I investigated the Fresh Air Fund’s fraught racial history, and they didn’t make it easy
A University of Montana professor finds the organization uncooperative
For nearly 150 years, the Fresh Air Fund has extolled the virtues of life’s simple, natural pleasures, running summer camps for underprivileged, urban-dwelling kids. But their mission has proven far from simple.
I set out to write a story about race and the Fresh Air rural hosting movement. The Fresh Air Fund tried to block me from telling that story.
I think I know why.
In 2008, I contacted Jenny Morgenthau, the executive director of the Fresh Air Fund, the country’s oldest rural and suburban hosting program. I had become interested through research for my previous book, Daily Demonstrators: The Civil Rights Movement in Mennonite Homes and Sanctuaries, in how separatist religious communities engaged with the civil rights movement. I became fascinated with the intimate, interracial exchanges taking place through rural summer hosting movements and realized that there was a much bigger story than that of Mennonites alone. I soon discovered that, since 1877, the Fund and its many imitators had brought urban children to the country for one- to two-week summer vacations in camps and homes. Originating in New York City during the Gilded Age, the movement spread throughout the Northeast and Midwest during the Progressive Era.
Conceived by its founder, a rural Presbyterian minister by the name of Willard Parsons, as a means to rejuvenate sickly city children through exposure to country air and wholesome food, by the onset of World War I the movement focused on indoctrinating children of recent European immigrants into American and middle-class values. By the middle of the 1950s as the Great Migration of African Americans to the North and West changed this country’s urban centers, the Fresh Air Movement had come to focus on race relations. As upwards of sixteen thousand children travelled each summer to the country during the 1960s, the vast majority of them came from African-Americana and Latinx homes. By 1962 well over a million children had participated in the program.
It was race, however, that tripped up my conversation with Director Morgenthau.
I had asked for access to their record room. I knew that the Fresh Air Fund modeled and other groups copied. I wanted to study the original source.
After a friendly start, the mood of our phone conversation shifted abruptly when she realized I was writing about race. She declared, “We have never been about race. You cannot have access to our record room.”
I didn’t know how to reply. I already knew that in 1883 black community leaders had criticized the Fund for not serving African-American children. I was aware that by 1936 the Fund had opened their camps to African Americans, allowed hosts to select the race of their guests from the 1950s through the early 1970s, and declared in 1967 that the most important result of their home-hosting program was the reduction of “baseless racial and class stereotypes.”
Over the course of the next seven years, I renewed my request. I even travelled from Montana to New York City, received a warm welcome from a member of the Fund’s publicity team, but was again denied access to their record room, this time by decision of their board. It did not matter that another researcher who focused on the environment in the Fund’s early years did receive access after I was denied.
I was able to gain most of what I needed by reviewing records held at the Library of Congress, visiting dozens of archives sprinkled across the country, conducting more than fifty oral histories, and reading thousands of regional newspapers.
Yet I often wondered why Director Morgenthau blocked my research. It was already a matter of public record that the organization intensified their host vetting process after a series of sexual abuse lawsuits in the early 1980s. And, it was not like I would be revealing a significant shift in their racial demographics. Their publicity materials continued to feature white families hosting children of color. Neither had I asked to look at personnel files or other confidential records.
I may never know all her reasons. She is no longer the director of the organization and, during a phone conference just before my book came out, the new director explained that she knew nothing of this decision.
I do, however, have a guess. But it is only a guess. And I must be clear that what I am about to write is nothing but speculation. Nonetheless, my hypothesis is consistent with more than a decade of research.
I think the Fresh Air Fund board and staff were frightened I would discover that the public story they have told about race relations does not match the historical record.
And they had reason to be scared.
In my research, I found evidence of black and brown children facing down racial epithets from their hosts, encountering both physical and sexual abuse, experiencing the repeated trauma of displacement, feeling like enslaved Africans on display as they, tagged and trotted out, waited to be paired with their hosts. One Fresh Air child had to listen to his host exclaim at the pick-up point, “You didn’t tell us this kid was gonna be no nigger.” Looking back on her experience as a child, a former Fresh Air child exclaimed, “It was two weeks of being afraid, two weeks of people staring at us, poking at us, asking us ludicrous questions.” Still another could not get her host mother to touch her hair.
I also found evidence of an African-American critic calling for “stale air” programs in which white suburban kids could be bused to the inner city. I read of a columnist who lambasted Fresh Air programs for giving black and brown children a week’s worth of access to suburban neighborhoods “which lock them out the other 51 weeks of the year.”
Of course, the children fought back, challenged their hosts’ racist stereotypes, and maintained an active rumor network through which they informed each other of the best ways to survive while on a Fresh Air trip. But their actions could go only so far in the midst of the adults’ positions of authority, financial resources, and institutional power.
Rather than a narrative of sweet, innocent contact between brown and black children and their white hosts, a complex pattern of one-way, tightly controlled, age-capped, paternalistic hosting ventures emerged.
This was the story that the Fresh Air Fund — I think — tried to hide.
And it appears they are continuing to try to hide it. I invited the Fund’s new director to appear with me in public so that we could have a conversation. I was planning to give several lectures in New York and thought it would benefit us both to hold such a dialogue. My publishers even sent advanced copies of the book to their staff.
The new director did not accept my offer.
To a degree, I understand their dilemma. They have a $129 million dollar endowment. The New York Times gives them free publicity every year. Their board includes luminaries like pop star Mariah Carey, Estée Lauder company chairman William P. Lauder, investment financier John N. Irwin III, and many others. They have an image to protect.
And their formula of one-way, carefully managed, short-term rural hosting has been incredibly long-lasting. Families continue to host city children, many of them asserting that the programs benefit the children by giving them a taste of country life. Many of the children find the prospect of a summer vacation away from home enticing; their parents, while often cautious and careful, have historically valued the resources their children gain by travelling outside the city. Yet, even after 1979 where I end my book, few have raised public criticism about what the actual, long-term effects of such sojourns might be.
The narrative I have written about the sacred cow of the Fresh Air movement challenges that image. But it also offers new insight into the way racial inequity has unfolded and been maintained in the twentieth century.
It remains to be seen whether the story that I tell will make a difference in how the Fresh Air Fund tells theirs.
Tobin Miller Shearer is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Montana where he also directs the African-American Studies Program. His most recent book is Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America (Cornell University Press, 2017).
