HOMES WITHOUT HATE
Weisbord, Marvin
Homes Without Hate by MARVIN WEISBOED "There is a man in Philadelphia who makes his living by making other people unhappy. "His name is Morris Milgram. He is a homebuilder and developer on a big...
...What was at stake here was free government itself, he emphasized, inserting, irrelevantly, a quotation from George Washington...
...Like a witch doctor invoking a spirit against evil, Deerfield anxiously invoked a new kind of public spirit against Negroes...
...Supreme Court if need be...
...One must pay a terrific price for avoiding one's social responsibilities, said the attorney, but he was sure Deerfield was willing...
...the decision is now pending...
...More than 200 residents attended this meeting in an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and bitterness...
...His practice is to choose a happy, contented community of attractive homes where there has never been a race problem and build a lot of integrated apartments and residences...
...but Milgram came in only on condition that when he learned the business he could build "open" housing...
...was Harold C. Lewis' comment...
...He is a homebuilder and developer on a big scale...
...The day after the referendum, MCD and Progress filed a $750,000 damage suit in the U.S...
...The average Deerfield husband, a college graduate who has moved up to junior executive grade in his Chicago office, brings home perhaps nine to ten thousand dollars a year...
...This is a test case that will decide whether or not a community can use its power of eminent domain to preserve segregation in housing," says Morris Mil-gram...
...Deerfield repressed its school problems and simmered quietly until November...
...Meanwhile, Lewis' North Shore Residents decided on an "unofficial poll" to see how many people favored Floral Park and Pear Tree...
...He threw it out of court...
...Much encouraged, Otto and Milgram moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where they formed a company with the help of local citizens, among them the Reverend B. J. Anderson, a Negro minister, who, by practicing what he preaches, has made his formerly all-Negro church twenty-five per cent white...
...A group of citizens led by Ross Allen Weston, minister of the Evanston, Illinois, Unitarian Church, and backed by such nationally known figures as Mrs...
...Once again there is someone we don't see eye to eye with, and maybe I couldn't be dafter, But I keep wondering if this time we couldn't settle our differences before a war instead of after...
...I will say I believe Judge Perry made a very sound decision, one that is in harmony with the Constitution...
...Few owners have enough courage to sell property in "white" areas to someone who plans to sell some of it in turn to non-whites...
...Milgram has built such communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and in all cases he has raised unhappy race issues...
...Its citizens had never remotely believed they would someday have to live with Negroes...
...We all of us recognize that basically there's no man, woman, or child in the world today that isn't entitled to a place to live, a place that is in keeping with what he has been able to earn, and to prove he's worthy of, irrespective of race...
...At least you do not have to fight your political leaders and ministers and newspapers to the extent we must up here," he added...
...But they haven't done either...
...But all this aside, argued Deerfield's lawyers, one ought not to obscure the insidious heart of the matter: it is not the village that discriminates against minorities, but rather Modern Community Developers...
...He has Negro friends and neighbors, and he understands, as few white people do, the anger, frustration, and pain of the rejected Negro family forced from one ghetto to another despite education, income, or stability...
...Lewis assured the Southerners that, contrary to what they thought, the North was doing its part...
...Since 1952 he has built nothing else...
...and stockholders earned seven per cent in capital gains...
...Probably, Lewis suggested, it isn't—a strange conclusion for the son of a Methodist minister whose church issues a pamphlet that says, "Our Lord Jesus Christ teaches that all men are brothers...
...Maybe this is why MCD is the only national firm in its field...
...Milgram has done so well that in 1958 he and several associates set up Modern Community Developers, Inc., to build what the trade calls "open occupancy housing" on a national scale...
...Privately Developed Interracial Housing, a report to the Fund for the Republic published by the University of California Press...
...Why didn't they consider the effects on white children, Lewis wondered...
...If Deerfield, as Lewis maintains, had no anti-Negro feeling to begin with, it was now suddenly beset with incidents one would be hard put to explain...
...Is There an Oculist in the House...
...There were no race riots, no hate literature, no drop in real estate prices...
...In other words, it saw a chance to do its civic duty and it did it...
...Because much of the force behind the wallop came from ministers, Lewis cited eleven Biblical sources to prove even theologians can't decide whether or not integration is Christian...
...There had been, in Park Board President Mitchell's words, much "general discussion" about parks and schools...
...O I960 Ogden Naih R«prlnted from Think Magazine...
...This, he contended, was unfair, un-American, and might hurt property values...
...There has been simply no anti-Negro feeling in this area...
...What's more, it was clear to him that the quota system amounted to a "restrictive covenant" or "racial quota system" which was illegal and discriminatory...
...Of course, Lewis pointed out, it is much easier to resist integration in the South...
...After the meeting hundreds of Deerfielders swarmed into the American Legion hall across the street...
...Let's add $10 to the tax bill...
...Here Lewis spoke again, and this time a local attorney was overheard remarking that what Deerfield was trying to do was avoid its social responsibilities...
...It wanted only a good building site...
...While the village board went into caucus, a Harold C. Lewis made a speech...
...On December 6, with the community in a frenzy, Deerfield made it clear it wanted Negroes as much as it wanted flood or famine...
...At least one of these is in suburban Chicago...
...Had the words "Negro" or "integration" ever come up...
...In spite of Lewis' claim that integration was not an issue, about 200 residents, including Reverend Berggren, felt the need for a Deerfield Citizens for Human Rights group to support Floral Park and Pear Tree...
...George W. Grier, co-author of MARVIN R. WEISBORD, Philadelphia free lance writer and formerly teacher of journalism at Pennsylvania State University, has contributed to a number of American publications, including Coronet, Science Digest, and Parents...
...Weinrib proposed to build thirty-nine houses on the first site and twelve on the second, and the Deerfield Village Board of Trustees approved his plans...
...More than 3,500 residents voted against the housing developments, only 460 for...
...MCD has money in three New York cooperatives, while in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., local groups are getting ready for future projects...
...MCD had proposed a "quota" of Negroes, say ten or twelve out of fifty-one families...
...On November 17, Deerfield's park board met and learned, to its dismay, that previously apathetic local citizens had suddenly become obsessed with the need for parks...
...How many more battles there will be depends to a great extent on what happens in Deerfield...
...Milgram, a dark-haired, intense, fast-talking, boyish-looking man of forty-four, believes that houses, like furniture, cars, and TV sets, should be sold to anybody who can afford them...
...Dooley or Will Rogers, Because I could then homelily call people's attention to the fact that we didn't see eye to eye with the Italians so we had a war with them, after which, to put it succinkly, We and the Italians became as close as Goodson and Todman or Huntley and Brinkley, And we didn't see eye to eye with the Germans and we had to either fight or bootlick, So we fought, and now everything between us and the Germans is gemutlich, And the Japanese didn't see eye to eye with us, so they fought us the soonest, And today we and the Japanese are of companions the boonest...
...He said MCD's plan was "totalitarian," and he was sure there was a legal way to stop it...
...MCD and Progress have already taken the case before the U.S...
...Witness after witness could not remember...
...The Lewis letter came to light in an interesting way...
...One would think from this that Deerfield didn't like the idea of integration...
...surprisingly, 1,207 voted "no...
...This time the park board "struck while the iron was hot...
...In any case, the board set December 21 for a referendum and decided $550,000 worth of bonds would give Deerfield all the parks, swimming pools, and school sites it could use for some years to come...
...Nowhere in the minutes of either the school or park boards does one find these sites mentioned as worth acquiring...
...If MCD loses, every village that would rather not integrate just now will know how to handle interracial builders...
...As far as he could see, Deerfield always wanted and needed parks but had never been willing to pay for them...
...The wallop, he indicated, was an unrelieved pressure campaign to intimidate the village into accepting totalitarianism...
...On November 13, Deerfield's building commissioner Bowen began looking for—and finding—code violations in the sample houses at Floral Park...
...56 couldn't decide...
...MCD, for its part, is tying up as much of its capital as it can afford, and intends—with much more at stake than the village—to fight to the U.S...
...Two of the sites already had been condemned by a school board, two of them were Floral Park and Pear Tree, and as for the other two, perhaps the board really felt it needed them and perhaps, as MCD contends, they were thrown in to make the operation look good...
...MCD-backed houses, with the editorial support of local newspapers, are going up in Waterbury, Connecticut, and near Wilmington, Delaware, so far without incident...
...Eleanor Roosevelt, Saul Bellow, and Norman Thomas, and key Deerfield citizens, has set up the American Freedom of Residence Fund to help fight legal battles of this kind...
...Within a day or two all Deerfielders knew—and a good many feared—that integration, considered by most Northerners an exotic Southern disease, was about to strike them...
...A week later, the village board convened again, and, mainly at the insistence of a conscientious local minister, the Reverend Paul Berggren, met Morris Mil-gram and heard MCD people explain their plans...
...but Lewis, who turned out to be head of a new civic group, the North Shore Residents Association, said nonsense...
...One Deerfield resident commented, "Many of the people who live here haven't come so they can assume new civic responsibilities, but so they can escape old problems...
...Deerfield can be proud of the sane and sober manner in which its village and park district officials have acted during this turbulent period," wrote the judge...
...MCD did not "pick" Deerfield, however...
...I'm for parks," he concluded...
...This group, which included Republicans, Democrats, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and most of the village's ministers, started a campaign of its own...
...His feeling has roots one can understand...
...They named Park Board President Mitchell and his four board members, Village President Koss and his five board members, Chairman Lewis and other North Shore Residents, and Joseph G. Powell and others of the Deerfield Citizens Committee as members of a conspiracy to deprive the corporation and its clients of their civil rights...
...Now at the daily boasts of "My retaliation can lick your retaliation" I am with apprehension stricken, As one who watches two adolescent hot-rodders careening headlong toward each other, each determined to die rather than chicken...
...Lewis smugly reported the poll in a letter which he sent, curiously, to the Association of Citizens Councils, of Greenwood, Mississippi...
...Handling the suit for MCD were lawyers, headed by John Hunt, from Adlai Stevenson's Chicago law firm...
...On December 18 the park board offered to buy out Progress and MCD, and three days later 2,635 citizens voted them the money with which to do it...
...On the other hand, there are a number of instances in which property standards and valuations have gone up as a result of the building of a well-planned non-discriminatory development...
...You could hardly expect a segregationist editorial writer, blinded since birth by bigotry, to examine Grier's painstaking analysis, let alone understand it...
...Unfortunately, this form of blindness —in which the eyes become extraordinarily sensitive to skin color— affects Northern builders too...
...In advertisements, handbills, and door-to-door visits, it told residents not to panic, that property values wouldn't decline, that Negroes had a right to live in Deerfield, and so on...
...Two big village problems that have nagged Deerfield citizens the past few years are how to get more school land when the two school districts have both already borrowed to their debt limit, and how to get parks when most residents don't want to pay for them...
...Judge Perry could not see how this violated anybody's civil rights...
...An interracial developer's biggest headache is land...
...Two months later, hoping to cut costs by building more homes, Progress picked up another seven acres nearby and named the site "Pear Tree...
...Capital is provided by 1200 stockholders who have invested more than $700,000...
...He got into building because his father-in-law was a builder and wanted a partner...
...Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit...
...As for the many private meetings, the defendants could not recall much of what went on...
...On December 7, the day after the poll, the park board met secretly, and, confident of the wind's direction, voted to condemn six sites for parks...
...To protect what for the moment appears to be its property, Deerfield has leased the two sample houses to its village manager and park grounds custodian...
...Deerfield, one of many all-white suburbs that ring America's big cities, could hardly be called an ideal place to build interracial housing...
...He feels this so deeply that integrated housing is a burning issue with him...
...The Princeton group built forty houses which sold on an open basis at from $18,000 to $45,000, seventy-five per cent to whites...
...About November 11, a Deerfield minister named Jack Parker anxiously told his vestrymen something he had just learned...
...Housing expert George Grier says there are at least seventy-five interracial housing developments in the United States today, most of them built and sold for profit...
...The news sped, almost with the speed of sound, from the church to the village fathers...
...Bowen ordered Max Weinrib to correct the defects...
...Integration didn't really matter in the Court's reversal of Plessy vs...
...A reliable source had told him ten or twelve of Progress' homes would be sold to Negroes...
...He felt sure the Deerfield poll "would be typical of residents anywhere in the North if confronted with a similar situation...
...In August, 1959—about the time Progress was laying its sewer lines at Floral Park—Deerfield's voters were offered two referendums...
...Progress began putting in sewers and water at Floral Park and contracted for two $30,000-$35,000 sample homes...
...Alabama Journal, Montgomery December 7, 1959 "We have not found a single case anywhere in the nation in which the presence of an integrated development has brought wholesale panic selling among nearby residents, or where the development has caused observable depreciation of real estate values...
...Most of Deerfield's residents live in homes worth an average of $23,000...
...On the masthead of the Augusta Courier, which printed Lewis's letter to the white citizens councils in Mississippi, is a motto by which Deerfield may be measured: It reads, "Be Not Content With the Appearance of Things, But Look For the True Meaning...
...a minister received a note, "Nigger lover, why the hell don't you just move out of Deerfield...
...Weinrib had looked for a long time without success for a homesite as good as this one...
...And despite the Alabama Journal's gloomy portrait of him, as far as anybody knows Milgram has neither created a race problem—nor depressed a property value...
...Well, he didn't like MCD's methods...
...This drop in the "anti" vote from better than eight to one only seventeen days earlier must be credited in part to the work of Deerfield's Citizens for Human Rights, led by Adrien Ringuette...
...What the Deerfield situation will cost some of its people in moral anxiety and guilt no one can estimate...
...But what MCD tries to do is neither so radical nor unprofitable as it may sound to many ears...
...Some of his houses have won prizes for good design, and all of them turn over at a much lower rate than the national average...
...A cross was burned on the lawn of a Deerfield Citizen for Human Rights...
...Deerfield is rumored to have paid one lawyer alone $25,000 of tax money to defend its officials, while the private defendants must find their own money...
...The firm is receiving some unexpected help in its struggle...
...That is why MCD was especially pleased with the two sites its Illinois subsidiary, Progress Development Corporation, bought in Deer-field last year...
...Ferguson, said Lewis, but rather "the threat to representative government...
...They pointed out that no building code violations turned up in Floral Park until the day after Deerfield discovered Negroes...
...In one they gave the school board its money for a new junior high school...
...It's silly to think of anything else...
...Although we have made it clear that integration is not the issue, our opponents continue to insist that it is," he wrote in a long tract, "The Massive Wallop...
...Some builders consider interracial housing—which means making neighbors of whites and Negroes—another way of going into voluntary bankruptcy...
...Finally, MCD and Progress said that despite Lewis' claims of no anti-Negro feeling, they had read his writings and reached a contrary conclusion...
...today he, Otto, and the Reverend Anderson serve as MCD's steering committee...
...I felt sure," he later told radio commentator Ed Randall, "that none of us were opposed to integration that comes about in answer to demonstrated and definite needs...
...Progress quickly bought the tract, fifteen acres known as "Floral Park," in April, 1959...
...His background aside, Milgram believes that the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States intended that all citizens should enjoy equal protection from their government and from each other...
...He permits no discrimination because of race, color or creed...
...in the other they turned down the park board's request for land to be used for a swimming pool and "joint park-school use...
...There is an unwritten law in America that all new housing is for white people only," says Milgram, who is president of MCD...
...Otto, as conservative as Milgram is liberal, agreed, as a matter of conscience, that Negroes deserved the same kind of housing their white counterparts have...
...The segregationist Augusta, Georgia, Courier, published it on the front page...
...In a preliminary hearing before Federal District Judge J. Sam Perry, they charged that the scheme to condemn the land for parks was hatched only after Deerfield learned of the plan to sell to Negroes...
...He also knew people with money, and between his friends and Milgram's the two raised $150,000 to build Concord Park (139 homes in the $1216,000 class, forty-five per cent Negro), near Trevose, Pennsylvania, and Greenbelt Knoll (nineteen homes costing $2045,000, eleven white, eight Negro families), where Milgram lives in Philadelphia...
...For evidence, MCD and Progress tried to show that neither the park board nor the school boards had ever mentioned Floral Park or Pear Tree in their minutes as sites worth developing— although they talked about many other sites...
...Whatever its pretenses, said the defendants, MCD is really out "to impose racial restrictions upon the occupancy of real estate throughout the country...
...he said he thought an interracial subdivision, soundly financed, could succeed...
...They were forcing integration on Deerfield, and, deceit in their hearts, had tried to keep the plan secret...
...But the newspaper interpreted for itself Deerfield's claim to lack of prejudice, for on the same page the lead story began, "Deerfield, Illinois, has voted overwhelmingly to remain segregated...
...then he shut down the job the same day, making correction impossible...
...Morris Milgram began building interracial housing in 1952...
...But it may also be that, despite the hysteria and anxiety, those who voted twice earlier that year against buying unimproved land at $4,000 an acre failed to see the logic of taking a site with sewers, water lines, and two $30,000 houses on it for $10,000 an acre—especially when the land had had "For Sale" signs on it for two years without anybody trying to build an "overall land program" around it...
...His latest is a proposal to build a similar community in Deer-field, a suburb of Chicago...
...and I don't think there's a soul in Deerfield that feels any different...
...This, it was argued, amounted to conspiracy...
...Judge Perry, after preliminary hearings that fill about 2,000 pages, did not even try the suit...
...The village is located about twenty miles north of Chicago but not quite far enough east to be part of the exclusive North Shore...
...Any support you can give us will be most helpful," he concluded...
...MCD is a stock company which lends money to builders, invests in co-op housing, builds houses, or sets up subsidiaries to build them, when and where it finds suitable land...
...Why, then, did Lewis oppose MCD's developments...
...District Court...
...Powell of the Deerfield Citizens Committee, a long-standing civic advisory group which had done little advising until now, told the park board his members had decided Deerfield could not live another day without an "overall land program" which the DCC would gladly prepare...
...In the early 1950's Milgram met an influential Quaker builder named George Otto...
...He was writing anyway to thank the councils for sending him segregationist literature in which "the absence of prejudice or emotionalism lends great credence to your arguments...
...And just to the left of the motto is a flag of the Confederate States of America...
...Neither referendum, it should be noted, grew out of a crying need for Floral Park or Pear Tree...
...The next night Floral Park and Pear Tree were top items on the agenda of the village board meeting, and one woman said a petition to ask condemnation for parks would soon make the rounds...
...Proof...
...Lewis, by trade a man who merges corporations, became upset at this and turned pamphleteer...
...Max Weinrib, a Chicago-area builder hired to run Progress, saw a "For Sale" sign in a likely looking field while driving through Deerfield one day...
...Both MCD and Deerfield have tied up large sums of money in the litigation, and in the end it may turn into a battle of bankrolls...
...by OGDEN NASH How often I would that I were one of those homely philosophical old codgers Like, say, Mr...
...Bringing Negro buyers and residents into the community depresses property values of existing homeowners and causes genuine sorrow...
...In 1958 Milgram organized MCD to do on a national scale what had worked out so well locally...
...They also tried to show that the defendants, many of whom did not even know one another before November 14, had met many times since to discuss Deerfield's problems...
...Deerfield, on the other hand, tried to show it had always needed more park land, that the sites had been talked about time and again as good ones, that building code violations did exist on the job, that MCD's stock had been misrepresented in its prospectus, that Morris Milgram had a pacifist record, and so on...
...A Mr...
...The two projects produced no race incidents, but they did make money...
...Born into a family of garment workers on New York's lower east side, he was weaned on Socialist tracts, and spent some years with the pro-labor (and anti-Communist) Workers Defense League...
...The Court, he argued, had muscled in on legislation, where it didn't belong, and was now deciding cases not in light of the Constitution but, instead, on whim at the advice of so-called experts (most of whom are on Senator Eastland's subversive lists) about the effects of segregation on Negro children...
...In an attempt to prove his contention that integration was not the issue, Lewis launched an attack on the United States Supreme Court, which, he implied, had been subverted by political hacks...
...And one night nineteen studs in a sample house at Floral Park were hacked through with an ax...
Vol. 25 • January 1961 • No. 1
