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Daisy Myers pours
coffee for her husband, Bill, in their new home in Levittown, Pa.
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Photo by Sam
Myers/Associated Press/File 1957 |
August 13, 1957, — Buck County,
PA, The American Dream is supposedly to own your own home in the community of
your choice and raise your children while having backyard barbeques with the
neighbors. On this day in 1957 William and Daisey Meyers decided to try and buy
their part of the dream but as African Americans, they faced bitter resentment
and threats from some Whites in the community.
The Meyers had been looking for
a new home. They wanted some place
of peace, quiet with relative safety to raise their children. The post-war
housing boom of the late 1940s and the 1950s introduced new terms to the
American lexicon, Levittown and Suburb and suburbia. Levittown was because the first
mass builder was William Levitt. He built the first of his developments on
Long Island, New York in 1947 and was completing his second in Bucks County.
The problem for the Meyers was that Levittowns were segregated communities, expressly built for White people. The reason for this has some historical controversy. Some people insist that Levitt was himself a bigot, although he swore that as a Jew, he knew prejudice and was not himself a bigot. That said he had to block sales due to his contract with the federal government. However, he took the sympathetic racist view that his customer base of Whites would not buy if there were Negros present.
Government contracts did specify that he as the developer could not sell to African Americans. The Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration had subsidized the building of these suburban developments with regulations that stated no new homes could be sold to Negroes.
The language was for, “New Homes”
The Meyers were able to get around this unreasonable law by agreeing to
purchase the home from Bea and Lew Wechsler, a Jewish couple from the Bronx.
The Wechslers were civil rights activists who saw an opportunity to upend the
quiet racism of the federal government and William Levitt. So, on this day
the papers were signed to buy the home.
The Meyers began to move in on
August 19th and were met with shock by their new neighbors. Some
of whom stood around outside the home and shouted, “Nigger Get Out.” A couple
of days later a mailman asked who owned the house and Daisy Meyers told him she
did and this was the correct address he started running down the street
yelling, “It's true, It's true the Niggers are here!”
Over the next few weeks, the harassment
escalated. Stones were thrown through windows. Mobs stood outside shouting
insults and demanding the Meyers leave. The mob also targeted the Wechslers for
selling the Meyers house. Soon many of the Whites in the community got
together and formed the “Levittown Betterment Committee” to organize the
threatening phone calls and other protests. They rented a home on the same
street which was renamed the “Confederate House.” At this location the Confederate
flag was flown and “Dixie” was played on loudspeakers.
When these somewhat subdued
threats didn’t force the Meyers out some locals stepped it up and defaced the
house with spray paint. One neighbor painted, “Not OKKK,” on the side of his
home. Another walked by nightly with his black dog, whom he had named “Nigger”
and yelled often. Soon crosses were burned outside the Meyers and Wechsler’s
homes.
These overt measures were
against a court order that no more than three people were allowed to congregate.
Finally, after two weeks outside pressure forced the local and state police to
intervene to stop the near riot activity that was happening every evening. Thanks to allies like the Quakers, the American Jewish Congress, and the
William Penn Center as well as friendly and supportive White neighbors word had
spread throughout the nation of the treatment of this family.
After three months in their new
home, Pennsylvania Attorney General Thomas McBride filed a complaint against
the Levittown Betterment Committee and the Confederate House. The complaint
read that the Confederate House and Betterment Committee had, “entered into an
unlawful, malicious and evil conspiracy . . . to force the
said Myers family to leave Levittown: to harass, annoy, intimidate, silence and
deprive of their rights to peaceable enjoyment of their property.” With the
help of local and state police patrols what had so quickly blown up seemed to
blow over.
The Meyers lived in their
Levittown home for four years and a second African American family the Mosby’s moved
into the Bucks County Levittown a year after the Meyers. This was the beginning
of legal change challenges to the historic racism in housing. After the Meyers made
national news. Broad enforcement of President Truman’s Housing Act of 1949
started with the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration
refusing to subsidize William Levitt’s next developments. He sued and the case
went to the New Jersey Supreme Court where Levitt lost and the United States
Supreme Court refused to hear the case.
Until he died William Levitt
swore that his segregation policy was entirely economic even with the court
loss and several boycotts and protests led by the NAACP and other civil rights
groups.
Bill Meyers died in 1987 at the
age of 65. Daisey Meyers became known as the “Rosa Parks of the North.” And wrote
a biography, Sticks'N Stones: The Myers Family in Levittown, published
in 2005. She spent 30 years teaching for the New York City School District. All
her life she was active in multiple community groups. Daisy Meyers died in 2011
at age 86 Bea Wechsler also died in 2011
at age 91 and Lew Wechsler is still living at age 105, he wrote his own memoir
in 2005 The First Stone: A Memoir of the Racial Integration of Levittown,
Pennsylvania
Sources:
https://jewishcurrents.org/remembering-the-battle-to-integrate-levittown
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-02/how-the-federal-government-built-white-suburbia
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