445452

2012
JUHXXX10.1177/0096144212445452WolfingerJournal of Urban History

Journal of Urban History

“The American Dream—For 38(3) 430­–451

© 2012 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission: http://www.
All Americans”: Race, Politics, sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0096144212445452
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Desegregate Levittown

James Wolfinger1

Abstract
This article explores the desegregation of Levittown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s. Following
World War II, black Philadelphians found themselves locked in the heart of the city, with bad
housing and few job opportunities. Levittown offered a place for African Americans to secure
better homes near growing industrial areas, but William Levitt refused to sell to them. African
Americans and their white allies mounted political and legal campaigns to force the community
to admit black residents. The Myers family finally broke the color barrier in 1957 but faced
weeks of protests until state authorities squelched local resistance. The Myerses got to keep
their home, but their victory did little to break down Levittown’s barriers. Building on new
scholarship about suburban history and the northern black rights movement, this article ana-
lyzes the meaning of suburbs to African Americans, conflicting ideas white and black residents
had about rights, and the limited ability of liberal approaches to address racial discrimination.

Keywords
Levittown, suburbs, Philadelphia, race, African Americans

“I have a right to live in Levittown or in any other section of our country so long as I am a good
citizen,” Bill Myers told reporters in his Levittown home in late August 1957. “We are church-
going, respectable people. We just want a nice neighborhood in which to raise our family and
enjoy life,” he added. “We will be good neighbors and I know, or at least hope, that those around
us will be the same.” The reporters, especially the ones from Philadelphia’s largest black news-
paper, the Tribune, must have listened to that last sentence with raised eyebrows. Outside the
front door, they could hear a mob of some three hundred people milling around, muttering racial
epithets, and threatening violence. Over the course of the last hot weeks of August, the Myers
family had a window shattered by stones, they and their supporters faced threats and vandalism,
and local and state police had to come in to quell the riotous atmosphere. Levittown was indeed,
in the words of a Tribune headline, “A Disgrace to America.”1
The August riots in Levittown came at the end of a long campaign to open this suburban com-
munity to African Americans. That campaign, as much as the riots themselves, reveals much

1
DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:
James Wolfinger, History and Teacher Education, DePaul University, 2320 N. Kenmore Ave., SAC 338, Chicago,
IL 60614, USA
Email: jwolfing@depaul.edu
Wolfinger 431

about race relations, black politics, and the meaning of democracy in mid-twentieth-century
America. In telling the history of the Levittown riots and, just as importantly, the history that led
to them, this article explores black suburbanization as a long-term movement with political,
legal, and grassroots components. The Myers family may have expressed a seemingly simple
desire to “raise our family and enjoy life,” but their presence in Levittown was a culmination of
a movement that included protests to governors and presidents, a legal campaign led by Thurgood
Marshall, and efforts by civil rights, religious, and labor groups to end segregationist practices.
This article thus explores the strength, as well as the ambivalence, a “pioneer” family displayed
in pushing for desegregation as part of a campaign that saw African Americans tie together con-
stitutional, political, workplace, and moral rights to claim that democratic equality meant they
must have access to any home that they could afford. At the same time, the piecemeal, individu-
alistic, approach that liberals employed in this case shows that activists could achieve some
victories but such gains were inadequate to the larger needs of black Americans. Ultimately,
Levittown became a critical scene in the postwar contest over the meaning of democracy where
African Americans defined equal rights as the freedom to live where they pleased and their oppo-
nents argued they had the right to choose the people with whom they would live.
This Levittown story builds on several bodies of scholarship that have led historians to rethink
their approach to twentieth-century African American history. One such body, typified by
Thomas Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty, Matthew Countryman’s Up South, and Kevin Boyle’s
Arc of Justice, has emphasized the national nature of America’s “race problem.” Their argu-
ments have pushed scholars away from a declension narrative that begins with Martin Luther
King, Jr. ascendant in the South and ends with the rise of black power and riots in the North. The
northern movement played out in local communities as activists campaigned to desegregate sub-
urbs like Levittown and pioneers like the Myerses helped lead the way. This article also builds
on the new suburban history, which in part has emphasized the diversity of suburban communi-
ties and the way they shaped and were shaped by race relations. Rather than a white monolith, as
Andrew Wiese has shown, the suburbs have always had an African American presence, and I
offer Levittown as a case study of how that presence was secured by a vigorous, multifaceted
campaign that was contested by white residents, business interests, and public officials. Finally,
this story builds on and extends a number of histories of the desegregation of Levittown, many
of which have offered narrative accounts that focus on the riot itself. Sugrue’s analytical treat-
ment in Sweet Land of Liberty, which places events in Levittown in the context of federal policy,
racial identity, and the postwar psychology of intergroup relations, stands as a notable exception
to this literature. This article, in contrast, emphasizes the campaign that led to Levittown’s deseg-
regation, the nature of black politics, and the contested meaning of democracy.2
To be sure, the Levittown riots of 1957 offer an explosive example of the racial tensions that
roiled the urban North in the decades after World War II. As such they have begun to earn
deserved attention from journalists and scholars. But treating the riots as an explosive moment,
I argue, minimizes the larger story of black activism that led people like the Myerses to believe
Levittown was where they had to take a stand. The politics and activism of Bill and Daisy Myers
and the supporters who backed them shaped what happened in Levittown, and that story of black
politics is too often lost in accounts of the riots. Levittown certainly put a moment of raw conflict
on display, but this article argues that by drawing on a broader perspective we can interrogate the
meaning of suburbs to black Americans, contested ideas about rights, and the efficacy of the
liberal approach to racial discrimination in postwar American society.3
Housing had always presented major difficulties to Philadelphia’s black population, but
World War II and the reconversion to peacetime exacerbated the situation. The city as a whole
found itself in a massive housing crisis after the war, with little public or private shelter avail-
able. The tens of thousands of African Americans who had come to the city to take factory jobs
432 Journal of Urban History 38(3)

during the 1940s (the city’s black population grew from 250,000 to 375,000 between 1940 and
1950) faced the worst problems as discrimination from real estate interests, public officials, and
neighborhood residents forced them into the city’s oldest, most run-down buildings. Studies
showed 35 percent of black Philadelphians lived in homes that either were dilapidated or lacked
a private bath and that the rate of overcrowding in black districts in North, South, and West
Philadelphia stood at 10 percent, three times the city average. This concentration came in part
from the burgeoning black numbers in some mixed tracts, which dwarfed the number of white
residents, and in part from whites leaving for the suburbs.4
While the housing stock within Philadelphia’s city limits was largely stagnant, private build-
ers worked to satisfy the suburbanizing white market. These companies, led by William Levitt,
built 140,000 homes in the metropolitan area between 1945 and 1955. Three-quarters of their
homes went up in suburban Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware Counties, with almost all of the
rest in northeastern Philadelphia, which was within the city limits but was so far removed from
downtown that it was suburban in character, if not in name.5
New residents of these communities sought the open spaces, new schools, and modern ameni-
ties that the suburbs offered, but race often motivated their move as much as anything.
Philadelphia’s Commission on Race and Housing reported that homeowners regularly said, “I
don’t know where we’ll go, but we’re going” and “I don’t mind a Negro down the street, but not
next door.” Around the region, Bucks County saw its white population rise by nearly 40,000
people between 1940 and 1950, but its black population climbed by only 500 residents. Delaware
County gained over 100,000 people, only 7,000 of whom were black. And of Montgomery
County’s 60,000 new residents, only 700 were African American.6
Once in the suburbs, residents relied on a variety of tactics to maintain the racial homogeneity
of their new neighborhoods. Their actions showed how the racism of ordinary whites meshed
with economic and legal structures to prevent African Americans from gaining access to new
homes. Many communities used restrictive covenants to keep blacks out. This method became
so prominent that the Philadelphia Housing Association called a conference where participants
“strongly condemned” the burgeoning practice. Some neighborhoods pressured local bankers
not to loan money to blacks and urged real estate agents not to sell to them. One banker said his
firm “never financed a sale which would break a block.” Doing so, he claimed, would antagonize
white patrons and thus be bad for business (an argument that Beryl Satter, in her study of Chicago,
has shown to be untrue: blockbusting practices could in fact be highly profitable to banks that
charged African Americans exorbitant interest rates and “flipped” houses multiple times). In
addition, a 1953 NAACP survey found that not one of sixty-two local real estate agencies sold
or rented to African Americans. Other communities put together housing associations and passed
zoning laws to “protect their property values” and “police their neighborhoods.” Builders, led by
William Levitt, accepted this discrimination, exacerbating the problem and giving it a stamp of
corporate approval. “Most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities,” Levitt once said.
“The responsibility [for this] is society’s. . . . It is not reasonable to expect that any one builder
could or should undertake to absorb the entire risk and burden of conducting such a vast social
experiment.” Everyone understood the racial implications of the physical construction of the
metropolitan area, leading the Society of Friends to worry that a “White Christian belt” was
encircling the city.7
Despite all the problems, the news about black housing was not entirely bad. Black
Philadelphians had the highest home ownership rate in the country, registering at nearly 30 per-
cent in 1950. In part this reflected the city’s housing market in general, dominated by row houses
and single-family homes, rather than the high-rise apartment complexes of other cities. The high
black home ownership rate also reflected the fact that in the mid- to late 1940s the city still held
several hundred thousand good-paying industrial jobs that employed thousands of African
Wolfinger 433

Americans. Also, the growth of white suburbs boosted black homeownership rates, as whites
moving out of their neighborhoods usually found African Americans to be their largest pool of
prospective buyers. Finally, there were a few mixed suburbs, Concord Park for example, that
offered a ray of hope. But overall, African Americans found a discriminatory housing market
that locked them into the worst homes located at Philadelphia’s core.8
Reconversion of the city’s industrial base at the end of World War II and the subsequent sub-
urbanization of jobs compounded black Philadelphians’ problems. At war’s end Baldwin
Locomotive, Midvale Steel, the Frankford Arsenal, and other businesses cut thousands of jobs.
The end of federal money only added to the anxious feelings engendered by the continued slide
of textiles and other industries that were moving their operations to avoid higher labor costs.
While some of the lost jobs headed south, many moved to the suburbs. From 1919 to 1939
Philadelphia held some 60 to 65 percent of the metropolitan area’s manufacturing jobs, but that
number fell to 50 percent in 1943 and below 40 percent by 1980. The city’s northeast and
Montgomery and Bucks counties picked up the bulk of this work as SKF, General Electric,
Budd, and other companies built new factories. With jobs in the city growing scarce,
Philadelphians’ salaries barely kept pace with inflation, while suburbanites in Bucks County and
Montgomery County saw their pay rise by 46 and 26 percent, respectively, over the next couple
decades.9
Reconversion and the dispersal of jobs had a particularly devastating effect on African
Americans who could not follow their employers to the suburbs. In the first weeks after V-J Day,
companies such as Sun Ship, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Philadelphia Transportation
Company laid off some fifteen thousand black employees. Some African Americans did hold
onto their factory work, especially in metals, into the early 1950s, but as the government reduced
its orders, companies laid off their workers, and blacks were the first to go. One study estimated
that the number of manufacturing jobs in largely black North Philadelphia fell by as much as
fifty thousand between 1928 and 1972. The unemployment rate in that district reached 37 per-
cent by 1956, and another 42 percent claimed to be working only irregularly.10
As jobs and housing suburbanized, the problems that process created for African Americans
became a vicious circle. African Americans could not live in most of the suburbs where compa-
nies were relocating, while at the same time jobs were drying up in Philadelphia, and they soon
found their incomes stagnant or gone. Without steady employment, blacks found that they could
afford to live only in public housing or the most run-down private housing in the inner city,
which concentrated them even more in neighborhoods where there were no jobs to be found, and
the cycle started all over again. Housing and employment, then, were mutually reinforcing prob-
lems that limited opportunities for the city’s African Americans.
Black Philadelphians of course understood the intertwined nature of the housing and work-
place problems confronting them and that is what made Levittown so crucial. Since the mid-
1940s, the Tribune had been warning Philadelphians that “[t]he housing situation can and will
destroy many of the things for which Americans fought and died.” George Schermer, executive
director of Philadelphia’s Commission on Human Relations, made the point more specific. “The
citadel of segregation in the next 10 to 20 years will be in Northern cities,” he said. One of the
largest problems in his view was the suburbs which “produc[ed] an intensified pattern of racial
segregation.” The largest of these suburban communities was Levittown, and it was built
expressly, if not exclusively, to house workers at U.S. Steel’s new Fairless plant about twenty
miles northeast of Philadelphia. The distance meant that if African Americans could not live in
the area, then they could not work at the factory, and in fact some forty men turned down jobs at
the mill for that reason. Levittown’s size and the economic activity the new steel plant was
expected to generate made the suburb, in the words of one NAACP report, a “frontier for today’s
democracy.” The problems that Levittown posed typified the issues confronting African
434 Journal of Urban History 38(3)

Americans throughout the region, and the NAACP, wrote Roy Wilkins, had to make sure there
would be “no discriminatory treatment of [African Americans] in the matter of housing.”11
Black activists knew it would be difficult to desegregate Levittown, Pennsylvania. William
Levitt, the head of Levitt and Sons, Inc., had publicly vowed that his construction company
would not sell homes to African Americans and had followed through on that pledge in his first
community on Long Island. There, he ignored protests from groups such as the NAACP and the
Civil Rights Congress and created a whites-only community. Levitt’s company turned away
black veterans with good credit, forcibly removed the NAACP’s Herbert Hill from its office
when he came to investigate, and even refused to renew the leases of two white families who
invited black children to play with their kids. A clause in early leases read, “The tenant agrees
not to permit the premises to be used by any person other than members of the Caucasian race,”
but the Supreme Court in its 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer decision declared such covenants “unen-
forceable as law and contrary to public policy.” Levitt’s response was to remove the clause but
maintain his segregationist restrictions. Levittown was widely perceived as so racist that in his
columns Langston Hughes compared it to the Deep South and argued that he would “rather be
treated like a dog than like a Negro” because at least dogs could live in Levittown.12
To black activists, one of Levitt’s greatest weaknesses lay in his dependence on federal funds.
In an era when African Americans were putting greater pressure on the federal government to
ensure equality before the law, desegregationists were appalled that mortgages on many
Levittown homes had Federal Housing Administration (FHA) backing. The federal government,
Thurgood Marshall, Walter White, and others from the NAACP and other organizations argued,
was using tax money drawn from all citizens to prop up segregation. This amounted, in their
view, to “federal aid and assistance for an unconstitutional purpose.” FHA administrators
responded that they had no authority to challenge racial discrimination and in fact could not
extend mortgage insurance to projects “where there are characteristics which tend to produce
undesirable community effects or threaten to influence adversely the value of neighborhood
properties.” “There is no doubt,” an FHA official concluded, “that in most cases the entrance of
a negro into a white section will adversely effect [sic] values.” An incensed Marshall demanded
that the FHA, which since its creation in 1934 had based its determination of the “stability” of
communities in part on their racial makeup, change its stance, especially in light of Shelley, and
revise its manual if necessary to conform to the law of the land. The FHA, he wrote, should no
longer “give aid and comfort to those in this country who are determined to continue and expand
racial segregation in public as well as in private housing.” Such arguments did little to change
Levittown, New York—as late as 1957 the community had only thirteen black households—but they
did foreshadow the Pennsylvania campaign to come. In the Bucks County community, black
activists would make even greater demands for equal treatment, and would do so with grassroots,
political, and legal campaigns.13
Shortly after Levitt announced in 1951 that he would build a segregated community in
Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia NAACP led an array of groups in a grassroots campaign that
demanded the abolition of segregation in the new Levittown. The NAACP held a series of meet-
ings to protest Levitt’s policies that would force the Philadelphia area to “become divided into
little islands of prejudice and distrust [rather than a] democratic community carrying on proudly
in the American tradition.” Levittown, the association asserted, should represent the “American
Dream—for all Americans.” It then formed a committee to take up what it called “one of the
Branch’s most important pieces of social action,” stopping the construction of a “discriminatory
housing project.” The association advocated sending a resolution to local governments to protest
Levittown’s discrimination, pressuring the state legislature to prohibit discrimination by a pri-
vate builder, mobilizing local churches and civic organizations to demand equality, and working
with newspapers to publicly excoriate Levitt’s plans. It also began laying the groundwork for a
Wolfinger 435

legal challenge based on the due process and equal protection clauses of the Constitution. The
black press, led by the Tribune, joined the campaign, running a series of editorials challenging
Levitt to abandon his policy that “contradicts both the religious and democratic heritages of the
American people.” “Segregation breeds contempt for the segregated, and hatred for the segrega-
tor,” the paper continued. “It destroys the unity of the American people.” Levitt might call his
suburb “the most perfectly planned community in America,” the editors wrote another time, but
it was in fact “just the opposite.” “Any community which is deliberately planned to discriminate
against any religious or racial group of Americans is not consistent with Democratic principles.
. . . Levittown,” they concluded, “breeds hate.” Television and radio shows featuring racial issues
reminded their audiences that “discrimination in housing [was] a direct violation of civil liber-
ties” and that Levittown represented “a monster of discrimination which could have harmful and
far reaching effects on the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” Real estate groups held meet-
ings to discuss “Discrimination in Housing in Philadelphia” and repeatedly challenged the FHA,
President Truman, and President Eisenhower to halt federal funding of segregated communities.
And religious groups, including the African Methodist Episcopal church and the Quakers, cre-
ated organizations such as the Committee on Democracy in Housing to protest the “immoral and
Un-American” suburb. Many people concerned about Levittown saw it as part of a bigger pic-
ture. In a worldwide propaganda war with the Soviet Union, the United States should be ashamed
of this “poor example of the American way of life,” wrote one man. “In light of world conflict,”
added another, “we need our people together in every phase of American life.” The grassroots
portion of the campaign, then, was built on local organizations that appealed to black
Philadelphians on a broad basis through newspaper articles, television and radio shows, and
mass meetings. It was a community-wide effort that touched on a number of themes in postwar
life: the meaning of democracy, the nation’s religious heritage, America’s image in the cold war.14
With pressure mounting in the black community, activists developed a multipronged strategy
that exemplified the mid-twentieth-century liberal, piecemeal approach to civil rights that relied
on quiet meetings with corporate and public officials to solve individual problems. In particular,
they pushed William Levitt, U.S. Steel, and public officials to eliminate segregation in Levittown.
The national NAACP, its efforts largely led by attorney Constance Baker Motley, arranged a
meeting with Levitt, H. Charles Ford of the steelworkers union, Drayton Bryant of the Philadelphia
Housing Authority, and Reginald Johnson of the Urban League. Levitt opened the meeting by
claiming that he “did not want an all-white policy in his developments, but that same was
demanded by the white public which he served.” He was willing to listen to counterarguments
though (a good sign in Motley’s view since he had refused to discuss his policy on Long Island),
and after two hours of discussion he backed down from his adamant stand. He would not, he said,
“take a chance on admitting Negroes and then not be able to sell his houses,” but he might allow
the Fellowship Commission, an interracial group in Philadelphia, to buy one thousand or fifteen
hundred homes and rent them on an interracial basis. He also suggested that he might be willing
to build a small interracial community elsewhere if it could be proved that he would suffer no
financial loss. But that was as far as he would go. Levitt did not budge much from his initial posi-
tion, but Motley was heartened by the fact that he appeared to be “not interested in building
communities as such, but in making money.” Sheer capitalist enterprise, she seemed to realize,
could at times be more race blind than planned communities. Motley left the meeting believing
that she had made some headway and hoping that more discussions with Levitt would bring
greater results.15
The NAACP next targeted U.S. Steel, cautiously optimistic that the company, which proudly
trumpeted itself as the largest employer of African Americans in the United States, would oppose
Levittown’s segregation. Motley and Walter White of the national NAACP, Charles Shorter of
the Philadelphia branch, and representatives from the Urban League and the American Friends
436 Journal of Urban History 38(3)

Service Committee met with company officials who “welcomed” the discussion about housing
in Bucks County. At first they appeared to support fair employment practices and recognize the
connection between jobs and fair housing. But things soured when White and Shorter asked for
specifics about African American employment. Nationwide the company employed over 32,000
African Americans, but of the 3,000 workers at the Fairless plant, only 70 were black. These men
had to commute in from either Trenton or Philadelphia, while many others had turned down the
work because it was inaccessible. Although the steel executives appeared somewhat sympathetic
to the NAACP’s case, they had little response when pressed on the demographics of Fairless
Village, a new 6,000-home housing project for plant workers that received some $15 million in
funding from the company. It had zero black residents. The meeting left the Chicago Defender
to wonder “Is All Fair at Fairless?” and accuse the company of not recognizing that “it is the key
to the installation of fully democratic practices in [its] community.”16
NAACP officials and their allies also tried to pressure public officials, starting with President
Eisenhower. In doing so, they demonstrated the belief that many African Americans held in the
1950s that the government, when pressed, would support nondiscriminatory policies. To
Eisenhower, NAACP officials argued that Bucks County offered a “unique opportunity to estab-
lish unsegregated patterns of living and employment.” “Indeed,” they continued, explicitly tying
housing and jobs together, “unless the residential racial pattern is biracial, there is no hope of
establishing fair employment practices in the surrounding industries.” Moreover, they reminded
the president that the FHA had committed some $81 million to mortgages in the community and
that he had vowed that federal funds “would not be used to support or extend racial segregation
and discrimination.” “We are appealing to you,” the NAACP concluded, “to open on an unseg-
regated pattern this vast program of government assisted housing in the Bucks county area. Such
action would not only be in accord with the policy announced by your Administration, but it will
also make a major contribution towards facilitating democratic employment patterns in indus-
tries now being created at Bucks County.” In response to their arguments, President Eisenhower
agreed to put Maxwell Rabb, his aide in charge of minority affairs, on the case. But several
months later, in May 1954, there had still been no movement on Levittown, and Walter White
was left to ask Vice President Richard Nixon for help. That appeal went nowhere.17
Black activists also pushed Pennsylvania Governor John Fine and local FHA and VA
(Veterans Administration) officials for help. “We ask the state of Pennsylvania . . . to insure that
Levitt does not adhere to . . . un-American practices,” wrote Walter White. “We respectfully
request you as governor . . . to take appropriate action to insure that there shall be no discrimina-
tion or segregation with respect to selection of tenants or purchasers.” A clergyman from the
AME church added that discrimination in Levittown would be “contrary to public policy . . .
[while] feed[ing] the propaganda mills of the enemies of Democracy, both here and abroad.” He
then called on the governor to speak out against housing discrimination and “to either ban a
Levittown, or to force the builders to scuttle their policy of excluding Negroes.” To these pleas,
Fine issued a boilerplate response that he was personally opposed to discrimination but that he
would not “impose conditions of occupancy on a private builder.” Telegrams to FHA and VA
officials who had the responsibility of backing home loans in the Philadelphia area requested that
they “insure there will be no discrimination or segregation because of race, color, or religion.”
But like the federal administrators in New York, they refused to intervene.18
As the NAACP pressed its campaign with Levitt, U.S. Steel, and public officials, it also built
a legal case against segregation in Levittown. The Philadelphia Tribune aided the cause, urging
its readers to apply to buy homes in the community. If they were turned down because of skin
color, the paper advised, they should sue Levitt. The NAACP, the editors concluded, was on the
case. By January 1953 Motley had collected names of a number of possible plaintiffs and had
begun plotting strategy with Jacques Wilmore of the American Friends Service Committee.
Wolfinger 437

Motley was cautious about bringing suit, concerned that state courts would rule they had no
jurisdiction since Pennsylvania did not have a law prohibiting housing discrimination (such a
law was not passed until 1961). Better, she thought, for the NAACP to win suit against the fed-
eral government in an ongoing public housing case in Savannah, Georgia, that would “establish
the principle that the federal government may not give its assistance to the construction of segre-
gated public housing.” That would give the NAACP grounds to argue that in Levittown the
government could not “give financial assistance of any kind to the construction of segregated
private housing.” Motley’s strategy led to the logical conclusion that FHA assistance made pub-
lic and private housing related strands of a single, broad federal housing policy rather than two
distinct means of sheltering people, one a government program and the other a private, suppos-
edly free-market, system. If that logic held, then, in her view, federal assistance to racially dis-
criminatory communities violated the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. It
was an easier argument to make, though, if the courts outlawed segregation in public housing
first. But Levittown was growing so fast—one hundred homes or more went up each week in the
early 1950s with some sixteen thousand built by 1955—that Motley feared the NAACP could
not afford to wait. The NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, did win
its Savannah suit in November 1956, but the association could not wait that long in Levittown
and sued William Levitt and administrators from the FHA and VA in January 1955.19
Marshall, Motley, and other officials from the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund thought
the tide of history was running with them as they headed to court. Shelley v. Kraemer had out-
lawed state sanction of racial covenants, and Brown v. Board had just declared segregated
schools unconstitutional. “The next targets,” announced the NAACP, “are the operations which
receive indirect aid from the Federal Housing Administration [including] the huge Levittown
communities which candidly discriminate against Negroes.” Moreover, the association thought
it had assembled a sympathetic collection of plaintiffs to front its class action suit. The six men
were all married, all but one had received an honorable discharge after serving in World War II,
and they all sought defense work in the Levittown area while the United States was engaged in a
cold war around the globe and, for a time, a hot war in Korea. These were working- and middle-
class men with families who projected the kind of “respectability” that the NAACP desired.20
The NAACP’s suit asserted that Levitt and Sons, Inc. and the federal government were intrin-
sically linked to each other and that discrimination in the resultant Pennsylvania community
violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the due process and equal protection
clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Levitt’s business plan, Marshall and Motley argued, was
to build for a mass market by selling at low prices and providing long-term amortization. To do
so, Levitt needed the support of the FHA and the VA, whose premium rates did not conform to
actuarial principles. Their mortgage insurance, the attorneys argued, “constituted a subsidy to
private builders” who rejected applicants “solely because of their race or color.” This was dis-
crimination that Levitt could not have practiced without taxpayers’ money. FHA and VA admin-
istrators, the lawyers charged, had the duty under the National Housing Act to make sure there
were no restrictive covenants on any of the properties their agencies insured, and in failing to do
so they not only broke the housing act but also violated the civil rights of numerous African
American applicants who had been denied a Levittown home solely because of their race.21
The association’s second argument held that Levitt’s community was so vast that it made his
company more than an ordinary home builder. “In constructing streets, roads, schools, [etc.],
defendant Levitt and Sons, Inc., has at all times acted as an instrumentality of the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania,” the attorneys said. “Levittown, Pennsylvania is in fact and in effect a city or
town similar in all respects to all other cities or towns in the Commonwealth.” With sixteen
thousand homes, Levittown ranked as the tenth largest city in the state, and Marshall and Motley
argued that it should be regarded as a public entity where home sales were subject to the due
438 Journal of Urban History 38(3)

process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment rather than as a private concern where Levitt had
greater latitude to make his own rules. The only proper relief, the attorneys asserted, was an
injunction “restraining Levitt from refusing to sell to the plaintiffs solely because of race and
color and restraining the government defendants from insuring mortgages on Levittown proper-
ties as long as Levitt discriminates against purchasers because of race or color.” The connection
between Levitt and the federal government was so great that “the actions of Levitt must be
deemed the acts of the federal agencies,” they concluded.22
The defendants’ attorneys offered counterarguments that spoke to the limits of state power
and the attenuated connection between Levitt and the federal agencies. First, it was by no means
clear that the government had the right to compel private actors to adhere to nondiscriminatory
principles. Shelley v. Kraemer made it unconstitutional for courts to uphold restrictive covenants
but there was no such thing as an open housing law at the time. Levitt enjoyed “the fundamental
right of a private builder to sell to whom he pleases,” his attorneys argued. In addition, Levitt,
they claimed, had no direct relationship with the federal government; instead, it was the home
buyers who contracted with federal agencies. As for the allegations against the VA and FHA,
Congress had never charged them with the duty of preventing discrimination in housing, which
meant the plaintiffs were asking the court to compel federal officials to overstep their charge.
Finally, the defense argued that the federal district court lacked jurisdiction over the case. The
NAACP should have sued either in state court (where the attorneys knew there was no
Pennsylvania state law appropriate to the case) or in federal court in Washington, D.C., where
the FHA and VA were headquartered.23
The NAACP’s arguments failed to persuade Judge William Kirkpatrick. The judge acknowl-
edged the close relationship between Levitt and the federal agencies, which gave the government
some control over Levittown’s construction, but that did not make “Levitt and Sons, Inc., of
New York, the government of the United States or a branch or agency of it nor [did it] make the
government of the United States the builder or developer of the Levittown project.” The judge
also agreed with the defense that the FHA and VA had never been charged with the duty of pre-
venting discrimination and that only Congress could change that fact. Finally, he rejected the
claim that Levitt was acting as an instrument of the state with the blunt comment that the argu-
ment was “too far-fetched to require discussion.” “The complaint,” Kirkpatrick concluded in a
curt final statement, “may be dismissed.” The NAACP considered filing an appeal, but ulti-
mately decided to drop the case.24
Although the association lost, its court battle was far from a dead end. The case kept Levittown
in the headlines of black newspapers such as the Tribune and Chicago Defender as well as
Philadelphia’s largest daily, the Evening Bulletin. In doing so, it made the racial problems of
Levittown common knowledge throughout the black community. “We knew, like everyone else
did, that the new suburb called Levittown . . . was supposed to be lily-white,” Daisy Myers
recalled. “Lawsuits had been lost by Negroes trying to buy new homes in both the New York and
Pennsylvania Levittowns.” The suburb also became a cause célèbre for black activists and their
allies, with men such as Ralph Abernathy coming to speak to audiences about desegregating the
community and area authors Pearl Buck and James Michener arguing that its discriminatory
policies gave support to America’s communist enemies abroad. And the case helped pull the
Bucks County Human Relations Council and the Quakers into greater involvement with deseg-
regating the suburb. It was this mass awareness of the court case and the larger Levittown cam-
paign that kept the suburb front and center for many people concerned about combating Jim
Crow in the Philadelphia area.25
With little help coming from public officials, the courts, or U.S. Steel, activists from a variety
of backgrounds took it on themselves to push to break the color bar in Levittown. The suburb’s
Faith Reformed Church, for example, held a public meeting titled “Fair Housing in Bucks
Wolfinger 439

County,” where a minister asked the crowd if they would accept an African American family
with “faith, love, and human understanding.” They had better consider the question, he told
them, because like it or not the day was coming when a black family would move into Levittown.
A real estate appraiser at the same meeting assured listeners that it was a myth that housing val-
ues depreciate because African Americans move into a neighborhood. At the same time, several
groups—the Bucks County Human Relations Council, the American Friends Service Committee,
and related Quaker organizations housed at the nearby William Penn Center—began looking for
a black family to move into Levittown. As historian Thomas Sugrue has detailed, the Quakers’
search was an exhaustive process, playing out over four years and involving interviews with
many candidates. The Quakers were looking for a stable, middle-class family that would move
into Levittown without upsetting too many white residents. As much as anything, the Quakers’
effort to desegregate Levittown “was intended,” Sugrue writes, “to change the hearts and minds
of white Americans.”26
Such an effort, however well-intentioned, was disturbing and intrusive to the Myerses. The
Penn Center, in Daisy Myers’s view, played perhaps the greatest role in sparking her and Bill’s
interest in Levittown. At meetings at Levittowners’ homes, the Myerses engaged in conversa-
tions about political, social, and economic topics. At one of the meetings in spring 1957, some-
one asked Bill if he knew “a nice Negro couple that would like to move to Levittown.” Bill said
no, but driving home that night he asked Daisy, “What about us?” With a growing family that
needed more room, Daisy and her husband decided to ask for more details the next time the
group met. That conversation led to hours of further discussions, reaching a point that Daisy
sardonically commented that the group should have been called the “Levittown Committee to
Discuss the Successful Move-in of a Negro Family.” The discussions, in Daisy’s view, quickly
became more like interrogations. Some of the questions were relevant, but others were “stupid.”
“I finally said that we were only ordinary people,” she recalled, “we had not invented anything
or created sensations or been in any trouble. They pried into our lives so extensively that one
would wonder if they were going to give us a house instead of us having to buy it.” The Quakers,
indisputable supporters of integration, still felt it their right and duty to apply a character test to
African Americans that no one expected white Levittowners to pass.27
Despite their disgruntlement about what Daisy termed the “third degree,” she and her husband
were ideal to make the move because of their background and determination. Daisy, an only
child born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1925, grew up in Navy Hill, a largely middle-class black
neighborhood. Her father worked for the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad and
made a good enough income that the family lived comfortably. Daisy’s parents were both deeply
religious, members of the local NAACP, and politically active. They paid their poll taxes, urged
friends and relatives to do the same, and often used the family car to take people to the polls.
They also stressed the value of education for their daughter who graduated high school at sixteen,
finished college at Virginia Union, and immediately began a teaching career in Amelia, Virginia.
In her memoirs, Daisy remembered that Jim Crow was ubiquitous, but it did not always impinge
on her life. Her attention to discrimination became more focused after she moved north to study
at New York University. Seeing integrated classrooms and African Americans in all walks of life
made Myers believe the integrated North was “like a Promised Land,” and the Jim Crow system
of Virginia appeared much more stifling. Bill grew up in York, Pennsylvania, the son of the bell-
man at the Yorktown Hotel. His was the only African American family in their neighborhood
near the hotel, but he told Daisy that he never felt out of place. He integrated his high school band
and played basketball well enough to earn a scholarship to Hampton Institute, where he met
Daisy while learning to do electrical work. During World War II Bill served two years in the
Army Quartermaster Corps. When he came back from the war, like so many other black veterans
Bill knew that he could no longer tolerate the South’s ways. He married Daisy in 1950 and they
440 Journal of Urban History 38(3)

moved to York a year later, seeking what Daisy termed “a freer life.” Bill had a hard time finding
suitable work in York, so they soon moved to the Philadelphia area, where they hoped for better
prospects. Daisy knew the abolitionist history of the city, its fame for the Quakers helping to run
the Underground Railroad, and hoped it would offer her family greater opportunities. Bill found
a job as a refrigerator technician, Daisy did some social service work, and they along with their
two children settled in Bloomsdale Gardens, an integrated community in Bucks County not far
from Levittown, where they wanted to enjoy what the Philadelphia Tribune called an “impres-
sive community . . . founded on the basis of ‘open occupancy’ for families of moderate income.”
The Myerses were happy in Bloomsdale Gardens, but with Daisy pregnant with their third child
they knew they needed more room, and Levittown was just down the road. After much angst-
filled conversation, they decided to make the move.28
Bill and Daisy Myers, then, were indeed what scholars have termed “pioneers,” the first fam-
ily willing to take the consequences of breaking the color bar when they move into a new com-
munity. But pioneer has another connotation, that of someone striking out on his or her own to
explore and settle a new land, and in that respect the term does not fit. The Myers family moved
to Levittown only after years of agitation by black Philadelphians, a series of behind-the-scenes
meetings with U.S. Steel, Levitt and Sons, and federal agencies, a high-profile court case, and a
campaign by religious and civic groups to find the “right” family. What made the Myerses the
“right kind of family,” as Daisy put it, was their background, their occupational status, and the
stability that their children implied to onlookers, but also the years of campaigning by the black
community and their white allies. Without both, the pioneering family and the community that
set the context for them moving in, desegregation would not have succeeded.29
It was no fait accompli, however, that the desegregation of Levittown would succeed. The
Myerses, assured by the Penn Center that they had some support in the community, moved into
the Dogwood Hollow section of Levittown on August 13, 1957, with a sense of optimism that
was quickly dashed. Daisy thought they could expect the local newspapers, politicians, police,
and at least some civic organizations to defend their right to live in the community. “What can
happen?” one supporter said. “We live north of the Mason-Dixon Line.” The Myerses’ sanguin-
ity faded when the mailman knocked on the door at noon. “May I speak to the owner?” he asked.
“I am the owner,” Daisy replied. The man went pale and backed away from the home. He spent
the rest of the afternoon going around the neighborhood, telling people, “It happened! Niggers
have moved into Levittown!” In a short time small groups began gathering on the street, watch-
ing the Myers house and circulating a petition protesting their new neighbors. By the end of the
afternoon, the Levittown Times had an article announcing to the entire community that the first
black family had moved in. The protests and threats began that night.30
The protests were inchoate at first, consisting of crowds milling on the sidewalk, muttering
epithets and promises of violence. During the daylight hours of August 13, the Myerses felt
comfortable enough to ignore the crowds. They had supporters stop by to welcome them to the
neighborhood and the arrival of the police also helped put them at ease. But as evening came, the
crowds became bolder and the police seemed to do little to quell them. With the tension rising,
Bill and Daisy decided to go back to Bloomsdale Gardens to spend the night and did not perma-
nently move into Levittown for another week.31
During that time, those Levittowners most vehemently opposed to integration formed the
Levittown Betterment Committee. Led by James Newell who had headed the local Veterans of
Foreign Wars post, this group claimed it was a “non-profit, non-political organization for the
people of Levittown” that only sought to “secure for their community the former status of limita-
tions by peaceful means.” They vowed to reject violence, claiming they felt no hate but only
wanted to halt the “encroachment upon our rights as a limited community.” “Nero fiddled while
Rome burned,” they wrote. “We do not propose to do likewise. From this we take our stand.” On
Wolfinger 441

a Philadelphia radio show, Newell and others claimed that Bill Myers was at fault, causing the
protests by moving into the community. “Before we have integration,” one man said, “we must
educate everybody and that takes time.” Some twelve hundred Levittowners heard the commit-
tee’s arguments and joined the group. On the face of it, they at least claimed to reject violence
and overt racism. This was about their right to control their community. But a darker side of the
committee emerged when it secured the home directly behind the Myers residence. Dubbing
the home “Confederate House,” they raised the rebel flag and played “Dixie” on the stereo, and
one member walked his dog, newly christened “Nigger,” up and down the street, calling loudly
for his animal in front of the Myers house. When he heard of the betterment committee’s behavior,
Georgia’s Senator Richard Russell expressed his sympathy for their “plight.”32
The rhetoric and behavior of the betterment committee well captures the various themes
within the reaction Levittown segregationists had to the Myerses. On one hand, committee mem-
bers threatened violence and raised hoary notions of black criminality and sexual depravity; on
the other, they talked of white rights, property values, and democratic principles. Ugly, overt
racism was not always on ready display in 1950s America, but it was by no means fully sup-
planted by other idioms.33
Throughout the protests, which stretched out until the end of the summer, violence always
seemed to be in the offing. At different times, protestors smashed a window in the Myers home,
exploded gas bombs, and threatened to use dynamite. African American reporters from the
Tribune were told “get out of Levittown; you don’t want to get hurt.” Service workers who dared
to go to the Myers house found their trucks vandalized. And the Myerses received so many
threatening letters that Daisy feared being murdered. Local police did arrest five protestors the
first night, but their otherwise anemic efforts struck the Myers family and their supporters as
weak at best and tacitly supporting the mob at worst.34
The Myerses’ consternation deepened with the growth of Klan activities. The evidence is
mixed about whether the KKK had a formal chapter in Levittown or whether segregationists just
appropriated its name. Some reports claimed that Levittowners voted down a proposal to invite
the Klan to their community; others said that the Klan had a two-hundred-member Klavern in the
suburb. Regardless, allies of the Myerses found crosses burned in their yards and “KKK” painted
on their houses. Klan applications and posters circulated in the community. One poster depicted
a white man kneeling in fear before a black man with the words “We are watching your every
move” at the bottom. Another featured a man in Klan robes on horseback, holding a fiery cross
to the sky. “Save Our Land. Join the Klan,” it read.35
Related attacks on the Myers family tied them to interracial sexual contact and criminal
behavior. “When the races mix socially there is bound to be race mixing,” wrote one man. “We
need segregation because most people are dominated by fleshy desires.” Another man said he
“wouldn’t let [his] wife and children walk the streets at night. The niggers will always be an
uncivilized race.” And a poster pasted to the wall of the Myerses’ supportive neighbors, the
Wechslers, was headlined “Conquer and Breed.” Daisy was even asked by someone friendly to
her cause what plans she had for her children to intermarry. Not only was she insulted by the
question, but her oldest son was five at the time. Just as insulting were the insinuations that the
Myerses were the vanguard for “urban problems.” “A great majority of Levittown people remem-
ber too vividly other street scenes in their former neighborhoods after Negroes moved in. The
memory of wild liquor parties, muggings, dope traffic, etc. is not easy to forget. If someone can
assure me that these same things will not follow to Levittown, I will be glad to accept a Negro
neighbor.” And a member of the Levittown Betterment Committee told a reporter that they did
not want African Americans in Levittown “because of all the crime and violence that happens
where colored people live.” When pushed on whether the committee was encouraging lawless-
ness in its own right, he responded, “This is different.”36
442 Journal of Urban History 38(3)

Mixed in with these overtly racist messages was a more rights-conscious strain of thinking
that was growing in this era. That line of argument focused in part on the value of people’s homes
and on property rights more generally. Time and again, protestors claimed the Myerses’ presence
destroyed what they had spent their lives building. “We spent a lot of money on our homes. Now
they are worth nothing!” one man cried. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” another
Levittowner shouted at Lewis Wechsler. “Our houses are worth only half of what they were
yesterday.” Concerns about property were expressed most clearly in a petition signed by six
hundred people who argued they had the right to control their community. “We, the citizens and
home owners of Levittown, Pennsylvania, protest the mixing of Negroes in our previously all-
white community. As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced
and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community. In as much as
having equal rights, the Negroes have an equal opportunity to build their own community of
equal value and beauty without intermingling in our community. We therefore feel that we must
keep our community closed to protect our interests.” Real estate experts, public officials, and
religious leaders tried to tell the crowds that they were wrong, that there was no evidence that
black residents harmed their property values or lessened their rights, but white Levittowners
were so enraged that they would not listen.37
In addition to issues of property, rights-based arguments targeted liberal politicians whom
segregationists believed made them victims of antidemocratic government policies. Any govern-
ment backing of this black family was sheer “political expediency,” wrote one woman. “All the
laws,” said another, “seem to be to protect the Negro race.” With the desegregation of Little
Rock’s Central High School dominating the headlines in September 1957, Daisy Myers received
phone calls praising the Jim Crow South and Governor Orval Faubus as “the type of man we
need in Levittown,” a man who would stand up for white rights. Instead, Pennsylvania had lib-
eral Governor George Leader, who had come out in support of the Myerses.38
The Levittown conflict, many white residents essentially argued, came down to whether they
had race-based rights in a democratic nation. They felt they were the true Americans, singing
“America the Beautiful” as they paraded with the flag in front of the Myers house and chanting
“This is America! This is America!” when the police tried to curtail their demonstrations. Five
hundred people attended a town hall meeting where they told Levittown commissioners that they
had the right to “say who we want to live in our neighborhood.” When one commissioner
responded that “[o]ur responsibility is to defend to the best of our ability the protection of prop-
erty regardless of race, creed or religion,” the crowd became so unruly that the commission had
to adjourn. Whites had made it clear, one member of the Levittown Betterment Committee said,
that “a majority of the people did not want [Mr. Myers] in Levittown [and] he should accept it.”
The Myerses, by this logic, were at fault for not having the “common courtesy to respect the
rights of other men.” Perhaps, one man suggested, it was time to repeal the Civil Rights Bill. In
the crabbed worldview of these Levittowners, democracy meant majority rule, and that meant
whites could deny equal opportunity to African Americans regardless of their constitutional
rights. Blacks, it followed, were at fault for challenging this discrimination.39
When the Myerses first moved to Levittown—before the depth of the attacks on their persons
and their character became evident—they espoused rather commonplace desires about their new
home. They wanted what they thought was the American Dream, the chance, as Daisy once put
it, “to raise the children somewhere where they have green grass and a fence around it—a home
with space and surroundings and good schools.” It was a myth, Daisy argued, that African
Americans preferred to “live with their own people.” Instead, she said, “Negroes—like all other
human beings—enjoy a neighborhood where they can enjoy a normal pattern of life among
people who respect them for what they are, regardless of the color of their skin.” So an explicit
part of the Myerses’ thinking was about taking part in a lifestyle that appealed to millions of
Wolfinger 443

Americans: a new home with a yard, good schools, and a place where their kids could grow up
carefree. Such a view was common to many African Americans, fostered, as the historian Adam
Green has shown, by social and cultural leaders in the pages of Ebony who portrayed the suburbs
as the embodiment of an idyllic American Dream. That the suburbs could provide all this may be
a myth that scholars have spent careers dissecting (as critics did at the time), but it was certainly
a popular one, and in many circles still is.40
Although the Myerses were committed to their move, ambivalence went hand in hand with
their new home and intensified with the protests. From the start, Bill and Daisy knew Levittown
was for whites only and that they would not receive a warm welcome from most of their neigh-
bors. Daisy was often racked with doubt, worrying about her children, her neighbors, her future.
“Would our children be ostracized?” she asked in her memoirs. “To what extent would our
neighbors object? . . . Could we live a normal, happy life in Levittown?” Bill worried most about
the safety of his children and sent them to live with friends until he was sure they would not be
harmed. But he was also concerned about what the black community might think of his move.
He knew the community had pushed for years for the desegregation of Levittown, but it still
pained him that reporters and letters to the editor asked why he was “reject[ing] his own people
[to] live in a community where there isn’t another Negro family for blocks and even miles.” He
repeatedly told the press, “I don’t want anyone to think that we are trying to get away from our
own people and live just with white people.” Even with white supporters in the community, Bill
lamented that “[t]hey used to say about Levittown, ‘You never have to live in Levittown and look
at a black face.’ I’d like to look out and see a black face.” It was enough to make him tell Daisy
in the quiet of their home, “Let’s give up. I’m ready to call it quits.” With legitimate worries
about their family’s safety, acceptance by their neighbors, and the possible response of the
African American community troubling Bill and Daisy Myers, it is no wonder the move to
Levittown left them feeling ambivalent.41
As the protests grew, the Myerses’ residence became much more than a house to them and
their supporters. African Americans’ fundamental rights, they believed, were at stake. Their
Levittown home became the embodiment, Daisy wrote, of the “basic moral principle [that
African Americans should have] full equality in housing, or schools, or jobs.” The protests led
Daisy to ask searching questions about Levittown and American society more broadly. “Why,”
she asked, “were the crowds at our home? . . . Do we love our children less than they do? . . . Do
we have the right to choose a neighborhood or do the neighbors have a right to choose us? Have
they come to tell us where we shall or shall not live? Aren’t we human? . . . Did we not, I asked
myself, as an American Negro family have a legal and moral right to live in a place of our own
choosing? What of the American ideals of justice and equality?” Facing naked racism also
angered Bill and Daisy after the years he served the United States in World War II. “He won five
battle stars,” Daisy bitterly told the Tribune, “but just try to tell that to the mob out there.” As Bill
and Daisy Myers articulated the reasons Levittown mattered, they raised many of the issues that
animated the black rights movement of the twentieth century: human rights and legal rights, the
right to decent housing, the right to raise your family in a safe and loving atmosphere, and the
right to live where you please without facing harassment.42
An array of individuals and organizations understood what was at stake and supported the
Myerses. The NAACP and Philadelphia Tribune, involved in the campaign to desegregate
Levittown from the start, led the way. The association held meetings with community leaders to
see how they could help calm Levittown and issued a statement demanding that the police
enforce the Myers family’s “fundamental property rights . . . to occupy a home of its choice.”
The Tribune took an angrier stance, labeling Levittown as being as bad as the Deep South and a
“morass of hate and vindictiveness.” The Levittown protestors, the paper continued, were
un-American bigots who “snarl like beasts in the jungle,” and William Levitt was Pontius Pilate,
444 Journal of Urban History 38(3)

unable to “wash his hands of the nasty mess which his company created.” But no matter how bad
the attacks on the Myers family became, the paper assured its readers, Bill and Daisy were strong
people, and they would not “permit a gang of hoodlums and terrorists to chase them out.”43
A number of white groups also backed the Myers family. The Quakers, who helped get the
Myerses into Levittown in the first place, lamented the violence and issued a statement proclaim-
ing their faith in “opportunities for all Americans to live side by side in a peaceful, democratic
way.” The Catholic Interracial Council, Americans for Democratic Action, the Bucks County
Human Relations Council, and Jewish groups all decried the protests and violence. And the
Evening Bulletin, the mouthpiece of respectable, middle-class Philadelphia, lambasted the riots
and told its readers that “Levittown may be divided on housing integration. Surely they are
united in wanting to stay in an unbloodied, lawful community.” Daisy Myers appreciated the
support, but wondered about the form it took. Calling for order and the end of violence was one
thing, she wrote, but too often the Evening Bulletin and other groups failed to offer “direct sup-
port for the principle of integration.” Too many groups, in her view, saw this as an issue of com-
munity peace rather than her family’s inherent rights.44
Supporters further left on the political spectrum took a firmer stand. The steelworkers union,
which had joined the NAACP in pushing Levitt to desegregate Levittown, called on its members
in the suburb to oppose “any un-American acts of bigotry.” “This veteran,” the union continued,
“[has] an inherent right to a better home, a right he has fought to protect, and a home he has
worked and saved to buy and, as an American citizen, he and his family are entitled to the full
protection of the law.” The AFL-CIO seconded this sentiment, as did Bill’s local union at the
refrigeration company in Trenton, New Jersey, where he worked. Even greater support came
from the Myerses’ next-door neighbors, Lewis and Bea Wechsler, who had been communists
and members of radical organizations when they lived in New York City. The Wechslers had a
deep belief in the cause of racial equality and had fought for tenant rights, especially for African
Americans, in New York before moving to Levittown. There, Lew helped Bill Myers secure the
loan for his Levittown home and personally confronted the mob harassing the Myers family. Fair
housing might not solve all of black Americans’ problems, he said, but he fundamentally believed
no one should “be denied the right to live where they could afford to, solely because of their color
or religion.” For his trouble, not only did Wechsler find a cross burning on his lawn and a gas
bomb down the street, but he and his wife received a series of threatening phone calls with peo-
ple calling them “nigger-loving Jewish motherfuckers.” Other families involved with the
Myerses, such as the Quaker family the Von Blums and the Jewish family the Mandels, received
similar intimidation, with the Von Blums getting racist literature and a burning cross on their
lawn and Irving Mandel losing his job and his wife and kids getting harassed.45
As the tension in Levittown grew, the Myerses and their supporters pressured the state gov-
ernment to act on their behalf. They thought they had a chance for state intervention because for
one of the few times since the Civil War Pennsylvania had a liberal-leaning Democratic gover-
nor. Immediately after the protests began, the Urban League wired Governor Leader, pushing
him to do all he could to prevent the “vicious and potentially explosive nature of the smoldering
Levittown, Pa., incident” from boiling over into racial violence. Soon after, the governor told a
crowd that he was “riled up” by events in Levittown and “ashamed that this happened in
Pennsylvania.” At the same time, Bill, with the help of a sympathetic member of the state House
of Representatives, arranged a meeting with Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, Thomas McBride.
McBride told the Myerses that he and his wife had been involved in the fight for racial justice for
three decades and that he would do all he could to help. Many other Democrats, including Mayor
Richardson Dilworth of Philadelphia and the Lower Bucks County Democratic Club, added their
support. Republican politicians tended to remain quiet or take the side of the segregationists. The
local assistant district attorney, for example, promised to help get the Myerses out of Levittown
Wolfinger 445

and a Republican leader in nearby Falls Township warned of “the invasion of our community by
the Negro” and said Bill Myers had caused all “the violence and disruptions in a once peaceful
suburban community.”46
Governor Leader and Attorney General McBride acted quickly to suppress the Levittown
demonstrations. “The state police,” McBride assured the Myerses, “will be there when you return
[to Levittown] and will remain there as long as necessary.” This came as welcome relief to Bill
and Daisy who found the local police in the first few days of the unrest ineffective at best, sym-
pathetic to the mob at worst. The police often disappeared at night when they were supposedly
providing the Myers and Wechsler families with twenty-four-hour surveillance, and they seemed
lethargic in investigating putative Klan activities. Compared to local law enforcement, the state
police made it clear that they would protect the Myers family and stop any threats of violence.
They broke up mobs that gathered in front of the Myers home, shut down the Confederate house,
and launched an investigation that led to the prosecution of seven people. Although the crowds
insulted them as “nigger lovers” and there was a smattering of violence when protestors threw
stones and the policemen reacted with billy clubs, the state police brought order to Levittown. It
was simple enough, Wechsler commented, “to enforce law and order—as long as the desire is
there.” Finally, with the state involved, he wrote, “Peace reigned.”47
In the ensuing trial, Attorney General McBride argued the case, making it clear how person-
ally he took the riots in Levittown and that Pennsylvania would not tolerate such behavior again.
McBride first got the district court to issue a temporary injunction against James Newell and six
other ringleaders of the protests that prohibited them from burning crosses, distributing inflam-
matory posters, and harassing any residents of Levittown. Six weeks later the attorney general
prosecuted the so-called Levittown 7 for an unlawful conspiracy that sought to deprive the
Myerses of their civil and property rights. McBride’s findings of fact detailed the violence and
intimidation that the Myers family and their supporters faced until the state police arrived. The
burning crosses and gas bombs, the Klan literature, the Confederate house, and the mobs on the
street all constituted what McBride called “an unlawful, malicious and evil conspiracy,” and
he had no choice but to prosecute those responsible for the “spirit of lawlessness” that roiled the
community. To make his case, McBride leaned heavily on the Shelley decision, arguing that the
court had to side with the Myerses and thus affirm that African Americans have “the same and
equal privilege under the law of the land as any other to acquire and possess their hom[es] and
other property.” This was a “constitutional right,” he said, and “nobody has the right to get the
Myerses out of Levittown by any means.” The judge agreed with McBride, issuing a permanent
injunction against the Myerses’ harassers on December 9. A later trial against two betterment
committee members for burning crosses resulted in fines and suspended sentences of two years
in prison. The punishments for those involved were not particularly harsh, but Daisy knew they
ended the ordeal. “We were finally assured a peaceful life in Levittown,” she wrote.48
Although Daisy remembered that her “peaceful life” in Levittown finally began, desegrega-
tion was in fact quite an uneven process, and the suburb never gained a substantial black popula-
tion. By the end of 1957 several Levittowners organized the “Dogwood Hollow Neighbors” and
invited the Myerses to join a group that pledged to “restore neighborhood friendliness.” A year
later, Daisy told the press that her family finally felt at home. Bill, however, admitted that they
still had neighbors who would not accept them. “On the other hand, there are some people that
we don’t find acceptable,” he added. Quaker activists looked for more black families willing to
join the Myerses, but the notoriety of Levittown’s protests made the job difficult. Finally, in June
1958 Kenneth and Julia Mosby moved their family into the Orchard section, about two miles
away from the Myerses. Small groups of neighbors stood and watched quietly as they moved in,
and although there was no violence, someone did tack up a sign on the street corner that read
“Black Bottom Road.” Levittown’s reputation as antagonistic to African Americans persisted
446 Journal of Urban History 38(3)

such that the community had only seven black families in 1961 and twenty-five in 1964, nearly
a decade after the Myerses first moved in. Before the Myers family moved to Harrisburg for bet-
ter job opportunities in 1962, they witnessed the first black teacher in Levittown’s schools
encounter what Daisy called “whispered threats” and heard some talk that they would need a
police guard to use the community swimming pool. For the next several decades, teenagers peri-
odically got into racially motivated fights, and the Klan annually marched just outside the com-
munity. Vandalism of black property followed in the wake of the marches, and black Levittowners
told the press, “[Here] you’re treated like a black person and you are different.” Little wonder
that the community’s black population stood at 1 percent in 1981 and had barely increased to
2.45 percent in 2000.49
The desegregation of Levittown was in some ways a triumph for the Myers family and for the
larger black community. A campaign that began six years earlier finally ended with Bill and
Daisy securing the home they sought. That campaign brought together black and white activists
who pursued long-term political, legal, and grassroots strategies that kept the suburb firmly at the
center of black Philadelphians’ attention. It helped the NAACP to hone its arguments about state
intervention in the housing market and the constitutional implications of the government backing
loans in discriminatory developments. And after numerous disappointments, it also secured the
support of the state, in particular the governor, the attorney general, the courts, and the state
police. Without such official backing, the Myerses never would have succeeded. At the same
time, without a couple as strong and dedicated as Bill and Daisy Myers, Levittown would
undoubtedly have remained fully segregated for much longer. Theirs was certainly a triumphant
moment in the long quest for equal rights in the North.
But the suburb’s desegregation simultaneously showed the limits of such an approach. Private
actors such as the NAACP and the William Penn Center simply did not have the resources to
integrate American society. Pursuing litigation, organizing protests, and holding private meet-
ings was an expensive and time-consuming approach that could at best result in piecemeal gains.
For African Americans to have a better chance of securing integration and equality, they had to
be treated as a class with legal rights rather than as individuals with private claims. It should
come as no surprise that Levittown proved an unsuitable setting for such alternative thinking.
The suburbs, in their physical and ideological construction, were more about individual striving
than community advancement for both whites and blacks, and any solution to discrimination
almost by default took an individualist approach. Moreover, this approach required the Myerses
and their supporters, especially the Wechslers, to show extraordinary courage to brave the
threats, intimidation, and violence that they encountered. Few black families for obvious reasons
wanted to follow them, even decades later. A campaign initially intended to secure housing for
hundreds if not thousands of black workers in industrializing Bucks County ended with activists
spending all of their time and money to get one house for one family. The liberal, piecemeal,
individualist approach was well-intentioned, but it had limits that made it difficult, if not impos-
sible, to achieve the larger goal of integrating American society.
From a broader perspective, this Levittown story highlights issues that should be central to
how historians understand postwar African American history and the suburban experience.
African Americans and their supporters understood that as policy makers, home builders, bank-
ers, and ordinary buyers remade the cities of the United States after World War II, the suburbs
controlled access to jobs, education, and resources. Opening Levittown required a long-term
campaign that, eventually coupled with state support for black rights, finally led to victory, albeit
a limited one. Paying close attention to that campaign puts the explosive riots of August 1957 in
historical context, emphasizing grassroots, political, and legal activism as well as state action,
and gives us a clearer understanding of the process of desegregation. While we rightly celebrate
the challenges African Americans made to segregation, the difficulty of that process, the
Wolfinger 447

hardship it placed on “pioneer” families like the Myerses, caused a deep ambivalence that should
not be overlooked. The suburbs and all that they promised for personal betterment mattered
greatly to African Americans, but so too did their fear that they would be ostracized in their new
neighborhood and that they might look like they were fleeing the black community that sup-
ported them. Facing constant attacks from white Levittowners who believed that the Myers fam-
ily intruded on their right to limit who they had to associate with greatly heightened their
concerns. The Myerses were ultimately willing to damp down their ambivalence and fight for
their home in Levittown because they believed white Levittowners were wrong in their beliefs
about the primacy of white rights. To the Myerses, moving into the suburb struck a blow for a
different interpretation of rights in postwar America. At a time when African Americans were
pushing the nation to rethink meanings of rights and democracy, the Myerses’ ownership of a
Levittown home forcefully made moral and constitutional points about the necessity of equal
treatment under the law. A home in Levittown, as the NAACP put it, was about making acces-
sible the “American Dream—for all Americans.”

Acknowledgments
For their comments and criticism, I would like to thank Erik Gellman and audiences at the Organization of
American Historians and the Historical Society. Thanks also to my research assistant, Emily Busse.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. Philadelphia Tribune, August 20, 1957, p. 1; August 17, 1957, p. 1; file titled Levittown, Evening
Bulletin morgue, Urban Archives, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. This article expands on my
treatment of Levittown in Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
2. For the black rights movement in the urban North, see among many books Thomas Sugrue, Sweet
Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House
Press, 2008); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race,
Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Holt, 2004); Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided.
Andrew Wiese’s approach of using an African American history lens to analyze America’s suburbs
has been particularly influential in my thinking about Levittown. For the new suburban history, see
Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and the essays in Kevin Kruse and Thomas Sugrue,
eds., The New Suburban History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). For Levittown lit-
erature, see David Kushner, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in
America’s Legendary Suburb (New York: Walker, 2009); Lewis Wechsler, The First Stone: A Memoir
about the Racial Integration of Levittown, Pennsylvania (Chicago: Grounds for Growth Press, 2004);
Daisy Myers, Sticks ’n Stones: The Myers Family in Levittown (York, PA: York County Heritage
Trust, 2005); Marvin Bressler, “The Myers’ Case: An Instance of Successful Racial Invasion,” Social
Problems 8 (Fall 1960): 126-42. See also Dianne Harris, ed., Second Suburb: Levittown, Pennsylvania
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), which does not focus solely on racial issues but
448 Journal of Urban History 38(3)

does cover the topic. The best, most analytical, treatment of racial issues in Levittown to date is
Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 200-230.
3. Besides the above, other works that inform my thinking about race, rights, and politics in postwar
America include Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the
Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Robert Self, American Babylon:
Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
4. James Wolfinger, “The Limits of Black Activism: Philadelphia’s Public Housing in the Depression
and World War II,” Journal of Urban History 35 (September 2009): 787-814; John Bauman, Public
Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1987); John Bauman, “Black Slums/Black Projects: The New Deal and Negro Hous-
ing in Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania History 41 (July 1974): 311-38; Philadelphia Housing Association,
Issues (November–December 1945): 1-2; “Some Basic Facts Concerning the Negro Population of
Philadelphia,” n.d., folder Housing Department, Non-white Housing 1939, 1953–60, box 10, “The
Real Story about the Big City,” February 6, 1959, folder Urban League of Philadelphia Equal Job
Opportunity 1944, 1960, box 2, Philadelphia Urban League Papers (PUL) (Urban Archives, Temple
University, Philadelphia, PA); Philadelphia Housing Association, Philadelphia’s Negro Population
(Philadelphia, 1953), 17, 7. The postwar housing shortage hit other cities too. For some examples, see
William O’Neill, American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960 (New York: Free Press, 1986),
12-13; Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1981), 242-43; Anthony Jackson, A Place Called Home: A History of Low-Cost
Housing in Manhattan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 244.
5. Edwin Rothman et al., Philadelphia Government, 1956 (Philadelphia, 1956), 3; Chester Rapkin and
William Grigsby, The Demand for Housing in Racially Mixed Areas: A Study of the Nature of Neigh-
borhood Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 140-41, 54.
6. Rapkin and Grigsby, Demand for Housing, 116-17; clipping from unnamed newspaper, June 16, 1945,
Philadelphia NAACP Papers, Urban Archives, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, Scrapbook of
Clippings, 1943–45, box 52; Philadelphia Housing Association, Philadelphia’s Negro Population,
55-56. For more on race, urban neighborhoods, and “white flight” with an emphasis on how public
policy helped shape people’s behavior in this era, see Amanda Seligman, Block by Block: Neighbor-
hoods and Public Policy on Chicago’s West Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
7. Philadelphia Housing Association, Issues (October 1944): 2; “Negro Housing,” November 15, 1946,
Housing Association of Delaware Valley Papers (HADV), Urban Archives, Temple University,
Philadelphia, PA, folder 259, box 47; I. Maximilian Martin, Housing Problems of the Philadelphia
Nonwhite Population (Philadelphia, 1953); “Some Basic Facts Concerning the Negro Population of
Philadelphia,” n.d., PUL, Folder Housing Department, Non-white Housing 1939, 1953–60, box 10;
Rapkin and Grigsby, Demand for Housing, 74-75; Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate,
and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); David Con-
tosta, Suburb in the City: Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, 1850–1990 (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1992), 160-263; Bressler, “Myers’ Case,” 127; “Report to the Committee on Race Relations,”
1951, file Annual Reports, Society of Friends Papers, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, box 3.
8. “The Real Story about the Big City,” February 6, 1959, PUL, Folder Urban League of Philadelphia
Equal Job Opportunity 1944, 1960, box 2; Rapkin and Grigsby, Demand for Housing, 5, 78; William
Dickinson, ed., “Great Industrial Variety Helps Philadelphia Stay a Solid City in Boom” in This Is
Greater Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Bulletin Company, 1954), 3; Philip Scranton and Walter Licht,
Work Sights: Industrial Philadelphia, 1890–1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 267;
Philip Scranton, “Large Firms and Industrial Restructuring: The Philadelphia Region, 1900–1980,”
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116 (October 1992): 419-65; Matthew Countryman,
“Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia, 1940–1971” (PhD diss., Duke University, 1998),
Wolfinger 449

80-81; W. Benjamin Piggot, “The ‘Problem’ of the Black Middle Class: Morris Milgram’s Concord
Park and Residential Integration in Philadelphia’s Postwar Suburbs,” Pennsylvania Magazine of His-
tory and Biography 132 (April 2008): 173-90; Philadelphia Tribune, October 29, 1957, p. 9.
9. Fredric Miller, Morris Vogel, and Allen Davis, Philadelphia Stories: A Photographic History, 1920–
1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 161, 192, 277; Carolyn Adams et al., Philadelphia:
Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Postindustrial City (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1991), 31, 17, 19; Scranton, “Large Firms,” 420; Population and Economic Research Advisory
Committee, Labor Force and Employment Estimates: A Projection for 1950 (Philadelphia, 1946), 9;
Dickinson, “Great Industrial Variety,” 4-5; Bauman, Public Housing, 162.
10. G. Gordon Brown, Law Administration and Negro-White Relations in Philadelphia: A Study in Race
Relations (Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970). 48; John Bauman, Norman Hummon,
and Edward Muller, “Public Housing, Isolation, and the Urban Underclass: Philadelphia’s Richard Allen
Homes, 1941–1965,” in Joe Trotter, Jr., ed., African Americans in Pennsylvania: Shifting Historical
Perspectives (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 454, 456; Bauman, Public
Housing, 84.
11. Philadelphia Tribune, January 5, 1946, p. 4; April 20, 1957, p. 20; NAACP to Earl Moore, March 2,
1954, file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1954–55, Roy Wilkins to Mrs. Motley, August 22, 1951, file Bucks
Co., PA Housing 1951, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, box A161; “Bucks
County—What Is It Like for Minority Groups?” n.d., “Newtown, America in Bucks County, Pennsylvania,”
n.d., file Levittown Housing Project, 1952–55, Philadelphia NAACP Papers, box 12. For more on the
connections between Philadelphia’s postwar development and workplace discrimination, see James
Wolfinger, “An Equal Opportunity to Make a Living—and a Life,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class
History of the Americas 4 (Summer 2007): 65-94.
12. Kushner, Levittown, 43; Chicago Defender, June 25, 1949, p. 18; February 21, 1953, p. 10; January
24, 1953, p. 10; Philadelphia Tribune, December 16, 1950, p. 3.
13. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 210; Kushner, Levittown, 43, 18; Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier:
The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 191-225; Philadelphia
Tribune, December 10, 1949, pp. 1, 3; December 13, 1949, p. 8; March 26, 1955, p. 12; September 7,
1957, p. 8.
14. “Your Stake in the New Bucks County,” n.d., file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1953, Philadelphia NAACP
press release, September 15, 1951, file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1951, Constance Baker Motley to Glo-
ster Current and John Flamer, February 26, 1952, file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1952, NAACP Papers,
box A161; Philadelphia Tribune, May 30, 1950, p. 16; May 31, 1952, p. 4; September 15, 1951, p. 2;
December 16, 1952, p. 3; February 21, 1953, p. 3; June 23, 1951, p. 1; July 14, 1956, p. 8; July 6, 1954,
p. 3; September 8, 1951, p. 3.
15. Constance Baker Motley to Mr. Wilkins, November 9, 1951, file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1951,
NAACP Papers, box A161. For an analysis of the shift from liberal to more radical approaches to
securing black rights, see Countryman, Up South.
16. Letter to David J. McDonald, November 10, 1953, press clippings, file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1953,
Henry Lee Moon to Mr. White, October 29, 1952, file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1952, NAACP Papers,
box A161; Chicago Defender, January 30, 1954, p. 1; January 23, 1954, p. 7.
17. Letter to Dwight Eisenhower, November 25, 1953, file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1953, Walter White to
Richard M. Nixon, May 3, 1954, file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1954–55, NAACP Papers, box A161.
18. Philadelphia Tribune, August 28, 1951, p. 3; Mansfield E. Jackson to John S. Fine, September 5, 1951,
file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1951, NAACP Papers, box A161; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 212.
19. Philadelphia Tribune, September 15, 1951, p. 2; May 31, 1953, p. 4; Constance Baker Motley to
Jacques Wilmore, January 21, 1953, file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1953, Walter White to E.E. Moore,
November 17, 1952, file Bucks Co., PA Housing 1952, NAACP Papers, box A161; Constance Baker
Motley to Charles Shorter, May 26, 1954, file Levittown Housing Project, 1952–55, Philadelphia
450 Journal of Urban History 38(3)

NAACP Papers, box 12; file titled Levittown, Evening Bulletin morgue; “Along the N.A.A.C.P.
Battlefront,” The Crisis 64 (January 1957): 36-39.
20. Philadelphia Tribune, May 22, 1954, p. 16; Arthur L. Johnson, et al. v. Levitt and Sons, Inc., et al., Civil
Action 18365, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, 1955. For more on “respect-
ability” in the black community, see Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and
Culture during the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
21. Arthur L. Johnson, et al. v. Levitt and Sons, Inc., et al.
22. Ibid.; Philadelphia Tribune, March 5, 1955, p. 1.
23. Arthur L. Johnson, et al. v. Levitt and Sons, Inc., et al.; Chicago Defender, March 12, 1955, p. 1;
Philadelphia Tribune, February 19, 1955, p. 16; March 5, 1955, p. 2.
24. Arthur L. Johnson, et al. v. Levitt and Sons, Inc., et al.; Chicago Defender, March 26, 1955, p. 1.
25. Kushner, Levittown, 68-70; Philadelphia Tribune, February 12, 1955, p. 16; Myers, Sticks ’n Stones,
4; Human Relations Council of Bucks County press release, February 1, 1955, file Levittown Housing
Project—Miscellany, Philadelphia NAACP Papers, box 12.
26. Kushner, Levittown, 84; Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 23; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 220-24.
27. Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 23-24.
28. Ibid., 11-14; Kushner, Levittown, 22; Philadelphia Tribune, May 17, 1955, p. 13, October 29, 1957, p. 12.
29. Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 4.
30. Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 26, 5; Kushner, Levittown, 83, 88; Wechsler, First Stone, 2.
31. File titled Levittown, Evening Bulletin morgue; Philadelphia Tribune, August 13–20, 1957; Kushner,
Levittown, 86-94, 108-33.
32. Philadelphia Tribune, September 7, 1957, p. 1; December 14, 1957, p. 14; Wechsler, First Stone, 31;
Chicago Defender, August 26, 1957, p. 3; Kushner, Levittown, 176, 152.
33. Works that analyze the shifting nature of arguments about race and housing in the postwar era include
Thomas Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the
Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 551-78; Matthew
Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2007); Kruse, White Flight; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Hous-
ing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
34. Philadelphia Tribune, September 7, 1957, p. 3; August 17, 1957, p. 2; Wechsler, First Stone, 63;
Kushner, Levittown, 140; Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 33, 51.
35. Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 68, 77; file titled Levittown, Evening Bulletin morgue; Wechsler, First Stone,
109, 88, 62.
36. Wechsler, First Stone, 118, 60; Commonwealth v. Williams et al., Bucks County Law Reporter 8
(Doylestown, PA, 1959): 213; Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 71; Kushner, Levittown, 114.
37. Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 33; Wechsler, First Stone, xii, 4; file titled Levittown, Evening Bulletin
morgue; Kushner, Levittown, 112.
38. File titled Levittown, Evening Bulletin morgue; Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 67-68; Kushner, Levittown,
91, 100-101, 137-38.
39. Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 51, 36; Kushner, Levittown, 115, 178, 106; Philadelphia Tribune, August 17,
1957, p. 2.
40. Wiese, Places of Their Own; Kushner, Levittown, 55, 90, 126; Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 25; file titled
Levittown, Evening Bulletin morgue; Philadelphia Tribune, August 20, 1957, p. 1, 3; Adam Green,
Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–155 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007), 129-77. The best starting point for the historiography of the suburbs is Kevin
Kruse and Thomas Sugrue, “Introduction: The New Suburban History,” in Kruse and Sugrue,
New Suburban History, 1-10.
41. Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 26; Philadelphia Tribune, August 24, 1957, p. 15; file titled Levittown, Eve-
ning Bulletin morgue; Andrew Wiese, “‘The House I Live In’: Race, Class, and African American
Wolfinger 451

Suburban Dreams in the Postwar United States,” in Kruse and Sugrue, New Suburban History, 112;
Kushner, Levittown, 126.
42. Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 37, 93, 8, 45; Kushner, Levittown, 109; Philadelphia Tribune, August 24,
1957, p. 15; Chicago Defender, August 27, 1957, p. 5.
43. Philadelphia Tribune, August 17, 1957, p. 1, 2, 4; August 24, 1957, p. 4, 15.
44. File titled Levittown, Evening Bulletin morgue; Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 61, 37.
45. File titled Levittown, Evening Bulletin morgue; Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 59-60; Philadelphia Tribune,
August 17, 1957, p. 2; August 20, 1957, p. 3; October 8, 1957, p. 2; October 26, 1957, p. 3; August 24,
1957, p. 1, 15; Kushner, Levittown, 24-33, 148, 130; Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 224-25; Wechsler,
First Stone, 9-11, 17-19, 14-15.
46. Philadelphia Tribune, August 17, 1957, p. 1; September 7, 1957, p. 1; Kushner, Levittown, 93, 109-10;
file titled Levittown, Evening Bulletin morgue; Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 62, 54; Chicago Defender,
September 7, 1957, p. 3. For more on the way race shaped the politics of Philadelphia’s suburbs, see
Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided, chaps. 7 and 8.
47. Kushner, Levittown, 110, 168-69, 94; Wechsler, First Stone, 83, 39-40, 98, 92, 110; Myers, Sticks ’n
Stones, 29; Philadelphia Tribune, September 21, 1957, p. 2; file titled Levittown, Evening Bulletin
morgue.
48. Commonwealth v. Williams et al., 206-21; Kushner, Levittown, 168-69, 178-79; Myers, Sticks ’n
Stones, 86.
49. File titled Levittown, Evening Bulletin morgue; Philadelphia Tribune, December 21, 1957, p. 3; Sugrue,
Sweet Land of Liberty, 227; Wechsler, First Stone, 122; Myers, Sticks ’n Stones, 101, 91, 93; Kushner,
Levittown, 202.

Bio
James Wolfinger is an associate professor of history and education at DePaul University. He is the author
of Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love (2007) and is now working on
two new research projects. One focuses on black Chicago in the 1920s and has the working title Building
the Black Metropolis, while the other examines public transportation and urban development in
Philadelphia from the 1880s to the 1960s and has the working title Capital’s Quest.