Making Good Neighbors

Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia

Bibliographic Data

ID19976715
AuthorsAbigail Perkiss (corresponding author)
Year2014
Pages231
Publication date2014-03-07
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueMaking good neighbors (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCornell University Press (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.7591/cornell/9780801452284.001.0001
OpenAlexW4237063897
Open LibraryOL26873876M
ISBN9780801452284
LanguageEN
Citations received8

In the 1950s and 1960s, 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 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. This book tells the story of West Mount Airy, drawing on archival research and 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 the book 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 1960s and 1970s. 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

American History and Culture · Appalachian Studies and Mathematics · Computer Science · Race, History, and American Society · 20th century · Civil rights · Discrimination in housing · History · Liberalism · Mount Airy (Philadelphia, Pa.) · Pennsylvania · Philadelphia · race relations · united states

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