Morris Milgram
Morris Milgram was the son of impoverished Russian Jewish immigrants who worked in the garment district in New York City. The youngest of six children, he imbibed socialist principles growing up. By the time he was 18, he had become the equivalent of a “woke” radical and was expelled from City College for leading a protest against a reception for a visiting delegation of Italian fascist students in 1934. Milgram completed his education at Dana College, now part of Rutgers University and then took a job with the Workers Defense League. Over the next ten years Milgram rose to become national secretary of this civil rights organization that socialists and liberals had founded to help Southern sharecroppers.
William Snello, Milgram’s father-in-law repeatedly invited him to join his construction business. In 1947, Milgram finally agreed and applied himself to learning marketing, tax codes, zoning laws, and construction finance with the goal of building open occupancy housing. After Snello passed away, Milgram moved to realize his dream, but he had a difficult time securing financing until he partnered with George Otto, a Quaker who chaired the Philadelphia Friends Social Order Committee. The American Friends Service Committee had launched a national campaign against segregated housing, so Milgram and Otto were able to raise money from Quakers and socialists by challenging them to “Put your money where your heart is.” Having secured $150,000 in venture capital, they acquired a property in Trevose, PA with plans to develop a subdivision of single-family homes for middle class buyers.
Though seven white and five Black families put down deposits of $200 each for homes in the community, Milgram had a hard time finding lenders willing to write mortgages for Black buyers. Twenty financial institutions balked at his plans before he found a New York bank with experience financing homes for African Americans. Between 1946 and 1953, less than 1% of the homes on the market in Philadelphia were available to Black buyers so there was keen interest in the community from Black families looking for a piece of the American Dream. Indeed, building quality housing for African Americans might have been a more practical approach to the equity issues Milgram wanted to address. Milgram, however, believed firmly in the vision of racial reconciliation that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described in the 1950s as “beloved community.” He named the development Concord Park and, on the suggestion of a board member, imposed a “controlled occupancy pattern” to balance the racial demographic at 55% white and 45% Black, fearing that whites would not purchase homes in a predominantly Black community.
The quota system forced some Black families who had paid deposits to wait for nearly a year before their homes were ready for move in. Milgram received criticism for the quotas but said in a 1969 interview, ‘If we don’t learn to live together, soon the world is going to come apart.” The Fair Housing Act of 1968 made Milgram’s “controlled occupancy pattern” illegal. As the original residents moved out of Concord Park, they were inevitably replaced by African American buyers who had limited options in other suburbs of Philadelphia. By the early 1990s Concord Park became a majority Black community despite Milgram’s original intentions.
Indeed, Milgram’s efforts to replicate the Concord Park experiment faced stiff resistance in other places. After lawsuits stopped him from building an interracial community in Deerfield, Illinois, he decided to focus on purchasing apartment buildings and changing their rental policies to open them to Blacks. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy sought to spare non-white diplomats and their families embarrassment from discriminatory rental policies. Angier Biddle Duke, then chief of protocol, asked Morris Milgram to help. Milgram and a group of investors purchased 633 units in three Washington, D.C. apartment complexes and integrated them without incident. Over the course of his career Milgram provided integrated housing for some 20,000 people in communities around the country including Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Princeton, Washington, D.C., California, Maryland, New York, Texas, and Virginia.
