Introduction

Abstract

Using the post-war industrial landscape of metropolitan Philadelphia as a case study, this special section of the Journal of Urban History examines the making and meaning of residentially integrated space in the latter half of the twentieth century. These three projects (Abigail Perkiss’ “Managed Diversity;” James Wolfinger’s “The American Dream for All Americans;” and Cheryl Greenburg’s “Liberal NIMBY”) look at racial integration not as an idealized form of racial justice, nor as a fleeting notion of residential life doomed for failure. Writing at the intersection of the historiographies on the American urban experience and the northern civil rights struggle, these scholars push beyond the historic notion that integration was the period between the first black family moving into a neighborhood and the last white family moving out, to examine residential integration as an historic process, a political objective, and a cultural experience.