Kitchen Table Politics. Stacie Taranto
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into white-ethnic working-class neighborhoods across New York City, families like the Anselmis headed to the suburbs.29
Despite these statistics, one cannot simply label their experience “white flight.” Many families were unaffected by racial turnover in the city. Catholic families typically had insulated social lives that revolved around activities in their mostly all-white parishes. Their children largely attended parochial schools in the city that were immune from discussions about racial balance and residential segregation. Nor did a dearth of jobs in the central city force their families into surrounding suburbs. Skilled professional work like the kind most of their husbands did proliferated in the city long after their families left, even as the manufacturing jobs that many of their parents had relied on began to dry up. “Push factors” such as racial turnover and industrial decline did not primarily drive these families out of the boroughs of New York City. Instead, the “pull” of more space, single-family home ownership, and a better overall quality of life—their version of the American dream—sent them packing as soon as possible.30
But the ability to attain this version of the American dream was not open to everyone, which makes the women’s supposedly “color-blind” politics more accurately a racialized form of activism. Like others who got involved in various conservative causes, the women often assumed that their own merit and ability to ascend the socioeconomic ladder had led their families to the suburbs. They failed to understand or acknowledge the link between social mobility and racially coded policies and structural inequalities.31 When the women later defended traditional nuclear families, some made allowances for mothers (of an unspecified race) to work outside the home if economic need dictated that they do so, as many had observed during their youth. They argued, though, that women like them who could afford to be full-time homemakers should do so, even if their families could benefit from additional disposable income. In effect, a mother’s home-centered care was better than material comfort so long as the basics (a house in the suburbs, good schools for the children, and so on) were met. Yet, this debate was only happening in the (white) middle- to upper-middle-class circles that they lived in, where the possibility of a one-income family was more realistic. African Americans and other racial minorities faced steep job and housing discrimination that made full-time homemaking impossible for most, and thus less subject to debate. The end result in the seventies was a defensive grassroots politics that was rooted in the women’s upward mobility and personal circumstances. Theirs was a politics that hardly mentioned race and purported to be color-blind when pressed on the issue, but that nonetheless supported a version of the family most accessible to other white, middle- to upper-middle-class families like their own.
In a few cases where racial issues did intrude upon the women’s lives in the suburbs, their relative privilege allowed them to avoid such conflict, as was the case for the Stern family when they moved from the Bronx to Mount Vernon in Westchester County in 1958. Mount Vernon, one of Westchester’s six larger cities located directly north of the Bronx, was a divided community at that time. Most white, middle-class residents like the Sterns lived in single-family homes on the north side of the New Haven-bound railroad tracks that cut through town. African Americans, who made up 20 percent of Mount Vernon’s population in 1960, lived in larger apartment complexes, subsidized housing, and multifamily homes on the much more densely populated south side of the railroad tracks adjacent to the Bronx. The city’s school system was also segregated, with different elementary, junior high, and high schools serving each side of the tracks; 96 percent of students at the various elementary schools on the south side were African American, compared to just 4 percent in northern Mount Vernon where the Sterns’ children attended a public elementary school.32
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), with its strong base of support in nearby Harlem and the Bronx, sought with limited success to remedy this situation in 1962. Their inquiry resulted in the closure of the city’s separate high schools. In 1964, a brand-new integrated Mount Vernon High School opened its doors at a cost of $8,000,000—a hefty sum, but a welcome fiscal consolidation after previously operating two high schools. But perhaps because the savings would not be as great at the primary level, there was little movement throughout the sixties to integrate Mount Vernon’s lower schools. A variety of ideas were floated to correct the racial imbalance, but most were likely stalling tactics since they were so expensive and impractical.33
The most contentious plans to integrate Mount Vernon’s elementary and junior high schools proposed busing children across town, something that people on both sides of the tracks opposed. White parents in Mount Vernon, as elsewhere in the nation, banded together to preserve the integrity of the neighborhood school system. They noted that neighborhood schools were within safe walking distance from children’s homes and cut down on Mount Vernon’s transportation costs. White homemakers also argued that it would be easier to volunteer at their children’s schools if they lived nearby—a warning that caught administrators’ attention since (free, female) parental involvement was heavily relied upon in the lower schools. These supposedly race-neutral claims were predicated on the belief that schools on the south side of Mount Vernon were lacking, whether because white parents thought that African Americans themselves were inferior, or because they correctly saw that black schools had far fewer resources. Racial barriers in the employment and housing sectors often meant, for example, that African American mothers worked for a wage during the day and could not volunteer their time. These constraints negatively influenced school performance. Still, African American parents did not necessarily embrace busing. Many also wanted their children educated near home in familiar schools. Some parents feared that their children would not have as much exposure to black culture, history, and adult role models in majority-white schools. Others worried about their children being bused into harm’s way if whites in Mount Vernon violently resisted their arrival, which occurred in larger cities such as New York and Boston.34
As various proposals to integrate the lower schools were debated, school board elections and meetings in Mount Vernon grew very heated and attracted national attention. At that time in the mid- to late sixties, reformers such as Martin Luther King, Jr., had eradicated de jure segregation laws in the Jim Crow South and were turning their attention to de facto battles in the North—in places like Mount Vernon that were segregated not by overt laws, but by custom and the legacy of discriminatory practices and policies in the employment and housing sectors. Although Mount Vernon was not a large or well-known city, with fewer than 75,000 people living there in the sixties, it was less than ten miles away from the Bronx and the Harlem section of Manhattan, both of which contained the national headquarters for several prominent black civil rights organizations. Mount Vernon also shares New York City’s major media market, and that, along with its clear and almost clichéd racial division by railroad tracks, drew national press coverage and amplified exchanges on the local level.35
In 1975, an integration plan for the lower schools finally was reached in the state court system—one that, because of the racial turnover that had occurred in the past decade, did not involve the massive busing scheme initially proposed. From 1960 to 1970, Mount Vernon experienced a 4 percent population loss, at a time when most places in Westchester County were gaining. But while Mount Vernon’s total population shrank, its African American community increased by 44 percent: from 20 percent of the total population in 1960 to 36 percent in 1970. Most racial turnover occurred from 1960 to 1965, when the new integrated high school opened and talk of granting African Americans greater access to Mount Vernon’s high-performing lower schools on the (white) north side heated up. African Americans living nearby in places like New York City soon moved to Mount Vernon to embrace educational opportunities for their children. As they did so, white residents left.36
The Sterns sold their colonial home on the north side of Mount Vernon in 1967. Annette and her husband were not on the school board or following the busing debates too closely throughout the sixties. Their boys were not yet old enough to attend the integrated high school; they attended mostly all-white public lower schools on their side of town while the family was in Mount Vernon from 1958 to 1967. Decades later, Stern did not mention any of these disputes, but she remembered that their move was prompted by the desire not to send their children to private schools in the future. At any moment the lower schools could implement busing and, eventually, the Sterns’ sons would be old enough