O Pioneer! O Morris!
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union O PIONEER! O MORRIS! BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways Pioneers! O pioneers! —Walt Whitman Pioneering doesn't...
...In 1962 Harry and David Rosen wrote But Not Next Door, an angry (and angering) account of Milgram's ordeal in Deerfield...
...No sooner said than done: Milgram immediately went on a fund-raising tour and launched a direct mail campaign...
...It would be nice, for instance, to learn something about those thousands of telegrams he is said to have dispatched in a single night in 1967, the night of the Detroit riots...
...The resulting virtually total exclusion of blacks from many communities increases the minority demand on open development, thus strengthening the 'tipping point' theory...
...It eschews the subject of violence, though black fear of white retaliation continues to be a powerful inhibitor of racial integration...
...If we can learn anything from Morris Milgram's long and frustrating struggles in fair housing, it is first, that busing is the opiate of the people, and second, that Tocque-ville was right as usual...
...From instant integration Milgram proceeded to found an astonishing series of new organizations, many of them described in Good Neighborhood: the Mutual Real Estate Investment Trust (m-reit), National Neighbors, the National Committee on Investment in Tithing, Sponsors of Open Housing Investment, National Housing Partnership, and several more...
...Instant integration," as he called it, might be accomplished by buying segregated apartment buildings and throwing them open to tenants of all races...
...As soon as it is admitted," he wrote in 1835, "that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two foreign communities, it will readily be understood that there are but two chances for the future: the Negroes and whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle...
...The scarcity is, in fact, part of the problem...
...And now look what's happening...
...According to a mutual friend, Milgram sold thousands of shares through that one impromptu effort...
...Walt Whitman Pioneering doesn't pay...
...They are a democracy's dirty little secrets, maybe the only ones that matter...
...We would like to have it both ways: in our ideology, wholly to mingle...
...Andrew Carnegie The jacket flap on Morris Milgram's new book calls him "a pioneer of integrated housing," which is true and says much about the current state of such housing...
...It took a St...
...One must start with Morris Abrams' remarkable ice-breaker, Forbidden Neighbors (1955...
...Get out of Cicero and don't come back to town or you'll get a bullet through you," the police chief told the War veteran...
...I met Milgram in 1964, about a decade after he built Concord and Greenbelt Knoll, his first two racially integrated developments outside Philadelphia...
...10.95), that Congress first passed fair housing legislation in '66?1866, that is...
...We need only read the first sentence to learn why he failed: "To deplore is far easier than to change...
...out of town when he and his family tried to move into an all-white building...
...Years ago in Skokie, Illinois, I covered a meeting of white residents who were protesting the presence of the town's first black family...
...The problem, in short, strikes Milgram as institutional, and so does the solution...
...What we get instead is a distillation of Milgram's quarter-century experience on the ramparts and hustings of desegregation—all the conclusions and few of the personal details...
...He had just suffered a nasty setback in affluent Deerfield, Illinois: The town fathers had summarily rejected his proposed subdivision, condemned his land, and turned it into a municipal park...
...Thus we endlessly debate the pros and cons of school integration, while we steadfastly evade the critical de facto question: Where, and near whom, shall we choose to live...
...Americans do not suffer desegregation lightly...
...Morris offers his special brand of practical wisdom—tips on how to start a local fair housing organization (not all that difficult...
...The interview took place in a dingy hotel room in Waterbury, Connecticut...
...and in 1970 Little, Brown brought out Because It Is Right,an ingenuous attempt by a Du Pont executive, James L. Hecht, to convert America's racist hearts...
...Milgram's entry in this sparse procession is less shrill than most and considerably more technical...
...Detroit is burning," each telegram began, and then went on to ask the recipient to buy shares in m-reit, an organization dedicated to the dispersion of ghettos...
...I moved out here so my kids could have grass and trees and sunshine," a young father shouted...
...Milgram points out in Good Neighborhood: The Challenge of Open Housing (Norton, 248 pp...
...In upholding the Joneses, the Supreme Court declared, "when racial discrimination herds men into ghettos and makes their ability to buv property turn on the color of their skin...
...If there is a way out of the American Dilemma, we shall need all the help from Morris we can get...
...it remains the last word on America's first century of segregation...
...An Appendix, listing about 50 national and local organizations that concentrate on open housing, is sadly similar to a list I compiled 10 years ago: Some of the old names are gone...
...But we at least have the consolation of knowing that Morris Milgram continues to wheel and deal on our behalf, while the rest of us ply our narrow trades and cultivate our (frequently segregated) gardens...
...The long list attests to Milgram's remarkable resiliency, and also to the cussed persistency of the evil he has been trying to expunge...
...He was evidently under the impression that blacks blotted out the sun...
...I wish Morris had given us more of himself in the book—his day-today ingenuity, his bouncier-than-thou attitude—and less of an organizational overview...
...how to deal with a bigoted realtor (know the law—it's on your side), what to expect in the way of affirmative action from Hl'ii officials (alas, verv little 1. He is especially astute about "the myth of the tipping point," noting its banefully circular consequences: "A substantial portion of the housing industry still seems to believe that once a building has more than one or two per cent black residents, this figure will soon rise to about 25 or 30 per cent, at which point an all-black status is inevitable...
...State and Federal fair housing laws abound, yet the desegregation movement remains painfully rudimentary and continues to rely on the frontier talents of this man, who is as stubborn as Davy Crockett, as resourceful as Daniel Boone and as dream-intoxicated as Joseph Smith...
...a few new ones, mostly Milgram creations, have arisen...
...No, Milgram would have developed plantations worked by free, wage-earning blacks, proving that freedom was good business...
...Louis couple named Jones to breathe life into the law a century later, by suing a white builder for refusing to sell them a house because they were black...
...I especially recommend the opening chapter, recounting how the Cicero, Illinois police drove Harvey E. Clark Jr...
...As a nation we have never fully faced up to Tocquc-ville's lean, hard insight...
...Beware of evils that permeate the social landscape but seldom break into print...
...Unlucky in reforms, we are lucky in our reformers...
...For his book seems addressed mainly to believers...
...most of us seem to share the delusion...
...Nevertheless, we ought to be grateful: The literature of fair housing, like the cause itself, is woefully underrepresented...
...it signals a national reluctance to look in the mirror...
...area...
...His enemy is not the racist mob but the red-lining banks, the discriminatory builders and brokers, the government bureaucrats who refuse to enforce the law, and the "neutral" trustees of investment funds who fortify segregation with their capital...
...in our daily lives, wholly to part...
...it is likely to sharpen their weapons and renew their faith without adding many soldiers to their thin ranks...
...It may be well, therefore, to cite a few pre-Milgram books, if only because they and their message have been so soon forgotten...
...Following the Deerfield disaster he decided there was an easier, quicker way to provide equal housing...
...Yet while all of this is perfectly true, it will probably persuade no one not already toiling in Milgram's vineyards...
...Although Milgram applauds the ruling, litigation is not generally his way...
...Constitution, as did Wendell Phillips...
...The harvest is vast, the summer is ended, and we are not saved...
...Soon after Abrams' book came George and Eunice Grier's Privately Developed Interracial Housing, an analysis of 50 such projects built since World War II...
...The work was never published, merely circulated via a kind of civil rights samizdat, yet it was an inspiration to Milgram and a few other builders...
...it is a relic of slavery...
...A sensible statute but one that was stillborn...
...All citizens of the United States," the law says, "shall have the same right in every State and Territory as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property...
...Along with the descriptions...
...The civil rights movement of the 50s is played out...
...He used the several million dollars he amassed to purchase three apartment buildings in the D.C...
...Milgram was full of plans and energy, popping vitamin pills ("You ought to try these"), discoursing on segregation in America ("I can feel things changing, I really can") and intermittendy telephoning Connecticut friends and "contacts...
...If he had been born 150 years ago he would doubtless have taken his place among the leading abolitionists, but he neither would have published inflammatory editorials, as Lloyd Garrison did, nor have publicly burned the U.S...
...He is a builder and an entrepreneur, a master investor and an indefatigable promoter...
Vol. 60 • May 1977 • No. 11
