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The Birmingham of the North NYU Press Chapter Title: The Birmingham of the North Book Title: Race and the Politics of Deception Book Subtitle: The Making of an American City Book Author(s): Christopher Mele Published by: NYU Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctt1bj4qhc.8 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms NYU Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Race and the Politics of Deception This content downloaded from 130.58.64.51 on Thu, 04 Feb 2021 17:13:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 4 The Birmingham of the North Notwithstanding the considerable economic and social changes cities faced after World War II, in many ways black- white divisions in Chester remained simply more of the same. The departure of whites to working- class suburbs immediately to the north and west of the city continued apace. The stream of southern black families moving north for employ- ment slowed somewhat as older manufacturing firms relocated or downsized, but in combination with new families, the city’s black pop- ulation continued its steady rise. Yet in everyday terms the shrinking of Chester’s white population and the rise in black residents changed little in the racial status quo that governed core aspects of everyday life— where people lived, worked, went to school, bought groceries and clothes, saw movies, and ate meals. Chester’s boomtown feel still reso- nated in the early 1950s regardless of steady but small yearly declines in its manufacturing output since the end of the war effort. Downtown Chester was the center for shopping in the expanding Delaware County, with Sears and Roebuck and Kresge’s 5 and 10 dominating a vibrant business district populated by restaurants, beauty salons, barbershops, shoe stores, corner stores, banks, bowling alleys, and movie theaters. And whereas black residents were welcome to spend their money down- town, most businesses hired few black workers, and many maintained separate facilities for their black customers well into the late 1950s. Postwar demographic and economic changes slowly put pressure on the city’s long- standing racial status quo and the seeming perma- nence of white- privileged Chester. Federal court rulings and national legislation targeting the segregation of schools and housing magnified the “work” of Chester’s white elites and institutions to maintain home- grown racial inequality. In hindsight and given the depth of commit- 73 This content downloaded from 130.58.64.51 on Thu, 04 Feb 2021 17:13:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 74 | The Birmingham of the North Speare Brothers Department Store, 7th Street and Edgemont Street, 1961, founded in 1921 and closed in 1973. Reproduced by permission of the Delaware County Historical Society, Pa. ment to segregation, the civil rights movement’s disruption of the racial status quo seemed inevitable. As this chapter recounts, Chester’s civil rights struggle in the early 1960s also factored into the local politics of suburbanization. Chester’s established civil rights leaders won incremental gains in im- proving conditions for black residents in the 1950s. The challenge to the racial status quo took a spectacular and explosive turn in the early 1960s. Over the course of five years Chester emerged as one of the key battle- grounds in the nation’s civil rights movement, earning the city a national reputation for public racial unrest. In the spring of 1964 the national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) called Chester “the Birmingham of the North.”1 This content downloaded from 130.58.64.51 on Thu, 04 Feb 2021 17:13:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Birmingham of the North | 75 Civil rights activism has deep roots in Chester, as local religious lead- ers and the NAACP advanced the cause of racial integration during the peak of overt racial antagonism and institutional discrimination in the 1940s and 1950s. This chapter provides an overview of early leaders and efforts before turning to a discussion of complex cleavages and oppos- ing agendas in the black and white communities set on challenging or preserving the city’s racial status quo. As was the case nationally, internal struggles over tactics and the pace of change divided Chester’s main civil rights organization in the early 1960s. Beyond describing the internal dynamics of civil rights activism, however, this chapter shows how local political leaders shaped and manipulated organized mass dissent against racial segregation and discrimination to benefit their own political aims and financial objectives, namely, furthering the racial divide between the city and the suburbs. In addition to feeding divisions within the black activist community, white elites benefited in a self- serving way from fan- ning the white fears of racial violence and unrest that they deceptively sanctioned. Chester’s civil rights activism, then, unfolded against a back- drop of elite, seemingly contradictory interests in protecting the racial status quo and white privilege while exacerbating whites’ fears of civil unrest that fed an exodus to the suburbs. Chester’s ruling white Republican machine had already eased the mi- gration of fellow whites from the city to the suburbs, politically coloniz- ing newly formed towns and unincorporated suburbs and extending its system of political favors to sway suburban residential and commercial developers, bankers, investors, and other business elites— all of whom benefited handsomely from the white exodus from Chester that trebled after the racial unrest and violence of the summer of 1964. They capital- ized on visceral racial antagonism and fear, the unsustainability of the racial status quo in the city itself, and the failed efforts by local whites to hunker down and maintain privileges to the exclusion of Chester’s black residents. In the 1960s the Republican machine, now fully invested in the city-suburban racial divide, allowed the racial status quo it had helped build and orchestrate in Chester to fully unravel. This content downloaded from 130.58.64.51 on Thu, 04 Feb 2021 17:13:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 76 | The Birmingham of the North This story of racial manipulation suggests that the processes that led to the condition of the impacted ghetto, a story often explained as the result of large- scale economic and labor market changes in the Ameri- can economy, have their foundations in a political agency that favored the exodus of white people and capital over racial compromise and in- tegration. As this chapter demonstrates, white elites intentionally inter- ceded in Chester’s civil rights campaign by covertly ratcheting up the scale of protests, answering them publicly with violent “law and order” crackdowns, and squashing efforts at compromise that might lead to racial integration. This duplicitous political strategy heightened racial antagonisms among residents in the city itself, ultimately ushering in black political control (described in later chapters) of a city economi- cally and socially hamstrung by the flight of white residents and white- owned small businesses (and their capital). Economic and Demographic Challenges to the Racial Divide In many ways Chester’s economic and demographic changes a decade after the end of World War II duplicated those of small northeastern manufacturing cities such as nearby Camden, New Jersey, and Wilming- ton, Delaware, and larger ones such as Baltimore and Philadelphia. The waterfront industries continued to be the main sources of employment throughout the 1950s and 1960s, although the number of manufactur- ing firms and positions steadily declined over time. Sun Shipbuilding, Scott Paper, and the Philadelphia Electric Company remained the city’s biggest employers. Baldwin Locomotive closed. The Ford assembly plant shut down in 1960, shedding 2,300 manufacturing jobs. Total manufac- turing employment in Delaware County declined 12 percent from 1950 to 1962, and between 1958 and 1962 the number of county manufacturing establishments fell from 415 to 385. Unemployment was 9.3 percent in Chester compared to 3.0 percent for the entire county. Black unemploy- ment in the city was 14.2 percent, double that of whites at 7.2 percent.2 This content downloaded from 130.58.64.51 on Thu, 04 Feb 2021 17:13:49 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Birmingham of the North | 77 In comparison with suburban Delaware County, Chester’s labor force was concentrated in industrial manufacturing and low-paying service positions. In 1960 only 9 percent of Chester workers were employed in white collar clerical, professional, and managerial positions, compared to 17 percent for Delaware County. The median family income in Ches- ter of $5,343 was considerably less than the county’s $7,289, reflecting the migration of middle- and high-income families out of the city into the suburbs. Indicative of residential suburbanization, Chester “imported” 11,500 employees from the rest of Delaware County while exporting 6,600 workers to jobs in the rest of the county. The out- migration of mostly whites occurred in tandem with the in- migration of blacks, whose prospects and earnings in manufacturing and service positions were curtailed. The 1959 median income for Chester’s black families was $4,059, less than 70 percent of the $5,880 median income for white fami- lies.
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