The Chris Moeller Archives

Little boxes

David Kushner’s book, “Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb,” is a gripping, true account of a story I had never heard before. The two families referenced, both couples with young children during the mid-‘50s, led the fight to integrate one of the early and most famous suburbs in the United States-- Levittown, Pennsylvania, a community located approximately 10 miles outside the city center of Philadelphia.

One family was African-American, that of Daisy and Bill Myers. They did the integrating while standing up to humiliating abuse and threats of terror from their neighbors, including cross burnings and broken windows. The other was that of an ethnically-Jewish couple, “tenant activists” Bea and Lew Wechsler, who worked behind-the-scenes to get the previous owners to sell the home next-door to theirs to the Myers, then faced threats themselves and had the letters “KKK” spray-painted on the side of their house.

Unfortunately, the heroes in this story are not well-known today, though Daisy Myers has often been referred to, in civil rights circles, as “the Rosa Parks of the North.” (Bill died in the 1980s, but the other three players all survived to be interviewed for this book, which was published in 2009. Only Lew is still living today.) Many of the Levittown neighbors played the role of villain, but the principal villain was William Levitt, the celebrated home builder who provided much-needed housing to war vets and their families, and who became so famous doing so that he once appeared on the cover of Time magazine, but who excluded blacks in his housing developments in shockingly-open defiance of the Supreme Court and the Constitution even for his time. When the author calls Levitt’s legacy “complicated” at the end of the book, you get the feeling he’s just being charitable to the surviving members of the developer’s family who agreed to be interviewed for the project. Throughout the rest of the book, whose narrative continues to follow Levitt until his death four decades after Levittown’s integration, he comes off as a thoroughly bigoted asshat.

Levittown, New York, Levittown, Pennsylvania, and Levittown, New Jersey together came to define American suburban life in the 1950s and even still today. The Levitt operation promoted “conformity” to its customers, that’s what it delivered, and that’s what the American suburbs have delivered for decades in its image. Kushner's Levittown speaks to how doggedly persistent racism has been-- and will continue to be into the distant future. Codifying the law was the start, not the finish. Late in his life, Dr. King started to focus his campaign primarily on economic justice. He was in Memphis campaigning on behalf of striking sanitation workers when he was killed. He knew that integrated cities and neighborhoods held the most promise for equality.

Black and whites were overtly segregated in housing from 1920 all the way to 1970 thanks to Jim Crow laws and the early policies of the Federal Housing Administration that are discussed in Kushner's book. Gains during the '60s and '70s have been eroded by worsening economic conditions and disparities in recent years. Between 1958 (the year of the Levittown, PA integration, incidentally) and 1997, the percentage of whites that said they would move away if a black person or family moved in next door to them dropped from 44% to 1%, but actions speak louder than words, and gaps in income keep the numbers in home ownership far apart and blacks largely isolated in what are called "hypersegregated" neighborhoods. In 2010, 71% of whites were homeowners, versus only 45% of blacks. Non-hispanic whites are less than 64% of the country's overall population, according to the 2010 Census, but make up 87% of all homeowners.

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Opening Day quiz! What is the most historically-lopsided of all the famous baseball rivalries? If you said Yankees/Red Sox, you need to update your records for the 21st Century, Einstein.

Yankees Championships—27
Red Sox Championships—7 (26% of the Yankees’ total)

Cardinals Championships—11
Cubs Championships—2 (18% of the Cardinals’ total)

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May you each have a truly wonderful Opening Day. Baseball is the oldest sport in North America. Shut up, yes it is. And it will be the last one still standing years from now when you and I are both on the other side of the grass.

That’s because the other sports are unsustainable. Boxing is on a respirator and football is being transported by paramedics to the hospital because of the new science surrounding head injuries. Wrestling already died in 1976. It won't be resurrected because you're not going to want to wrestle anyone when the whole world is armed. Auto races will go when the crude oil is gone. Golf courses require an obscene amount of water, especially when we consider that most of the new courses being built now are in the desert. Plus, all the rich people will be locked up inside their compounds afraid of being beheaded. Basketball will have to go because there will be no more trees left to cut down to maintain the courts. Nobody will want to participate in foot races after the power grid goes out and the iPods can't be charged.

You're probably ahead of me already on hockey, and you're absolutely right that the Earth's climate won't support it-- or any other activity on ice, and soccer will lose popularity once parents discover that all of that hand-eye coordinator Junior has been building up through video games does him or her no good in a sport where you're not allowed to use your hands. So it will just be baseball left, and, I guess, swimming. There will definitely still be swimming, as I think this through all the way. We'll be playing baseball and swimming our asses off.

posted by CM @ 6:28 PM