Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America(American Institutions and Society)

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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
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.

Review :
In this thought-provoking analysis of the Fresh Air organization, Shearer (history, Univ. of Montana) describes philanthropic attempts to provide two weeks of vacation from the "unhealthy and dangerous cities" to mostly white suburban and rural counties for mainly minority city children from the 1940s to the 1970s. Initially a summer vacation program for poor white city children in the late 19th century, Fresh Air, still in existence, responded to population changes by catering to white hosts' requests for young innocent girls, ages 5 to 12, to assuage their fears of Hispanic and black teenage boys. The organization also established camps for boys and disabled children. Fresh Air curtailed return visits for the youth to prevent interracial liaisons between teenagers. Alumni interviews reveal racial tensions and the education the children provided their hosts about civil rights and city life. Rejected from examining the Fresh Air archives, the author relies on the organization's published materials and interviews with participants. Despite the strong criticism, some alumni benefitted from the program. For collections on social history, urban history, history of childhood, and race in the US. - N. Zmora (Choice) Tobin Miller Shearer investigates how Fresh Air programs' overwhelmingly white leadership and supporters reckoned with race during the period of demographic transition between 1939 and 1979... Two Weeks Every Summer offers us a valuable story about the racial politics and consequences of childhood reform efforts and the role of children in civil rights activism. Shearer's criticism of Fresh Air reform is convincing, and present day organizations should follow his suggestion to look honestly at their histories. - Marika Plater, Rutgers University (The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth) A meticulously researched examination of the "Fresh Air movement" sponsored by newspapers and social service agencies from the 1870s into the present.... One of the strengths of Shearer's narrative is that he is able to shed light on unexamined assumptions about poverty, race, innocence, and the city and its peoples while also providing clear evidence that there were also people who, when faced with unexpected challenges to their tangled generosity, learned something new and constructive.... An impressive and important book. (American Historical Review) This book is a must read for those who may desire an understanding of the sojourn experiences of children who were selected to participate in the Fresh Air programs during a turbulent era in America's history. Through the author's telescopic lens of archival evidence and oral histories, readers are offered glimpse of those telling experiences, in particular, the last chapter that provided oral histories from two Fresh Air participants. (The Journal of African American History)