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The "Problem" of the Black Middle Class: Morris Milgram's Concord Park and Residential Integration in Philadelphia's Postwar Suburbs
| September 15, 2000, would have been a bittersweet day for Morris Milgram had he lived to see it. It was on that day that Warren and Betsy Swartzbeck—the last original white residents of Milgram's pioneering Concord Park development in Trevose, Pennsylvania—moved out of the home into which they had first moved forty-six years earlier. Morris Milgram's Concord Park was one of the first of its kind in the United States—a suburban development dedicated to achieving racial integration. During its early years, Concord Park proved wrong the many skeptics—including most of the era's real estate industry—who claimed that whites and blacks could not live together without strife, rapid racial turnover, or a precipitous decline in property values. For many of its early residents—Warren and Betsy Swartzbeck included—Concord Park was not simply a nice place to live, but a grand experiment. Its interracial character was made all the more significant because it stood just eight miles from the most famous of America's postwar suburban developments, Levittown. Indeed, as Milgram later acknowledged, Levittown was Concord Park's "major ... competitor."1 In terms of size and design, the houses of Concord Park and Levittown were virtually identical; yet, despite quite tangible similarities, Levittown remained an all-white community. In 1957, when a stone-throwing mob threatened Levittown's first black family (Bill and Daisy Myers and their children), the marked social variance between the two communities was made acutely manifest, as Concord Park's residents sent a biracial contingent to Levittown to guard the Myers's home.2 |
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However, Concord Park's existence as "the beloved community," a living witness to injustice in an all-white Levittown, was rather short-lived. Morris Milgram found it increasingly difficult to maintain the development's interracial character. When the original residents began to move out, many more blacks than whites were eager to buy. Into the 1960s, Concord Park remained one of the very few places where black families could find new housing in the Philadelphia suburbs; conversely, white buyers could choose from a plethora of new developments. As Warren Swartzbeck recalled, Milgram "kept a map of all the houses on his wall.... [He] used pins, red and blue, to represent whites and blacks.... Wherever ... there might be a liberal who might have a friend who might be interested in integrated housing," Milgram would try to search him or her out. Yet by 1968, when Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, the law of supply and demand had prevailed: Concord Park was majority black. Today, 95 percent of its residents are African American.3 |
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Although Concord Park demonstrates that racial integration did occur as a part of the process of postwar suburbanization in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, the fact remains that African Americans were largely shut out of the region's suburban boom—in integrated settings and otherwise. As builders like William Levitt rapidly made the American dream of homeownership on the suburban periphery of the nation's major urban centers a reality for many white Americans, African Americans often remained in the decaying core. The topic of racial discrimination and housing is one that historians have examined in some depth. Starting with Kenneth Jackson's landmark study Crabgrass Frontiers, scholars have ably demonstrated the degree to which federal housing policy and private real estate practices combined to critically limit the availability of housing to African Americans during the postwar boom years.4 |
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