Living as Equals: How Three White Communities Struggled to Make Interracial Connections During the Civil Rights Era

Chapter 1. Camping for Democracy

25 1 Camping for Democracy Brotherhood Camps, 1957–1967 This [camp] showed that brotherhood isn’t just a word, but rather a way of life. It proves that something can be done. —Brotherhood camper, 1960 In the summer of 1959, a bright, almost fifteen-year-old blond rode from Long Island into Manhattan. Her parents dropped her at a rank of buses waiting to transport a couple hundred of the region’s teenagers to a rural campsite. An academic leader and school newspaper editor, Gail Kern had volunteered to attend a week-long National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) camp focused on the issues of prejudice and democracy. She calculated that this “citizenship-type activity” would contribute to her “standing out” at school.1 Gail’s family conceived itself as not racist. Her German-Irish Catholic American father and Swedish Lutheran American mother had both expressed disapproval of racial discrimination, even though they lived in a segregated town. By the end of her week at camp, Gail had become aware of unspoken constraints, especially the objections that she believed her parents would have to her dating a black boy. In the afternoon discussion groups assigned to campers to argue through the morning lectures, she met an “African American boy from Brooklyn whom [she became] really fond of.” She remembers that when the campers bussed back into New York City and said their good-byes in front of their waiting parents, I hugged and kissed [him]. I don’t know whether that was the first time we had kissed or the only time we had kissed. My memory is I would have felt perfectly comfortable walking around that camp, 26 Living as Equals may well have done, holding hands with him—out of friendship, a sense of real closeness. Filled with a sense of companionship, this dutiful eldest daughter could ignore her parents’ presumed disapproval as they witnessed what she had learned at camp. But she knew that the social intimacy between a white girl and a black boy that had been comfortable and unremarkable in the camp’s realm could become a spectacle in the everyday outside world. In recounting her teenage experiences, Gail expressed a distinction between two meanings of whiteness available to well-intentioned white Americans during the 1950s. The good-citizen form of whiteness required displays of fair-mindedness and disapproval of race prejudice—all consistent with living in a segregated neighborhood. But the social association model that Gail had lived at camp asked for actual engagement with other races and opened possibilities of disrupting presumptions of natural white authority. The NCCJ camps that Gail and thousands of other teens would attend during the 1950s and 1960s came out of citizenship traditions, but they created learning spaces that authorized young people to try out unprecedented behaviors not generally allowed in their families, schools, and neighborhoods. Regional offices of the NCCJ chose whether to make human relations camps part of the local program. From the early 1950s on, starting in Los Angeles, regional directors authorized one-week, residential sessions of camps intended to teach a diverse group of young people how to live in more democratic ways, accepting heterogeneity as an essential component of democracy. Depending on the camp director’s vision, the camps recruited between 125 and 300 students for each session, usually at the start and the end of the summer school break when NCCJ could rent facilities from church, community, or college groups. Over the period covered by this chapter, between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, about 5,000 young people attended Los Angeles region camps; about 4,000 went to New York City camps; about 1,500 attended the Newark, New Jersey, camps; and a few thousand more joined NCCJ discussion groups at their high schools. Although the overall numbers were small, the emphasis on recruiting school leaders, working with sympathetic teachers and organizations, and offering a practical response to the cultural vision of inclusive democracy made the NCCJ camps, and others organized by church and community groups, visible experiments in the willingness of some white Americans to replace racial dominance with friendship. Camping for Democracy 27 Cultural Pluralism in Practice The camps emerged within a prevalent, post–World War II liberal ideal of cultural pluralism, which promised that the United States would never fall into the disastrous racism so recently defeated in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Moreover...