Levittown’s Palimpsest: Colored Skin

January 14, 2004

For its first years, Levittown wasn’t just overwhelmingly white: it was entirely white. The Levitt organization’s people didn’t rent homes to Negroes or colored people, and after they began to sell, they didn’t sell to them either. In addition, those who rented were forbidden to sublet to nonwhites, and those who owned were also enjoined by restrictions in the bill of sale from selling to anyone not white or, more precisely, not “Caucasian,” to quote from the Levitt lease.

No one at the time should have been surprised by this. In the newspapers, new subdivisions aimed at integrationists and people of color had to advertise the fact in the real estate ads: “No restrictions! No discrimination!” read one. Ronek Park, also on Long Island, opened in 1950, with a declaration by its builder, Thomas Romano: “”Dedicated to the Proposition that All Men Are Created Equal...and no UnAmerican, Undemocratic restrictions as to race, color or creed!” His declaration was comforting, but it wasn’t creed that mattered on Long Island. Jews and Catholics were surreptitiously banned from many places but rarely from housing developments. It was race that separated Ronek Park from Levittown. Ronek Park and its fellow non-racial subdivisions ended up overwhelmingly or entirely black-- there just weren’t white Americans willing to overcome their fears in sufficient numbers to make Romano’s utopian experiment work.

Veterans– black veterans, anyway– may have been outraged, but only a naive or heroically stubborn few expected otherwise. Throughout the war, housing in military barracks and defense plants had sequestered soldiers and workers by race as well as by gender. On the Manhattan Project, sites in the South were completely segregated, while other sites began with some integration but quickly converted to segregation-- in housing and jobs, entertainment and dining. Conditions for blacks were pointedly worse than for whites and their labor was persistently undervalued. This was the pattern on the bases and in the defense plants throughout most of the United States during the war, and there wasn’t much evidence that things would rapidly change when war was over.

Even after Harry Truman integrated the armed services in the summer of 1948, the reality differed from the edict. Racial segregation in the military wasn’t officially ended until 1954, and even then, forms of de facto segregation were endemic. Outside the military, racial integration continued to be a rarity, and the legal restrictions on integration were extensive and common in housing, in union membership (and hence in trade and occupation) in schools and universities. Not just private citizens, not just businesses and corporations, but federal agencies urged the continuation of racial segregation, especially in housing. Black veterans had left segregated neighborhoods to go to war, they lived in segregated circumstances throughout the war, and they returned to separate housing, separate communities, after the war. There were exceptions but no one pretended they were otherwise than exceptional.

To break the pattern required a revolution of thought, attitude, and political will, and a shift in legal precedent as well. It didn’t happen at Levittown. When a particularly stubborn black vet named Eugene Burnett tried to get a purchase contact from a salesman back in 1949 or 1950, the salesman apologized; it wasn’t him, he said; it was just that the developer hadn’t yet decided whether to rent to colored people. He was being gentle; in fact, Levitt’s rental contract from the first clearly required the tenant “NOT TO PERMIT THE PREMISES TO BE USED OR OCCUPIED BY ANY PERSON OTHER THAN MEMBERS OF THE CAUCASIAN RACE,” and put the clause in capital letters for emphasis. Had Levitt decided differently, no doubt he would have offered a separate section of the development to nonwhites and those who might want to rent or buy in that area. But he didn’t need to: Ronek Park served that function.

Levitt’s salesman bumped responsibility up to the developers. The decision by Jewish-American builders to continue the policy of segregation seemed to many, Bill Levitt among them, a hypocrisy in the face of German genocide and racialism. Levitt wasn’t proud of his policy; in fact, he didn’t consider it his policy. In the later ‘70s, he told reporters that he faced impossible pressure from outside– from renters and buyers nervous about their property values, to start with. He later told historian Stuart Bird that the market required him to segregate—“originally we would not sell to a black person because it was an old story that if we sold to blacks, whites would not buy ...”

1948 Rental Agreement

He also bumped the responsibility upward; to the banks, which routinely refused to make big-block loans to developers of integrated housing. The banks further shunted the blame– to the government, whose loan guarantee programs specifically enjoined lenders from offering integrated housing. The Federal Housing Administration, the FHA, upon which Levitt and the other master builders of the postwar era depended for their financing, was quite clear: no “inharmonious racial or nationality groups.” “If a neighborhood is to retain stability,” FHA regulators explained, “it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” Levitt’s covenant was nearly word for word the template proposed by the FHA as an example of “suitable restrictive covenants.”

This policy of “redlining,” in which the government drew boundaries separating safe investment areas from those considered too risky, also pushed the blame elsewhere. This time it was the citizenry who were at fault; the government loan programs announced that they were not in the business of altering social policy but of lending money for housing in a way that ensured the economic success of the developments and not their racial profile.

There was evidence to support the FHA/VA proposition that forcing social integration of suburban housing would ensure not just racial conflict but something closer to chaos, at least as banks and govenment banking agencies might define that. One of the first black residents of Levittown reported he’d been offered his house by a friend– white– who was moving. When word got out, the seller received a visit from neighbors, who offered to pay a premium to ensure that the sale fall through. And given the opportunity for integration, the new home-buyers of the postwar years weren’t interested. Bernice Burnett, one of the first to buy in Ronek Park, reported that, of the first few hundred houses, only perhaps one or two families were white. How Romano managed to get financing for his community remains a mystery.

There’s no need to point out the paradoxes inherent in this story of failed policy. White residents throughout the era claimed that their attitudes weren’t set by hatred or fear of people but by a genuine concern that their hard-won investment in home ownership would be taken from them as property values plummeted after integration. The banks wouldn’t lose, they said– they’d still have to pay their mortgages, but they’d end up with more paid out than they could recoup if they sold. Had Levittown been a typical working-class and lower-middle-class community, this phenomenon of Americans whose houses contained their entire savings (including all they hoped to use to supplant Social Security for their retirement) would probably have followed patterns elsewhere: rigid if surreptitious exclusion of blacks or “white flight” into self-segregated communities further out in the widening rings of suburban development.

In the United States, integration finally became a legal, a governmentally sanctioned and even advocated policy, in 1954. That was the year of Brown v. Board of Education, the year the Supreme Court announced what to any but the most naive Americans was a self-evident fact: to sequester facilities by race was to guarantee better facilities for the majority race, the race with economic, political and social power. 1954 was also the year the FHA/VA regulators abandoned redlining and even warned client banks against the policy. It was the year the Defense Department made an active policy of desegregating the bases and the immediately surrounding areas. That was also the year the Levittown covenants fell.

After 1954, Levittown didn’t experience the pattern of “white flight” and panic peddling that characterized so many communities of about Levittown’s size, home value, and proximity to a major city. In Chicago, real estate agents would enter a neighborhood or a close-in suburb with black actors paid to play the role of families in search of housing. Prominently promenaded up and down the street on a Saturday afternoon, these apparent home-shoppers were the opening phalanx in an assault designed to end with the real estate company in possession of whole blocks of houses purchased at rates far below market value. Then these companies sold the houses at inflated prices to black families looking for integrated housing, safe streets, good schools, the suburban dream exemplified by Levittown. Instead they found themselves in steadily expanding clusters of black suburban housing surrounded by hostile white families.

The pattern in Levittown during the era of white flight– 1954 through the end of the ‘60s– might seem anomalous: the community stayed almost entirely white. Some of this was simply the extraordinary stability of the community: once a Levittowner, always a Levittowner..

The census data for 1960 tells this clearly: of the 14,742 homeowners in Levittown, more than eleven thousand had been there since 1955, and the majority were original Levittowners, still in the houses they’d bought from the Levitt organization. . The stability of the community itself worked to prevent wholesale turnover or the allied phenomenon of “pocket segregation,” by which some areas went black while others remained white-- “integration” of a community marked by stony avenues of suspicion and aversion. Because Levittown houses weren’t “churning”, because Levittown residents stayed there, year after year, decade after decade, there grew up a simultaneous stubborn refusal to give in to panic peddling, and a simultaneous powerful pressure on those who did sell, to keep Levittown “stable”-- that is, of course, white.

Yet stability isn’t a sufficient or satisfying answer to the question of Levittown’s failure to integrate. This was a town that prided itself on its liberalism, its tolerance of difference, its ability to make a polyglot American melting pot. This was a town of affordable houses, houses where working people, union people, people getting weekly paychecks, could buy in. Even if half the homeowners in 1960 had been there from the first years Levitt put the houses up for sale, that still left thousands and thousands of houses available, at working-class prices, near the manufacturing plants where black mechanics, black craftsmen and black assembly-line workers were earning a decent living. By rights, Levittown should have shifted to more closely resemble the racial demographics of the nation and the region. It didn’t.

A close look at the 1960 census reveals more than perhaps even its sponsors intended. Unlike previous censuses, this one didn’t just break out the population into “white” and “nonwhite”-- the categories that Levitt adhered to when he forbade renting or selling to “non-Caucasians.” “Negroes” were counted separately; so were Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos. All over America, a new attention to race, wary, even fearful attention (in some cases, already, exultant) was reflected in that bureaucratic decision to tell Americans just how to understand their neighbors.

In 1960, the U.S. population was just under 11% Negro. New York City, the nearest feeder for Levittown, was a bit over 7% Negro. Levittown’s percentage of black residents was .0008705, less than one-tenth of one percent..

To map these numbers across the physical and social spaces of Levittown we can return to the census. There were about 15,000 houses in Levittown in 1960. There were fifteen occupied by black families. About one per thousand houses. If you were a white kid going to school, what would that mean? That you never saw a black kid, except, perhaps, at a distance, a dark face far down the hallway.

But the census data doesn’t stop there. A breakdown by gender reveals that there were 48 women and girls, nine men and boys. This seems particularly odd– despite the rhetoric about the breakdown of the black family, middle-class suburban-dwelling black families were pretty stable.

We can find a revealing answer by panning out from Levittown to the larger picture the census shows us, of race and geography in the United States at the end of the ‘50s. Look at the numbers on the other cities and towns of New York State; look only at the ones on the two-page spread of the census. What you find are cities and towns with solid black populations– industrial towns, like Newburgh, on the Hudson River, 39.6% black; Niagara Falls, close to 7%. In these, and in most of the other cities and towns with substantial black communities, men and women are equally represented.

There are others where the Levittown pattern appears. Locust Grove: 56 women, one man; Lynbrook: 54 and 19; Massapequa, just south of Levittown, 46 and four. In Massapequa Park a little further to the east, 28 female Negroes were listed in the census column; there were no men at all. Merrick had 148 black women and girls, and 19 black men and boys. (Actually, the numbers are even more skewed, as most of the male blacks were children.)

To know something of these communities is often to have the quandary resolved. Take Massapequa. It was a resort town, on Jones Beach, with resort hotels that needed maids and cooks; this form of domestic labor brought with it, often, a place to stay: Black maids and domestics, counted in the census. In other communities, summer homes for the rich or landed estates required domestics, too.

 Up and down these columns of numbers, the pattern clarifies. In communities needing servants, black women and children make up the small enclave of workers counted in the census. Once it had been different; when photographer James VanDerZee grew up in the Berkshires, his family was part of a small community that included carpenters and tradesmen, but also male domestics– butlers and manservants. By the later ‘50s, that pattern had shifted, as fashions among the wealthy changed, but also as male servants found better-paying jobs in the factories, while women and children still eked out their livings in the kitchens and laundry rooms.

The list of towns and cities on that double page of the census embeds Levittown in a larger history of racial separation and racial space in America. From towns without a single black resident to towns with substantial black populations, one can trace the history of the region: towns and cities that needed workers– to break the strikes, to fill the vacancies in the factories during the wars, to clean the rooms and houses and serve the estates– found them, and kept them, and the integrationist laws of the ‘50s did not bring about a revolution. For the rest of the area, for the rest of the nation, white communities stayed white, or they turned black. They didn’t, with very rare exceptions, become truly multiracial communities.

 Levittown never became substantially integrated. As late as the 1970 census, only ½ of 1% was demarcated as Negro-- at a time when the population of the nation was just over 11% Negro. To be a Negro, and later a black, and finally an African-American in Levittown meant something very different than to be black in Harlem or in New Haven or Peekskill, New York or, most pointedly, Ronek Park, Long Island. Over time the population of maids and menials was supplemented by a few black families living in the Levittown houses. Those black Levittowners were middle class by definition; they were self-selecting by nature– they had chosen to move to Levittown and that wasn’t simply a matter of distance from work or the quality of the schools. They weren’t born there and it wasn’t their only option or even an easy one. Those who came and stayed had to face obstacles that white people in America rarely if ever know: to be far from all that you have grown up with, to see your children alone and lonely in the schools and rarely called on the telephone or invited to dances or parties– to live, on an everyday basis, knowing you were strangers, more or less, to all your neighbors. To overcome those obstacles required something close to heroic commitment. That was what drove one family out of Levittown; that, and the suffering of their high-school girls, whose chances of being invited to a party were small and, they reported, the chances of dating were absolutely nil. The Levittown Negroes who bought and stayed were there because they, too, believed in something of the Levittown myth.

Most American blacks stayed away from Levittown. Though it was inexpensive even in the later ‘50s, it didn’t become a place of starter homes for the black middle class of New York or the rapidly increasing numbers of well-paid black union workers in the defense industries. The unwelcoming reputation of the place preceded it. As had Levittown in so many other areas, in this one, too, it became a place of legend and myth– the place where, after the war, the line of American identity was redrawn to include Jews, Catholics, Irish, even Chinese, but not Negroes.

In black America, Bill Levitt’s explanations seemed more than weak; thanks to the black press and the rich underground communication system, most American Negroes knew (as most white Americans didn’t) that Levitt had continued to include Caucasian-only covenants in his new developments, had sued the state of New Jersey to allow him to write such contracts, had testified before Congress defending white-only housing development. Negro veteran Eugene Burnett had tried to buy, back in 1950, and he reported, forty years later: “I will never, ever in my life forget the experience and the feeling that I had when I rode back to Harlem that night....” For blacks, the myth of Levittown was a photographic negative of the picture that had arisen throughout the rest of the nation and the globe.

To white Levittowners, though, the question of race was more complicated than they knew it seemed to their black counterparts. There was the fear of financial ruin if the community “went black.” But there was also something else-- a distinction based not upon race so much as a suspicion of outsiders. To long-time Levittowners, particularly to the first generation who stayed in their original houses and were proud to be counted as pioneers in the 1960 census, the few Negro settlers were first of all not their kind– not the pioneers, not the still-childlike veterans and young veterans wives, not the ones who’d invented Levittown and been invented by it. These Negroes were not actors in the Levittown drama. Theirs was another drama, one seen on television after 1954, a drama set in places like Kansas City and Selma, Alabama. In that history play, the Levittowners weren’t heroic pioneers but weak-minded escapists from the difficulties of the American utopia, settling for hypocrisy. Not a pleasant self-image– Levittown as huddling-place– it was a picture that further ensured Levittown’s isolation.

For most Levittowners, the new black neighbors who did come became objects of projection– they were just like us (but their children could still be ostracized) or they were not like us, people to be feared or treated with suspicion. Neither picture conformed to the complex reality and, in truth, few Levittowners had to concern themselves much about the matter. There were simply too few Negroes to serve as more than curiosities.

Billy Joel is a pop singer and songwriter. Were there a Brill Building today, Joel would be one of the kings. He grew up in Levittown, leaving it in the ‘60s, as social ferment infected even that place. When he listened to popular music, he heard Buddy Holly, but also Chuck Berry, Sam and Dave, the Supremes, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Martha and the Vandellas. His life has been defined by that extraordinary blending of races and classes into a complex cry of celebration and rebellion that is American rock music. More than a quarter-century after he left Levittown, he recalled what it was like to grow up there. His parents moved out from the Bronx; they called it their “house in the country.” In the mid-‘50s, he and the other kids in his immediate neighborhood played “cowboys and Indians; we played army, we ran wild through these great big potato fields.” And it was in those fields that Joel encountered his first black people. At the start he couldn’t understand what he was seeing; these dark-skinned people with very different faces and hair, clothes and accents. It was a testimony to the utter racial isolation of America at that moment that Joel had not simply never seen black people; he didn’t even know that they existed. Nothing in his schoolbooks, nothing his parents or friends had told him prepared him for the presence of another race.

In a subtle but crucial way, Joel’s vision was a true vision-- an accurate assessment, and something close to a religious epiphany. Those people he saw out there didn’t in fact exist, at least according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s count in 1960. They weren’t part of that count because they weren’t permanent enough to have places of residence and their employers didn’t want them counted. They weren’t included in the 48 women and girls, nine men and boys, of African-American extraction, who resided in the legal and geographical entity called Levittown.

 And that’s the other factor hidden in Joel’s story. The first, the only black people he saw growing up were out past the edges of the community, outside its boundaries, out in the terra incognita of the potato fields where you could run wild. There they were, in the clothes of agricultural workers, with the dirt of farm work on them. They were weeding between the rows of potato plants, on their knees in the black earth, ghostly images as if of a different time and place, a different land and landscape than the busy, orderly setting of this drama of the American dream of progress and improvement: human improvement bound up around the improvement of lands.