Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America

By Tobin Miller Shearer

Two Weeks Every Summer, which is based on extensive oral history interviews with former guests, hosts, and administrators in Fresh Air programs, opens a new chapter in the history of race in the United States by showing how the actions of hundreds of thousands of rural and suburban residents who hosted children from the city perpetuated racial inequity rather than overturned it. Since 1877 and to this day, Fresh Air programs from Maine to Montana have brought inner-city children to rural and suburban homes for two-week summer vacations. Tobin Miller Shearer brings to the forefront of his history of the Fresh Air program the voices of the children themselves through letters that they wrote, pictures that they took, and their testimonials. Shearer offers a careful social and cultural history of the Fresh Air programs, giving readers a good sense of the summer experiences for both hosts and the visiting children. By covering the racially transformative years between 1939 and 1979, Shearer shows how the rhetoric of innocence employed by Fresh Air boosters largely served the interests of religiously minded white hosts and did little to offer more than a vacation for African American and Latino urban youth. In what could have been a new arena for the civil rights movement, white adults often overpowered the courageous actions of children of color. By giving white suburbanites and rural residents a safe race relations project that did not require adjustments to their investment portfolios, real estate holdings, or political affiliations, the programs perpetuated an economic order that marginalized African Americans and Latinos by suggesting that solutions to poverty lay in one-on-one acts of charity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Apr 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781501708459

Tobin Miller Shearer

Tobin Miller Shearer is co-founder with Regina Shands Stoltzfus of the Damascus Road anti-racism process (now Roots of Justice) and an award-winning professor of history and African American studies at the University of Montana. He is the author of five books and more than one hundred articles. His work has appeared in publications such as The Chicago Tribune, Conspire, The Mennonite, and Anabaptist Historians. He blogs at Truth and Grace. Shearer is also the co-founder with Cheryl Miller Shearer of the anti-racism training and consulting nonprofit, Widerstand Consulting (www.widerstandconsulting.org).

Book preview

TWO WEEKS

EVERY

SUMMER

Fresh Air Children and the

Problem of Race in America

Tobin Miller Shearer

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Reckoning of Childhood, Race, and Neoliberalism

1. Knowledge, Girl, Nature: Fresh Air Tensions prior to World War II

2. Church, Concrete, Pond: How Innocence Got Disrupted

3. Grass, Color, Sass: How the Children Shaped Fresh Air

4. Sex, Seven, Sick: How Adults Kept the Children in Check

5. Milk, Money, Power: How Fresh Air Sold Its Programs

6. Greeting, Gone, Good: Racialized Reunion and Rejection in Fresh Air

Epilogue: Changing an Innocence Formula

Appendix 1. Fresh Air Organizations

Appendix 2. Documented Fresh Air Hosting Towns, 1939–1979

Notes

Bibliographic Note

Index

Preface

Ten years ago, when I was working in the record room of Eastern Mennonite Missions (EMM), an agency supported primarily by Lancaster Mennonite Conference congregations in Pennsylvania, I encountered a photo that grabbed my attention (see figure 1).

It was most likely taken by volunteer host Anna Denlinger to help promote the Children’s Visitation Program, an initiative begun on October 11, 1949, to bring—in the now dated and problematic language of the day—colored children of our city missions into church member homes.¹ The program copied the much older and larger initiative known as the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund or the Friendly Town Program. The Fresh Air Fund had since 1877 brought children from New York City to the country and suburbs for one- to two-week summer vacations at little or no cost to the children or their parents. Dozens of cities along the Eastern Seaboard, the Midwest, and some portions of the West Coast had replicated the model, and by 1962 well over a million children had participated. Urban congregations, social service agencies, settlement houses, and other nonprofit organizations vetted the children while rural churches, civic organizations, and women’s groups organized the home stays and camp visits. Although originally designed to restore malnourished white ethnic children to health, by the early 1970s white hosts and African American and Latino guests dominated the program. The Lancaster-based initiative had focused on African American and Latino children from its inception.

But it was the image itself that arrested me. When I first saw the photo, I wondered how such an event came to pass. Who had proposed sending African American children from the city to spend time with white people in the country? Why was the girl so young? Where were her parents? What motivated the white hosts to flock in such large numbers to the pickup point? What was awry? What caused the expressions of consternation? Had the young girl’s hosts failed to show up? Were the white adults and the girl simply uncomfortable being photographed? And why were the girl’s eyes closed? Was she imagining a more familiar place than the one where a crowd of religiously garbed white women and children—along with one man, out in front, holding some document—hovered around her? I set out to discover more.

FIGURE 1. Edith and John Boll of Easter Mennonite Missions with unidentified Fresh Air participant at Lancaster City, Pennsylvania, train station, circa late 1950s. Used by permission of Eastern Mennonite Missions, Salunga, PA.

As I began to present my initial findings at conferences and public lectures, I often featured this photo. Every time I presented my research, without exception, someone in the audience had either hosted a Fresh Air child or had been one. Often, both former hosts and guests came up to me after a talk. The vast majority of the hosts expressed positive memories about picking up their guests at train stations like the one featured in the photo. However, the former Fresh Air children spoke with far more ambivalence. Some shed tears because of the feelings evoked by their Fresh Air memories; a few grew quite angry as they recalled insults and indignities like the ID tag draped around the girl’s neck. One Fresh Air child said such tags made her feel like she was the subject of a slave auction; others expressed gratitude for their hosts’ generosity even while raising questions about the programs’ disparagement of the city.²

Reactions to my first forays into writing about Fresh Air were likewise mixed. Some readers found the research fascinating and sent me photographs and newspaper clippings from Fresh Air programs in their communities. Others found my critical stance unfair. A few reprimanded me for writing about the program at all because they felt it was just too important of a resource to bring under academic scrutiny. But the vast majority of readers wanted to know more.

So I kept on writing. I continued to travel to archives and interview participants. This book is the result of a decade’s worth of research that began when I first encountered that photo in the EMM record room.

As I near the completion of this book, I realize that I know much more about the white people featured in the photo than I do about the African American girl. I do not know exactly when it was taken, but most probably in the late 1950s. Although I do not know the names of the white crowd members, I do know that John Boll, a Mennonite farmer and businessman from Manheim, Pennsylvania, holds papers in his hands as his wife, Edith Boll, cradles one of their children in her arms. Like many white Mennonites in southeastern Pennsylvania, the Bolls hosted children connected to Mennonite urban congregations. However, I know much less about the Fresh Air girl. She appears to be fairly young—perhaps seven or eight—although not as young as some participants. I do know that the photo was taken at the train station in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, soon after her arrival from New York City. The tag around her neck indicates that she has been labeled for pickup at a location far removed from friends and family who could identify her on sight. I have not been able to discover her name.

Hundreds of thousands of children like the girl featured in this photo spent summer vacations away from their families in ventures fueled by anecdotes alone. All those involved in promoting and organizing the programs asserted that a two-week stay in the country had a meaningful impact on the life of a city child. However, these promoters used only anecdotes and carefully crafted stories to defend their practice. At no point between 1939 and 1979 did any of the programs present convincing, research-based evidence that the programs improved children’s lives.³ The assumption that fourteen days of interracial connection had enough power to transform the lives of children had widespread support but little empirical grounding.

The white volunteers pictured in the photo represent the rural and suburban residents who hosted Fresh Air children for decades and saw themselves as champions of the downtrodden. Through the 1940s, many hosts participated in order to offer a simple act of charity to white ethnic children of city tenements. Beginning in the 1950s, many more signed on to host an African American, Asian American, or Latino child as part of a massive, widespread race relations effort. During the height of the Cold War, still others sought to take part in—as Fresh Air Fund administrator Bud Lewis came to call it—an experiment in the production of democracy. Volunteers poured countless hours into transport, hosting, entertainment, and relationship building. Those most committed maintained some kind of connection with the children they welcomed into their homes, even if only by the occasional letter, phone call, or visit to the city. The hosts used the relational, conceptual, and social tools that they had available at the time, ones that left them ill-equipped to address the underlying issues of power and privilege that separated them from the children they hosted. They focused first and foremost on the publicity material fashioned by eager boosters about a popular program, one in which children reported that they liked … the smell of the air, … the green trees … the flowers … even … [the] frogs.⁴

The photo thus captures a multilayered moment. On one level, the photo depicts a local group of charitable, white Pennsylvania Mennonites hosting a destitute, black urban child. Yet the photo also reveals the inner workings of an interlocking array of white-led, child-centered institutions intent on ending poverty and racism through one-on-one acts of charity.⁵ At the same time, the photo illustrates an example of national white neoliberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century, one focused on privatization, minimal government, and reduced appropriations for social services. This book explores all three levels of the Fresh Air story: the local, the institutional, and the national.

When I first encountered this photo of the Fresh Air girl surrounded by well-meaning white people, I was not just intrigued; I was also discomfited. I was left unsure about how I felt about the photo. Should I excoriate it as did many critics in the 1960s and 1970s as yet another example of the paternalistic excess of naïve white people wanting so desperately to do something about the state of race relations in America but lacking the will and resources—whether social, historical, or political—to offer a more nuanced response? Should I draw attention to the deliberate separation of child from parent? Should I ask for pity for the black girl, as did most of the white boosters involved in the programs? Should I highlight the courage, fortitude, and creativity of the children who learned how to negotiate racial boundaries at a very young age? Or should I ignore the photo and focus instead on happier images that affirm the kindness of white hosts who took black and brown children into their homes?

The photo still leaves me unsettled, but I also think it is an evocative and accurate reflection of a multivalent Fresh Air movement. And so I return to the photo yet again. It is a complex image, one that is replete with notions of place, race, and identity. One that touches on prejudice, fear, innocence, and superiority. It is an image that asks how we decide whose lives matter inside our national household. The photo resonates with any political moment—which is to say most of them—in which we struggle to determine both boundaries of exclusion and gates of welcome.

Acknowledgments

As with all intellectual enterprises, a book arises in the midst of many conversations. I am grateful for those who have engaged with this project. My colleagues in the history department, African American Studies program, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program at the University of Montana have offered unwavering encouragement and insightful feedback. I am especially thankful for splendid interlocutors like Robert Greene, Anya Jabour, Mike Mayer, Jody Pavilack, Kyle Volk, and Jeff Wiltse. During his all-too-brief sojourn with us before heading back to New York, Christopher Pastore also provided excellent counsel about the craft of writing itself. The provost’s office at UM awarded me a sabbatical to complete this manuscript, and the University Research and Creativity Committee funded a trip to the Northeast during which I visited multiple archives and encountered some of my most important sources. Peter Staudenmaier, Geeta Raval, my brother Jud Shearer, and his partner, Sue Ann Foster, provided wonderful hospitality each evening after I was done flitting from archive to archive during the day.

Scholars in the fields of childhood and environmental history have been incredibly helpful—Pamela Riney-Kehrberg and Barry Ross Muchnick provided especially astute feedback—as have colleagues in the Afro-American Religious History group of the American Academy of Religion and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. The 2014 Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy in Jackson, Mississippi, also provided conversation partners and interlocutors extraordinaire. Special thanks go to Jeff Kolnick, Barry Lee, Jolie Sheffer, Jervette Ward, and Dwana Waugh for their particularly insightful commentary. Courtney Bender, Josef Sorett, and participants in the Religion and Politics in American Public Life lecture series at Columbia University provided me with the opportunity to develop key components of my argument for a lecture there. In the same way, lecture invitations from Provost Fred Kniss at Eastern Mennonite University and Stacy Keogh George from Whitworth University allowed me to hone the interpretive frame I have employed in this book.

The archivists and librarians at the institutions listed in the appendix have been unfailingly supportive. In particular, Linnea Anderson at the Elmer L. Andersen Library, Simone Horst at the Menno Simons Historical Library, Wayne Kempton at the archives of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and John Thiesen at the Mennonite Library and Archives of Bethel College provided essential support. The staff of UM’s interlibrary loan department also served above and beyond the call of duty. I likewise owe a debt of gratitude for the on-site assistance offered by Andrew Jungclaus at Columbia University, Ian Lewenstein at the University of Minnesota, and James Ward at the Library of Virginia when I could not travel in person to these collections. James Lont organized and recorded a conversation of former Fresh Air hosts in Graafschap, Michigan, after only one phone call from me. And Molly Williams, my intrepid work-study student from 2013 through 2015, diligently assisted me in the tedious task of documenting Fresh Air hosting locations.

I am furthermore thankful for all those who spoke with my colleagues and me about various Fresh Air experiences. They were unfailingly forthcoming, honest, and courageous in relating stories that were, in many cases, difficult to tell.

My editors at Cornell—Brian Balogh, Michael J. McGandy, and Jonathan Zimmerman—have been steadfastly professional, consistently perceptive, and more percipient than I sometimes wished (although I always came to appreciate their feedback).

Two additional groups have earned my deep gratitude. First, the members of our weekly supper club—now meeting in its eighth year—have offered delicious food, spirited conversation, and tons of teasing. I don’t know what I would do without you all—Beth and Britta Baker, Brad Clough, Julie and Steve Edwards, Mark and Kara Hansen, Clary Loisel, and Ken Thompson. Finally, I am ever grateful for the support, encouragement, and droll badinage that my life partner, Cheryl, and our two sons—Dylan and Zach—brought to me in the midst of writing this book. They kept me grounded, balanced, and laughing out loud.

Introduction

A RECKONING OF CHILDHOOD, RACE, AND NEOLIBERALISM

Gee, it smells good to be home.

Unidentified Fresh Air Fund boy, New York City, 1972

Since 1877, Fresh Air programs from Maine to Montana brought hundreds of thousands of urban children to rural homes and camps for summer vacations. Through the 1950s, few had criticized the annual ventures. That changed in the 1960s. In 1963 a resident of Bennington, Vermont, noted that African American Fresh Air children became an economic and social threat to their former hosts after they reached adolescence. Although younger children could share intimate home space, white residents repulsed black teens.¹ Three years later another critic called such social service programs paternalistic arrogance.² By 1967, black and Latino residents from the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan labeled programs like Fresh Air irrelevant, discriminatory, and not really committed to integrating.³

But it was not until the 1970s that the most intense criticism erupted. When the National Association of Black Social Workers declared in 1971 that placement of black children in white homes for fosterage and adoption was cultural genocide, Fresh Air critics intensified their rhetoric.⁴ In addition to ironically calling for city-based stale-air vacation programs directed at white suburban children, critics asserted that taking black and brown children out of the city was, in fact, psychologically damaging.⁵ Busing children to the country or suburbs, asserted the critics, harmed the children by instilling false expectations about their ability to relocate to such nonurban settings. That same year a blistering critique of the Cleveland Friendly Town Fresh Air program appeared in the pages of the historic black newspaper Call and Post excoriating the Inner City Protestant Parish for transporting children to areas which lock them out the rest of the year. Under the heading Brushing up on Paternalism, reporter Ellen Delmonte mocked not only the short duration of the suburban vacations but also the magnanimous gift of a new toothbrush given to each child as she or he climbed aboard buses bound for southern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and rural New York. As Delmonte queried, [W]as this their way of showing how they love all the little ‘cullud’ kids?⁶

Such acerbic criticism marks one end of the Fresh Air movement’s narrative arc. Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America tells the story of the Fresh Air movement’s efforts to bring city children to the country for summer vacations in homes and camps from the onset of World War II through the end of the 1970s. In addition to the words and actions of both adult hosts and critics, the exploits and insights of the Fresh Air children guide this narrative.⁷ Together they tell the story of a movement that was active in twenty states, that was based out of more than thirty-five cities, and that connected with more than one and a half million children from its inception through 1979.⁸

That Fresh Air story hinges on four themes. First is the centrality of nature discourse to the Fresh Air enterprise. Promoters returned time and again to the notion that city children had never encountered lawns or green space. In the process, they promoted the countryside by disparaging the city. A second theme focuses on the multiple ways in which guest children protected their interests even while the adult hosts and administrators dismissed their actions as simple recalcitrance. The children surprised their hosts by their politeness as much as their truculence but had to face racial bias about their standards of behavior at every turn. The third central theme, the pursuit and promotion of innocence through age caps, follows from the second. Hosts preferred younger children because the older the guests became, the more problems the hosts perceived. A final theme emerges from the adult promoters’ persistent concern about sex. Program administrators fixated on the children’s knowledge of intimate matters as they tried to keep interracial romance from blossoming. Each chapter expands on these themes and introduces related topics such as health care, religion, swimming, finance, and power.

At some point in the forty years analyzed here, nearly every major urban center in the Northeast and Midwest hosted an initiative to offer short summer stays for children from the city. Although rarely found in the Deep South, each of those programs based in Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and elsewhere sent children out and collected them back (see figure 2).

The thousands of Fresh Air households who responded to invitations to join in Fresh Air work were usually white, rural or suburban. The hosts were usually home owners with their own children tended by a stay-at-home parent—most often the mother. Although poor white ethnic children had been the programs’ original beneficiaries, the hundreds of thousands of children who received invitations for summer vacations in host homes or Fresh Air–run camps usually were—after the 1950s—black or brown, came from poor families, had been vetted by both social service and medical providers, and (in the vast majority of the cases) lived inside a city’s limits. The cadre of organizers, administrators, boosters, and volunteers who wrote promotional pieces, managed logistics, vetted the children, and raised funds were also white, came from both the city and the country, had become increasingly professional in the course of the twentieth century, and believed fervently that their efforts had long-lasting effects on the children’s lives. They took a far more positive view of the programs, contributing to an initiative designed to bring inspiration, education and fun to children of all races and creeds trapped in … [the city’s] stone caverns.⁹

FIGURE 2. This map locates more than 1,100 hosting sites from 1939 to 1979, culled from archival sources, newspaper accounts, and publicity materials. The Fresh Air Fund alone claimed more than 2,500 hosting sites but would not provide a list of those locations. Map designed by Bill Nelson based on data compiled by Molly Williams.

Four types of programs structured the movement. Those run by newspapers like New York City’s Herald Tribune emerged during the Progressive Era and outlasted other sponsors. Originally concerned both with generating goodwill for the paper and combating malnutrition, newspapers dropped their official sponsorships by the 1960s as budgets tightened and nonprofits professionalized. The independent nonprofits that remained made nature, race, and poverty their chief concern amid the effects of the second Great Migration and the subsequent white flight. Denominational-run programs like those offered by the Christian Reformed Church proliferated during the middle of the twentieth century, driven by a concern for child evangelism. Throughout the four decades on which this book concentrates, religiously affiliated programs became increasingly focused on racial matters as church groups dealt with the aftermath of desegregation and the advent of civil rights activism. Social service agencies and settlement houses like New York’s Union Settlement Association included Fresh Air vacations among the broad range of programs they offered from the beginning of the twentieth century onward. Although also providing city-based summer programming, such agencies focused more on day trips and longer camp excursions but did help send children to private homes as well, usually in an effort to expose children to nature and white norms. Civic-religious associations like the joint venture run by the Ecumenical Metropolitan Ministry and the Seattle Public Schools or the cooperative initiatives organized by local congregations and Rotary or Kiwanis clubs appeared after World War I. These groups placed racial and class concerns at the forefront of their efforts as civic leaders searched for ways to respond to growing racial foment and urban unrest.

The interlocking but organizationally distinct groups that made up the movement used the same terminology and program design to market their initiatives. As the oldest, largest, and highest-profile rural hosting program, the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund provided the model, and others copied it. Independent groups like Chicago’s City Missionary Society and the Episcopal Diocese of New York adopted the Tribune’s Fresh Air label to describe their overall efforts and borrowed the Friendly Town title to publicize the home-based portion of their initiatives. All involved treated the home stays and camp stays as part of a single effort to save children from the city.¹⁰ To indicate this programmatic unity, Fresh Air movement, Fresh Air program, or simply Fresh Air will refer to the full breadth of rural hosting ventures for children from the city, including both those that sent children to homes and those that sent them to camps. At the same time, the term Fresh Air Fund or simply the Fund will be reserved for the Herald Tribune’s program. Independent sponsors will be noted where indicated.

The children’s experience during the summer vacations varied widely. Some children returned to the same host family for more than one summer, in a small number of cases as many as six or seven times. About half the children returned to the same home at least twice, but only about 10 percent returned to the same home more than two times. In other communities, hosts rarely offered re-invitations. A smaller percentage got to stay for extended visits of a month or longer, and some programs only offered a week or weekend vacation, but the vast majority returned home after two weeks. Between 1939 and 1979, an overwhelming majority of the children stayed in homes rather than camps. Upon occasion a select group—at most 10 percent of the total participants—spent Christmas vacation with their rural hosts. And although sponsors rarely found it difficult to recruit children interested in participating in the programs, a familial and social rumor network relayed cautionary tales about what to do and what to avoid doing when traveling to the country.

Despite strong interest from the children, many critics joined the vitriolic columnist from Cleveland in raising questions about Fresh Air. Even the director of the Herald Tribune program acknowledged the perennial and persistent criticism that their programs did more harm than good, an assessment in keeping with similar criticisms of white-led social service programs by African American and Latino urban leaders during the 1960s and 1970s. The children, said the critics, would become disillusioned and embittered by sampling a much better life.¹¹ As another queried, What is the good of exposing these youngsters to the comfort and pleasure of country life and then sending them back to the same dismal slums?¹²

The emergence of such criticism coincided with the shift to hosting children of color. This book begins with the onset of World War II, in 1939, when the hosting of a child of color in a white home was still a rarity and ends in 1979, the year that staff and local organizers at the Fresh Air Fund admitted that racial prejudice and a rising tide of suburban apathy had dramatically curtailed their volunteer host base.¹³ Within the space of forty years, the Fresh Air movement transitioned from a program that brought an almost exclusively white group of children to stay with white families to a program that brought an almost exclusively black and brown group to stay with white families. As urban racial demographics shifted, so did the various programs’ goals. Rather than restore the children’s health and counter malnutrition, Fresh Air ventures became much more focused on bridging the racial divide and introducing children to middle-class suburban values. That transition to serving children of color offered Fresh Air programmers their most daunting challenge. The story of how they responded spans the middle four decades of the twentieth century while also tracing the shifts and patterns in the discourse about childhood innocence and its often ironic intertwining with racism in the United States. In sum, Two Weeks Every Summer examines the racially transformative years between 1939 and 1979 in order to explore how one-on-one models of social change influenced patterns of racial subordination.

The tensions evident in a program both lauded and excoriated for its race relations record reveal the social forces at play from the beginning of the 1940s through the end of the 1970s. In particular, the qualities of childhood innocence reiterated by promoters and lambasted by critics served political purposes—in this case, to promote a particular response to mid-century racial conflict.¹⁴ Fresh Air promoters did not just offer their ventures alongside other, more confrontational efforts to address racial inequity; they also argued that their measures were superior. Comparing their hosting ventures to those of the 1961 civil rights Freedom Riders, one promoter insisted that Fresh Air initiatives created better relationships and better understandings.¹⁵

And the boosters had a point. By comparison to other interracial initiatives, the rural summer visits offered greater intimacy, more interaction, and less risk for white participants. During civil rights marches, black and white activists rubbed shoulders for several hours but usually returned home to separate living rooms. The activists who crossed racial lines in the early years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s integration efforts and voter registration drives lived together for a time, but these interracial practices generally came to an end by 1966. Schoolchildren who attended interracial classes did connect across racial lines, but those relationships frequently snagged on the controversies surrounding school desegregation during the 1950s and 1960s and busing during the 1970s. Other interracial venues like military barracks and sports locker rooms did build interracial bridges but affected proportionately fewer individuals.¹⁶ By contrast, Fresh Air programs integrated living rooms, lasted for decades, and bused black and brown children to white communities with no legal interference.

Boosters, administrators, and volunteers in the thousands countered their critics by telling a nonthreatening story. They focused on crafting a narrative about black and brown children restored to full health and well-being through short stays in the country.¹⁷ The rhetoric worked. Although hosting efforts waned by the end of the 1970s, during the peak years between 1968 and 1975 white hosts welcomed upwards of 16,000 children per summer—the vast majority of them African American and Latino—in the Fresh Air Fund’s program alone. Many of those children, once on site at their hosting locale, disrupted the story told about them by wrinkling their noses at the smell of manure, complaining about bugs, and growing homesick for their urban homes. Yet the children’s efforts to challenge the racism they encountered and participate in the programs on their own terms could not entirely refute the rhetoric of innocence that brought them out of the city. During the period of peak civil rights activity in the 1950s and 1960s, leaders of the Fresh Air movement stuck tenaciously to a common narrative, a story focused on individual change, told by well-intentioned white people, featured in the media, and divorced from demonstration. Most Fresh Air hosts and organizers genuinely desired an end to racial strife. They believed that hosting children of different racial groups for two weeks in the country could solve the country’s racial problems one child at a time. In so doing, the hosts’ feelings dictated the national narrative about Fresh Air vacationing.

When approached from the perspective of the children, however, a different story emerges. This narrative, one that few adults recognized at the time, shows how the young Fresh Air visitors engaged in their own civil rights struggle. In far more intimate settings than those entered by Martin Luther King Jr. and his associates, the children integrated racially segregated neighborhoods, challenged racist stereotypes, and demanded respect. Even though most ventured into white communities for short, two-week stints at a time, they nonetheless confronted crank phone calls, stood up to racial epithets, and dealt with verbal harassment in living rooms and camp cabins where no reporters witnessed their efforts. Sometimes the children fought back with words. Other times, with their fists. Whether withholding information about their home life, objecting to rules that excluded teenagers, or refusing to spend their vacations working without pay, the children did not always conform to their hosts’ visions of cooperative, well-mannered, compliant innocents. The hosts viewed them, in short, as sassy. But the children’s actions speak more of nascent activism than disrespectful behavior.

By paying attention to these three interlocking narratives—of the boosters, critics, and children—this book expands and refines much of what has been written about U.S. racism by revealing the complex negotiations involved in the hosting of children across racial lines. Some authors have attempted to explain why racial inequity persisted through the 1970s by examining voting rights, presidential elections, and congressional acts.¹⁸ Others have focused on interracial marriage, housing patterns, and cultural stereotypes.¹⁹ Without question, historians need to analyze public policy and social and cultural patterns to understand racism’s longevity. For example, activists and elected representatives shaped the outcomes of the civil rights struggle. Yet the Fresh Air movement’s well-meaning hosts, trenchant critics, and redoubtable children also helped determine what would and would not change in the country’s racial constellation. Hosts focused energy on integrating their homes and neighborhoods through carefully structured, time-limited visits. Critics called foul at one-way, white-led, parent-demeaning programming. Guest children challenged the attitudes and actions of the white adults they encountered and the host children they befriended.

In addition to revealing the complexities of mid-twentieth-century racial negotiation, the Fresh Air story also shows the close association that Americans have posited between nature and childhood innocence, a notion employed by adults throughout this period first and foremost as a quality of untroubled naïveté about sex. Although innocence could also refer to freedom from the demands of work, politics, and culture, intimate matters remained most salient. Throughout the nineteenth century, artists, writers, and philosophers linked the idea of childhood innocence with nature and the country.²⁰ Historians such as Sarah Burns have suggested that this nature-centric impulse intensified as adults pined for forgotten youth in the face of industrialization.²¹ Yet Fresh Air promoters attempted, and in many ways succeeded, in extending the linkage of nature and childhood innocence far into the twentieth century. In donor campaigns such as the Fresh Air Fund’s 1962 give summer to a child advertising blitz, publicists and administrators effectively froze in time and space the idea of childhood wonder before all things natural.²² Rapturous prose about the children’s immersion in nature appeared as frequently in the 1970s as it did in the 1940s. Although various scholars have warned against making claims about innocence devoid of the particularities of time and place, participants in the Fresh Air movement stabilized the linkage between nature and childhood through sheer force of repetition.²³

Innocence in Fresh Air programs also involved sex. To be certain, promoters evoked innocence as they extolled the country and sought to keep the children under control. Likewise, critics touched on innocence as they denounced programs that cut black and brown adults out of the equation. But it was sex and the hosts’ attendant fears of interracial romance that generated sustained attention. The Fresh Air story reveals just how central concerns about interracial sexual attraction—even concerning prepubescent children—remained during the middle three decades of the twentieth century.²⁴ In keeping with the tradition of Romantics like William Wordsworth who emphasized the holiness and redemptive capacity of children, most Fresh Air promoters countered all hints of sexuality by describing the children as wholesome waifs whenever