Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community

Index

Preface

From summer 1975 through summer 1989, I did fieldwork in the general area I call the Village-Northton, which encompasses two communities—one black and low income to very poor (with an extremely high infant mortality rate), the other racially mixed but becoming increasingly middle to upper income and white. When my wife Nancy and I moved to the Village in 1975, I had not planned to study the area; but this changed as I encountered the local community and discovered what seemed an ideal urban laboratory. I found the Village one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse areas of the city, where wealthy people and poor people, gays, hippies, students, Jews, WASPs, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, newly arrived Southeast Asians, Ethiopians, Zambians, Pakistanis, Iranians, and others lived together in relative comity. First I came to know the setting informally, simply experiencing its everyday life, making contacts almost by accident, and learning cultural rules from these experiences as any newcomer might. I became so intrigued by the neighborhood that I decided to study it formally. After acquiring research funding from the National Institute of Justice, I began to interview residents more formally and to write field notes.

Over the course of fourteen years, various issues emerged and subsided. I came to focus on the nature of street life and public culture—how this diverse group of people got it on or related to one another in public. What was the nature of local street life? What were the prescriptions and proscriptions of public behavior? For me these issues persisted, a logical outgrowth of my previous book A Place on the Corner (Anderson 1978). To gain an effective point of view, I spent many hours on the streets, talking and listening to the people of the neighborhood. To obtain further understanding I photographed the setting, videotaped street corner scenes, recorded interviews, and got to know all kinds of people, from small-time drug dealers to policemen, middle-class whites, and outspoken black community activists. I hung out with various residents and interviewed many of them extensively. I frequented neighborhood bars, laundromats, and carryouts and attended brunches, parties, and community gatherings. From 1985 through 1987 I was an active board member of the Village-Northton Educational Fund, a racially mixed group of community activists concerned with improving the quality of local public-school education. As my research focus became more refined, it also expanded to include issues important to those I was coming to know, for whom I would serve as a communication link to an outside audience.

Particularly during the 1980s, the problems of United States cities grew more and more insistent, if not intractable to many. With rising unemployment, brought on in part by increasing deindustrialization and the exodus of major corporations, the local black community suffered. The employment lives of its members are further complicated by continuing racial prejudice and discrimination, which often frustrate efforts to make effective adjustments to these changes and the emerging reality. Many who have difficulty finding work in the regular economy become ever poorer and may join the criminal underground, which promises them huge financial rewards, a certain degree of coolness, and happiness—that seems never to fully materialize. Yet in hot pursuit, many alienated young people commit themselves to this way of life, adopting its morality and norms and serving as role models for other youths. In this way the drug economy has become elaborated, and drug use has grown widespread among the local poor. As the black community of Northton has undergone social deterioration, the adjacent Village has experienced spillover crime and public incivility.

These developments had profound consequences for the more general area I was studying, requiring further refinement of my research plans from a limited ethnographic representation of the gentrifying neighborhood of the Village to a more inclusive study of the relationship between it and the adjacent black ghetto of Northton. I found that I could not truly understand the Village independent of Northton, and vice versa, particularly where the two communities met, and that realization posed insistent sociological and ethnographic questions. How do these diverse peoples get it on? How are their everyday public lives shaped and affected by the workings of local social institutions? What is the culture of the local public spaces? What is the public social order? Is there one? How are the social changes in the two communities affecting the residents of both?

From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, moving to the city and refurbishing inner-city areas seemed to young professionals like a brilliant idea, and a good investment to boot. They could afford an inner-city home that they could treat as a starter house, and the antique bargains held a special allure. Many were alienated from the life-styles of their suburban parents and sour on what the suburbs represented to them—social and cultural homogeneity—and they saw the city as a place where they might define their own lives in a different manner, close to their work and play. This group contributed to the process we know today as gentrification. Yet commitment to such projects had its costs and brought some uncertainty. Crime in the street and wariness about strangers have always been recognized as costs of living in the city, but today many feel such realities have become worse. With looming municipal budget deficits, higher local taxes, a decline in city services, and growing inner-city poverty, drug use, and crime, many gentrifiers have come to see their own fortunes as inextricably linked to those of the nearby ghetto. They realize that changes in the neighboring black community directly and indirectly affect not only their sense of well-being but also their property values. This acknowledgment has slowed down—but not yet reversed—the process of gentrification.

I mean my descriptions and analyses to convey my understanding of the way social relations are shaped by these changes—how individuals come to interpret and negotiate the public spaces in the community I have been studying. Much of what I learned came through informal interviews and direct ethnographic observation over an extended period, and it draws on my experiences in the Village-Northton and in nearby communities that share some of the area’s more prominent features. In a sense, over time I became my own informant. What emerges, then, is to a certain extent conceptual and abstract, but it reflects my sense of what is true.

I like to think of this study as a beginning. I intend to continue working from the data base collected here, producing occasional ethnographic essays. I hope others will follow me in trying to disentangle the various questions uncovered by this study. If that provocation is initiated, this book will have achieved its goal.

My work was supported by the United States Bureau of the Census, contract 50YABC-J-66015, by grant 80-NI-AX-0003 from the National Institute of Justice, and by a grant from the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health. The views, opinions, and findings contained in this book are my own and should not be construed as an official Bureau of the Census position, policy, or decision unless so designated by other official documentation.

Earlier versions of some of the material in this book have been published in Social Class and Democratic Leadership, ed. Harold J. Bershady (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), The New Urban Reality, ed. Paul Peterson (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985), Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 501 (January 1989): 59–78, and Society 21, 1 (December 1983) (© 1983 by Transaction Publishers; published by permission).

Over so many years of ethnographic research and writing, I have incurred numerous debts. Though I cannot acknowledge every one, I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues who have commented on portions of this work and helped me in all sorts of ways: Victor Lidz, Harold Bershady, Charles Bosk, Fred Block, Samuel Z. Klausner, Philip Rieff, Philip Morgan, Samuel Preston, William Labov, Carol Stillman, Alison Anderson, James Kurth, Aaron Porter, Luke Harris, Herman Wrice, Karen Kauffman-Knibbe, Gerald Jaynes, Janie Freeman, Lois Bye, Christine Szczepanowski, George Funderberg, Frank Furstenberg, Jr., Demie Kurz, Jack Katz, Rachel Bedard, Leonard Braitman, Kirk Wattles, Karen Keyes, Gerard Bye, Gerald D. Suttles, David Kairys, Roosevelt Dicks, Karen Faulkner, Ted Hershberg, Elizabeth Martin, Lee Rainwater, Renée Fox, the Reverend Fletcher J. Bryant, Arthur Paris, Robert Washington, Howard Arnold, Dell Hymes, Ira Harkavy, Martin Kilson, the late Erving Goffman, William J. Wilson, Michael B. Katz, Cara Crosby, Antonio McDaniels, Tom Gavin, Ralph Smith, Harold Haskins, and Howard S. Becker. Kirk Wattles compiled the tables in the Appendix. I owe enormous gratitude to the many people of the community who allowed me to enter their social world and shared their local knowledge with me, but who must remain anonymous. My wife Nancy and I, particularly at the beginning, did the fieldwork for this project jointly, and without her collaboration and constant support, this book would not have been written.

Introduction

Around the nation, urban residents feel intimidated by their streets, parks, and other public places, particularly after dark or when too many strangers are present. The national problem of safe streets has become especially acute in the city, particularly in underclass ghetto communities and adjacent areas undergoing transitions in race, class, and culture. The margins of the ghetto can be scenes of tension as they become gentrified and are slowly absorbed by a wider community made up primarily of middle- and upper-income people who for the most part are white.

Housing in these marginal areas is inexpensive but promises a high return on investment. Local prices ebb and flow somewhat arbitrarily, strongly influenced by an area’s hot or trendy reputation. The housing itself is generally old, even vintage, which for many is an important part of its attraction; and some people genuinely value the novelty and social diversity of such neighborhoods.

In cities in some parts of the country, a fluctuating movement advances house by house and block by block as sometimes unwitting middle- to upper-income newcomers struggle to reclaim neighborhoods from the poorer residents who have come to be identified with the inner city. Finding it practical to live close to work and play, many pay higher and higher rents for apartments, while others fashionably renovate spacious old houses built by the gentry of an earlier period. Some buy property to sell it again to the highest bidder; they are in effect speculating.

Such prime but often undiscovered city neighborhoods increase in financial value, particularly when the old dwellings are restored to something approaching their original elegance and are inhabited by well-to-do people. In time these newcomers, because of their professional status and (usually but not always) their white skin, are able to alter the earlier perception of the area as a marginal neighborhood. Making visible use of the neighborhood, they imbue it with a certain social distinction. They are then joined by others of their own social class and, through their individual purchases and collective residence, form a subculture of well-off urban people who for the time being may feel under siege by local crime and public incivility, but who eventually threaten to overwhelm their predecessors.

In establishing their presence, the newcomers make social, cultural, economic, and territorial claims that sometimes confuse and upset their neighbors. Some move in next door to relatively poor people; they may even actively seek a deal by canvassing door to door and offering a price below market value, attempting to buy residents out.

As real estate deals are consummated property values usually rise, and taxes follow suit. Home improvement loans suddenly become available, houses get refurbished, long-vacant apartment buildings are renovated, and the neighborhood is physically improved. City services are revitalized and local schools become more attentive to their charges, though the newcomers approach these institutions cautiously, if at all. An area perceived as on the verge of becoming a slum slowly turns around and in time is redefined as quaint, historic, and desirable. As prices rise the poorer residents, who tend to be renters, find themselves compelled to move—sometimes, if they are black, into the adjacent ghetto.

Typically this ghetto has also undergone social change in recent years. Older black residents remember better days when life was more orderly and civilized, when crime and drugs were almost unknown, when young people respected their elders, and when the men worked in good jobs and took care of their families. But now many of the older, decent people are gone. After working to pay for a home, many have died and left their property to poverty-stricken relatives who lack the money or the priorities to keep it up; people’s morale and the physical appearance of the area have declined, undermining the sense of community. The offspring of some have become upwardly mobile and have found the neighborhood incompatible with their developing status and sense of identity. As this group emerges socially and economically, its members tend to become steadily more distant from the ghetto community, eventually expressing this distance by literally moving away. Their departure has diminished an extremely important source of moral and social leadership within the black community. In pursuit of status and employment, and out of genuine concern for their own survival, the black middle class and those who aspire to it increasingly leave the ghetto behind.

In their wake, unemployment, crime, drug use, family disorganization, and antisocial behavior have become powerful social forces. With severely limited education and skills, younger and poorer blacks who are left behind have little chance to participate in the regular economy. The jobs that do exist for them are usually low paying or many miles away. Young blacks in particular are caught in an employment bind. To many young men, the underground economy of drugs and vice looks attractive.

The interpersonal trust and moral cohesion that once prevailed are undermined, and an atmosphere of distrust, alienation, and crime pervades the area, further disrupting its social organization. One of the community’s most important institutions has become a casualty of these changes—the relationship between old heads and young boys. Traditionally, the old head was a man of stable means who believed in hard work, family life, and the church. He was an aggressive agent of the wider society whose acknowledged role was to teach, support, encourage, and in effect socialize young men to meet their responsibilities regarding work, family, the law, and common decency. The young boy, usually a single man in his late teens or early twenties, had confidence in the old head’s ability to impart useful wisdom and practical advice about life. Often the old head acted as surrogate father to those who needed attention, care, and moral support.

But today, as meaningful employment has become increasingly scarce for young blacks and as crime and drugs have become a way of life for many, the old head is losing his prestige and authority. With the expansion of the drug culture and its opportunities for large sums of quick money, street-smart young boys are concluding that the old head’s lessons about life and the work ethic are no longer relevant. Today, too, many of those who in earlier times might have become old heads have left the ghetto with the middle class exodus or have simply disengaged.

A new role model is emerging and competing with the traditional old head for the hearts and minds of young boys. He is young, often a product of the street gang, and at best indifferent to the law and traditional values. This new old head is in many respects the antithesis of the traditional one. If he works at the low-paying jobs available to him, he does so grudgingly. More likely he makes ends meet, part time or full time, in the drug trade or some other area of the underground economy.

This emerging role model derides family values and has a string of women. He may feel little obligation toward them and the children he has fathered, but on mother’s day, when welfare checks come to these single mothers, he expects his share. On the local street corners, his self-aggrandizement consumes his whole being as he attempts to impress people through displays of material success like expensive clothes and fancy cars. Eagerly awaiting his message are the unemployed young black men, demoralized by what they see as a hopeless financial situation and inclined to emulate his style and values. For some who follow this model, great though often fleeting financial success may be in store. More often a trail of unfulfilled dreams, broken lives, jail, and even death awaits.

Female old heads have suffered a fate similar to that of the men. As poverty and hopelessness become pervasive and drugs proliferate, the community mother—once an omnipresent figure on the neighborhood porches and in local beauty shops and corner groceries—has also undergone a serious decline in numbers, prestige, and authority. Serving as important exterior role models, these women repeatedly and insistently told attentive boys and girls what was good for them, at times physically disciplining them. The few such women who remain active in the community are overwhelmed by a virtual proliferation of street kids—children almost totally without parental supervision, left to their own devices—and they lament the decline of the local community. The families of these youngsters often are casualties of the rampant drug culture. As family caretakers and role models disappear or decline in influence, and as unemployment and poverty become more persistent, the community, particularly its children, becomes vulnerable to a variety of social ills, including crime, drugs, family disorganization, generalized demoralization, and unemployment.

As the social life of the ghetto deteriorates, those living in middle-class areas nearby, newcomers and old-timers alike, feel the impact. Adjusting to the local neighborhood reality, many try to coexist and others flee. In addition to their interest in the status of the community and the rise in property values, most residents are very concerned about safety in public. As sometimes strange bedfellows (conservative and liberal, black and white, gays and straights), they join their diverse counterparts in local struggles to fight crime and otherwise preserve an ideal character for the neighborhood, forming town watches and shoring up local municipal codes that might discourage undesirables and encourage others more to their liking.

In their conversations with neighbors, both blacks and whites assume that the main offenders are young, black, and male. Some residents refer to them euphemistically as kids, while really thinking of them as ruthless street criminals who recognize no bounds. At night, when crack addicts and others roam the streets, breaking into cars, scavenging and stealing items of little cash value such as house plants, garden hoses, doormats, garbage cans, and toys, or simply harassing people, the residents become even more set in their perceptions, and they often adopt a siege mentality.

In these circumstances, intolerance surfaces in the residents’ relations with unknown blacks, particularly males. The teenagers who walk through the streets with their boom boxes seem even more obnoxious. Decent, well-intentioned white people wonder whether they are becoming racist as they catch themselves studying the anonymous black man, defensively seeing him first as a predator and seeking not to become his prey. Many worry about a figure lurking in the shadows, hiding in a doorway or behind a clump of bushes, ready to pounce on an unsuspecting victim. Law-abiding users of the streets, encountering a group of young black males, picture them as a wolf pack—out to hit (mug) anyone who looks vulnerable.

Accordingly, residents black and white, male and female, young and old become suspicious of unfamiliar black males they encounter, particularly as they venture warily into the streets at night, wondering if they will get home safely. In trying to be careful, some whites agonize about the way they keep anonymous black men at a safe physical and social distance. But growing numbers appear indifferent and comfortable about such distancing behavior, viewing it as simply one more urban survival tool. Still others, including newly arrived young Asian males, identify with the young blacks, adopting their clothing styles, speech, and public behavior, and thus lend fresh meaning to the term assimilation. Whereas some residents simply give up and flee, apologizing to the neighbors and friends they leave behind and bewailing inadequate police protection and the high crime rate, others tough it out, learning and refining a peculiar etiquette for surviving in public places, and often developing a profound street wisdom in the process.

This street wisdom is largely a state of mind, but it is demonstrated through a person’s comportment. It represents a perspective gained through public interaction, the give and take of street life. This perspective allows one to see through public situations, to anticipate what is about to happen based on cues and signals from those one encounters. In essence, a streetwise person is one who understands how to behave in uncertain public places.

One gains street wisdom through a long and sometimes arduous process that begins with a certain uptightness about the urban environment, with decisions based on stereotypes and simple rules of public etiquette. Given time and experience, the nervousness and fear give way to a recognition that street life involves situations that require selective and individualized responses—in this complicated environment, applying broad stereotypes simply will not do. After much practice, a person may operate with a certain aplomb, easily maneuvering through what were once viewed as tricky situations. The process is like learning to drive an automobile. The novice may hesitate and navigate uncertainly, but an experienced driver moves through complicated traffic patterns with little apparent thought. The same principles of driving are employed in both cases, but in the latter they are almost effortlessly applied.

Through public experience, a person becomes deeply familiar with elements of the neighborhood—drug dealers, policemen, the local grocer, poor people, homeless people, and middle class families and individuals making up the community’s social fabric. But perhaps most important, one gains some working conception of how these elements fit together.

In these circumstances the person neither takes the streets for granted nor recoils from them but becomes alive to dangerous situations, drawing on a developing repertoire of ruses and schemes for traveling the streets safely. In a word, the person learns street sense, how to behave in a sensible manner. In becoming something more than a passive reactant to public situations, the individual becomes proactive and to some degree the author of public actions.

1

The Village Setting

The Village-Northton area, a community within Eastern City, is a case study of an urban neighborhood facing the problems that accompany racial and class transition. Northton is predominantly black, residents range from low income to very poor. The Village is at present racially mixed, but it is becoming increasingly white and middle to upper income. The history of the general area is interwoven with the growth and expansion of Eastern City.¹

The Village was first settled in the 1800s by well-to-do people who could afford to commute across the Tyler River to the center of Eastern City or to maintain summer homes along the river’s west bank. The first landowners built large houses on their estates, but in time these holdings were cut up and additional homes were built there. Neighborhoods developed, with general stores, churches, and schools. During the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, many elaborate Victorian houses were built that remain to this day. Some inhabitants branched out farther west into an area that is still wealthy and suburban.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the land to the north and west of the Village was overtaken by industrial development. Small factories emerged, and homes were built nearby at a rapid pace. One of the most prominent of these working-class neighborhoods was Northton, just north of the Village. In many respects Northton was like a company town, with its small, sooty, close-packed dwellings. The social history of the area is evident in its architecture, the scale of the houses, the size of the lots, and the craftsmanship of the facades. Walking through, one gains the impression that much of Northton was built for a class that worked for, not alongside, the inhabitants of what is now the Village.

One version of community lore says that Northton was settled by newly arrived Irish and German immigrants who were employed in local industries or as servants in the large homes across Bellwether Street and near the town square that once served as a dropping-off point for farmers’ produce. In time Bellwether Street became a boundary that separated the working class from the wealthy. During the early twentieth century this boundary was often violated by middle-class Irish and German proprietors of local shops and businesses, who were eager to obtain Village property. The wealthy viewed the up-and-coming Northtonians as invaders, and with each inroad the social definition of the Village was altered.

The steam engine brought even greater change. Rails were laid along the bank of the Tyler River, not far from the Village. Trains left great billows of smoke and soot, and residents had trouble keeping their clothes and houses clean. This invasion of technology, along with the invading lower classes, encouraged the earlier inhabitants of the once pastoral setting to seek a new environment. They left the sooty Village to the middle-class Irish and Germans and to the remnants of their own group who would not move elsewhere.

The Irish and Germans were joined by blacks from the South, who were attracted to Northton during and after World War II when, in search of a better life, many migrated north and settled in similar white working-class areas, often despite strong physical resistance. The blacks eventually succeeded the Irish and Germans and claimed Northton; the whites fled to other parts of the western section of Eastern City and to working-class and middle-class suburbs.

In time the blacks threatened the border areas of the Village, where slumlords found they could make good money by renting them their subdivided mansions and townhouses. The whites of the Village, some of whom by now were refugees from Northton, offered waning resistance. They reluctantly accepted pockets of black settlement within the Village, often on the least desirable blocks. The immediate result was distinct white working-class and middle-class areas coexisting, not always peacefully, with growing enclaves of blacks who had recently migrated from the ghetto of Northton. Moreover, Bellwether Street increasingly became a geographic and social boundary separating races as well as classes; other informal boundaries developed on the edges of the white community. These boundaries were defended, sometimes violently, by white gangs. As one black resident of Northton who remembers the forties and fifties declared:

Yeah, I can remember the time when you had to have a pretty good pair of sneakers [for running] if you wanted to get through the Village. The white [Irish] boys would get you for crossing the line.

What had once separated the lace-curtain Irish from the Irish working class now separated blacks from whites, though the racial boundaries were less permeable than the class boundaries had been.

During this period, the Village was undergoing great changes in density and appearance. As financial depressions took their toll, houses were sold to be subdivided and rented out. The Village went from a neighborhood of upper-income homeowners to one inhabited primarily by working-class and middle-class renters. Landlords bent on earning quick profits from makeshift apartments ruined a good number of spacious homes. Ceilings were dropped, rooms were divided, and separate stairs and entrances were added. A living space that had once accommodated one family could now hold two or three, ensuring a nice profit for the landlord. But though the stone mansions and townhouses were gradually turned into multiple-family dwellings, lot sizes remained the same. The towering sycamores still spread a lush canopy over the brick walks. These factors preserved the area’s potential to be restored to something approaching its former glory.

The Liberal Era

During the 1950s, when the Korean War was ending and civil rights was becoming a major political issue, a group of liberal and civic-minded Quakers established a cooperative in one of the grand old houses of the Village. They called themselves the Village Friends, and they passionately supported pacifism, racial integration, and economic egalitarianism. The Village Friends invited blacks and others to live in their communal dwellings. They condoned biracial and interethnic marriages among their members. The group even began buying dilapidated buildings, refurbishing them, and renting them out to the right kind of people, including university students of color and others who had difficulty finding decent housing in the Village or nearby. It was the time of the Beat generation, and the Village Friends developed their own version of Bohemian values, modified to emphasize their commitment to racial equality and other liberal goals. Because they were especially concerned with brotherhood and equality between the races, their most immediate mission was to develop an integrated and egalitarian community—issues that deeply concern their successors to this day.

Some of their neighbors, particularly the conservative middle-class Irish and German Villagers, looked on the Friends with suspicion, if not outrage, calling them communists and nigger lovers. One middle-aged white woman who was involved in this movement and remembers the 1950s in the Village said:

The way I saw it happening was the Village Civic Association was so racist and so strong that they talked people into cutting their houses up into apartments rather than selling them because there was no white market for houses at that point. The Irish population was fleeing, and there was no incoming white population. Or things would happen like they would sell the houses to their plumber or carpenter, and he would cut them up. Most of the conversions were just terrible. They were done by mechanics, not by architects. And usually they were people who did work in the neighborhood. And they rented those houses. Probably there was still a white market for renting, and they were renting to whites until the buildings got so run down that they couldn’t rent to whites. Then they would rent them to blacks, and of course the blacks were poor. And then came the professional group that was mostly white. Oh, we [the Village Development Association] tried so hard to get black professionals to move into [the Village]. But they wouldn’t be caught dead there, ha-ha. It just was not a place where they wanted to live, not that there were that many black professionals to begin with. It just didn’t work. Our group grew from Friends Cooperative Houses, and the racist group was called the Village Civic Association, and VDA was formed out of the need for Friendship Co-op to survive. It was a development company that was supported from investments by residents. The board said we needed a civic effort. And they really inspired a new civic organization, Village Neighbors. At that time it was decided not to infiltrate the Civic Association and to take it over but to start a new group, because the Civic Association had such a bad reputation in the black neighborhoods surrounding the area. Apparently, in the thirties they had sound trucks on the streets, admonishing people not to sell to Negroes and not to rent to Negroes. They were infamous in the black community. So we decided that to take over the Civic Association would be to take over an organization with such a negative image that it wouldn’t be worth our while, that we’d better start a new organization. So we did, and the racist Village Civic Association just went down the drain. Our group, the Village Development Association, bought at least forty-three properties. We started out on a quota basis, renting and selling to all kinds of people.

Despite the criticism of the conservative Irish and German residents, the Friends adhered to their stated goals: To keep the Village from becoming a land speculator’s paradise and to make the Village the kind of place where all different kinds of people can live. Meanwhile, the Bellwether Street boundary was showing signs of weakness. Numbers of poor blacks were concentrated on the periphery of the Village. Slumlords continued to buy run-down buildings, making a minimum of cosmetic repairs and renting them at exorbitant rates to the poorest class of blacks from Northton and other parts of the city. The middle-class Irish and Germans, as well as the Village Friends and some of the blacks themselves, could rally together against this trend, for none wanted the wrong kind of blacks for neighbors. As the Friends competed with other whites for control over Village resources, the hidden restrictions in their own conception of the kind of blacks who were to be tolerated became evident. They were most hospitable to educated, decent blacks who would contribute to neighborhood stability, thus creating an ambiance of racial integration and