Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
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Trade Review
By contextualizing Perkiss's analysis within a broader postwar urban history, Making Good Neighbors offers striking breadth for a relatively short book. Perkiss offers a valuable counternarrative to the growing scholarship on civil rights and de facto segregation in the urban North.
-- Timothy J. Lombardo * Journal of American History *
Having grown up in the neighborhood, Perkiss has both an instinctive sympathy for the residents of the neighborhood and a thorough understanding of the cultural, economic and demographic challenges facing the city. Her study reflects this familiarity while remaining analytically rigorous. As a bonus, she writes beautifully. The result is a book that sheds much light on what the residents of West Mount Airy meant when they talked about integration, how they strove to integrate their neighborhood and how they struggled to address the challenges to that accomplishment.
-- Kelly McFall * New Books in History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 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 America6. 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
