Norvelt: Worker's Haven and Missed Opportunity

Norvelt is a New Deal subsistence homestead community in western Pennsylvania established to provide secure and comfortable homes, access to healthy food, and an affirming cooperative community to unemployed miners and their families. It succeeded in these aims, but its virtual exclusion of African American residents affirmed the racial prejudice and discrimination that permeated much of the New Deal. Creating an integrated community would have met with great resistance from white residents, who voted to exclude African American applicants, and from powerful regional voices already suspicious of what they considered to be a socialist experiment. Accommodating racial prejudice perpetuated injustices that denied African Americans access to opportunities available to whites.