Levittown : Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb

Levittown : Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb

The dark side of the American dream: the true story of the first African-American family to move into the iconic suburb, Levittown, PA . In the decade after World War II , one entrepreneurial family helped thousands of people buy into the American dream of owning a home. T he LevittsWilliam, Alfred, and their father, Abepooled their talents to create storybook towns with affordable little houses. T hey laid out the welcome mat, but not to everyone. Levittown had a whites-only policy. The events that unfolded in Levittown, PA, in the unseasonably hot summer of 1957 would rock the community. There, a white Jewish Communist family named Wechsler secretly arranged for a black family, the Myerses, to buy the pink house next door. T he explosive reaction would transform their lives, and the nation, leading to the downfall of a titan and the integration of the most famous suburb in the world. Levittown is a story of hope and fear, invention and rebellion, and the power that comes when ordinary people take an extraordinary stand. And it is as relevant today, more than fifty years later, as it was then. David Kushner is the author of Masters of Doom and Jonny Magic and the Card Shark Kids. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone and Wired, he has also been published in the New York Times, New York, Entertainment Weekly, Parade, Salon, and the Village Voice. He does commentary for NPR, and teaches journalism at New York University. Kushner lives not far from Levittown in New Jersey. David Kushner's Levittown highlights the dark side of the American dream. It is the true story of the first African-American family to move into the iconic suburn, Levittown, PA. In the decade after World War II , one entrepreneurial family helped thousands of people buy into the American dream of owning a home. The LevittsWilliam, Alfred, and their father, Abepooled their talents to create storybook towns with affordable little houses. They laid out the welcome mat, but not to everyone. Levittown had a whites-only policy.The events that unfolded in Levittown, PA, in the unseasonably hot summer of 1957 would rock the community. There, a white Jewish Communist family named Wechsler secretly arranged for a black family, the Myerses, to buy the pink house next door. The explosive reaction would transform their lives, and the nation, leading to the downfall of a titan and the integration of the most famous suburb in the world. Levittown is a story of hope and fear, invention and rebellion, and the power that comes when ordinary people take an extraordinary stand. And it is as relevant today, more than fifty years later, as it was then. Kushner has gathered a mass of material, organized it effectively, and tells a gripping story. After reading it, Americans will understand how suburbs became so white in the first place and what two families -- one black, one white -- did to remedy the situation. -- James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown TownsA gripping, beautifully-written history of a hot summer in one town where so many threads of postwar American history came togethersuburbanization, segregation, the civil rights movement, McCarthyism. A real page-turner. Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were and Marriage, a History'Rolling Stone and Wired contributing editor Kushner skillfully pieces together a shameful chronicle of racial discrimination during the American postwar economic boom. The child of Jewish immigrants, Abraham Levitt became a successful real-estate developer in the midst of the Great Depression. He bought land on Long Island, the new frontier of suburbia, with sons Bill (the front man) and Alfred (the designer). They developed housing efficiently and sold it affordably. In 1946, they transformed the farming community of Island Trees, Long Island, into Levittown, a self-contained development geared toward the 16 million returning veterans. Proclaiming that 'an undesirable class can quickly ruin a community,' Bill Levitt barred blacks from buying into the complex. This discrimination was supported by the ingrained business practices of the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which gave higher marks to homogenous communities and 'redlined' bad areas. However, after the opening of a second Levittown just north of Philadelphia in 1952, events converged to challenge these policies. Civil-rights groups made integrating the new Levittown a top priority, and Jewish activists Bea and Lew Wechsler invited the African-American Myers family to move in next door at 43 Deepgreen Lane in August 1957. Over the next months, the Myerses and Wechslers endured harassment, heckling, mob violence and cross-burning. Civil-rights sympathizers clashed with anti-integration residents. A KKK-sponsored organization secured a neighboring house for meetings, complete with display of the Confederate flag. Kushner's immediate story of the trial andconviction of the racist mob's leaders occurs within a larger frame of national civil-rights upheavals, including the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the murder of Emmett Till and the integration of Little Rock Central High School. The Levittown fracas, he demonstrates, was a crucial moment in the overall struggle. A remarkable story fashioned into a dramatic narrative.'Kirkus Reviews'In 1957, Bev and Lew Wechsler, activists and residents of Levittown, PA, welcomed Daisy and Bill Myers and their children to move next door. The Myers thus became the first black family to reside in Levittown, built and maintained as an explicitly 'whites only' suburb. Rolling Stone contributing editor Kushner frames the Myers's story within the rise of self-assured entrepreneur developer Bill Levitt, who built wildly successful postwar suburbs and was an unrepentant defender of racially exclusive policies. Kushner also limns the contemporary civil rights struggle but focuses on the immediate fallout of the Myers's move into Levittown: nonstop protests, near-riots, and threats from appalled residents backed by out-of-town white supremacists, which were countered by the Wechslers and other forward-thinking residents with support from local Quaker and human rights groups. Though the Myers family prevailed in the courts, and Levitt's communities would be officially integrated by 1960, the tension of that summer is still palpable in this gripping account. Timing gives this publication an additional layer of historic intrigue: in November 2008, voters in Bucks County, PA, home to Levittown, selected Barack Obama for President by an 8.5 percent margin.'Janet Ingraham Dwyer, Library Journal'Migration to suburbia has long been an American ambition, but its allure was never stronger than in the post-WWII years, when the fantasy of a dream house played to the imagination of millions of Americans, especially returning veterans. Already waiting for many of them was a model community on the North Shore of Long Island called Levittown, the brainchild of Abraham Levitt and his sons, William and Alfred, the nation's first real estate tycoons. But Levittown came with its own set of requirements: perfectly manicured lawns, no fences and no black families. In 1957, as the Levittsby now massively successful and nationally laudedhad already expanded to a second model city, two families challenged the segregationist policy: one, a white Jewish Communist family, secretly arranged for the other, a black family, to buy the house next door. In an entertaining round-robin format, Kushner relays each party's story in the leadup to a combustible summer when the integration of America's most famous suburb caused the downfall of a titan and transformed the nation.'Publishers Weekly

Manufacturer: ecampus
ISBN: 9780802716194
Category: History

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