THE WHITE NOOSE OF THE SUBURBS
Bacon, Margaret H.
the White Noose of the Suburbs by MARGARET H. BACON In common with most major American cities, Philadelphia has experienced a tremendous outward expansion since the close of World War II....
...After months of searching, a Negro couple sees their dream house, only to find out that it is not for sale to them...
...Sparked in part by the National Council of Churches, volunteer gioups are active in New England, in the Midwest, and all along the West Coast, trying to find houses for middle class Negroes in traditionally white areas...
...buyers have sometimes proved excessively particular...
...Nor is there a drop in real estate values, unless a wave of panic selling gets started...
...Meanwhile the recent establishment of Concord Park, Philadelphia's first integrated suburban housing development, had sharpened the interest of some parents in raising their children in integrated neighborhoods...
...It is this conviction that has kept Philadelphia area realtors from welcoming FSH with open arms...
...The inspiration for Friends Suburban Housing seemed to come from several directions at once...
...It's time that we all quit hiding behind one another's assumed prejudices," a church official recently said in calling on church members to sign "open occupancy covenants...
...The day that other realtors adopt this practice is perhaps still distant, but possibly a little closer since FSH has been on the scene...
...You're here," the head of a realty board recently said to some FSH board members, "so I guess we had better learn how to cooperate with you rather than fight you...
...The Philadelphia suburbs are not alone in facing this challenge...
...The present situation, in which Negro lawyers, doctors, teachers, and businessmen can live only in Germantown or in Yeadon, a Delaware county suburb, will lead only to the creation of more ghettos...
...Whether any of these groups plans to pattern itself eventually after FSH, incorporating as a real estate firm, nobody knows...
...After a minority family has moved in, FSH follows up with efforts to promote the successful integration of the family into the community...
...MARGARET H. BACON is a free lance writer whose articles have appeared in a number of American publications...
...Although it shows houses openly to either white or Negro buyers, it does not poll the neighborhood for its reaction...
...It has proved true, too, that once a Negro is living in a neighborhood, traditional American patterns of friendliness and fair play are shortly at work to counteract the original fear and suspicion...
...In all white neighborhoods it gives preference to Negroes, while in fringe areas, or blocks in transition, it looks for white buyers in order to stabilize the situation...
...In one Delaware county community an industrial designer, a Negro who had bought a modest home for his bride, was pressured into immediate resale by threats of mob violence, while in a similar area a skilled Negro worker found his home a mass of smoking ashes the day before he was to move in...
...FSH plans to continue its operations as long as it is the only real estate firm in the area to practice non-discrimination...
...One of the most encouraging findings of FSH, its friends believe, is that once he stops worrying about what the neighbors will think, or what will happen to property values, the average suburban home owner is able to forget his stereotypes and see his new neighbor as a human being with the same wants, interests, and tastes as himself...
...But it is clear at least that Philadelphia's interracial housing experiment is not alone, and that all across the land is a stirring which must result someday in breaking everywhere the "white noose" of the suburbs...
...When the first Negro family bought a house entirely on its own in this huge all-white community, mob violence resulted on such a scale that the story was nationally headlined for days...
...During the winter of 1955 all these rivulets of interest began to run together into a series of informal meetings which came to fruition in June, 1956, in the formal organization of Friends Suburban Housing...
...Within the city itself the immigration of Southern Negroes—another national postwar trend—has brought the Negro population up to twenty-four per cent of Philadelphia's 2,208,000 residents...
...But when two other Negro families subsequently bought houses through FSH, and the way was carefully prepared in cooperation with interested groups in the area, moving day in each case was entirely without incident...
...Even in those cases which do not proceed smoothly, and no sale is made, homeowners and their neighbors have been confronted, perhaps for the first time in their lives, with the fact that there are families of the same economic status as themselves who want green grass and fresh air for their children just as much as anyone else, but who are denied these things because of the color of their skin...
...A woman decides to list her house with the agency, but withdraws the next day because the neighbors have complained...
...This form of basic neighborhood education is the essence of the FSH program, the very reason for its existence...
...In the course of three years more than 300 qualified Negro families have applied for houses in the suburbs in the $10,000 to $30,000 bracket...
...One man prominent in the organization was called into the office of the large industrial firm for which he worked and told he had no further chance of promotion with the company because of his interracial activities...
...Mayor Richardson Dilworth has described his City of Brotherly Love as a city slowly being strangled by a "white noose...
...It once turned down a house because the owners wanted to sell to Negroes only...
...It is rarely at the completion of a sale, but rather in its initial stages, that FSH runs into trouble...
...Always the story is the same...
...Many persons basically sympathetic with the FSH program have hesitated to use the agency themselves for fear of community or job reprisals...
...The new service has been ignored generally, although a few firms have fought FSH over particular listings, even stooping occasionally to the practice of soliciting the neighborhood for a cash subsidy to help a white family outbid a Negro buyer...
...And because much of the new Negro population is in the unskilled class, the result is an increase of density of population in the slums, a drop in tax revenue, and a sharp rise in racial tension, all of which menace Philadelphia's ambitious urban renewal program...
...The Friends Race Relations Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting employs a full-time community relations secretary who will work closely with FSH in a community in which a sale is being made...
...Of the twenty-eight houses sold to Negroes by FSH, in twenty-three cases there was no discernible community reaction, while in the remaining five most of the opposition was expressed before the new family moved in...
...This contrast in reactions to hostility points to one of FSH's most interesting findings...
...The middle class Negro, having fought so hard to win status and respectability, seems unwilling to risk the indignities which might result from moving into a hostile neighborhood...
...It takes courage, the FSH experience has revealed, for a white person to sell his suburban house to a Negro...
...Others who have listed their houses for rent or for sale have withdrawn the listings when the neighbors objected...
...mortgage money has been scarce...
...community reaction—stirred often by some prejudiced individual —has several times flared to the danger point...
...The industrial designer withdrew in the face of hostile reaction, but the skilled worker stubbornly stood his ground...
...He applied for a permit to rebuild, took the case to court when the borough refused him a permit, and after a long series of delays and disappointments rebuilt a better house on the ruins of the old...
...FSH differs from other real estate brokers in that it accepts only listings which are open to all...
...The solution, many people feel, is to help those middle class Negroes who share the station-wagon, ranch-house aspirations of their white peers to find houses throughout the suburban areas...
...The future health of Philadelphia and its dependent suburbs demands that the strands of this noose be frayed...
...Stretching out into the five counties surrounding this historic City of Brotherly Love are ring after ring of suburbs, composed mainly of new housing developments, virtually all of which are closed to Negro families...
...At about the same time Margaret Collins, a Bryn Mawr decorator, began to talk with her Main Line friends about the same problem...
...In the Philadelphia suburbs volunteer efforts led, more than three years ago, to the creation of a unique business enterprise, Friends Suburban Housing, Inc., a conventional real estate firm with the unconventional aim of making sales to anyone with the taste and the pocket-book for suburban living...
...As a result, the organization has turned increasingly to community-wide agencies to help with the job of community education that must parallel the real estate work...
...The validity of teaming up community education with the sale of a house to a Negro in an all-white area is amply demonstrated by experience in Levittown, Bucks County...
...This much-debated point is rarely accepted by realtors, who genuinely feel that they must keep minority groups out of suburban areas in order to protect property values...
...But if realtors have been cool, prospective buyers have not...
...In the fall of 1955 a Swarthmore group under the chairmanship of Mike Yarrow of the American Friends Service Committee began meeting to discuss how best they might desegregate their all-white neighborhoods...
...Neighborhood hostility is far more liable to be crystallized on the seller than on the buyer...
...A college professor moving to a distant city learned that the neighbors had written to his new dean complaining about his listing his house for open occupancy...
...It's not that I'm prejudiced myself, but my neighbors would never stand for it...
...Into the small FSH office come many letters from other groups interested in housing desegregation, asking detailed questions about methods of organization and operation...
...Under the pressure of a constant backlog of eager applicants, FSH has had to go far afield in its search for suitable houses to sell, picking them up wherever it may in the suburban area...
...The fear of reprisal is not entirely imaginary...
...The sensitivity to community reaction that makes the middle class Negro timid causes the middle class white to fear the hostility of his neighbors if he lists his house for sale with the non-discriminatory service...
...As badly as they want suburban homes for their children, Negro doctors, teachers, and engineers will often withdraw from a contemplated sale if there are signs of adverse community reaction...
...Suitable listings have been hard to find...
...As more and more white families move out to the all-white suburbs, the proportion of Negro to white in the city grows daily greater...
...While all this sounds simple enough, in practice few of the firm's more than thirty sales have moved along without difficulty...
Vol. 24 • October 1960 • No. 10
