Two Weeks each Summer, that's in keeping with wide oral historical past interviews with former visitors, hosts, and directors in clean Air courses, opens a brand new bankruptcy within the background of race within the usa through exhibiting how the activities of thousands of rural and suburban citizens who hosted young ones from town perpetuated racial inequity instead of overturned it. considering the fact that 1877 and to at the present time, clean Air courses from Maine to Montana have introduced inner-city young children to rural and suburban houses for two-week summer season holidays. Tobin Miller Shearer brings to the vanguard of his heritage of the clean Air software the voices of the youngsters themselves via letters that they wrote, photos that they took, and their testimonials. Shearer bargains a cautious social and cultural historical past of the clean Air courses, giving readers a very good experience of the summer season reports for either hosts and the vacationing children.

By protecting the racially transformative years among 1939 and 1979, Shearer exhibits how the rhetoric of innocence hired by means of clean Air boosters mostly served the pursuits of religiously minded white hosts and did little to supply greater than a holiday for African American and Latino city adolescence. In what might have been a brand new area for the civil rights stream, white adults usually overpowered the brave activities of youngsters of colour. by way of giving white suburbanites and rural citizens a secure race kinfolk venture that didn't require changes to their funding portfolios, genuine property holdings, or political affiliations, the courses perpetuated an financial order that marginalized African american citizens and Latinos via suggesting that suggestions to poverty lay in one-on-one acts of charity.