As Long As They Don T Move Next Door

"The first full-length national history of American race relations examined through the lens of housing discrimination."--Jacket.

Raised with twelve brothers in a part of the segregated South that provided no school for African American children, Sylvia Bell White went North as a teenager, dreaming of a nursing career, but in Milwaukee she and her brothers found only racial discrimination, and she had to persevere through racial rebuffs to find work. When a Milwaukee police officer killed her younger brother in 1958, the Bell family suspected a racial murder but could do nothing to prove it?until twenty years later, when one of the officers involved in the incident unexpectedly came forward. Sylvia was the driving force behind the family's four-year quest for justice through a civil rights lawsuit.

This study attempts to illuminate the vitality of religious identities in America during the nineteen-forties, ninteen-fifties, and early nineteen-sixties. It also explores the discourse that surrounded the integration of these groups. During the two decades following the war, Protestants, Catolics, and Jews developed a language of social acceptance that was different from all its predecessors.