Making Good Neighbors

Abigail Perkiss tells the remarkable story of West Mount Airy, drawing on archival research and her oral history interviews with residents of this purposefully integrated Philadelphia neighborhood.

Abigail Perkiss is Assistant Professor of History at Kean University and lives in West Mount Airy.

Having grown up in the neighborhood, Perkiss has both an instinctive sympathy for the residents of the neighborhood and a thorough understanding of the cultural, economic and demographic challenges facing the city. Her study reflects this familiarity while remaining analytically rigorous. As a bonus, she writes beautifully. The result is a book that sheds much light on what the residents of West Mount Airy meant when they talked about integration, how they strove to integrate their neighborhood and how they struggled to address the challenges to that accomplishment.

Timothy J. Lombardo:

By contextualizing Perkiss's analysis within a broader postwar urban history, Making Good Neighbors offers striking breadth for a relatively short book. Perkiss offers a valuable counternarrative to the growing scholarship on civil rights and de facto segregation in the urban North.

Phyllis Palmer, The George Washington University, author of Living as Equals: How Three White Communities Struggled to Make Interracial Connections during the Civil Rights Era:

In Making Good Neighbors, Abigail Perkiss describes the creation of an interracial urban neighborhood during the civil rights, racial power, and post–civil rights eras. The basic history of West Mount Airy is known to many people across the United States and particularly in the Philadelphia region. What most people do not know, and what Perkiss presents here in rich detail, are the nuances and knotty complications that characterized the inception and development of an intentionally integrated neighborhood. In clear and often forceful prose, she offers a highly readable study of an important neighborhood in an important city.

James Wolfinger, DePaul University, author of Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love:

Abigail Perkiss's writing is fluid and engaging, and Making Good Neighbors is gripping. Perkiss uses research in archives and the secondary literature to strong effect and has written a book that will be of interest in African American and urban history.