One day, Bea, Lew, Daisy, and Bill went up to the city to meet with the woman in her vast apartment in Manhattan. She agreed to loan the Myerses the down payment with no interest. But she was concerned. “I can lend you the money,” she told them, “but I would have a very guilty feeling if anything happened to you.” This was the North, they replied, racial violence only happened in the South. Don’t worry, they assured her, everyone will be fine.
While they agreed not to announce or publicize the move, the general topic was on people’s minds anyway. On July 9 at the Faith Reformed Church in Levittown, a public meeting was coincidentally held to discuss “Fair Housing in Bucks County—A Panel Discussion Held in Levittown, Pa., on the General Subject of Open Occupancy Housing,” under the auspices of the Lower Bucks County Council of Churches. Though the organizers were not aware of the plans to move the Myerses into town, their meeting explicitly addressed the issue head-on.
A local real estate appraiser told the crowd that, despite Levitt’s fears of a loss in housing values, his industry’s studies of trends in Philadelphia proved otherwise. “There is no depreciation in values when colored families move into a neighborhood,” he said. “As a matter of fact, in some areas, there actually has been an increase in prices because of the pressure which the demand of colored buyers has put on existing housing because of their shelter needs.”
A local Levittown minister, the first clergyman to come to the town in 1952, appealed directly to the group. “Suppose, for example,” he said, “that a Negro family were to move into Levittown tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or next year. What would be the reaction of the people of this community? What would be your reaction to this Negro family? Would it be based upon hearsay, rumor, emotional panic, irresponsibility, mob violence? Would it be based upon reason, faith, love, and human understanding? This is a question which we had better decide in our community, and we had better decide it now. For whether a Negro family moves in tomorrow or next year, that day will arrive when will find one or two or more Negro families moving into Levittown.”
Four days after the meeting, Daisy gave birth to a baby girl they named Lynda. Bill was “tickled pink,” as Daisy said, about finally having a daughter. Brothers Stephen and William awed over their little sister’s tiny fingers and toes. With two big brothers to contend with around the house, Lynda would make good use of the extra bedroom waiting for her on Deepgreen Lane.
It was moving time.
Nine
43 DEEPGREEN LANE
AUGUST WAS ALWAYS a tense month in Levittown. Kids climbed the walls at home. Fathers idled around off work. And mothers tried in vain to keep everything in order. But the unseasonably hot and dry August of 1957 spiked tensions even higher. Bucks County baked in the worst drought in Pennsylvania history. Rain had not fallen since April, and the one-hundred-plus-degree days without precipitation had cost local farmers more than five million dollars. Pennsylvania governor George Leader asked President Eisenhower to declare Bucks County a disaster area.
Attorney Sam Snipes feared tensions would grow even worse on Tuesday, August 13, 1957, the 110th day of the drought. That was the day, as he and a handful of others secretly knew, that the Myerses were arriving in Levittown. Three days before, Snipes had settled the closing between the Mandels and the Myerses. Though Snipes’s Quaker ancestors had been involved in civil rights struggles for years, he knew that the fight for Levittown was historic, and risky. On the advice of a Realtor friend who had experience with helping blacks move into white neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Snipes had decided to write a letter of notification to Bristol Township police chief John R. Stewart of the Myerses impending arrival so the authorities could best prepare:
“I will appreciate your Police Force giving careful place on or about the premises of Mr. and Mrs. William E. Myers, Jr., at 43 Deepgreen Lane. Mr. and Mrs. Myers are, I believe, the first Negro family to move into Levittown, and come very highly recommend as citizens who will be an asset to the community.”
Snipes sealed two copies of the letter—one to the police chief, and one to the Myerses on Deepgreen Lane—and put them in the mail.
The next morning, Bill and Daisy packed the last of their belongings into the moving van. They delicately wrapped their sherbet glasses in a separate box, which they put in the back of their baby-blue-and-white Ford Mercury. They stood on the curb, with one-month-old daughter Lynda and the boys, outside their Bloomsdale Gardens home.
One by one, neighbors came up to say good-bye. Bill and Daisy had purposefully not told too many of their specific plans, for fear of inciting a crowd at Levittown before their arrival. Bill hadn’t told his parents either, because he didn’t want them to worry. In a sad twist of fate, Daisy didn’t have the chance to make such a choice. Both her stepparents had died within a month of each other just a few months earlier. Daisy took comfort in knowing that they wouldn’t have to bear the worries about her move. However, she knew they’d be proud of her courage and her commitment to starting a new life.
By ten thirty A.M., they were on the road. Daisy and Bill had spent the past two days at 43 Deepgreen Lane preparing the new house for their arrival. Scrubbing floors. Painting. Putting the final touches on the children’s rooms. The neighbors who saw them coming and going were, in fact, quite happy; they assumed the black man and woman were workers and that if the family moving in could afford such help, they would surely make fine additions to the town.
After driving less than a mile from Bloomsdale Gardens, the Myerses pulled into Levittown. It was a sweltering morning, with just a few kids playing outside. Abe Levitt’s precious emerald-green lawns had turned an awful brown from the drought. Clothes hung out back on the Levitt-approved clotheslines, not one dish towel in sight—as the regulations required. Any trepidation Daisy and Bill felt quickly vanished into the tumult of moving into a new home with three young kids. As Bill pointed the movers to the appropriate spots in the house, Daisy changed Lynda’s diaper and Stephen and William darted around, exploring their new house. Though they wanted to play outside, Daisy urged them to stay indoors because of the stifling heat.
When a knock came on the front door two hours later at one P.M., Daisy barely noticed it in the rush of activity. She opened it to find the mailman, a surprise since hardly anyone knew they were there. “Can I speak with the owner of the house?” he asked.
“I am the owner,” she replied.
The mailman blanched. “You? You’re the owner?”
“That’s right.”
In a daze, the mailman handed her a letter and left.
“Did you see how he looked?” Daisy said to Bill. “He looked ill.” Daisy opened the letter to find it was from Snipes, a copy of the notification he had sent the police chief alerting him of their arrival. Daisy and Bill couldn’t understand why the mailman had come to their door at all, since the letter wasn’t registered. Why hadn’t he just slipped into their mailbox? they wondered.
It didn’t take long to find out. The mailman had wanted to see for himself who this black couple was inside the home. Now he was going door-to-door down the street alerting the neighbors. “It happened!” he told them. “Niggers have moved into Levittown!”
When the afternoon edition of the Levittown newspaper landed on doorsteps that day, it had the usual mix of homespun stories. A voter drive for the fall elections would be held at the William Penn Fire House. Two cars collided the pervious night on the Levittown Parkway. The Science Explorer Post of the Boy Scouts was looking for new members.
Tucked in the bottom, left-hand corner was a small three-paragraph item. FIRST NEGRO FAMILY MOVES INTO LEVITTOWN the headline read. “The first Negro family to buy a Levittown house moved into the Dogwood Hollow Section this morning. Mr. and Mrs. William My-ers, Jr., moved here with their three children, William III, 4, Stephen, 3, and Linda [sic], one month. Formerly residents of Bloomsdale Gardens, the couple moved to the area two and a half years ago from York, Pa. Mr. Myers, who is an engineer
, is employed by C.V. Hill and Co., in Trenton, N.J., in the refrigerator testing laboratory. He is a World War II veteran.”
One by one the Dogwood Hollow neighbors began making their way outside. Just fifteen minutes after the mailman had been at their home, Daisy and Bill began to see small clusters of people gathering on the brown lawn of the Wertzes home across the street. As Bill and Daisy watched the crowd form, their telephone rang. Daisy answered.
“Hello?”
“I will not let my children drink chocolate milk again as long as I live!” said a hysterical woman on the other end, who then hung up.
Daisy’s heart raced. “Do you think there will be any trouble?” she asked Bill. Outside the window, the neighbors across the street craned. Bill put his arm around her shoulder and forced a reassuring smile. “Oh, they just came for curiosity,” he said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
The Myerses returned to their chores. When the doorbell rang again later, Daisy opened it cautiously. This time the warm faces of their discussion-group friends were there to greet them with a lunch of sandwiches and cake. As they sat around eating, Daisy and Bill told their friends about what had happened with the mailman and the onlookers outside. When their friends handed the Myerses the afternoon paper, it all made sense. The mailman had spread the word. The truth was out. Now they would just have to see how this would all unfold.
They weren’t the only ones. Next door, Katy Wechsler was home alone babysitting her brother, Nick, while her parents worked. The Wechslers knew the Myerses would be moving in that day and planned on getting together with them once they all got home. In the morning, Katy had gone next door to greet Bill and Daisy and invited them over to the house for some cold lemonade. The children played together happily. Once the Myerses had gone home, however, Katy began to get an ominous feeling.
Across the street at the Wertzes, small clusters of people began to linger again. By two thirty, a procession of cars began slowly driving down the block. The traffic built until, ninety minutes later, it was at a crawl. Katy grabbed the phone and dialed Bea, who was working now as a bookkeeper in nearby Bristol at a fuel-delivery company.
“There’s a riot going on,” Katy told her mother.
“What do you mean?” Bea said.
“There are cars going by one after another! It’s been weird; they slow down, stare into the house next door, then go around the block and do it again.” Katy peeked out her window at the gathering crowd of people on the Wertzes’ lawn. Bea said she’d be right there. As she drove home, she knew there was trouble when she hit the strange jam of traffic leading into the Dogwood Hollow community. Some of the cars had Confederate flags in the windows.
By the time Lew came home from work, he found about fifty people milling around as the cars continued their procession up the street. Lew was surprised to see the groups of people at the Wertzes. George Wertz, after years of being neighborly, was showing his true colors. Lew watched George milling with the mob across the street as the cars with Confederate flags rolled slowly down the road dividing them.
By seven thirty P.M., reporters began showing up among the crowd, taking pictures and interviewing onlookers. One of them came to the door and asked Bill Myers why he’d moved to Levittown in the first place. Bill lit a cigarette. “I only wanted to buy a nice home and provide well for my family, as every American, who is able, likes to do,” he said. “We will be good neighbors, and I know, or at least hope, that those around us will be the same. We are churchgoing, respectable people. We just want a nice neighborhood in which to raise our family and enjoy life.”
But, as the reporter walked away, Bill’s fear began to set in. Because of the heat, the windows were open and the family could hear the curses being spewed nearby. Daisy, who had pulled her boys inside from playing in the backyard, tried in vain to establish some sense of normalcy. The Wechslers had come over with Nick and Katy, and the children played. Now Daisy was struggling to get her children to settle down to sleep. But there was no peace to be had. A drunken man had pushed his way up to their front door, where he was now talking with Bill, who could smell liquor on his breath.
“All I want to know is who sold this house to you people?” the man slurred. “How much did you pay for it? What right do you have to come? I just want to find the people who sold it. Just tell me what their names are. When did you make settlement?”
Bill looked him squarely in the face and replied, “It’s all part of the public record. Check it.” When the man stumbled back to the others in the mob to share the news, Bill and Daisy heard a commotion. “Something is going to happen!” they heard someone shout. “I’m sticking around to see it!”
Inside the Wechslers’ home, Bea and Lew decided it was time to take action before violence broke out. Lew and his friend Peter Von Blum, a Quaker who had been part of the discussions preceding the Myerses’ move and had come over when he heard of the mob, said they’d go outside and try to reason with the growing crowd. Bea’s throat constricted. She had marched in the streets in the Bronx as a teenager, been thrown down the steps during a housing fight. But she had never felt so under siege. “Don’t be a hero,” she implored her husband. “Be careful, Lew.”
Lew wasn’t concerned. He had faced plenty of opposition in his years as a social activist, and he wasn’t going to fold now. He reassured her gently that everything would be okay. As soon as he stepped outside into the night, he found a scene unlike any he’d experienced before. Women stood cursing and spitting. Men grumbled about “niggers.” Many of them made it clear that they had come to Levittown because Bill Levitt had promoted it as whites-only. “Levitt promised!” shouted one man near Lew. “He should get them out even if he has to buy them out!”
“The NAACP bought the house for the nigger as a test case,” shouted another.
“No one wants them here,” remarked a third. “Let’s drive them out!”
Lew stepped right up to him. “The Myerses have the same right to buy a house as I do, or he does,” Lew insisted, referring to an onlooker nearby.
A towering man with a scowling face came over. It was the father of the neighborhood bully who had helped Nick and Katy build their fort after Katy had beaten him in a fight. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” he told Lew. “Our houses are worth only half of what they were yesterday.”
“I doubt there are many black families in Philadelphia who are anxious to move into Levittown now,” Lew scoffed wryly.
Inside the pink house behind them, Daisy and Bill pleaded for help from the police. “This situation is being taken care of,” the cop on the phone assured them. But with a glance outside at the growing mob in the darkness, they knew the truth was otherwise. Calls to the state police were no more helpful. “It’s up to the local police to handle this,” they were told. Bill and Daisy stood by the phone as their children cried in the background. Suddenly, two drunken men stumbled up outside their picture window clenching beer cans.
“Let’s blast them to bits!” they heard one yell.
“Yeah,” the other replied, “let’s do it! We just need some dynamite!”
Before the men could act, the lawn was flooded with flashing blue and red lights. The Myerses and Wechslers breathed a sigh of relief as the police cars pulled up outside. But then something strange happened. The police made no move to disperse the crowd. They just ticketed some of the cars out front while the mob lingered. The police, many of whom also lived in Levittown, were letting the chaos ensue. Whose side were they on? the Myerses wondered. And, they decided, they had had enough—they were not going to remain here one minute longer. Bill asked for a police escort. With heads ducked, Bill and Daisy held their kids firmly and made their way to their blue-and-white Mercury outside. Reporters barked questions. Flashbulbs popped. Mob members jeered.
As the Myerses pulled away in their car, they could barely make their way through the crush of people. Daisy held baby Lynda in her arms as they drove slowly out of Dogwood Hollow back to t
he home in Blooms-dale Gardens they thought they had left behind.
Standing on the lawn outside, Lew watched the Myerses go with sadness. Then suddenly he found himself and his friend Von Blum left there in the dark alone with the mob. A lone streetlight glowed over the corner mailbox. There stood the hulking flattop-haired man who had, in just a few hours, distinguished himself as the leader of the group. He was James E. Newell Jr., a thirty-year-old electrician from Durham, North Carolina, who lived around the corner on Daffodil Lane.
Beside Newell was a sidekick, an unemployed forty-eight-year-old named Eldred Williams, who had emerged from behind the wheel of his gray Pontiac station wagon. Williams was thin and short, with sharp features and a cigarette dangling from his thin lips. A crowd had formed around them as Newell stood sermonizing at the mailbox. What had started as a debate about the Myerses had begun to shift to threats of violence. Von Blum heard people talking of beating up the sympathizers. The mob eyed him and Lew. One of the people was a reporter from the local newspaper, the Levittown Times.
Suddenly, Lew felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned around to find his friend Barney Bell, the Texan truck driver with whom his family had become so close. “Lew,” Bell drawled in his Southern accent, “you’d better go back into your house. It could get rough here.” Lew eyed Bell, who was standing there with another mutual friend, who nodded. The message was clear: It was time for Lew to go back before he got hurt, and his buddies would watch his back.
Once inside, he and Bea saw out their window as Newell continued ranting and inciting the crowd, which had now grown to over 250 people since the police had left with the Myerses. At ten P.M., they saw a familiar man emerge from the shadows in a bow tie and suit: Sam Snipes. The Myerses’ diminutive lawyer had received a call that evening telling him of the disturbance on Deepgreen Lane, and he wanted to do anything he could to help. Snipes eyeballed the agitated crowd, until he heard someone say, “Let’s get the house!” Snipes wasn’t a big man, but he was fast, having set records in the quarter mile in college, and knew he could get away in no time if need be. So he put himself in between the mob and the home in defiance, suggesting to them in vain that plainclothes cops were in the crowd.
Levittown Page 11