Tobin Miller Shearer

Two Weeks Every Summer (eBook, ePUB)

Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Two Weeks Every Summer, which is based on extensive oral history interviews with former guests, hosts, and administrators in Fresh Air programs, opens a new chapter in the history of race in the United States by showing how the actions of hundreds of thousands of rural and suburban residents who hosted children from the city perpetuated racial inequity rather than overturned it. Since 1877 and to this day, Fresh Air programs from Maine to Montana have brought inner-city children to rural and suburban homes for two-week summer vacations. Tobin Miller Shearer brings to the forefront of his history of the Fresh Air program the voices of the children themselves through letters that they wrote, pictures that they took, and their testimonials. Shearer offers a careful social and cultural history of the Fresh Air programs, giving readers a good sense of the summer experiences for both hosts and the visiting children. By covering the racially transformative years between 1939 and 1979, Shearer shows how the rhetoric of innocence employed by Fresh Air boosters largely served the interests of religiously minded white hosts and did little to offer more than a vacation for African American and Latino urban youth. In what could have been a new arena for the civil rights movement, white adults often overpowered the courageous actions of children of color. By giving white suburbanites and rural residents a safe race relations project that did not require adjustments to their investment portfolios, real estate holdings, or political affiliations, the programs perpetuated an economic order that marginalized African Americans and Latinos by suggesting that solutions to poverty lay in one-on-one acts of charity.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cornell University Press
• Seitenzahl: 264
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. April 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781501708459
• Artikelnr.: 48788918

Autorenporträt

Tobin Miller Shearer is Associate Professor of History and Director of African American Studies at the University of Montana. He is the author of Daily Demonstrators: The Civil Rights Movement in Mennonite Homes and Sanctuaries and Enter the River: Healing Steps from White Privilege to Racial Reconciliation and coauthor of Set Free: A Journey toward Solidarity against Racism.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: A Reckoning of Childhood
Race
and Neoliberalism1. Knowledge
Girl
Nature: Fresh Air Tensions prior to World War II2. Church
Concrete
Pond: How Innocence Got Disrupted3. Grass
Color
Sass: How the Children Shaped Fresh Air4. Sex
Seven
Sick: How Adults Kept the Children in Check5. Milk
Money
Power: How Fresh Air Sold Its Programs6. Greeting
Gone
Good: Racialized Reunion and Rejection in Fresh AirEpilogue: Changing an Innocence Formula