Nicest Kids in Town

by Delmont, Matthew F.

  These white homeowners’ groups also directed their defensive localism and rights discourse toward the Fellowship Commission’s civil rights work. The leaders of the Angora and Overbrook associations accused the Commission of forcing its integration agenda on blacks. Reporting on a Fellowship Commission meeting that he attended covertly, the Overbrook association president told the homeowners’ groups that the “colored” people at the meeting “did not seem to be at all interested in housing [but] the ‘Fellowship Boys’ got up and agitated these people by saying to them that they had the right to move in to any street or any neighborhood in Philadelphia they wanted to.”33 The Overbrook president advised the association members: “You see that these Fellowship people are fellowship for them only—no fellowship for everybody.”34

  The homeowners associations also accused the Fellowship Commission of being involved in a “sinister conspiracy” with real estate agents who had reportedly convinced white homeowners to sell their houses to blacks, thereby “blockbusting” all-white neighborhoods. There is no evidence that the Fellowship Commission and real estate agents worked in concert, and, in fact, real estate brokers played a much larger role than the Commission in helping black families move into formerly all-white neighborhoods. Real estate agents had complex motives, but, in almost every case, racially changing neighborhoods presented brokers with substantial economic opportunities. Blockbusting real estate brokers looked for, and sometimes fostered, panic in racially changing neighborhoods and bought homes at below-market prices from panicked white sellers. They then placed advertisements in black newspapers touting these new homeownership opportunities.35 The Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s largest black newspaper, ran several such advertisements every week during the early and mid-1950s. A real estate advertisement from 1952, for example, advised readers to “Go West Young Man. Come to West Philadelphia.” Another realty company promised that “we will secure homes for you in any neighborhood desired,” while a company billing itself as “Phila.’s Most Progressive Office” listed different “West Phila. Specials” on a weekly basis.36 These homes usually sold at a markup to black buyers looking for good quality homes. While these agents helped expand homeownership opportunities for the city’s black residents, they also accelerated the tensions in racially changing neighborhoods like West Philadelphia, and many brokers made significant sums of money in the process.37 For the white homeowners’ groups, both blockbusting real estate agents and the Fellowship Commission represented outside agitators threatening the racial identity of their neighborhoods.

  Since the CHR lacked the ability to prosecute cases of housing discrimination, the Fellowship Commission took a different approach. The Commission believed that the best options were simultaneously to try both to win the ACA over by persuading it that its actions would only foster panic selling and to isolate the group by planning meetings and events to improve relations in the racially changing neighborhoods of West Philadelphia. The Fellowship Commission and its West Philadelphia chapter worked with the CHR and local Baptist and Catholic clergy to reach out to the homeowners’ groups. A flier for the Fellowship Commission’s first outreach meeting in 1954, under the headline “Let’s All Pull Together,” invited residents to talk “facts about West Philadelphia” concerning “money, people and houses for sale.”38 Illustrating the strength of the Commission’s relationships with the city’s Democratic Party, the city’s district attorney and future mayor Richardson Dilworth spoke at the meeting. Fellowship Commission executive director Maurice Fagan also met with the ACA president privately, advising him that the Commission was concerned with the rights of religious and nationality groups as well as those of racial groups.39 Fagan further told the ACA that the Commission would not object to “open and above board” civic associations. These efforts to influence the attitudes of white homeowners prefigured the CHR’s 1958 series of “What to Do” kits that were distributed to residents in racially changing communities. Aimed at local leaders in areas like West Philadelphia, the “What to Do” folders included suggestions for local leaders on how to organize and conduct meetings to discuss the importance of communities working together to avoid panic selling and to ensure fair-housing practices. While the CHR distributed the kits widely in an attempt to meet the scale of racial change in the neighborhood, they did not lead to a substantial decrease in reports of community tensions over housing.40

  In addition to these outreach efforts, the Fellowship Commission also sponsored neighborhood seminars to encourage community involvement in intergroup relations. Foremost among these efforts, the Commission worked with principals, teachers, and home and school associations to plan inter-playground fellowship events at the elementary schools in West Philadelphia.41 These events were well attended and well received by many black and white parents and children in the area. The Fellowship Commission’s efforts appear to have limited the growth of the ACA past 1955. Racial tensions in other West Philadelphia neighborhoods and other parts of the city, however, overwhelmed the Fellowship Commission’s resources.42 In his evaluation of the Commission’s work in 1955, Fagan asserted:

  New problems are developing faster than old ones are being solved because of the emphasis on cases instead of causes. With only 35 full-time workers in the entire city of Philadelphia, it is not possible … to do more than move from crisis to crisis, neighborhood to neighborhood, without staying put long enough to make an enduring difference.43

  As Fagan noted, the depth of white resistance to racial integration overwhelmed the Fellowship Commission’s educational strategy.

  On the legislative front, the Fellowship Commission played an important role in passing the state’s fair-housing bill, which was enacted in 1961. The Commission lobbied the forty-two member groups of the Pennsylvania Equal Rights Council to advance a narrow bill that covered new housing and housing transactions receiving government assistance, but excluded sales of owner-occupied homes such as those frequently purchased by blacks in racially changing urban neighborhoods.44 While the Commission’s fair-housing bill made political sense in an effort to get legislation through the Republican-controlled state senate, the bill’s exemptions aligned with the view of property rights being advocated by the white homeowners’ groups and weakened the credibility of the Commission’s approach to civil rights.

  The magnitude of the challenges facing the Fellowship Commission and other fair-housing advocates, however, was immense. Discriminatory federal housing policy and the business practices of the real estate industry blocked black families from most new suburban construction and managed the racial turnover of urban neighborhoods. Mortgage redlining treated black neighborhoods and black homeowners as investment risks, and this lack of access to credit limited the efficacy of open occupancy or fair-housing legislation for many African Americans.45 Combining with these factors, white homeowners’ groups and civic associations policed the boundaries of segregated neighborhoods and demonstrated what James Wolfinger calls “the limits imposed on liberalism from below.”46 In many cities and states, this resistance to integrated housing coalesced into organized opposition to fair-housing legislation. Most notably, in the 1964 election 65 percent of California voters approved Proposition 14, which sought to nullify the Rumford Fair Housing Act (the state Supreme Court declared Proposition 14 unconstitutional in 1966). As with the Angora Civic Association, supporters of Proposition 14, such as future California governor and U.S. president Ronald Reagan, portrayed fair-housing legislation as “forced housing” and as “an infringement of one of our basic individual rights.”47 As historian Robert Self shows in his study of Oakland, this language of property rights appealed to a large cross section of white voters. “The numbers suggest that the resistance to desegregation in Oakland did not come solely from an antiliberal white working class,” Self argues, “but arose equally among middle- and upper-class whites who understood property rights as sacrosanct expressions of their personal freedom and had little daily contact with African America
ns.”48 Similarly, historian Phil Ethington notes that in Los Angeles, the white neighborhoods most geographically isolated from black communities were more likely to vote to repeal fair-housing legislation.49 While anti-fair-housing legislation did not become a ballot issue in Pennsylvania, a 1965 survey of residents in Philadelphia suburbs found that over 70 percent considered “keeping undesirables out” to be a very important objective for local government, rating it well ahead of “maintaining improved public services,” “providing aesthetic amenities,” and “acquiring business and industry.”50 Attempts to pass fair-housing legislation at the federal level also encountered significant resistance. President Lyndon Johnson’s aide later recalled that when Johnson first tried to push a national fair-housing bill through Congress in 1966, for example, the bill “prompted some of the most vicious mail LBJ received on any subject.”51 When Congress finally passed the 1968 Fair Housing Act in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the bill’s weak enforcement provisions did little to curb housing discrimination.52

  Sociologist Jill Quadagno summarizes opposition to fair-housing legislation simply, arguing that “for many white Americans, property rights superseded civil rights.”53 White mobilization for segregated neighborhoods, in combination with discriminatory federal housing policy, the business practices of the real estate industry, and the shortcomings of local and federal antidiscrimination policies in housing, made residential segregation the norm in cities and suburbs around the nation. As chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate, defenders of housing segregation laid the foundation for de facto school segregation. This residential segregation emerged from and reinforced a belief that a neighborhood’s racial composition and property values were intertwined and mutually constitutive. This way of viewing space informed everyday encounters across the United States, and in Philadelphia it motivated white homeowners’ groups like the Angora Civic Association to fight for segregation. This group was part of a larger national story, but it also reflected and influenced racial attitudes locally, in Bandstand’s backyard.

  INTEGRATION AND SEGREGATION IN YOUTH SPACES IN WEST PHILADELPHIA

  These everyday fights over segregation were not confined to housing. For the teens who appeared on Bandstand and for those who watched the program on television, different levels of racial integration and segregation were part of their daily experiences in youth spaces such as schools, parties, snack counters, and roller rinks. As more black families moved into previously all-white neighborhoods in West Philadelphia, for example, some youth spaces became integrated by virtue of the racially mixed neighborhoods in which they were located. At West Philadelphia High School (WPHS), black enrollment grew from 10 percent in 1945 to 30 percent in 1951.54 Black students held leadership roles in the school, including class president, received class honors in the school yearbook (e.g., most popular, most likely to succeed, peppiest), attended school dances, and participated on the boys’ track, basketball, and swimming teams; the girls’ sports club; and the school newspaper.55 Despite these signs of inclusion in the social life of the school, black students also encountered the anxieties of parents, teachers, administrators, and students who associated their presence with racially changing neighborhoods. In 1951, for example, George Montgomery, the newly appointed principal at WPHS, singled out working-class black students in an assembly after an incident in the school. The Philadelphia Tribune quoted Montgomery as telling the students: “Negroes have become more conspicuous in Philadelphia. There are [a] few intelligent Negroes in the city, there are some fine colored children. However, if you choose to class yourself with them, then it is up to you to go home and ask your parents to which class they prefer you to belong to, the lower or upper class of colored people.”56 Class differences among the black students at West Philadelphia, specifically the entrance of working-class students from the “black bottom” neighborhood, motivated at least some of this racial anxiety. Walter Palmer, who lived in the “black bottom” and graduated from West Philadelphia in 1953, recalled that most of his black and white classmates lived in the more prosperous “top” or western part of West Philadelphia. “We dressed differently, talked, walked, danced, and fought differently,” Palmer remembered. “They were folks with better resources. They tolerated people like myself because they needed me to protect them outside of the school. We didn’t get invited to their parties. We would invite them to ours, but they would be too afraid to come.”57 While it was far from a model of racial equality, in the early 1950s WPHS was among the only high schools in the city that were neither 90 percent white nor 90 percent black (90 percent being the percentage the city’s civil rights leaders would later use to define segregated schools).

  FIGURE 3. Teens dancing at prom at West Philadelphia High School. Located three blocks from WFIL’s studio, West Philadelphia High School was racially integrated when Bandstand debuted. West Philadelphia High School Record, 1953. West Philadelphia High School Archives.

  Outside of school, informal youth gatherings at house parties and snack shops offered the possibility of interracial association. Dances in the small basements of row houses were a frequent social outlet for teens in West Philadelphia. Weldon McDougal, who grew up in a subdivided house on 48th and Westminster Avenue, in what he called the “top part” (or northwest side) of the “black bottom” neighborhood, remembered:

  In the neighborhoods, this is how it worked. I lived at 48th street. Somebody would say, “hey man, there’s a dance on at Shirley’s house tomorrow.” On the way to Shirley’s house which is maybe two blocks away, you could hear a party going on in another basement. So you go down there, and you know there some kids there dancing and having a good time. Well, anybody could come down there. And like I said, we lived next door to white guys and everything so they would come to the dances.

  Between twenty and fifty teenagers, mostly black but some Italian and Irish teens from the neighborhood, squeezed into these basements to dance to their favorite R&B songs, and whatever other 45s they brought to the party. McDougall recalls that there were five or six of these local dances every Friday and Saturday in his West Philadelphia neighborhood.58

  FIGURE 4. From 1954 to 1960, the proprietors of Joe’s Snack Bar placed ads in West Philadelphia High School yearbooks featuring an integrated group of students from the school. West Philadelphia High School Record, 1955. West Philadelphia High School Archives.

  In addition to weekend dances, young people hung out at a variety of lunch counters, soda fountains, and ice cream parlors in West Philadelphia. While historical evidence of the racial climate of these establishments is difficult to ascertain and surely varied based on proprietor and clientele, at least one attempted to welcome both black and white teenage customers. Joe’s Snack Bar, located across the street from the West Philadelphia High School, placed advertisements in the school’s yearbook every year from 1954 to 1960.59 These ads stand out from those of the other shops and services that advertised to West Philadelphia students and their parents because every Joe’s Snack Bar ad pictured the proprietors, a middle-aged white couple, happily serving an interracial group of students.

  In contrast to the opportunities for casual and friendly interracial interactions at WPHS, basement parties, and some snack shops, other youth spaces were segregated by policy or by custom. Many popular social and recreational spaces used by young people, such as roller skating rinks, bowling alleys, and swimming pools, had segregated admissions practices that flouted the city’s antidiscrimination policies. The Adelphia Skating Rink in West Philadelphia on 39th and Market Street, for example, operated as a club that required teens to be sponsored by members in order to be admitted. Using this policy, the rink’s manager turned away any potential customers he deemed undesirable, including all black teenagers.60 The discriminatory practices at the Adelphia, as well as at rinks in other sections of the city, drew the attention of the local branches of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colo
red People (NAACP). Working in cooperation with adult members of the ACLU and NAACP, the teenage members of the Fellowship Club formed interracial teams to test the policies of the city’s rinks. With the help of Fellowship Club’s volunteer investigators, the ACLU and NAACP brought the skating rink issue to the Commission on Human Relations (CHR).

  In spring of 1953, after receiving reports of discrimination at skating rinks, CHR officials met with the owners of Imperial and Adelphia, as well as four other rinks. The CHR secured written agreements from all of the rink owners to operate in accordance with the city’s antidiscrimination policies.61 Despite these agreements, when mixed groups of skaters from the Fellowship Club tested the rinks’ policies, they continued to find evidence of racially exclusive signs and membership practices, and of managers encouraging segregated patronage. In further defiance of the city’s antidiscrimination policies, rink operator Joe Toppi called the CHR before he opened the Imperial skating rink in West Philadelphia on 60th and Walnut Street to ask permission to operate the rink on a segregated basis. After being informed that this would be illegal, Toppi said he would not exclude anyone, but that he would do everything he could to influence white and black teens to come on different nights. With the rink set to open in early September 1953, Toppi posted signs at the rink and distributed fliers in West Philadelphia and South Philadelphia publicizing three “white nights” and three “sepia nights” a week. This practice immediately drew criticism from the black community in West Philadelphia, and on September 17 a group of black teenagers from the NAACP youth council picketed the rink.62 This same group of teens gained admission on one of the white nights and reported that the white skaters were friendly and that no incidents occurred. Despite the efforts of these black teens, Toppi kept his signs up and continued encouraging white teens to skate on white nights and black teens to come on sepia nights until at least the following year.63