As Long As They Don't Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (review)

As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door is the first comprehensive history of racial discrimination in 20th century U.S. housing and the struggle to overcome it since Charles Abrams’ classic, Forbidden Neighbors (1955).¹ In addition to its focus on an important topic, the book is lucidly written and impressively researched. It presents a clear and coherent argument that applies historical analysis to a significant contemporary issue. For these reasons, the book is likely to become a standard on many undergraduate and graduate reading lists. Nonetheless, the book also exhibits several interpretive shortcomings that diminish an otherwise notable achievement.

Among the book’s strengths is the author’s narrative skill. In chapters covering the late 19th century through the 1960s (with a brief afterward on the period since), Meyer spins gripping tales of white efforts to create and maintain racially segregated neighborhoods and African American efforts to transcend imposed boundaries. Along the way, Meyer recounts many stories that are familiar to students of the subject, such as the Ossian Sweet murder trial, the Sojourner Truth riot, and the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, but he also provides new details to illuminate less celebrated incidents such as the racist bombing campaign that gripped Dallas in 1940, and the heroism of the St. Boniface “commandos” of Milwaukee who mounted a campaign of non-violent direct action against housing discrimination in that city in 1967.

Beyond telling a good story, Meyer illustrates his narrative with a mountain of primary evidence. Among his most important accomplishments is to bring to light the riches of the national and branch papers of the NAACP. From these files, Meyer draws eyewitness reports of neighborhood terrorism against African Americans and behind-the-scenes evidence of the legal, political, and propagandistic efforts of African Americans and a handful of whites to achieve “democracy in housing.” Meyer also extracts evidence from federal housing records, congressional hearings, FBI and Department of Justice files, real estate journals, and court decisions, as well as the black press and public and private archives in a handful of cities. To call Meyer’s research efforts impressive would sell him short by a wide margin.

For all its strengths, the book runs aground on its main argument. In Meyer’s view, racial conflict over residential space was pervasive in the 20th century United States. So far so good. Parting company with social scientists such as Abrams or Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, who, he argues, emphasize the institutional bases for expanding racial segregation in the 20th century, Meyer interprets the persistence of segregation and discrimination in housing as the result of enduring racism “deep in the nation’s culture” (2) and the “popular unwillingness on the part of whites to have African Americans living in their midst” (7).² In his words, “neither government nor realty, lending, and construction interests forged racial policies out of thin air” (7). “Legislation and public policy did not create [racial prejudice], and they alone cannot rectify it” (2). Although Meyer is right to question interpretations of housing discrimination and racial segregation that rely too much on top-down or institutional explanations, his reliance on grassroots racism as the “original” (5) and enduring cause of racial segregation is equally simplistic. By adopting a view of racism as a kind of cultural constant, Meyer accords a trans-historical status to attitudes and ideas that clearly developed in time and in relationship to a range of legal, political, economic, social and spatial practices. Even if he is right that institutions at any particular moment often “reflected a popular unwillingness” among whites to live in integrated neighborhoods, it is abundantly clear that laws, bureaucratic structures, expressions of political and economic power, and the historical and spatial legacies of earlier racism shaped subsequent thought and behavior among both whites and African Americans. As...