Abstract
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a fair housing movement made up of white-collar professionals and housewives rapidly emerged in the Route 128 suburbs outside of Boston. The Boston network, which eventually included thirty-five hundred members and thirty-seven chapters, became the largest and most active example of a national phenomenon. Tracing the evolution of the fair housing movement complicates standard narratives of suburban politics, modern liberalism, and the civil rights movement. The movement’s combination of localized and legal tactics played a crucial role in creating the grassroots support and legal means to fight racial discrimination and came to shape state and federal housing policy. Yet its suburban-based and individualist political outlook imposed serious constraints on the efforts to eradicate the root causes of residential inequality and solidified larger patterns of spatial inequality in Massachusetts and the nation.
“More than 2000 Massachusetts residents have joined a new grassroots campaign to eradicate racial discrimination—not in distant Alabama but in their own backyard,” a 1961 Boston Herald article announced. 1 The article referred to a cluster of fair housing committees that “sprang up spontaneously” in the late 1950s and early 1960s within the affluent suburbs along the Route 128 highway that encircled Boston. The creators of this campaign had decided, according to the Herald, “that they wanted to do more than just ‘feel guilty’ about the discrimination suffered by Negroes” in the so-called “cradle of liberty” and birthplace of the American Revolution. These suburbanites soon created the umbrella organization, the Massachusetts Federation of Fair Housing Committees, which by the mid-1960s came to include thirty-five hundred members in thirty-seven communities. 2
The Boston groups were part of the largest and most organized network of a national suburban-based movement that stretched from New York, New Jersey, and Chicago to Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Interpreting residential segregation as a largely local problem, the fair housing groups in Boston suburbs such as Belmont, Brookline, Concord, Newton, Lexington, and Wellesley sought to raise tolerance for residential integration and help individual African American families find homes in their communities. The white middle-class suburbanites also worked within the formal channels of government to pass laws that upheld their tactics and vision of residential integration. In doing so, the movement helped to codify into law a definition of fair housing that privileged the concepts of individualism and equal opportunity. These efforts reveal not only the power that white suburbanites could wield in the political system, but also the underappreciated and important linkages between grassroots suburban activism and the creation of state laws aimed at combating racial discrimination and residential segregation. The campaigns these groups led ensured that by 1963 Massachusetts had the most extensive fair rights laws in the nation. In fact, by the time Congress passed the 1968 Fair Housing Act, Massachusetts was one of more than twenty-two states in the North and West with long-standing and wider-reaching laws restricting residential discrimination. 3
The evolution of the fair housing movement in Massachusetts during the 1960s complicates standard narratives of suburban politics, modern liberalism, and the civil rights movement. Grassroots-based accounts of suburban activism such as Lisa McGirr’s pathbreaking study of Orange County have offered key insight into the mobilization of the New Right. 4 Yet the overwhelming attention to the conservative, reactionary, and Republican dimensions of suburban political culture has obscured the alternative political constituencies that exist in suburban settings, especially liberalism. The fair housing movement shows that a similar set of factors, such as New Deal liberalism and the cold war military-industrial complex that contributed to the rise of conservative politics, established the conditions for liberal political activity to flourish in the Massachusetts suburbs as well. The towns and residents of Route 128, therefore, are equally important to understanding national political realignment and postwar suburban politics as New Right strongholds in the South and West. While local context undoubtedly matters, the fair housing movement reveals that certain aspects of a suburban political sensibility, including commitment to middle-class entitlements, meritocratic individualism, and normative notions of family and gender, transcended partisan and regional divisions. The movement also underscores the central role of affluent white suburbanites in the postindustrial periphery in transforming the demographics and policies of modern liberalism and of the Democratic Party. 5
During the two decades after World War II, the Route 128 highway around Boston evolved into a major node in the nation’s growing high-tech economy and drew a new generation of executives, engineers, and professors with ties to the area’s postindustrial corporations and renowned academic institutions to move to the affluent suburban communities along its border. Many of the newcomers defied the conventional image of the apolitical or conservative suburbanite. These upper-middle-class and overwhelmingly white residents capitalized on identities as home owners to work in support of fair housing and other causes of social equality and in the process solidified the reputation of their communities as some of the most liberal in the nation. Indeed, in a 1970 article titled “Liberalism in the Suburbs,” Newsweek characterized Newton and its neighbors as the “seedbed for liberal causes” such as antiwar activism, environmentalism, feminism, and especially fair housing and civil rights. 6
Historians of civil rights and suburban politics have traditionally focused on the fights of white suburban residents against rather than for fair housing legislation and integrated communities. The campaign for the passage of Proposition 14 in California in 1964 and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1966 march in Chicago have become well-worn examples of white backlash to residential integration outside of the South. 7 As civil rights scholars have successfully expanded the temporal and geographic parameters of the movement, the efforts to combat housing discrimination have come to serve as a key example of the types of interracial activism that emerged in the North in the late 1940s and 1950s. The works of scholars such as Thomas Sugrue and Martha Biondi have brought new attention to the importance of the story of fair housing activism, but they have not fully fleshed out how study of the movement actually helps challenge many of the dominant scholarly assumptions about suburban politics and postwar liberalism. 8
A more in-depth analysis of the development of fair housing activism in Massachusetts, where the movement was the largest and most active, illustrates the potential of and limits on suburban residents and their influence on laws and liberal ideology in the postwar era. The fair housing movement’s agenda remained firmly rooted in a suburban-centered political sensibility of individual meritocracy and consumer rights that reflected a distinctly white middle-class understanding of equal opportunity and freedom of choice. 9 The movement transformed the notion that African Americans should have “opportunity” to live anywhere into a core principle of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Yet its approach succeeded in helping only a handful of primarily middle-class African American families move into affluent communities and prevented the development of a permanent metropolitan and interracial coalition to fight for residential equity. 10 The activists’ tactics did very little to alter the problems of racial segregation and exclusionary zoning in the suburbs or change the situation of the 90 percent of metropolitan Boston’s African American population that remained confined to slum-like conditions in the city. The suburban-centered movement, therefore, shaped ideas and laws about racial equality and patterns of spatial inequality, which together would have a long lasting influence on local, state, and national policy and politics.
The Emergence of Fair Housing Activism
The Massachusetts fair housing movement arose from the interplay of national and local circumstances. Its dual goals of promoting “interracial understanding” among neighbors and assisting individual African Americans to purchase homes in their communities reflected this fusion of the national open housing campaign with the localized concerns about metropolitan Boston’s segregated housing market. 11 In the 1950s the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH) along with religious organizations like the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) popularized the issue of residential discrimination. 12 Combining the moral language of religion with social scientific evidence, the cause drew inspiration from Gunnar Myrdal’s notion of racial liberalism and the idea that racism emerged more from personal prejudice and moral deficiencies than state-sponsored policy. Myrdal’s emphasis on eradicating racism not through restructuring the market economy and the political system but, rather, through changing the “hearts and minds” of individuals served as a template for the “open housing” movement’s goals and activities, such as its highly publicized campaign to integrate Levittown, Pennsylvania. 13
By the late 1950s, the NCDH and AFSC had made a more concerted effort to spread the open housing cause at the local level. Members and observers would later emphasize the “indigenous,” “spontaneous,” and “grassroots” origins of the suburban housing groups. While these adjectives are not misnomers, religious institutions undoubtedly sped their pace of development. 14 The New England Regional Office of the AFSC created a Community Relations Committee in 1958 to work on race relations and housing discrimination in the suburbs, which proved particularly important in establishing the foundations on which the fair housing movement in metropolitan Boston flourished. To “spark” interest, the AFSC hired a paid staff to work with members living in the suburbs as well as with religious leaders from other denominations in the communities on Boston’s periphery. 15
The existing religious infrastructure in the suburbs proved an essential springboard for the fair housing movement in the communities around Boston. One reporter described “religious leaders of all three major faiths” as the “driving force behind” the housing movement by encouraging congregants to get involved. 16 The population explosion in the postwar decades spurred construction of new churches and renovation of older ones in the cities and towns throughout metropolitan Boston. Unlike in Sunbelt metropolises like Los Angeles, where postwar migration led to a boom of evangelical Protestants, especially southern Baptists, around Boston the church remained primarily in the mainline tradition, which emphasized commitment to democracy, rational thought, and social justice. 17 The upper-middle-class suburbs around Route 128 witnessed a rise in the numbers of Jewish and Catholic residents and institutions, which also promoted messages of tolerance and equality. 18 These communities demonstrated considerable interfaith collaboration in establishing the connections from which fair housing activism flourished. 19 In Newton and Brookline, members of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish congregations came together for weekly informal discussions that often addressed issues of discrimination and racial inequality. 20
In the late 1950s, several Route 128 churches and synagogues began sponsoring events where community members heard firsthand accounts from African American families about the difficulties they confronted in the suburban housing market. The events proved critical to the creation of the fair housing movement. 21 The individual stories recounted by the African Americans reflected the more systemic problems of housing segregation in the area. The combination of suburban out-migration and discriminatory Boston Housing Authority practices left most African Americans across the economic spectrum with the only option of living in deteriorating houses in the former streetcar suburbs of Roxbury and Dorchester. Although a half century earlier these contiguous neighborhoods had housed much of the area’s middle-class white population, by the 1950s they had fallen into disrepair. 22 The 1960 census reported that almost one-half of all African American residences in Boston were “dilapidated” or “deteriorating” housing, compared to 18 percent of white residences. Many landlords took advantage of the fact that African Americans had few options by significantly overcharging for rent. 23 The stories of the hardship African American families faced trying to find decent housing shocked many of the white self-identified liberals and inspired them to form local fair housing committees to take action. 24 By 1960 committees had organized in eighteen communities, and in 1961 these local groups formed the Greater Boston Federation of Fair Housing Committees to coordinate activities and create a united front (see Figure 1). 25
Map of fair housing committees in greater Boston, ca. 1964.
This fair housing movement met its greatest success in the affluent suburbs surrounding Route 128 due in large part to the broader demographic changes in these communities. 26 In the decades after World War II, historically notable suburbs like Concord and Lexington attracted a new generation of postindustrial professionals with the means to purchase homes in physically attractive, socially exclusive towns that offered easy access to Boston, Cambridge, and corporate headquarters or business outposts along the roadway. 27 “Scientists and engineers are the main thing here,” a real estate developer explained in the early 1960s about these suburbs. “These are quiet leafy places with good public schools, and scientists with young children like to live in them. They favor them because of their history—Paul Revere and so on.” 28 In 1950, one in five employed Lexington residents worked in the service sector, yet one in three who moved to the suburb in the next six years listed their occupation as professional or technological worker. 29 The migration patterns enhanced the reputation of Lexington and neighboring communities as strongholds of liberalism, which in turn attracted more progressive-minded newcomers and proved crucial to the development of the fair housing movement. Attorney Julian Soshnick stated that he had decided to settle in Lexington because he believed the “wall-to-wall Ph.D.’s, and the doctors and the lawyers,” made it “a very nice, sensitive, caring community.” Likewise, fellow Lexington resident and fair housing committee member Bonnie Jones later opined, “Lexington has a lot of university connections to Cambridge and Harvard and MIT and professional people who are perhaps a little more on the liberal side of things than maybe some of the other communities. And like-minded folks tend to move into the same communities.” 30
The early leaders of the fair housing movement included a large contingent of scientists, engineers, academics, lawyers, and business executives who shared a commitment to ending residential discrimination at the national and local levels. The Lexington committee’s board of directors, for instance, included Harry Petschek, an astrophysicist and then president of the AVCO Corporation, and David Reiner, an MIT-employed engineer. In addition, lawyers like Soshnick and Albert Sacks of Belmont, who would later become the dean of Harvard Law School, and other academics like social psychologist William Ryan of Brookline and sociologist Milton Rubin of Newton also served as leaders in their local committees. These suburbanites often aimed to apply their professional expertise to the cause, which helped shape the direction and emphasis of the movement’s activities.
College-educated women also served as central figures in the fair housing movement and played a major role in its popularity and growth in affluent Route 128 communities. For women like Astrid Haussler, Bonnie Jones, and Barbara Petschek of Lexington, Sadelle Sacks of Belmont, and Phyllis Ryan of Brookline, who moved to the suburbs in the 1950s and early 1960s, fair housing activism offered a means to reconcile their political views and domestic duties and to meet fellow community members who shared their liberal outlook and commitment to ending injustice. 31 “I and a lot of other people who became my friends, all had young children around the age of my children,” Norma McGavern-Norland of Lexington later explained. “We were all united by childcare and interest in what was going on in the world. I suppose we gravitated to the same organizations because we cared for the same things. And we were friends, so it was a very natural thing to do.” 32 These early members frequently used their suburban social contacts and networks to recruit coworkers, neighbors, fellow school parents, and church and synagogue members to join the movement through events such as coffee klatches, cocktail parties, and informal individual discussion.
From its very inception, the movement contained a split among members about the roots of and solution for residential segregation. Early leaders like Ephraim Weiss and Father Thomas McLeod of Lexington believed that having individual neighbors convincing one another that discrimination was “legally and morally wrong” offered the most effective means to overcome the problem. 33 But other activists, such as Bill Ryan and his wife Phyllis of Brookline, always recognized the structural dimensions of residential segregation and saw an individual approach as only the first step toward achieving a more metropolitan-based solution. “Segregation is largely a metropolitan problem and must be dealt with on a metropolitan basis,” the Ryans warned their fellow federation members in the fall of 1961. “We always keep in mind that our strategic target is the community and that we are aiming for SOCIAL change, not individual change.” 34 Despite such different perspectives, the movement’s leaders reached an early consensus: they would be able to attract support from their more moderate neighbors by couching their cause less in the language of metropolitan inequality and urban renewal policy and more in one of individual tolerance. 35
The literature of the local groups, therefore, often advocated for the abstract general concepts of “equal opportunity” and “individual rights” rather than addressing the more specific structural underpinnings of racial segregation and economic inequity. The movement’s tactics rested on the principle that residential discrimination was “essentially a community problem.” The grassroots-based focus on working at the neighborhood level demonstrated the suburban activists’ shared recognition that racial discrimination was not just a southern issue, but operated in affluent northern communities as well. 36 Yet the focus on “housing practices” also optimistically implied that, unlike the more systemic issue of southern white supremacy, the individualist problem of residential segregation represented the last and only barrier to racial integration and equality. The movement’s main emphasis on home ownership encouraged adherents to work within, rather than to remake, the structures of capitalism, especially the housing market.
The local groups applied the framework established by the NCDH, using educational outreach to promote tolerance and understanding within their communities and to change the “hearts and minds” of their skeptical neighbors. Recognizing the role that property values played in shaping the political subjectivity of suburban residents, the groups focused most urgently on convincing their fellow residents that a black neighbor did not depress real estate values. The Brookline Fair Housing Practice Committee (FHPC) published a series of articles in the local newspaper that incorporated information from a variety of academic studies to emphasize that panic selling, not racial integration, caused a decline in property values. 37 These groups also sponsored frequent talks by a variety of government officials, politicians, community activists, and academics, including the leading experts on intergroup relations who were affiliated with area institutions, such as Gordon Allport. 38 The Newton FHPC marshaled a local sociologist, a lawyer, and a group of housewives to conduct a study that proved black families moving into all-white neighborhoods in Newton did not affect property values, which they later published as a scholarly article in the Journal of Intergroup Relations. 39 Several of the groups even tried to suggest that integrated housing would enhance property values in an effort to fuse the priorities of middle-class home owners with the basic theoretical findings of intergroup relations scholarship. 40
The local committees’ efforts to assist African American families who wanted to move into their communities further exemplified the suburban-centered and individualist dimensions of the movement. Many suburban activists used their personal contacts to gain promises from home owners and real estate brokers that they would sell homes on a nondiscriminatory basis and even convinced some residents to list their houses directly with their local committee. 41 In addition, the members worked closely with potential African American buyers or lessees, accompanying them to look at available housing options and serving as advocates, negotiators, and mediators in the purchase or rental process. Some committee members devoted long hours and full weekends to helping just one African American family find housing in their community.
The placement activities of the suburban committees produced a disturbing cartography of segregation in metropolitan Boston in the postwar period, revealing just how embedded residential discrimination had become in the physical and social geography of the region. Many of the prospective buyers who enlisted the help of the suburban groups reported protracted struggles finding housing in suburban Boston, having experienced overt racial prejudice from landlords, realtors, sellers, and residents. For instance, Samuel Turner, a native of Newton and teacher in its public schools, who had earned the title “Outstanding Young Man in Newton,” found a home in that community only through the assistance of the local committee after a twelve-month search. 42 In Belmont, the committee went into action after an African American Harvard dean’s attempt to move into a particularly exclusive neighborhood in the upper-middle-class town created a surge of protest. Committee members worked to change the attitudes of the dean’s new neighbors and to reassure them that the presence of the black Ivy Leaguer would not tarnish the prestige of the area or the values of its houses. They also stressed that the dean only wanted to raise his family in a neighborhood “suited to his intellectual and financial position.” 43
These forms of assistance illuminate the explicitly classed and suburban-centered dimensions of grassroots fair housing activism. The federation compiled long lists of single-family houses in the Boston area available to nonwhite buyers, but the cost of homes on the lists usually fell between $16,000 and $20,000, which was out of the price range of most prospective minority buyers or renters. 44 A report conducted by an organization closely affiliated with the movement discovered that “out-of-state families are more successful than any other group” in finding housing and that most “homeseekers in this group are professionals in the scientific industries.” 45 It was no coincidence that the beneficiaries of the committee’s strategies were almost exclusively minority white-collar professionals and academics who had recently relocated to the Boston area for professional purposes. African Americans who wanted to move into suburban communities and could afford to do so actually represented a very small percentage of the city’s black population. Between 1961 and 1963, members of the federation and its offshoot Fair Housing, Inc. secured housing placements for slightly more than one hundred people spread out among more than a dozen suburbs, revealing the breadth but lack of depth of its efforts. 46
This mismatch between potential buyers and the federation’s available homes exposed the deeper and more structural problem of exclusionary zoning in suburban Boston. In the postwar period, several municipalities along Route 128, such as Lexington, had established forty-thousand-square-foot (i.e., one acre) minimums for more than half the land in their respective towns as a means to prevent overdevelopment and maintain their socioeconomic exclusivity. A few other towns, such as Concord and Lincoln, went even further and implemented two-acre zoning, a particularly notable feat given the fact that they abutted Route 128, which served as a major commuter roadway and whose industrial parks were a symbol of the high-tech economy. 47 The ordinances made the prices of plots available in these communities extremely high. Several towns, such as Wellesley and Weston, increased their own exclusivity and the housing shortage of the state by inscribing into their local zoning codes strict limitations on the types of dwellings deemed acceptable, thereby effectively excluding multiunit and mass-produced homes. 48 The combination of zoning and building policies did not just restrict mass-produced housing and apartment complexes but also excluded the vast majority of lower-income and even middle-income families who could not afford to purchase a well-built single-family home on a one- or two-acre lot. Thus, many of the communities most “open” to residential integration and with the most active fair housing committees, such as Lexington and Wellesley, also had some of the metropolitan area’s most socioeconomically restrictive zoning policies.
The embrace of the therapeutic and individualist language of racial liberalism complemented rather contradicted the class exclusivity embedded in the fair housing committees’ suburban-centered ideology. The mission statements of the various committees illustrate the narrow parameters by which many of the members defined the seemingly broad idea of “fair housing.” The groups frequently adopted the terms and ideas of “equal opportunity” and “freedom of choice,” which constituted common planks of the racial liberal ideology interpreting discrimination in terms of individual prejudice not structural inequality. 49 This discourse of choice and opportunity also reflected a distinctly white middle-class understanding of racial integration that promoted individual meritocracy and consumer rights and normalized class exclusion as a natural feature of the suburban landscape. 50 Robert Feldmesser of the Concord FHPC observed the effort to encourage residents to put their homes for sale on an “open market”: “Many people thought it definitely meant selling to a Negro family which would also be a form of discrimination,” he explained, but in, fact it should have meant “you are willing to allow who can afford to buy, an equal chance at getting the house.” Similarly, the Belmont FHPC, in a flyer titled “An Invitation to Act for Democracy,” explicitly declared that it was not “seeking to induce a member of any race, religion, or ethnic group to move to Belmont” but to provide “the same freedom of choice” to minorities as have “members of majority groups with essentially the same needs, resources and capacities.” 51 The fair housing committees also frequently characterized the people they aimed to help with labels or designations such as “good character” and “financially qualified.” 52
The Belmont FHPC’s flyer outlined a cognitive map of the metropolitan region by affirming its goals as “maintaining and improving the high standards of attractive well-kept homes, fine schools and local enterprises” in Belmont and not creating new “slums and ghettos.” 53 While the group clearly aimed this point at skeptics fearful about their declining property values, their choice of imagery exposed the ways in which this strategy of promoting racial integration rested on an explicit language and ideology of class exclusivity. Code words such as “slums” and “ghettos” highlighted the movement’s appropriation of social scientific ideas about the pathological consequences of African American urban life to bolster a class-based vision. 54 Jeanne Theoharis has suggested that using the discourse of cultural pathology allowed “northern liberals” to “claim attention to race,” while maintaining that the structures of schooling, housing, and jobs in these cities were open and that success was determined “through hard work and abiding by middle-class social norms.” 55 This use of symbolically charged language shows the ways in which the fair housing movement codified an ideology of racial equality directly predicated on notions of individual meritocracy and class stratification.
“Good Neighbors for Fair Housing”
The movement’s “Good Neighbors for Fair Housing” campaigns, which combined the two goals of changing the hearts and minds of local residents and assisting individual African American families, exemplify the ways in which the movement embodied and promoted notions of suburban racial liberalism and middle-class-based individualism. The Brookline committee first launched its door-to-door effort in the winter of 1962, asking residents to sign a pledge, which it defined as “a simple concrete way . . . to show broad community support for the principle of Fair Housing.” 56 The idea quickly spread to the nearby towns of Arlington, Belmont, Lexington, and Wellesley. The three-point contract began with a sweeping articulation of the racial liberal principle “that all people regardless of race, religion, or national origin should have equal opportunity for housing.” 57 Moving to the more concrete, the pledge made the signer promise to rent or sell the property he or she owned or managed without regard to race, religion, or national origin and to encourage neighbors to join in to achieve an integrated neighborhood. 58
Although promoting a seemingly simple premise, the campaign’s “Good Neighbor for Fair Housing” poster best illustrates the initiative’s complex web of meanings (see Figure 2). Drawn by a member of the Brookline committee in stick-figure form, the poster features two identical single-family homes. In the foreground of the picture two stick-figure men talk while leaning on push mowers, behind them two women speak to each other from within the insides of the respective houses, and off in the distance (or conceivably the backyard) two small girls hold hands. The pair of smiling families exactly mirror each other except that the artist colored in the faces of the family on the right to mark their race. 59 The message of a Lexington Civil Rights Committee’s flyer to “make possible for every one of Lexington’s neighbors to view a prospective neighbor not as a Negro, but as a doctor, engineer, or businessman” could have easily provided the Brookline poster’s accompanying text. 60 The image and text show how the fair housing groups adhered to a color-blind ideology of equality explicitly grounded in notions of class difference. The poster also illuminates the ways in which both the campaign and suburban-centered movement as a whole rested on a postwar ideology of the nuclear family and traditional gender roles. Indeed, the mission statement of many of the groups articulated the common goal of making their communities open to “families” of all races, nationalities, and religions, and the groups usually referred to the prospective home owners they aimed to help in terms of familial units. This designation both built on and reified the family-centered ideology and traditional gender norms of postwar suburbia. 61 Yet the visual and rhetorical emphasis on domesticity also implicitly contained the racialized and class-coded message to reassure their less committed neighbors that the fair housing committees did not aim to recruit dangerous and deviant single black “bachelors” or welfare mothers with large numbers of children into the suburbs, but, rather, safe and stable middle-class families. 62 Thus, the movement and its iconography implicitly suggested that the coded concept of a “good neighbor” ran in two directions.
Brookline Fair Housing Practices Committee, “Good Neighbor for Fair Housing” poster, ca. 1962.
The campaign gathered four thousand signatures across five communities in the span of two months in 1962 and in doing so helped to promote the reputations of these communities as bastions of liberalism. In Brookline, committee members convinced fourth-fifths of residents canvassed to sign the petition, thus creating what one member boastfully characterized as “a better than 80% batting average.” 63 The twelve-week drive of the Lexington Civil Rights Committee (LCRC) had the most favorable response, garnering the signatures of 1,540 residents. 64 Never losing an opportunity to make an allusion to the town’s historic importance, a local reporter glowingly observed that this enthusiastic response proved that the “birthplace of American liberty” continued to be “its most ardent champion.” 65 Once the drive concluded, LCRC members Irene Blum and Dee Zobel conducted an analysis of the basic demographics of the signers broken down by location, gender, and profession. 66 Using information from the town directory, Blum and Zobel reported that 802 men and 738 women had signed the document, representing a spectrum of white-collar vocations. While “housewives” represented more than one-third of the total signers, engineers constituted “the most predominant profession by far,” with teachers, doctors, physicists, chemists, business executives, and lab workers following behind. 67 The favorable response from members of the scientific industry not only challenges McGirr’s interpretation of the conservative worldview of employees in defense-related companies in Orange County but also directly corroborates the key role of the rise of Route 128 industry in bolstering the causes of fair housing and suburban liberalism. 68
The “Good Neighbor” initiative received strong endorsements from the area press. The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald each featured editorials on the campaign and cited the canvassing as an important effort “to implement basic American principles” and attack the “citadel of prejudice in the North.” 69 The Globe observed that the drive proved the “enormous reservoir of good will” in Boston suburbs and showed the ways in which individuals had the power to affect and change public opinion. 70 It also gained recognition and support from both local and national politicians. U.S. Representative Lawrence Curtis patriotically proclaimed the Brookline group as acting “in our country’s best interest in seeking to eliminate discrimination in housing,” and a few months later Representative Benjamin Smith read the text of the Lexington committee’s pledge on the House floor. 71
The Good Neighbor campaign drive reveals the very literal grassroots components of the movement, while its wide-ranging support shows that presumed indifference to issues of race and civil rights among suburbanites was by no means a given. The campaign also embodied the basic tenets of postwar racial liberalism in both its implicit focus on creating equality of opportunity and its confidence that changing the “hearts and minds” of individuals offered the surest route to ending racial discrimination. The effort proved extremely popular largely because it provided a way for residents in these largely affluent communities, even those not formally affiliated with their local fair housing group, a relatively easy way to demonstrate their commitment to the particular cause of ending housing discrimination and to liberalism more generally. The limits of this commitment and approach became patently clear, nevertheless, with two stories out of Lexington just a few months after the campaign’s conclusion. A distressed resident wrote to the LCRC to complain about how her efforts to sell her house to a black family failed after her neighbor, who had signed the pledge, blocked the transaction. 72 Similarly, in the fall of 1963 a prominent Lexington real estate agent, Mark Moore, prevented an African American Foreign Service officer named Jim Parker from renting a cottage in the affluent suburb for himself and his family. Moore’s action led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and members of the local fair housing group to stage a protest on the Lexington Battle Green, a picture of which ended up on the front page of the Boston Globe and created intense controversy. 73 These instances confirmed to the fair housing leaders that they needed to work not just on their neighborhood streets but also within the halls of state legislature to truly “open up” the suburbs.
Fair Housing Law
The Massachusetts fair housing movement’s advancement of legal and political solutions provides three important insights into the tactics of this brand of activism and of suburban liberalism more broadly. First, it highlights members’ faith in the formal mechanisms of the law to eradicate the societal problems of racial segregation and their effectiveness at working within the formal channels of government. Second, it reveals the success and limits of the coalitions that suburbanites forged with local civil rights groups and the ways the fair housing movement both contributed to and constrained the achievements of the black freedom struggle in Boston. Third, it shows the ways in which the fair housing movement successfully harnessed and applied the professional expertise of its members, especially attorneys, to create laws and policies that upheld a positive vision of equality centered around “equal opportunity” and “individual rights” rather than attacking the structural underpinnings of racial segregation. This effort ultimately reproduced several of the same strengths and weaknesses of the Good Neighbor campaign and the fair housing movement’s other projects.
In the decades after World War II, the local chapters of black-led groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League had made the issue of housing central to their efforts to create legal remedies to correct spatial and racial segregation. This decision stood in line with the national civil rights movement’s legal strategy, the architects of which had recognized the virtual impossibility of influencing the adoption of fair housing laws at the federal level and turned instead to the states where they found much greater success. 74 The Boston chapters of the League and the NAACP sponsored legislation to strengthen antidiscrimination laws and to enhance enforcement powers of the state’s antidiscrimination agency, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD). By the late 1950s the commonwealth had the largest number of antidiscrimination statutes in the nation, but this abundance did not immediately translate into effectiveness, especially because the state had little power to intervene in the private housing market.
The fight to give the state more aggressive oversight of private housing achieved new success as the fair housing committees began to work in coalition with members of Boston’s civil rights community beginning around 1959. 75 This campaign revealed the effectiveness of the fair housing movement in harnessing its existing organizational infrastructure and taking advantage of its status as an organization of educated upper-middle-class white suburbanites to gain the support of members of the legislature and influence legal change. Members of the fair housing committees wrote articles for local newspapers, placed flyers on cars in various suburban town centers, and distributed colorfully illustrated pamphlets throughout their communities alerting them about the need for the enhancement and better enforcement of state housing laws. 76 In addition, the local committees launched letter-writing campaigns and staged organized visits to the State House to pressure representatives. Individual members repeatedly testified at committee hearings often using personal anecdotes from their grassroots experience assisting prospective African American buyers find homes in their communities. 77 The local fair housing committees often encouraged prospective buyers or renters to file charges with MCAD, thus supplying many of the cases that came before the commission after 1958.
The actions helped to gradually expand both the percentage of the targeted housing and enforcement and awareness of the new statutes. William Ryan observed the committees had contributed to the “climate of opinion” among Massachusetts politicians such that they were “required to damn discrimination with as much fervor as a Minnesota politician is required to damn margarine” and that “big-city Democrats” and “Yankee Republicans” sought to “outdo each other in speaking out for Fair Housing.” 78 While these efforts led to revised statutes significantly expanding MCAD’s jurisdiction, the new laws extended only to developments with ten or more contiguous units and apartment buildings with three or more units and still did not cover conventionally financed or single-family homes. The improved laws, therefore, covered only about 15 percent of housing in the state and in 180 of Massachusetts’s 351 cities and virtually none of the housing stock in places such as Brookline, Newton, and Lexington with the most active fair housing groups. 79 The federation members set about to use their legal expertise and lobbying acumen to correct this substantial loophole.
The federation’s role in strengthening the law brought the organization into closer physical and ideological collaboration and conflict with other civil rights organizations, especially CORE, which was also working to eliminate residential discrimination in metropolitan Boston. A group largely of white Cambridge residents perplexed by reports of discrimination against black home seekers in their community had revived the area’s dormant chapter of CORE in 1958. The founding members of Boston CORE shared with their suburban counterparts both a commitment to the broad ideals of equality and a vision of an integrated society. 80 CORE began to develop strategies that would challenge individual discriminatory practices while at same time drawing attention to the larger cause. The Boston chapter quickly became a leader in combating housing discrimination both in the Boston area and among CORE affiliates nationally. 81 Boston’s CORE members pioneered a formula of testing realtors by sending in white teams to apply for the same unit denied to an African American family and coupled the tactic with forms of picketing of developments found to discriminate.
In 1962, the decision in Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination v. Colangelo showcased both CORE’s strategy and its successful coalition with the suburban fair housing groups. 82 In 1960, Maurice Fowler, a single African American member of the Air Force, sought a “garden-type” apartment at the Glenmeadow development in Waltham, but real estate developer A. J. Colangelo turned him down on the basis of his “bachelor status.” 83 Fowler’s lawyer, Edward Barshak, a member of the Brookline Fair Housing Practices Committee, contacted CORE, which discovered that many white “bachelors” lived at Glenmeadow and the owner also offered apartments to two white CORE testers. Barshak, on behalf of Fowler, filed a complaint with the MCAD, and at the final hearing CORE presented an overwhelming amount testimony and evidence that convinced the commission not just to rule in Fowler’s favor, but to require that the real estate developer pay damages. Colangelo and the rental agent appealed all the way to the state Supreme Judicial Court to challenge MCAD’s order and the constitutionality of the 1959 law on the grounds that they had been denied due process, protection of private property, and the freedom of association.
The case illustrates the fair housing coalition’s effectiveness at creating change through legal means and its commitment to adopting individualist solutions to structural problems. 84 The arguments prepared by members of the movement in Colangelo transcended arcane legal technicalities and case law and instead offered a sweeping argument that drew on a wide range historical, political, and social science research to prove that housing served as the basis for all other forms of institutionalized racism. 85 This line of reasoning relied heavily on an extensive study conducted by Helen Kistin, a member of the Newton FHPC, illustrating the extent to which spatial segregation in metropolitan Boston had increased between 1950 and 1960. Despite this careful attention to the dynamics of structural racism, however, the lawyers still couched their respective and collective arguments in the racially liberal language of individual rights and moral wrongs stressing that housing discrimination had “ramifications beyond bricks and mortar” to “the hearts and minds of men of all races and nationalities, and to their modes of living together in one society.” 86 This argument proved persuasive, and on May 16, 1962, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the constitutionality of the statute prohibiting discrimination in private housing and declaring “neither property rights nor contract rights are absolute; for the government cannot exist if the citizen may at will use his property to the detriment of his fellows, or exercise his freedom of contract to work them harm.” 87 The decision established important local and national precedent.
For the suburban-centered activists committed to the cause of fair housing, the successful outcome of the Colangelo case validated their efforts and reinforced the ways in which grassroots activists could use the law to create meaningful change. 88 The court case also provided the legal justification for the Massachusetts legislature to expand the parameters of the existing fair housing law to cover all private property. In the spring of 1963, the state legislature passed a new act, drafted by Alfred Halper, a Newton resident and successful home builder, that outlawed discrimination on the basis of “race, creed, color or country of origin” in the sale or rental of all private housing, with the sole exception of a two-apartment house if the owner occupied one of the apartments as his or her home. 89 The new statute corrected the major weakness of the earlier laws increasing the amount of coverage from 15 percent to over 90 percent of all housing in Massachusetts. The revised law solidified the state’s claim to having the strongest antidiscrimination laws in the nation. The law also reaffirmed Massachusetts’s position at the vanguard of liberalism especially since it passed with little opposition while California residents voted overwhelmingly to overturn their state fair housing law the following year. It also solidified the reputations of the Boston chapters of CORE and the NAACP as effective leaders in the arena of housing and earned the groups national attention and praise. 90
The new fair housing law, however, not only bolstered Massachusetts’s progressive reputation but also perpetuated the suburban-centered movement’s racial liberal ideology. The law promoted individualist ideas of fairness and antidiscrimination rather than targeting many of the structural problems that had produced metropolitan Boston’s stark patterns of racial and class segregation and inequality. Thus, like the placement activities and the Good Neighbor campaign, the newly enacted Massachusetts statutes underscored the dual-sided notion of individualism embedded in the fair housing movement’s strategy and ideology. Despite their expansive language of freedom of choice and equal opportunity, these laws in practice really addressed only the concerns of a small cohort of middle-class citizens. For instance, Jim Parker, the diplomat whose case had stirred controversy in Lexington, was in fact able to use the law to challenge the discriminatory actions of the local developer and move his family into the suburb with relative speed. 91 The vast majority of African Americans in Boston, however, were far less concerned with having the opportunity to buy or even rent a house in the suburbs than in finding adequate and affordable apartments to rent in the city. In fact, these statutes did not even contain measures to legally enforce the Good Neighbor pledges, demonstrating the symbolic importance but fundamental constraints in both components of the fair housing movement’s vision and agenda. 92
From Fair Housing to Civil Rights
The gap between goals and reality of the state’s fair housing law helped to undo the coalition that had been forged between the federation and members of the larger Boston freedom struggle. The limited impact of these laws on the state’s broader black community inspired many civil rights groups to shift away from the legal and individualist interpretation of the fair housing concept advanced by the local suburban committees. By the end of 1963, CORE and other local groups like the NAACP, the Massachusetts Freedom Movement, and the Boston Action Group transitioned toward a vision of fair housing that emphasized both improving the housing conditions of lower income African Americans in Boston and increasing community empowerment and control. 93 The groups sent inspection teams into buildings to canvass for health and safety violations, staged rent strikes and pickets, led the press and local and state politicians on walking tours of Roxbury’s housing stock, and pressured city officials to intensify enforcement of building codes. 94
Several suburban members of the fair housing movement suggested the federation should also expand the definition of “Fair Housing” in its name to mean more than simply equal rights in the suburbs and to address the problems of residential and affordable housing in Boston. “Our major area of concentration must be in the low-income housing field,” Sadelle Sacks announced in late 1963. 95 More committed suburban activists, such as Phyllis and Bill Ryan, left the federation to join organizations dedicated to more directly targeting the structures of racial and residential segregation getting involved in the Massachusetts Freedom Movement and later campaigns related to poverty, prison, and welfare reform. 96 The majority of federation members did not follow suit, believing that the organization should maintain its focus on promoting interracial tolerance within the suburbs. 97 In the spring of 1964, organization president Roy Brown insisted that “the Federation’s strength lies in the unique grass roots character of its constituent committees” and made a convincing case, stating “no other civil rights group is so favorably situated to speak for and to the essentially white suburban areas of greater Boston.” 98
By the end of 1963, the federation, however, decided to shift its focus and widened its interests and activities beyond housing alone to other civil rights issues. Many local chapters became actively involved in the growing controversy over desegregating the Boston Public Schools, applying many of the strategies they had developed to fight against residential discrimination and sought to once again collaborate with African American activists. Recognizing one area where this grassroots structure and suburban base could be particularly beneficial, the federation began to broaden its legislative agenda and lobbying role. The grassroots and suburban infrastructure of the federation provided a unique advantage in its legislative pursuits. Most of the thirty-five hundred mainly white middle-class suburban members spread throughout about thirty-seven communities maintained only a nominal affiliation to the organization. Still, invoking the numerical strength and dispersed geography of its membership gave the federation a powerful lobbying device and leverage, particularly in building coalitions of suburban politicians to pass certain pieces of legislation. The leaders also marshaled the organizational structures of the local chapters frequently to pressure their state and national representatives through letter-writing campaigns and visits to the State House.
By the middle of the 1960s, therefore, the federation had become one of the state’s most powerful and effective advocates for laws related to housing and other civil rights issues. The group spearheaded the lobbying campaign that led to passage of the Racial Imbalance Act in 1965, the landmark and controversial legislation that made the commonwealth the first state to outlaw school segregation. Following that success, the federation helped orchestrate the creation of a voluntary, one-way, state-funded integration program called the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity (METCO) that transported black students from Boston into the suburbs. The program would become one of the first and largest of its kind in the nation, and the earliest communities to participate were strongholds of fair housing activism. Many of the members of the federation and their white middle-class neighbors in suburbs like Brookline, Newton, and Lexington also stood at the vanguard of peace and antiwar movement, environmental causes, and feminism and directly influenced landmark federal policies including the War Powers Resolution Act, the Federal Highway Act of 1973, and the state’s passage of an Equal Rights Amendment. In addition, the members of the federation and the communities in which they resided played a key role in the campaigns of liberal candidates ranging from Father Robert Drinan and George McGovern to Edward Kennedy and Barney Frank. 99
The federation experienced far less success in combating structural inequality in metropolitan Boston. The dire prediction and call for actions by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in the 1968 Kerner Report convinced many federation figures that to prevent the United States from permanently becoming “two societies,” it must “open the suburbs” not just in the enforcement of fair housing statutes but also in the construction of affordable housing units along the metropolitan ring. 100 Federation members applied the two-pronged strategy they had developed in fair housing campaigns earlier in the decade and tried to fight within their communities and through formal channels for the cause. 101 Committee members in affluent suburbs like Newton and Concord developed plans to construct small low- and moderate-income housing developments in their respective communities. Likewise, the federation took the leading role in campaigning for a state law to curb the exclusionary zoning practices of suburban municipalities and address the limits of the 1963 fair housing law. The passage of Chapter 774, or “the Anti-Snob Zoning Act” in the summer of 1969 proved the effective lobbying capacities of suburban liberal activists and made Massachusetts the first state to take such a bold step. The law, nevertheless, had more symbolic than statutory power. It lacked requirements for construction of affordable housing (as New Jersey would enact under court order a few years later) and contained a complex administrative procedure with methods of delay. 102 Local opponents to the federation proposals in places such as Newton, Concord, and Lexington waged their own grassroots campaign and were able to use these delay tactics along with other means to thwart or significantly scale back the local affordable housing projects in their affluent communities. Ultimately, the federation’s campaign, which lasted almost a decade and spread throughout several communities along the Route 128 ring, resulted in the construction of fewer than two hundred units dispersed across several different towns.
The outcomes of these efforts to “open” affluent and seemingly progressive Boston suburbs such as Newton, Concord, and Lexington reveals a strong core of suburban residents deeply committed to the cause of racial and economic equity. However, the vast majority of their neighbors, even those who supported candidates, laws, and policies that promoted abstract liberal ideals, were consistently unwilling to accept responsibility for the causes and consequences of racial segregation and metropolitan fragmentation, exclusionary zoning, or the weaknesses in earlier civil rights and fair housing laws. In the mid-1970s, many suburban residents voiced dismay at the events of the Boston busing crisis, but few were willing to confront their own complicity in the factors that fueled the violent reaction to the mandatory desegregation of the Boston Public Schools. 103 A report released by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1975, nevertheless, interpreted the crisis as the direct result of patterns created by the exclusionary zoning practices of suburban municipalities. The report, Route 128: Boston’s Road to Segregation, also found residential segregation and discrimination in metropolitan Boston had actually intensified during the 1960s and suggested that the Anti-Snob Zoning Act had merely provided “suburban communities with new strategies for circumventing racial inclusion.” 104 More than thirty years after the release of these findings, the majority of the wealthiest (and most politically liberal) towns in metropolitan Boston have failed to build even a single low-income unit. 105
Beginning in the late 1970s, these communities, nevertheless, become home to a surge of middle-class ethnic immigrants fulfilling their own “high-tech version of the American dream.” During the 1990s, in Lexington the Asian population grew from 3.0 to 7.0 percent, in Newton from 2.0 to 4.6 percent, and in Brookline from 4.8 to 8.4 percent. 106 Most longtime white residents of the Route 128 suburbs have embraced their new middle-class ethnic neighbors and touted the new multiculturalism of their communities. Like many of the fair housing movement’s campaigns and literature, these celebrations endorse the meritocratic achievements of middle-class people of color while perpetuating discrimination against less privileged minorities. In fact, as the overall suburban minority population of metropolitan Boston has increased since the 1970s, so too has the segregation of blacks and Latinos from whites and Asians. 107 These demographic developments have indeed lessened the pronounced black–white binary in the Route 128 suburbs, but they have intensified patterns of class and race inequality.
Conclusion
The fair housing movement in Massachusetts ultimately demonstrates the potential of grassroots suburban activists to work within both their own communities and the formal systems of power to create political and legal change. Through these strategies and tactics, the movement secured passage of state legislation that served as a national model and helped Massachusetts secure its reputation as the most progressive state in the nation. The movement’s activities also codified class exclusivity and segregation as an accepted and guiding principle of local, state, and federal housing policy. 108 The fair housing movement, therefore, exposes the dual-sided definitions of individualism, equality, and fairness embedded in suburban liberal attitudes about housing discrimination that became reproduced into state and federal law. While suburban residents in communities such as Lexington and Newton believed in social and racial equality, at the same time they personally benefited from the government-subsidized entitlements provided by home ownership. Many white suburbanites’ bifurcated understanding of individualism explains why campaigns and programs that advocated for symbolic solutions and minimal financial sacrifice, such as fair housing laws and the Good Neighbor pledges, experienced large-scale success in metropolitan Boston’s most liberal communities. Meanwhile, efforts to create structural or redistributive remedies to problems of residential inequality, such as affordable housing construction, engendered enormous resistance among the same constituencies. It also explains how Massachusetts continues to have some of the most progressive state laws devoted to challenging housing discrimination, but African Americans in metropolitan Boston remain roughly as racially and economically concentrated as they were in 1960 (see Figure 3). 109
Maps of 1960 and 2010 censuses for metropolitan Boston by race.
The worldview of these Massachusetts residents, however, is not unique to suburban Boston but exemplifies a political sensibility that has grow over the past fifty years in metropolitan regions across the country. From the suburbs of New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Cleveland, and Chicago, to the college towns of Ann Arbor and Madison, and to the subdivisions of the Bay Area, Boulder, and Los Angeles, these communities simultaneously remain both among the nation’s most “blue” electorally and the most exclusive socioeconomically. 110 This constituency’s emphasis on social liberalism and fiscal moderation, which first became clear in the fair housing campaigns in the late 1950s, has solidified over the past fifty years and has had a profound influence on both politics and policy. In 2008, Barack Obama overwhelmingly carried this voting bloc and won 50 percent of suburban voters across the nation, proving once again the importance of this constituency in ensuring the Democratic Party’s persistence at the national level. 111 The stories of the fair housing movement and its white middle-class participants, therefore, need to be more fully incorporated into the narratives and frameworks of suburban, political, and civil rights history as they have contributed in crucial ways to the endurance of liberalism, the Democratic Party, and structural inequality over the past half century.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.