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 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 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. The efforts of
residents in the 1950s and 1960s helped to define the neighborhood
as it exists today.
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