Black and Jewish Communities in Interwar Pennsylvania

Industrial towns in Pennsylvania attracted Black migrants from the South and Jewish and other immigrant families from Europe. In neighbourhoods excluded from wealthier districts, shops, theatres, churches, synagogues and informal credit networks became centres of economic and social life.

These communities faced residential segregation, racial discrimination and hostility towards immigrants. Disabled and poor children were also vulnerable to state institutions such as Pennhurst, which opened in 1908 and reflected the era’s eugenic assumptions about disability and social worth.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store centres on a community’s attempt to protect a deaf Black child in 1930s Pennsylvania.