Racing the City: Intentional Integration and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in Post-World War II America

My dissertation, Racing the City: Intentional Integration and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in Post-WWII America, examines the creation, experience, and meaning of intentionally integrated residential space in the latter half of the twentieth century. Entering into the growing historiographical conversations on post-war American cities and the northern civil rights movement, I argue that with a strong commitment to maintaining residential cohesion and a heightened sense of racial justice in the wake of the Second World War, liberal integrationists around the country embarked on grassroots campaigns seeking to translate the ideals of racial equality into a blueprint for genuine interracial living. Through innovative real estate efforts, creative marketing techniques, and religious activism, pioneering community groups worked to intentionally integrate their neighborhoods, to serve as a model for sustainable urbanity and racial justice in the United States. My research, centered on the northwest Philadelphia neighborhood of West Mount Airy, chronicles a liberal community effort that confronted formal legal and governmental policies and deeply entrenched cultural understandings; through this integration project, activists sought to redefine post-war urban space in terms of racial inclusion. In crafting such a narrative, I challenge much of the scholarship on the northern struggle for racial justice, which paints a uniform picture of a divisive and violent racial urban environment. At the same time, my dissertation explores how hard it was for urban integrationists to build interracial communities. I portray a neighborhood struggling with the deeper meanings of integrated space, with identity politics and larger institutional, structural, and cultural forces, and with internal resistance to change. In that sense, I speak to the larger debates over post-WWII urban space; my research, here, implies a cultural explanation complementing the political and economic narratives of white flight and urban crisis that scholars have crafted over the last two decades. This is at once the story of a group of people seeking to challenge the seeming inevitability of segregation by creating an economically stable, racially integrated community predicated upon an idealized vision of American democracy, and it is the story of the fraying of that ideal.

Grantor dc:publisher

Temple University. Libraries

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Perkiss, Abigail Lynn

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Farber, David R.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Bailey, Beth L., 1957-
• Simon, Bryant
• Kruse, Kevin Michael, 1972-

• History, United States
• Black History
• Integration
• Liberalism
• Middle-class
• Neighborhoods
• Race Relations
• Urban Space

Statement dc:rights

• IN COPYRIGHT- This Rights Statement can be used for an Item that is in copyright. Using this statement implies that the organization making this Item available has determined that the Item is in copyright and either is the rights-holder, has obtained permission from the rights-holder(s) to make their Work(s) available, or makes the Item available under an exception or limitation to copyright (including Fair Use) that entitles it to make the Item available.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Dc Identifier Other

864884797

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/2135