Folcroft and the Baker Incident

The small Delaware County borough of Folcroft, tucked between Philadelphia and the Main Line, is the site of one of the most significant and least-remembered civil rights confrontations in Pennsylvania history.

On August thirtieth, nineteen sixty-three, two days after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech on the National Mall, Horace and Sara Baker purchased a row home in the Delmar Village section of Folcroft. Horace was a medical laboratory technician; Sara was a nurse at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. A Quaker housing organization, Suburban Fair Housing Incorporated, had arranged the sale after acquiring the property following a mortgage default. The Bakers were the first Black family to buy a home in this neighborhood.

Within hours, their neighbors organized. Two hundred fifty residents initially blocked the Bakers from entering their own house. Rocks were thrown and windows broken. By the end of the confrontation, as many as fifteen hundred people had gathered. One hundred Pennsylvania State Troopers were required to restore order and allow the Bakers to cross their own threshold.

The riots lasted two days, but the harassment did not stop. Neighbors poured sugar into Horace Baker's gas tank. The family endured years of hostility before finally moving to West Mount Airy in nineteen sixty-six. No one was held criminally responsible for the violence against them.

The Baker Incident, alongside the nineteen fifty-seven housing riots in nearby Levittown, documented that racial exclusion in postwar America was not a Southern problem. It was suburban Philadelphia. It was the block you lived on. The incident helped drive fair housing advocacy in Pennsylvania through the nineteen sixties and ultimately contributed to the political pressure that produced the federal Fair Housing Act of nineteen sixty-eight.