeking to move in.

In the years following the Second World War, Mount Airy’s unique physical, economic, and cultural character ideally positioned the neighborhood for interracial living. Key to the effectiveness of the neighborhood’s integration project was the area’s spatial layout; over the course of the region’s history, West Mount Airy had experienced five distinct periods of residential development, resulting in marked diversity of the built environment. In the early 1950s, housing stock in the neighborhood ranged from historically prestigious pre–Revolutionary War farmhouses to nineteenth-century summer estates, from elegant early twentieth-century row houses and twins to privately commissioned modern homes constructed before and during World War II. Among its owner-occupied homes, the neighborhood was made up of 29 percent row houses, 41 percent twins, and 30 percent single-detached houses.83 This rich variety of housing stock attracted a wide range of people to the community and made many residents resistant to flight, as the region’s distinctiveness was difficult to replicate in other areas of the city and surrounding suburbs.

Contributing further to the unique physical landscape of the neighborhood was the region’s proximity to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park and the Wissahickon Gorge. In 1824, Germantown-born merchant George W. Carpenter began construction of an estate, ultimately totaling 350 acres, in the area that would become West Mount Airy. Utilizing the Wissahickon, once a critical outpost during the Revolutionary War, Carpenter created expansive parks with creeks meandering through, laying the rudiments of the geographic landscape of Mount Airy in the mid-twentieth century. By the time the neighborhood experienced its first hints of postwar racial transition, the area was surrounded on two sides by Fairmount Park and bisected by Carpenter’s Woods, one of the lasting remnants of the original Carpenter estate. Though some white residents had chosen to leave the historic neighborhood in favor of the modern split-level homes in the expanding suburbs, many more saw value in the traditional housing styles and ubiquitous green space.84

Those white residents who remained embraced the neighborhood’s growing reputation as a socially liberal community. Although the region’s roots as a well-to-do retreat from the rush of city life remained, Mount Airy residents in the middle of the twentieth century professed a sense of cultural liberalness that lent itself to the possibility of open-minded acceptance. In the years following the Second World War, the neighborhood was home to a broad community of high-achieving white residents. They were well educated, politically oriented, and liberally minded. They were physicians and judges, lawyers and business owners, race relations specialists and longtime activists, acclaimed jazz musicians and established members of the Philadelphia orchestra. Educator and ornithologist Joe Cadbury, of the famed Cadbury Chocolate family, lived on the 100 block of West Hortter Street.85 Charles Darrow, one of the developers of the game Monopoly and the first board-game millionaire, lived on the unit block of Westview Street.86 George Schermer, director of the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission, moved to the 6700 block of McCallum Street in 1953.87 Dress manufacturer Lester Sacks lived at 506 W. Springer Street, where, on November 7, 1951, Frank Sinatra married Ava Gardner in a secret ceremony.88 As Shirley Melvin, who moved to the neighborhood with her family as a teenager in 1942, later reflected, many Mount Airy residents had experienced working and engaging with African Americans through their professional and social networks.89 They had grown accustomed to interracial interaction in their public lives and were perhaps more open to the prospect of such friendly relations in their residential community as well.

Figure 1. Families sled and ice skate on Wissahickon Creek in Fairmount Park’s Wissahickon Gorge, Philadelphia Bulletin, 1955. Used with permission from Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia.

These cultural and political leaders were members of a well-established professional class in Philadelphia. Though Mount Airy residents spanned the spectrum of middle-class status, most were relatively fiscally stable; unlike the blue-collar homeowners of many of the rapidly transitioning communities who resisted racial transition, in part out of a fear of the property devaluation that so often came with neighborhood volatility. The residents of West Mount Airy were generally more economically secure, and as such were risking less during the unpredictable period of transition.90

This unique combination of circumstances, individuals, and social and material conditions created possibilities for residential integration in the neighborhood. In the early 1950s, community leaders in West Mount Airy became part of a small but important national movement that conceived of alternative ways to think about race and residential space.91 Sometimes in conversation with one another and more often working as independent entities, reform-minded middle-class neighborhood organizations in northern and midwestern cities drew lessons from public integration efforts, working to reclaim control over their blocks from panic sellers and create a system for interracial residential stability. They waged community-wide campaigns toward intentional integration; by replacing residential segregation with residential integration, they sought to disrupt a system predicated on separation and infuse their day-to-day lives with the experience of interracial living.