What do you think?
Rate this book
Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America
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.
263 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 11, 2017
1 person is currently reading
16 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 25, 2024
My family hosted 4 different Friendly Town children in the 1960s from Cleveland when I was growing up. So I was glad to find this book, and that someone had looked into this program. Those experiences had a deeply formative impact on me. The suburb we lived in, Brecksville, was an absolutely segregated town. I don't know about the legal situation, but we had one Jewish family, and that was the extent of our diversity. So Friendly Town was my first and only introduction to black folks in person growing up. Bless my mother for somehow finding this program and involving us. She was a nurse, and I believe she began by helping with medical screening of visiting children. I believe we were an ideal host family--we had 4 children, went to church, and lived in the woods. We had a different child each summer--one for each of us siblings--and at least one repeat visitor.
I was surprised to learn about the magnitude of the programs. Friendly Town was just a small part of a larger "Fresh Air" movement that lasted over a century, but from the 40s to the 70s in particular, and it covered many cities and towns mostly in the Northwest and Midwest.
All of that said, this was a troubling book. It offers a very skeptical account of the programs. The first thing to say is that it is wholly anecdotal. The author has done an incredible job researching information based on ad's, articles, interviews, etc. from contemporary sources and occasionally in retrospect. On pp. 160-1 the author mentions the "body of evidence that supports this study" as "more than 1500 newspaper articles" and "over 5000 pages" of material from sponsoring agencies. That is impressive and I'm glad someone did it. The author's accounts in the book of experiences are supported by endless endnotes (amounting to 55 pages). But this is what is called qualitative research and as such it is supported anecdotally. That means it is left to the author to offer illustrations and conclusions based on the author's judgement of what is important. I'm afraid that left me with the feeling that there was a lot of cherry-picking going on. By the end of the book it is unclear whether the author thought these programs were even worth doing. He seems mainly interested in showing the downside, or at least giving equal time to any downsides, of the program. So we hear a lot about imbalance of racial power dynamics, devaluation of black experience, devaluation of urban experience, white adult abuse, rural injuries, teenage disappointment, sexual concerns, overvalued innocence, etc. All these phenomena are supported by well-documented anecdotes. But one wonders what the big picture was. It feels like the author was looking for evidence to present a cynical view of the programs. For example, he belittles the idea that these visits could solve the racial problems of the US. But did anyone actually think that it could? We certainly did not. While it was probably impossible to do an impartial quantitative study of any of these issues, that is really what is needed to provide any large-scale conclusions about the programs. Otherwise it is easy to think of an angle and then offer evidence for it. If the author's point is just that these angles shouldn't be ignored, then I suppose that is right. But there seemed to be something more.
The book primarily attended to the experiences of visiting children and the experiences of host parents. Apart from their appearance in a few photos, I don't recall hearing anything about the children of host families (which is what I was). My experiences with our visiting children, especially Warren, who was my age, taught/helped me to be comfortable with black people. That meant a lot to me. Of course, you might say I "used" Warren for my own purposes, but I hope it helped him become comfortable with white folks. Of course, all this happened on MY terms, whereas his experience was also on my terms. That is a fair concern, and it would have been good to have a reverse exchange, where I visited his family, but that wasn't on offer. It should have been. And I don't know if I would have taken advantage of it. MANY years later (30 some), I joined a black church. I finally realized the importance of engaging black folks on THEIR terms, not mine. Admittedly I wasn't vulnerable in the same way Warren was, but it was an approximation. Anyway, the book gave zero attention to what benefits the host children might have gotten from the program. And apart from whatever many downsides there must have been to visiting children, there was little attention to what they might have gotten in the long run. There was a lot of attention to silly advertising about how they got to romp barefooted in green grass and breathe clean air. But there were only a few anecdotes about how the program gave visiting children a different view of the world, and how that might have had a positive effect on them. As it turned out Warren became an architect. I didn't keep in touch with him after our teen years, so I don't know if his visits meant anything to him in the long run, but I wonder. The main criticism I recall from that time was that you let inner-city kids out of the trash can for 2 weeks and then put them back. I don't know what to say about that. I recall Warren calling me shortly before a planned repeat visit to say that he did not think it was safe for us to come pick him up because there were riots in his (Glenville) neighborhood. So this was 1968: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenvil... . Certainly the visits didn't fix anything. But they were a personal, hands-on experience. Not just writing a check or liking a meme. Somehow I felt the book ignored or undervalued the upside of these programs.
Although the Friendly Town and Fresh Air programs lost their significance starting in the '80s. I was part of another similar program that ran from the '70's into the '90s. Good News Partners, in Chicago, https://www.goodnewspartners.org/ provides a variety of services to a poor neighborhood, including housing, employment and youth activities. They offered trips for their youth to a rural camp in Tennessee, and then a further trip to my current town, Blacksburg VA, for a short stay with white folks. This was somewhat different from the Fresh Air programs because it originated from an inner-city ministry, and visiting kids were hosted in pairs or triplets and not only singlely. Anyway, I was on both sides of this--coming with visiting kids, and then later also hosting kids. One had a particularly sad story. Patrick saw this visit as a way to escape a gang he was involved with. He connected with an older woman in Blacksburg who eventually adopted him so he could move away from Chicago and start over. It worked for about a year, until Patrick started getting involved in drugs and dealing drugs here. He eventually opted to return to Chicago and the gang, and was later convicted for a gang murder, and as far as I know he is serving a life sentence. A view and even experience of another way of life is not always salutary even if it it becomes an actual option. But isn't it better than nothing? Patrick opted to return to the "trash can." But I suppose he knew what he was doing. He reminded me of: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Update 2024: Patrick has been paroled, has gotten married, and recently came back to Blacksburg for a brief visit with the woman who adopted him.
I was surprised to learn about the magnitude of the programs. Friendly Town was just a small part of a larger "Fresh Air" movement that lasted over a century, but from the 40s to the 70s in particular, and it covered many cities and towns mostly in the Northwest and Midwest.
All of that said, this was a troubling book. It offers a very skeptical account of the programs. The first thing to say is that it is wholly anecdotal. The author has done an incredible job researching information based on ad's, articles, interviews, etc. from contemporary sources and occasionally in retrospect. On pp. 160-1 the author mentions the "body of evidence that supports this study" as "more than 1500 newspaper articles" and "over 5000 pages" of material from sponsoring agencies. That is impressive and I'm glad someone did it. The author's accounts in the book of experiences are supported by endless endnotes (amounting to 55 pages). But this is what is called qualitative research and as such it is supported anecdotally. That means it is left to the author to offer illustrations and conclusions based on the author's judgement of what is important. I'm afraid that left me with the feeling that there was a lot of cherry-picking going on. By the end of the book it is unclear whether the author thought these programs were even worth doing. He seems mainly interested in showing the downside, or at least giving equal time to any downsides, of the program. So we hear a lot about imbalance of racial power dynamics, devaluation of black experience, devaluation of urban experience, white adult abuse, rural injuries, teenage disappointment, sexual concerns, overvalued innocence, etc. All these phenomena are supported by well-documented anecdotes. But one wonders what the big picture was. It feels like the author was looking for evidence to present a cynical view of the programs. For example, he belittles the idea that these visits could solve the racial problems of the US. But did anyone actually think that it could? We certainly did not. While it was probably impossible to do an impartial quantitative study of any of these issues, that is really what is needed to provide any large-scale conclusions about the programs. Otherwise it is easy to think of an angle and then offer evidence for it. If the author's point is just that these angles shouldn't be ignored, then I suppose that is right. But there seemed to be something more.
The book primarily attended to the experiences of visiting children and the experiences of host parents. Apart from their appearance in a few photos, I don't recall hearing anything about the children of host families (which is what I was). My experiences with our visiting children, especially Warren, who was my age, taught/helped me to be comfortable with black people. That meant a lot to me. Of course, you might say I "used" Warren for my own purposes, but I hope it helped him become comfortable with white folks. Of course, all this happened on MY terms, whereas his experience was also on my terms. That is a fair concern, and it would have been good to have a reverse exchange, where I visited his family, but that wasn't on offer. It should have been. And I don't know if I would have taken advantage of it. MANY years later (30 some), I joined a black church. I finally realized the importance of engaging black folks on THEIR terms, not mine. Admittedly I wasn't vulnerable in the same way Warren was, but it was an approximation. Anyway, the book gave zero attention to what benefits the host children might have gotten from the program. And apart from whatever many downsides there must have been to visiting children, there was little attention to what they might have gotten in the long run. There was a lot of attention to silly advertising about how they got to romp barefooted in green grass and breathe clean air. But there were only a few anecdotes about how the program gave visiting children a different view of the world, and how that might have had a positive effect on them. As it turned out Warren became an architect. I didn't keep in touch with him after our teen years, so I don't know if his visits meant anything to him in the long run, but I wonder. The main criticism I recall from that time was that you let inner-city kids out of the trash can for 2 weeks and then put them back. I don't know what to say about that. I recall Warren calling me shortly before a planned repeat visit to say that he did not think it was safe for us to come pick him up because there were riots in his (Glenville) neighborhood. So this was 1968: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenvil... . Certainly the visits didn't fix anything. But they were a personal, hands-on experience. Not just writing a check or liking a meme. Somehow I felt the book ignored or undervalued the upside of these programs.
Although the Friendly Town and Fresh Air programs lost their significance starting in the '80s. I was part of another similar program that ran from the '70's into the '90s. Good News Partners, in Chicago, https://www.goodnewspartners.org/ provides a variety of services to a poor neighborhood, including housing, employment and youth activities. They offered trips for their youth to a rural camp in Tennessee, and then a further trip to my current town, Blacksburg VA, for a short stay with white folks. This was somewhat different from the Fresh Air programs because it originated from an inner-city ministry, and visiting kids were hosted in pairs or triplets and not only singlely. Anyway, I was on both sides of this--coming with visiting kids, and then later also hosting kids. One had a particularly sad story. Patrick saw this visit as a way to escape a gang he was involved with. He connected with an older woman in Blacksburg who eventually adopted him so he could move away from Chicago and start over. It worked for about a year, until Patrick started getting involved in drugs and dealing drugs here. He eventually opted to return to Chicago and the gang, and was later convicted for a gang murder, and as far as I know he is serving a life sentence. A view and even experience of another way of life is not always salutary even if it it becomes an actual option. But isn't it better than nothing? Patrick opted to return to the "trash can." But I suppose he knew what he was doing. He reminded me of: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
Update 2024: Patrick has been paroled, has gotten married, and recently came back to Blacksburg for a brief visit with the woman who adopted him.
September 27, 2020
I feel like I learned a lot—but also felt he was extremely harsh on programs that many participants thought they were doing a good thing. I didn’t realize how long the various fresh air programs were in existence and still continue today.
September 25, 2018
I remember hearing about these programs when I was growing up, but never really gave them any thought until I started college.I really can't believe that my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents generation actually thought they were doing something so noble and uplifting! It makes me laugh at how pathetic it was, and how little things have changed over my life time. In college I learned more about these programs, settlement houses. Started in the 1800's, the founders and workers at these establishments, mostly middle and upper class women, actually thought that poor immigrants problems were that they couldn't fit a ten course meal or do fine needle work! Sometimes white culture just cracks me up, if it wasn't so sad. Sesame Street was developed to help inner city children catch up to their suburban counterparts. Only, most of the inner city children didn't have tv's and Sesame Street just widened the divide. Not a real well thought out program, but white kids loved it! Well written and insightful book! Kudos Toby Miller Shearer!
I received a Kindle ARC from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.
I received a Kindle ARC from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.
May 1, 2017
The title, the subtitle, the books synopsis, and the cover photo are all misleading of the books content. In short, reading “Two Weeks Every Summer” is comparable to trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. In conclusion, good luck. No, seriously, Good Luck.
**ARC/publisher/NetGalley
**ARC/publisher/NetGalley
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews