Adapted from Just Action (Rothstein and Rothstein, 2023)
by Monica Li and Sandra M. Donnay, Ph.D.
Some communities across the U.S. that were once segregated implemented successful interventions to integrate Black and White populations. Just Action, by Leah and Richard Rothstein, describes successful strategies:
West Mount Airy, Pennsylvania2
West Mount Airy, Pennsylvania was segregated in the mid-twentieth century but has since cultivated shared values and an identity centered around integration. Here are the strategies that were used:
● Religious groups developed sermons, living room conversations, and pamphlets on the economic and cultural benefits of integration.
● The West Mount Airy Neighbors Association (WMAN) mobilized people to support and promote integration.
Specifically, WMAN
○ asked and persuaded local bankers to offer equally favorable loan terms to any qualified buyer
regardless of their race.
○ developed contacts with realtors and asked them to sign a code of ethics that required them to show
available homes to all home buyers regardless of their race.
○ magnified their efforts by inviting United Nations Delegates to stay with West Mount Airy families,
during which Europeans stayed with Black families and Africans with White families.
● Through various marketing campaigns for the integrationist ideal, the WMAN boosted housing demand,
raised property values, therefore incentivizing White people to stay and Black people to achieve economic
stability.
● Recent activists are reviving “parent organizations, monthly school tours, campus beautification, new music,
science, technology, and math curricula, and a principal committed to integration” (p. 224, Just Action).
Recent ethnic-racial demographics of West Mount Airy, Pennsylvania1
Chart adapted from http://statisticalatlas.com/
References
1 Overview of the United States. The Demographic Statistical Atlas of the United States – Statistical Atlas. (n.d.). http://statisticalatlas.com/
2Rothstein, R., & Rothstein, L. (2023). Just action: How to challenge segregation enacted under the color of law. Liveright Publishing
Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company.