Making good neighbors : civil rights, liberalism, and integration in postwar Philadelphia / Abigail Perkiss.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Perkiss, Abigail, 1981- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Civil rights--Pennsylvania--Philadelphia--History--20th century.

Civil rights.

Liberalism--Pennsylvania--Philadelphia--History--20th century.

Liberalism.

Philadelphia (Pa.)--Race relations.

Philadelphia (Pa.).

Mount Airy (Philadelphia, Pa.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (248 p.)

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, New York : Cornell University Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the 1950's and 1960's, as the white residents, real estate agents, and municipal officials of many American cities fought to keep African Americans out of traditionally white neighborhoods, Philadelphia's West Mount Airy became one of the first neighborhoods in the nation where residents came together around a community-wide mission toward intentional integration. As West Mount Airy experienced transition, homeowners fought economic and legal policies that encouraged white flight and threatened the quality of local schools, seeking to find an alternative to racial separation without knowing what they would create in its place. In Making Good Neighbors, Abigail Perkiss tells the remarkable story of West Mount Airy, drawing on archival research and her oral history interviews with residents to trace their efforts, which began in the years following World War II and continued through the turn of the twenty-first century. The organizing principles of neighborhood groups like the West Mount Airy Neighbors Association (WMAN) were fundamentally liberal and emphasized democracy, equality, and justice; the social, cultural, and economic values of these groups were also decidedly grounded in middle-class ideals and white-collar professionalism. As Perkiss shows, this liberal, middle-class framework would ultimately become contested by more militant black activists and from within WMAN itself, as community leaders worked to adapt and respond to the changing racial landscape of the 1960's and 1970's. The West Mount Airy case stands apart from other experiments in integration because of the intentional, organized, and long-term commitment on the part of WMAN to biracial integration and, in time, multiracial and multiethnic diversity. The efforts of residents in the 1950's and 1960's helped to define the neighborhood as it exists today.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Civil Rights' Stepchild

1. "A Home of One's Own": The Battle over Residential Space in Twentieth- Century America

2. Finding Capital in Diversity: The Creation of Racially Integrated Space

3. Marketing Integration: Interracial Living in the White Imagination

4. Integration, Separation, and the Fight for Black Identity

5. "Well- Trained Citizens and Good Neighbors": Educating an Integrated America

6. Confrontations in Black and White: The Crisis of Integration

7. The Choice to Live Differently: Reimagining Integration at Century's End

Epilogue: West Mount Airy and the Legacy of Integration

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8014-7085-4

OCLC:

874563368