MeWeFree | Untold Black History: The Baker Incident (The 1963 Race Riot In Folcroft, PA)

This is an unpublished interview I did with Phyllis Taylor from 2013. It is a very important story to me since it comes from my hometown (Darby Township, PA). This incident happened in 1963 in Folcroft, the next town over.

Rest in peace Horace Baker, Sarah Baker and Dick Taylor. If anyone knows if Mrs. Taylor is out there, please send her my way.

(most of the Photos used here are from the Library of Congress)

Horace & Sarah Baker on their front steps (Folcroft Baker Incident) — Horace & Sarah Baker in front of their home I Folcroft, PA in 1963 (CREDIT: Library of Congress)

Richard & Phyllis Taylor in the 1960s (CREDIT: Phyllis Taylor)

A more recent photo of Richard & Phyllis Taylor (CREDIT: Phyllis Taylor)

The town of Folcroft has long been a location of racial tension (especially for residents in neighboring/my hometown, Darby Township). Memories of Ku Klux Klan activity from the past and questionable incidents involving profiling and predominately Black stops in speed traps have long been whispered between Blacks in the area.

However, in 1963, racial volatility in Folcroft was the focus of the international community. Days after the March on Washington, Horace and Sarah Baker, young parents of one with one on the way, tried to move from Philadelphia into their first home in Folcroft’s Delmar Village area. As the couple’s moving van arrived, a mob of thousands erupted in outrage, shouting statements such as “We don’t want them,” along with concerns about their property devaluing. Rioters broke all of the windows out of the house as well as smashed all of the cabinets.

Local heroes, Richard “Dick” Taylor and his wife, Phyllis, were integral in the support effort for the Baker family. The couple met through The Movement as opponents of housing and job discrimination. Mr. Taylor served as director of the Fair Housing Council of Delaware Valley and previously worked with the American Friends Service Committee in the South fighting housing discrimination. Mrs. Taylor was a senior at Beaver College, doing fieldwork in the areas of job and housing discrimination. She also went south as a trained “Freedom Rider,” railing with other youngsters against Jim Crow.

As written in their joint recanting of their account of the incident for the Chestnut Hill Local, “For both of us, our faiths taught why these commitments were so important. Dick, a Quaker (who now combines Quakerism with Catholicism) and Phyllis who is Jewish (who now combines Judaism with Quakerism) both felt called to the prophetic tradition.” In the movement, folks like the Taylors were known as “White allies,” according to Mrs. Taylor. Furthermore, Mr. Taylor’s ancestors travailed as abolitionists, and Mrs. Taylor, whose grandparents were escapees of the turbulence of the Holocaust, remembers younger days growing up in New York with “no dogs or Jews allowed” signs hung from establishments. “There were White folks there, then and now, who are concerned about combating racism. We’ve got to help each other,” said Mrs. Taylor.

Through his work at the Fair Housing Council, the Taylors met the Bakers after Margaret Collins, the real estate agent for Friends’ Suburban Housing who found the Bakers the home that they’d been looking for. Since both Mrs. Taylor and Sarah Baker were pregnant at the time, she remembered sharing maternity clothes with her.

However, that fateful August day, Mrs. Taylor remembered, “The moving van couldn’t get through. They couldn’t get through.” She recalled “all the glass and all the destruction” after what she labeled as “methodical destruction” by the townspeople and the police who just watched it happen and claimed to not get involved for fear of potentially injuring pregnant women. Mrs. Taylor sees that rationale as a “contrast” to the following year’s demonstrations in Chester, PA against de facto segregation in schools (which drew the likes of Malcolm X and Dick Gregory) where police beat women, some who were pregnant.

She recalled the chaotic scene and rowdy crowd. “I remember I cut myself on glass. The people cheered. It was bizarre.” She said that the Bakers were far from making a Rosa Parks-like statement by turning down housing in predominately Black next-town-over, Darby Township, in favor of Folcroft. “They did not do it for political reasons. They did it because the quality of the house was better,” she explained. “It’s really a politically-oriented person that is geared for that. They were simply a young couple with one child who wanted a good, quality house. They were not pioneers at all. They were just plain people; a lovely family who wanted a good house.”

Seeing no help was coming from local authorities, Mr. Taylor instantly drove to the Governor’s Mansion, a move that resulted in state forces coming in to quell the rioters and the support of the NAACP, CORE and clergymen who pledged to form a human barrier, donning their collars and pastoral garb between the rioters and the house.

The Bakers lived there shortly, where the opposition never slacked. Their neighbors even went so far as to pour sugar in Horace Baker’s gas tank, sabotaging his vehicle. They eventually gave in and moved in with the Taylors in Mount Airy, where they ultimately found a home and moved on. Mrs. Taylor reflected on the “sad irony” of Sarah Baker, who was a nurse at Pennsylvania Hospital, being rebuffed so by people that she may well have delivered.

It was disheartening for the couple who had just participated in the historic event on the Washington Mall days before, “Here, we left Washington and all the excitement of the ‘Dream,’” she said thinking back on seeing dynamic figures like Dr. King and Bayard Rustin, “to come back to basically the ‘Dream’ shattered.” She’d been on the Freedom Rides but hadn’t seen anything quite like the scene in Folcroft. “This had a different feel to it. It was really pretty ugly.”

She always regretted that the “good people” in Folcroft, remained silent and out of focus. “It was really quite terrible. I’m sure there were good people in Folcroft, but I think the good people were afraid,” she said. “One of the things I’m mainly aware of is that when good people are quiet, terrible things can happen,” she stated, comparing such a situation to lead to Hitler’s oppression of her people.

Today, the Taylors live in Germantown. Mrs. Taylor now ministers as a chaplain in Philadelphia Prison System. She sermonized, “We all have to be vigilant, and we (as a community) have to all not know not to be afraid and speak out whenever we see wrong.”