Levittown

by David Kushner

  Levittown honored the patriarch by ordaining Abraham Levitt Day in October 1951, and a thousand people crowded into Levittown Hall on the Parkway Village Green to celebrate. After the Levittown Opera played “Glory Road,” a bronze plaque was unveiled on the Levittown Hall, depicting the guest of honor. “Levittown to me is just like a child to its parent,” Abe said. “It is not just a commercial enterprise, I want the people of Levittown to be happy. Particularly do I want the children to grow up in a fine atmosphere; it’s the children I am interested in.” Children, he added, including his boys, William and Alfred. “The success of a parent lies in his children.”

  But as the Levitts’ fame grew, it was Bill Levitt who clearly became the country’s favorite son—much due to his own flair for self-promotion. Bill would receive the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ highest honor, the Good Citizenship medal, for his suburban town. Life published a picture of Levitt posing in front of his ivy-covered Manhasset office with the caption “Nation’s Biggest Housebuilder.”

  Time magazine put Levitt on its cover and had, like the rest of America, fallen head over heels for Bill’s bold ways. “Levitt and Sons’ President William J. Levitt describes the product simply as ‘the best house in the U.S.,’ ” the article read. “Coming from Bill Levitt, that exaggeration is natural, and pardonable. At 43, the leader of the U.S. housing revolution is a cocky, rambunctious hustler with brown hair, cow-sad eyes, a hoarse voice (from smoking three packs of cigarettes a day), and a liking for hyperbole that causes him to describe his height (5 ft. 8 in.) as ‘nearly six feet’ and his company as the ‘General Motors of the housing industry.’ His supreme self-confidence—his competitors call it arrogance—is solidly based on the fact that he is the most potent single modernizing influence in a largely antiquated industry.”

  Now it was time to do even better. Flush from the success on Long Island, the Levitts announced a second development to be built in Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia. Ads appeared in magazines painting a picture of happy housewives with sparkling appliances, “quiet, spacious beauty . . . gently curving streets with modern lighting uncluttered by cars . . . Everywhere you look, your eyes rest on the loveliness of well-kept lawns, majestic shade trees, fruit trees and flowering shrubs.” This great new mass-produced suburb would, as Bill Levitt wrote in an advertisement, be the “most perfectly planned community in America.”

  And whites-only.

  Five

  A GOOD HOME

  THEY WANTED WHAT everyone else wanted: a good home in a good community. The Myerses were in their twenties and ready to begin their new life together. As long as Daisy had known Bill, he had effused about the fun and freedom of York. Frustrated with the Jim Crow South, he was more determined to return to Pennsylvania with his new wife, which he did in 1950.

  But it only took a few spins around the block with the real estate agents to realize this was no model town after all. Bill had gotten a job as an engineer working on turbines at the York Corporation in town. He had saved up plenty of money to get the house of their dreams. But every time he and Daisy got into an agent’s car, they found themselves driven to the poorest, and invariably black, parts of town. The homes there were falling apart with broken windows and rickety foundations. As an erudite fix-it man, Bill knew a bad deal when he saw one. But when they asked to be taken to other parts of town, the agent would just look them in the eye and say that nothing else was available.

  While communities such as Levittown had explicit racial covenants in their leases, many places relied on their own means of exclusion. This is called racial steering—the practice of real estate agents refusing to show or rent homes in white neighborhoods to blacks. It infuriated the Myerses, who had broken down color lines for years. After several incidents, Daisy finally lamented the situation to one real estate agent. “You shouldn’t feel bad,” he explained, “my wife and I can’t buy where we want to buy either.”

  “Why is that?” Daisy said.

  “Because we’re Jewish.”

  Unwilling to give up, the Myerses took matters into their own hands. Bill’s family had been around long enough to have some connections in high places, and they found an agent to show the young couple a lovely town house at 45 East Maple Street. The brick house had three bedrooms, one and one-half baths, and plenty of room for kids. That only one other African-American family lived in the neighborhood made no difference to Bill and Daisy. This was the home they wanted, and no one could stop them.

  Once they moved in, it didn’t take them long to realize not everyone was happy about their plan. Late at night, they would hear their neighbors slamming doors or banging the lids of their metal garbage cans. Someone was taking a tin pail and throwing it against the ground again and again and again. Bill and Daisy lay in bed listening to the commotion, but chose not to respond. Just because they were in the North didn’t mean they were safe from racial violence. Bill, the more reserved of the two, wasn’t one to cause a stir. Daisy tried to ignore as best she could. “You can’t think about it as such,” she would say, “you have to put it in the back of your mind. Because if you think about things like that as foremost in your mind, you won’t get anything done. You won’t be able to function.” It was best, they decided, to stay quiet.

  But they couldn’t ignore the couple next door for long. One morning, they heard someone pounding on their front door. “Who are my neighbors?” the person hollered.

  “I am,” Bill called, “Come upstairs.”

  The angry man opened the door and marched up the steps, but when he saw Bill, his jawed dropped. “Benny?”

  The man had been Bill’s high school classmate in York years before—and knew Bill as Benny from his days playing clarinet. Soon the rest of his family came over, including his sister-in-law—the woman, it turned out, who had been banging the doors and cans after the Myerses moved in. “I’m sorry,” she told Daisy, “but we didn’t know who was moving in here.” She tried to explain to Daisy how she had grown up among black people but couldn’t help feeling superior to them nonetheless. As she kept clumsily apologizing, Daisy thought, Too little too late.

  For Daisy, it was getting difficult to live as she had in Richmond—compartmentalizing her feelings about racism. Though she enjoyed her life on East Maple, she couldn’t believe how segregated life in this Northern town was. African-Americans had to sit upstairs away from the whites in the movie theater. As a substitute teacher, she was not allowed to teach in her neighborhood schools, which were white. After answering an ad for a low-rent-housing administrator and speaking with the company by phone, she showed up in person—and the supervisor was surprised to see that she was black.

  “You are Mrs. Myers?” the supervisor asked.

  “Surely,” Daisy replied.

  The woman, a former social worker, hit it off with Daisy, but she confided that she wasn’t sure “whether I’m allowed to hire a Negro or not.” Her bosses were conservative white men, she explained.

  Daisy felt the woman was sincere. “I understand,” she said.

  A few days later, Daisy got the call—and, to her surprise, the job. Her responsibility was to interview low-income families to determine if they were eligible for housing loans. She would conduct her interviews in person at their homes. She couldn’t believe the conditions of the black families’ homes she visited: no running water, no electricity, outhouses instead of bathrooms, seven people living in two squalid rooms. With every trip, she realized how “sheltered,” as she put it, she had been all her life.

  One day, Daisy interviewed a white man about a possible loan and he said, “They tell me niggers gonna live side by side with white folks out there, and I ain’t fillin’ out no forms until I find this out.” Daisy’s supervisor tried to placate the man. “There are many people of different races in this world,” she said, “and someday they will learn to live side by side if America is going to be the democratic country she set out to be.”

  As Daisy listened quietly, she tho
ught to herself, When will people ever learn to get along with each other regardless of color? And how much better the world will be if we can get over that hump. But she wasn’t about to throw herself into the fight. I’ll leave that to somebody else, she thought.

  Across the country, however, plenty of others were taking up the fight for civil rights. They proved that ordinary people could bring about extraordinary change. But they would often pay a price.

  Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling against racial covenants, terrible events in housing continued. In 1951, an African-American bus driver and veteran in Chicago named Harvey Clark wanted exactly what the Myerses wanted: a decent home. He found one in Cicero, a white suburban neighborhood. But when he showed up in his moving van, he wasn’t met by welcoming neighbors. Instead he was met by the police, who told him he needed a special permit to move in. No such permit existed. Then they assaulted him until he fled. Despite eventually winning an injunction against the police, the violence against Clark continued—culminating with a mob breaking into his house and setting his furniture on fire. When a crowd of thirty-five hundred rioted on the site the next night, it took the governor’s calling in the National Guard to bring the violence to an end.

  Clark wasn’t the only one taking a stand. Also in 1951, a battle was brewing in Daisy’s home state of Virginia. Barbara Rose Johns, a sixteen-year-old African-American high school junior in the small town of Farm-ville, organized a student protest against the inequalities of black kids’ education. She and her classmates didn’t just demand desegregation, they went on strike—refusing to go to class for two weeks. Soon after, the NAACP took up their cause too, filing a case against the county school board to desegregate once and for all.

  They had supporters in Topeka, Kansas. There, Oliver Brown wanted his seven-year-old daughter, Linda, to attend a perfectly good white school nearby instead of being bused to an African-American school. The NAACP sued the school board on his behalf. At the same time, another NAACP suit was pending in Clarendon County, South Carolina, where twenty black parents were challenging segregation in their own elementary schools.

  The three cases were heard together by the Supreme Court on December 9, 1952, but the first was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Nearly a year and a half later, on May 17, 1954, the ruling finally came along: “We conclude, unanimously, that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” announced Chief Justice Earl Warren. “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” What started with the courageous actions of a few schoolkids and their parents had transformed the nation. With the Brown decision, the modern civil rights era had begun.

  But as the Myerses and others observed, the harsh realities continued. Despite the Brown win, enforcement was another matter entirely. Governors in the South denounced the victory. Georgia governor Herman Talmadge called the decision “a mere scrap of paper,” and Governor James F. Byrnes in South Carolina warned that “ending segregation would mark the beginning of the end of civilization in the South as we have known it.” Mississippi senator James Eastland said the ruling signified the destruction of the U.S. Constitution. “You are not obliged to obey the decisions of any court which are plainly fraudulent,” he advised his minions.

  The small town of Money, Mississippi, soon showed how far some Americans were willing to go to fight back. One night in August 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago visiting his grandfather in town, on a dare from friends allegedly exchanged words with a white woman in a convenience store. “Bye, baby,” he was thought to have said as he passed her on the way out. Three days later, Till’s dead and bloated body washed up on the edge of the Tallahatchie River. A cotton-gin fastened with barbed wire hung from his neck. He had been shot in the head.

  Till’s death sent shock waves around the country. His mother insisted on an open casket, and a picture of the boy’s mangled corpse was published for all to see. It was an indelible image and moment. For white supremacists, it galvanized them against what one editorial writer in Mississippi termed a “Communist plot” to desegregate the South. For African-Americans, it underscored the brutality lurking behind the wealth and prosperity of the postwar nation.

  During the widely publicized trial, Till’s aging grandfather risked his life to testify against and identify the suspects: the husband and friends of the white woman his grandson had passed by. In that simple gesture of pointing at the suspects, Till’s grandfather proved the power an individual could have by taking a stand. But he also showed how unjust the outcome could be. The all-white male jury, despite the overwhelming evidence, found the defendants not guilty. As one writer later put it, the message was clear: “The word spread through the black community. Keep your mouth shut.” And like other Americans across the country, the Myerses heard it loud and clear.

  As the Myerses began their new life in York, Daisy had enough distractions to keep her from taking a stand about anything. She and Bill were busy turning their house into a home. Bill started fixing small appliances and equipment in the backyard. He became known around the neighborhood for his handiness, and people would routinely bring by appliances for him to fix. But when it would rain or snow, he’d have to head inside, where there wasn’t a suitable space to do this work. One day, he wished to Daisy, he’d have a house with a garage he could convert into his workshop.

  But they enjoyed their lives as a young couple. At night they’d stayed up late playing music, Daisy on the piano, Bill on clarinet. They also began a family. In 1952, they had their first child, William III, and, two years later, Stephen. As the house bustled with activity, Daisy and Bill’s love grew deep and strong. Daisy prided herself on the quality of their relationship. She made a list of their golden rules: never go to bed angry with each other, to listen and not just talk, to plan fun things to do with each other, to make up after a fight, and never be afraid to say “I’m sorry.” Daisy admittedly found this last rule the most challenging of all. While Bill tended to be amiable, Daisy was considerably more headstrong. As she would put it, “I feel ‘my way’ is the right way most of the time.”

  While her home life was so strong, however, her job was proving difficult for the most troubling reasons. Despite her tireless work for the housing administration, racism prevented her advancement. She learned this when her supervisor—the woman who had hired her and with whom she had become friends—told her she was leaving her post. Daisy was well liked and loyal, clearly the best candidate for the job. But her supervisor’s boss coldly let her down. “Mrs. Myers,” he said briskly, “a new lady will be in to take over the job as supervisor. I’d like you to teach her everything you know. You see, this lady has no experience in this field but has worked as an accountant.”

  Daisy’s heart sank. When she had applied to work here in the first place, her employers had made a huge deal out of the amount of experience the job required, but now they were hiring someone with no experience. Experience was secondary, Daisy realized, because the applicant was white. Daisy had had enough. Soon after, she marched up to her boss and gave notice. The man begged and pleaded, sheepishly explaining that this wasn’t his doing, it was at his boss’s insistence. He offered Daisy incentives to stay, including a raise in salary. She and Bill could use extra money, she knew, but Daisy also knew that her way was the right way, and this time she wasn’t going to say she was sorry. So she left.

  But the cost of her decision didn’t take long to arrive. Daisy and Bill had two boys for whom to provide. And just as their overhead was mounting, Bill got laid off from his job. They tried to make ends meet, with Bill picking up odd jobs and Daisy working as a substitute teacher. Their dream of a perfect home and a perfect town would have to wait. For now, they would pack their bags and go to Philadelphia, where, they hoped, more opportunity would be found.

  Philadelphia proved a disappointment. They lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment on the second floor over Walnut, a noisy street. They had both li
ved in homes their whole lives, and with two little boys now climbing their walls, they desperately wanted to get back into one more than ever. Daisy just wanted what anyone else wanted, she said, “to raise the children somewhere where they have green grass and a fence around it—a home with space and surroundings and good schools. The suburbs are an ideal place for everyone.”

  In the fall of 1955, they finally found a slice of the American Dream of their own: a two-bedroom home in a community about an hour north of Philadelphia called Bloomsdale Gardens. The houses were attached, four or five in a row, but the development had a warm and open feeling. It was fully integrated, with just as many whites and blacks. The house had green back and front yards, a walkway and a patio. Bill still didn’t have his dream garage to convert into his work space, but he agreed to convert the utility room into a makeshift tool room instead.

  Life in Bloomsdale Gardens began to resemble the ideal they had harbored for so long. Good neighbors. New friends. Bill found a job working at a refrigeration company in nearby Trenton, New Jersey, where he earned a $5,000 annual salary. He supplemented his income with part-time jobs, such as washing dishes at Howard Johnson’s. Daisy cared for their boys and became active in political groups. Bill got voted president of Bloomsdale’s Civic Association, and he and Daisy worked to register voters—just as her parents had done in Virginia long ago.