On being mobbed

The impact of the rescission was immediate and is being felt by stations from coast to coast. Hardest hit are expected to be small broadcasters and those in rural areas. Within hours of the CPB statement, Pittsburgh’s WQED announced a 35% cut in staffing. WQED, the station that gave Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood its start (Corporation for Public Broadcasting begins “orderly wind-down” following Trump’s funding cuts, August 1, 2025, AV Club), was the first American community-supported public television station (https://pcusa.org/news-storytelling/news/2020/2/11/real-mister-rogers).

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood debuted before winter’s thaw on February 19, 1968. It would be a tumultuous year. Prague Spring was quashed by the invasion of the Soviet Union joined by Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland. The year 1968 shaped the women’s movement and catalyzed the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered and President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act. Robert F. Kennedy won the California Democratic primary and lost his life a few minutes later. On the eve of the Lunar New Year, the 85,000 North Vietnamese troops attacked more than 100 cities and military installations in South Vietnam, including the U.S. Embassy.

If World War I marked the industrialization of war, Vietnam marked its unprecedented display on primetime TV. By 1966, 93% of American homes had televisions. Handheld film cameras, the 16mm film format and Kodak “reversal” film stocks that produced positive prints that were broadcast-ready for the American family. The imagery of war was broadcast over terrestrial television and burnished into the American mind. Like never before, wartime policy was influenced by the photographic image. The Tet Offensive would be recognized as tactical defeat and strategic win for North Vietnam. The excess of war saturated the airwaves of terrestrial TV, forcing an American reckoning and the beginning of the end for American involvement in Vietnam (https://www.history.com/articles/tet-offensive).

The scene is a street in Saigon, February 1, 1968: General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Viet Cong prisoner (https://historycollection.com/40-graphic-images-vietnam-war-tet-offensive/). The photograph captures the General on the left of the black-and-white frame, his arm extended across the frame towards a captive on the right. He holds a handgun at point-blank range to the head of the cringing man. The prisoner’s face contorts with emotion as he waits for the bullet. The grainy look of high-ASA film softens the stark scene. A few weeks later on February 19, 1968, a different scene: A studio camera frames the front door of a Pittsburgh film set and “Mister Rogers”steps into the lives of millions of children. He sings, “It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor” (Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood). The first episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were shot in black-and-white; color televisions did not outsell black-and-white models until the early 1970s (“Color television,” Wikipedia). Billed as an educational show for preschoolers, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood tackled subjects including the Vietnam War and the assassination of RFK even that first year. It was Fred Rogers who made the show special, speaking directly to children about things that weren’t easy to talk about.

Rogers got into TV because, as he told Chairman Senator John Pastore (D-RI) on May 1, 1969, he hated it. Rogers testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications on behalf of WQED and the newly formed Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to defend a cut to federal funding for what was then a new concept in America—public television. To sell public TV, Rogers explained to the Committee that when the money ran out after he and his team made 100 shows, people in Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago voiced a desire to have more of Rogers’ “neighborhood expression of care” (May 1, 1969: Fred Rogers testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on on Communications).

For Fred Rogers, neighborhood was the bridge from childhood to greater society. As Mister Rogers, he invited his viewers to be his neighbors (“Won’t you be my neighbor?”). Acceptance of self was key to acceptance of the other (“I like you as you are”). Learning to accept and manage one’s emotions was key to the ability to resolve the conflicts that were unavoidable in the neighborhood and would be unavoidable in life (“What do you do with the mad that you feel?”). In his curriculum critique of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Kevin M. Talbert of The College of Idaho explains that in casting his viewers in the role of neighbors, Rogers sought to be “a kind, caring, trusted member of [their] community” (“Engaging Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2024, p. 23). To be neighborly is the “grounding ethos of democratic community,” observes Talbert (p. 23). Being a “good neighbor” is qualitatively different than being a “good person”:

Being a neighbor is inherently relational and thus requires mechanisms to navigate the desires, wants, and needs of everyone in the neighborhood. Mister Rogers treats the neighborhood as a curricular space where we learn how to live together in humanizing ways.

Talbert views Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as an exemplary pedagogical tool. One of the criteria by which the quality of a pedagogical tool is assessed is whether it changes lives for the better. Talbert concludes that the program “models” a democratic community practicing essential values including fairness, justice, tolerance, and diversity (p. 17). By including himself in the community of his young viewers and making himself their neighbor, Rogers included them in the neighborhood.

Fred Rogers integrated concrete examples from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood into his 1963 testimony to the Senate Committee on Commerce Subcommittee on Communications. In an out-of-control world, he spoke about teaching children how to manage their emotions. “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” he sang. Senator Pastore responded positively: “I think it’s wonderful. Looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars” (https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fredrogerssenatetestimonypbs.htm). The show ran from 1968 to 2001, totaling 895 episodes and beating out Captain Kangaroo as the longest running TV show for children (Fred Rogers, Wikipedia). Fred Rogers taught inclusivity in service to democracy and upon hearing his testimony, the Senate delivered the funding to support it.

Ω

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood welcomed the children of America to the neighborhood in 1972. This was the year “segregationist” George Wallace was paralyzed in a failed assassination attempt and generously visited in the hospital by Shirley Chisholm, the first African American Congresswoman and Wallace’s opponent in the Democratic primaries. (Elected governor of Alabama in 1962, Wallace had vowed: “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!”) It was the year when the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were forced by a leak to the press to end the medical “experiment” of 40 years duration then referred to as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was passed by the 92nd Congress that year, and sent to the states for ratification. J. Edgar Hoover died, leaving the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headless after running it for 37 years after its founding in 1935 (“J. Edgar Hoover,” Wikipedia). President Richard Nixon made a historic trip to the People’s Republic of China and met with Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party. Angela Davis was acquitted on charges of conspiracy, murder and kidnapping. Five men were arrested for breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington D.C. Title IX became law, mandating the fair and equal treatment of the sexes by schools receiving federal money. Daniel Ellsberg published Papers on the War as he awaited trial for his 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers. Senator Edmund Muskie opened his campaign in the New Hampshire Presidential primary by demanding U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and saying that the investment of 55,000 American lives and $130 billion had been “wasted” (“Muskie Bids U.S. Get Out Of War,
Jan. 7, 1972, The New York Times). The challenges to privilege and power were mounting. That’s about when the National Neighborhood Watch (NNW) came along.

Ω

The National Neighborhood Watch Program was developed in the late 1960s and formally introduced in 1972. The National Neighborhood Watch (NNW) was created by the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA) (a trade organization), and funded in part by the U.S. Department of Justice. But the neighborhood of the National Neighborhood Watch looked nothing like Mister Rogers’.

The National Neighborhood Watch was a policing organization from its inception, its tagline Crime prevention through neighborhood cohesiveness and collaboration. The NNW would be the long arm of the law, extending the reach of the police into and strengthening ties with the neighborhoods they patrolled. The impetus for creation of the watch dog organization is often attributed to a late 1960s rise in crime. According to the St. Louis County Library, there was an increase in burglary rates in rural and suburban areas (National Neighborhood Watch). Liberation, the newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, puts it differently, claiming the NNW was a response to the Black freedom movement (“The ugly history and repressive role of Neighborhood Watch,” Liberation, April 13, 2012). NNW, Liberation explains, was a “soft power” strategy of police control. The NNW “typically function to insinuate the police into the social lives of residents. Rather than replace police control or surveillance, they encourage it.” Given that the NNW is often regarded as an entry point to policing (“Zimmerman’s interest in police work fair game at trial,” July 13, 2013, USA Today) and that the forté of at least some neighborhood watch groups seems to be forced eviction by surveillance and defamation (referred to by the Seattle real estate mobbers as “clearing by smearing”), this seems a reasonable conclusion.

As the 1960s progressed, winds of change swept from the streets into the branches of government. A landslide victory in the 1964 elections and a Democratic supermajority in both chambers clearcut a path for the reforms of President Johnson’s Great Society (“Great Society,” Wikipedia). In 1967, Thurgood Marshall became the first Black man nominated to the Supreme Court.

The Great Society started where John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier proposals left off, from 1964 to 1968 expanding programs for social welfare and to fight poverty and racial injustice. The reforms would build on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) New Deal and address key civil rights issues including economic inequality. Social Security was expanded in 1965 and 1967. Medicare and Medicaid were incorporated into the Social Security Act of 1965. These are among the pillars of the Great Society that the current administration is tearing down. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities were created in 1965. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, now another casualty. Capping the achievements of the Great Society, the Fair Housing Act (FHA) was passed in 1968. With the stroke of a pen, the FHA deemed redlining and racially restrictive covenants illegal, changing the balance of power on the block.

The housing mortgage is one of the greatest financial inventions….

— Albert Saiz, Design and Violence

The American mortgage lending system most familiar to us today was created during the years of the Great Depression. In the National Housing Act (NHA) of 1934, FDR introduced a government program that would be supported by private investment. Investors would be protected against loss by the National Act’s Federal Housing Administration (FHA) (“National Housing Act of 1934,” Wikipedia).

The program promised greater access to home ownership but, given societal strictures, the goal was unrealistic. Inequality was entrenched in American society and institutionalized into government. The global context wasn’t much better. The language of redlining reflected the semantics of Hitler’s rise to power and the coming European war:

The language used in the maps and associated archival documents is violently demeaning and dehumanizing, including sentences such as “undesirable racial concentration,” “undesirables,” and “subservient racial elements.” These were sad times for humanism: across the Atlantic, fascist parties and the Nazis were infusing European intellectual thought with their notions of racial and national superiority.

(“T-RACES: Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces (Marciano, McKeon, You & Goldberg“), Albert Saiz, DESIGN AND VIOLENCE).

In an effort to convince private lenders to onboard to the new program, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a federal agency, commissioned “residential security maps” to assist mortgage professionals in evaluating risk. The maps used color to indicate relative areas of risk with the highest risk neighborhoods “redlined.” The assigned risk of investment was based on factors that would exclude those less affluent and less “white” from access to mortgage loans. FHA appraisal manuals advised banks to avoid lending in areas of “inharmonious racial groups” (quoted in “Redlining,” Wikipedia). In the years between 1945 and 1959, African Americans received fewer than 2% of federally insured home loans. A woman could not apply for a mortgage loan on her own until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974 (“Equal Credit Opportunity Act,” Wikipedia). Discrimination was inscribed into the lines of the meticulously drawn historic maps of Thomas Bros. and other cartographers of the day.

According to KQED, neighborhoods were assigned grades based on “favorable” and “detrimental” conditions including terrain, the type and age of the buildings, and the “threat of infiltration of foreign-born, negro, or lower grade population” (https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/18486/redlining).

The Albany of 1937 was composed of the less enthusiastic blue (“still good”) and yellow (“in decline”) areas. When the Bay Area Rapid Transit system was built in Albany in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the elevated track was run over an old rail line on Masonic, bounding the blue from the yellow.

My parents, Bay Area natives, moved to Albany in the early 1960s, hoping to live in U.C. Berkeley’s married student housing. You can see where what’s left of the “University Village” remains—it’s in the white area beneath section C2. The location of U.C. Berkeley housing in Albany annoyed conservative taxpayers who feared the impact of the student vote. We never did live in the University Village and ended up renting houses in Albany as my mother attended school to become a teacher and my father built a landscaping business. Years passed before my parents managed to purchase this house, sited in what was a 1937 area of decline on the Thomas Bros. Residential Security Map. (My mother told me in the years before she died that the house had been moved from Emeryville in the 1940s, to make way for the railway. Albany, experiencing significant growth in the postwar years, created architectural diversity by integrating existing structures into new development.)

Ω

Redlining was not the only method used to enforce segregation. Segregation, a matter of custom as well as law, exerted control over every facet of society. According to the University of Minnesota Libraries article “Mapping Prejudice,” the American “urban planning orthodoxy [itself was] founded on White supremacy.”

In 1917, the US Supreme Court found that redlining constituted civil government-instituted racial segregation and was illegal under the 14th Amendment (Buchanan v. Warley). In 1915, William Warley, a Black attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) offered to purchase Charles H. Buchanan’s property in a predominantly white neighborhood of Louisville. With his offer, Warley challenged a discriminatory Louisville ordinance:

It is understood that I am purchasing the above property for the purpose of having erected thereon a house which I propose to make my residence, and it is a distinct part of this agreement that I shall not be required to accept a deed to the above property or to pay for said property unless I have the right under the laws of the State of Kentucky and the City of Louisville to occupy said property as a residence.

Buchanan accepted the offer, but Warley refused to complete the transaction. The discriminatory ordinance would prevent him from residing on the property. Buchanan sued, arguing that the discriminatory ordinance was unconstitutional and that Warley should pay him in full. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Louisville, Kentucky ordinance violated Fourteenth Amendment protections (Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917)). Before long, the practice of government redlining was replaced by racially restrictive covenants.

A covenant is a contractual agreement. As defined in property law, a “real covenant” or “deed restriction” typically imposes restrictions on how the land may be used (“Covenant,” Wikipedia). Racial restrictive covenants typically restricted the race or ethnicity of those permitted to acquire, own, or reside on the contracted land. Such covenants may be covenant appurtenant and “run with the land,” contractually obligating future owners to comply with the specified covenant in perpetuity.

Racial restrictive covenants were the “brainchild” of the real estate industry and its collaboration with early 20th century city planners (“The origins of racial covenants“). Noting that “[r]acial restrictive covenants were just one weapon in the arsenal of white supremacy,” James Gregory of the Washington State Racial Restrictive Covenants Project explains that after the 1917 ruling in Buchanan v. Warley, real estate professionals favored the use of covenants to enforce segregation (“Understanding Racial Restrictive Covenants and their Legacy,” University of Washington).

Restrictive covenants from the 1920s to the 1940s barred non-whites and sometimes Jews from residing in North Seattle, West Seattle, and some parts of South Seattle, Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, and Madison Park. The resulting ghetto ran east from the International District and north from South Jackson Street. This left the Central Area and the Chinatown International District as the neighborhoods open to African Americans and Asian Americans.

In those days, my own Seattle neighborhood north of Sand Point would probably have been unavailable to the groups typically excluded by covenant. Until the 1968 passage of the Fair Housing Act, racial covenants were an alternate to redlining and a means to the same end.

The strategies of exclusion were not limited to restrictive covenants. Realtors—purveyors of exclusivity—”steered” the unwanted elsewhere. The practice was written into the 1924 professional code:

A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.

(Code of Ethics,The National Association of Real Estate Boards, a professional association of realtors.)

The practice of “steering” the unwanted away from certain neighborhoods based on “property values” should make us question the premise that property values depend on who lives in the neighborhood. The statement that the presence of certain individuals is “detrimental to property values” is exclusionary and yet even now, appears to be the fallback of Seattle neighborhood watch groups that defame and harass legal tenants when the real problem is that they just don’t want the competition. According to Gregory:

Rarely did segregationists need to file lawsuits to block families of color from moving into a restricted neighborhood. That was handled by realtors who refused to show properties and warned off potential renters or buyers. And it was backed up by the threat of ostracism, harassment, and violence that would likely greet a newcomer of the wrong background.

Maybe this explains the muttering of the south house mobbing owner while looking down at his shoes, “You’re the WRONG demographic.”

Over the years of talking about the mind-blowing attitudes and entitlement of neighborhood watch groups like those in Seattle’s South Cedar Park, I’ve heard and read comments that make clear how discrimination based on race or class is repackaged and hidden in economic exclusion. For example, the comment that in some circles the word “renter” is a euphemism for “Black,” or the comment that “renters” are about the only group you can get away with discriminating against these days.

Doug Honig writes of the “long history” of housing discrimination in Seattle (Redlining, Racial Covenants, and Housing Discrimination in Seattle, Oct. 29, 2021, History Link.org: The free online encyclopedia of Washington state history). Honig gives the example of King County Council member Larry Gossett whose father hoped to purchase a West Seattle home in 1956. A realtor refused to help, saying she’d be “run out” of the business. Honig details another example in which a Jewish refugee from Austria was forced by threats from a “neighborhood leader” in Seattle’s Sand Point to abandon his attempt to purchase a home there.

Covenants proliferated with development, color-coding growing towns and cities across America. The 1948 Supreme Court ruling that covenants could not be enforced because of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment did not make covenants illegal (https://depts.washington.edu/covenants/segregation.shtml). Until the 1968 Fair Housing Act, restrictive covenants were part of the business of building. Exclusivity is profitable. Developers continued to write restrictive covenants, and counties continued to record them.

In 1972, the National Neighborhood Watch was rolled out to American cities and towns long since color-coded. The bill of goods for the NNW was sold to home owners whose own acceptance in the neighborhood was based on exclusion. These captains and coordinators would join together to maintain homogeneity in the neighborhoods, keeping the right people in and the wrong people out.

The fight for civil rights does not end with one battle. As we’re now seeing with Trump’s attempts to reshape the nation in his own image, courtroom wins on civil rights issues are oft ignored and every battle gives way to another. The pattern repeats itself. The 1968 victory over restrictive covenants was short-lived. Redlining and restrictive covenants gave way to exclusion by virtue of economics. Economic exclusion is even harder to fight in the courts. This was the first blow in the one-two punch that knocked the hope of equal access to housing out of the water. The second was the National Neighborhood Watch (NNW), a policing program and neighborhood surveillance association whose paramount concern continues to be the practice of exclusion. Mister Rogers taught us about inclusion and how good neighbors are the bedrock of democracy. Fifty years later, the National Neighborhood Watch hasn’t learned the lesson.

(To be continued in Mobbing is extremism (part 2).)