Levittown

by David Kushner

  Soon after, an African-American family named the Cotters sublet a home from a white family in Levittown, New York. The resident was none other than William Cotter, the chairperson of the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown and a past president of the Great Neck chapter of the NAACP. Cotter had tried to buy a home for his family in Levittown only to be told by the Levittown management company he was “undesirable.” But he managed to sublet a home instead. When word got out, Bill Levitt closed in again for an eviction.

  Cotter went to court, claming racial discrimination. While Levittown’s management company said Cotter had simply stayed in the home after his lease had run out, the comments were racially charged nonetheless. “If we don’t like the color of your necktie,” said the Levittown attorney, “then we don’t have to rent to you.” This time, Levitt would not back down. The judge ruled in favor of Levitt, and Levittown’s attorney accused Cotter of unnecessarily stirring up racial issues. In December 1953, the Cotters were forced to leave. As volunteers from the Committee to End Discrimination carried signs saying KEEP BROTHERHOOD IN LEVITTOWN and sang “Go Down Moses” and “God Bless America,” marshals carried Cotter, and his furniture, outside in the rain for good.

  Three days later, a white Levittown family offered to sell the Cotters a house, and they accepted. They remained there without incident, and two other black families would move into the community as well without a problem. But Bill Levitt refused to change his policy. “It was not a matter of prejudice, but one of business,” he insisted. “As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice. But, by various means, I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then ninety to ninety-five percent of our white customers will not buy into this community.”

  But towns near Levitt’s defied any such easy prediction. Ronek Park, a community near Levittown, Long Island, was a postwar development that was open to all potential buyers from the day sales began in 1950. The builder, Thomas Romano, promised the homes would be available to anyone “regardless of race, creed, or color.” When it opened, Newsday observed that most of the buyers were black. Not far from Levittown, Pennsylvania, the community of Concord Park, built by Quakers, was diverse and thriving. The town’s motto: “Under Quaker Leadership, Democracy in Housing.”

  Bea and Lew took Concord Park’s success to heart. They weren’t alone. The Saturday Evening Post and other publications became publicly critical of Levittown’s stance. Letters came in supporting integration. Opponents voiced their outrage too. “A large majority of people moved to Levittown because there are no Negroes,” wrote one. The Trenton Evening Times called for action. “The eyes of the world are upon [Levittown],” the paper read. “For what happens here may help bring American democracy raised to new and greater heights. Or it may establish an evil pattern that could tend to destroy the freedom on which this country is based.”

  The Bucks County area had a long history of integrationist activity, mainly exercised by the local Quakers. As far back as the 1700s, Quakers had fought to free slaves in the area. In fact, they and other activists had been working on civil rights issues under the auspices of the Bucks County Interracial Committee for years before Levitt and his exclusionary community arrived. In 1952, the activists formed a civil rights organization called the Human Relations Council.

  Bea and Lew were delighted to discover that the spokesperson of the group and leader of the area’s Interracial Committee was an old college buddy of Lew’s named Paul Blanshard Jr. He was joined by other notable community leaders, such as Sam Snipes, a bow-tied Quaker lawyer whose ancestors had lead the emancipation struggle almost two hundred years before. And they were not about to back down now, no matter how powerful the Levitts had become. As Blanshard promised in the Saturday Evening Post, “The day will come when a Negro family will move into Levittown.”

  The Human Relations Council along with a Quaker group called the Friends Service Association made the integration of Levittown a top priority. As Blanshard put it, the goal was “bringing moral pressure upon leaders in housing and industry who foster discrimination.” They called for meetings with Bill Levitt, but he turned them down. With enough persistence, however, they finally got a sit-down and brought along a celebrity, the Bucks County writer Pearl Buck, for good measure. When Bill stood firm against their proposal to integrate, however, even Buck couldn’t take it, and she stormed out of the room.

  The Human Relations Council organized workshops and meetings against Levittown’s racist plan. Residents went to a meeting at a church on the topic of integration, and Ralph Abernathy, one of Martin Luther King’s close friends and colleagues, was the speaker. At one point during the impassioned gathering, an African-American from Concord Park stood up and said that she lived in an integrated community, why couldn’t Levittown be that way? What did Abernathy think? “Well,” Abernathy said, “if Martin were here and heard this question, he’d say, ‘Things are looking up in heaven!’ ” The first step to change, in other words, was questioning the situation.

  On January 15, 1955, the groups threw their support behind the NAACP when it sued the federal mortgage agencies that helped finance the Levittown houses in Pennsylvania. The lawsuit came to pass after six black veterans claimed to have been denied the right to buy homes in Levittown because of their race. “Levitt’s bias policy has not gone unnoticed,” wrote a director of the NAACP in Bucks County in a letter to the editor. “We do state firmly that the NAACP resolves to use the courts, legislation, and public opinion to crack the iron curtain of bias housing policies and to keep campaigning until we bring to an end such painful disparity between American principles and American practices.”

  In a statement, the Human Relations Council said it “deplores such discrimination, especially at this hour when the fate of man may hang on the realization of proper rights by the colored people of the earth. It seems more important than ever in America to live by the principles we teach. There will be some who judge this statement as a condemnation of a single building firm. This is but a fraction of its intent.”

  Representing the veterans, Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP chief counsel and famed lawyer from Brown v. Board of Education, tried to get an injunction placed against Levitt “as long as he uses the credit, guarantees, insurance approval and assistance of the Federal government,” Marshall said. However, the Philadelphia district court dismissed the suit, ruling that while the FHA and Veterans Administration did provide loans, they were not congressionally charged to prevent housing discrimination. Levitt had skirted the law once again.

  As the sad reality of Levittown’s racist policy lingered, Bea and Lew struggled with more disillusionment of their own. On February 25, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, gave what became known as the “Secret Speech” or “Khrushchev Report,” detailing the atrocities practiced under the preceding Stalin regime. Bea and Lew, after a lifetime of political action, couldn’t believe their ears. “They were murdering Jews,” Bea said. “How could socialists do this?”

  Lew felt “shattered” by the report, he said. But some of their friends in the movement were more than shattered. Some had nervous breakdowns. “This is the end,” Bea said. “If this is what socialism can bring, then I don’t want it. I’m not a Communist anymore. I’m finished.” It was a devastating thing to say, after a lifetime supporting the cause. And it wouldn’t be so easy to move on. Despite McCarthy’s having been censured in 1954, red-baiting continued as the country waged the Cold War. To make matters worse, the Wechslers knew they would forever bear the brand of their affiliation, and the threat of retaliation, from lost jobs to lost lives, was still as real as ever—especially in Levittown.

  Levitt had, after all, built his communities on the promise of keeping out both blacks and Communists. Now Communists were under fire. In Levittown, New York, a battle had been waged over a song called “Lonesome Train.” Penned by a folk artist who had written many union songs, “
Lonesome Train” was a tribute to Abraham Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves. The song had been played for schoolchildren as a tribute to President Lincoln.

  But a Catholic magazine declared the song “so patently loaded with Communist propaganda that even a tyro in Communist lore could detect it.” And a battle had broken out in Levittown, New York, as members of the Board of Education wanted it banned. The community formed groups to explore what tolerance meant in a newly blazed community. With the approval of the Board of Education, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith planned a “Workshop on Human Relations” to discuss such issues in a high school in Levittown. But the approval didn’t come without objections. “I don’t like the title ‘Human Relations,’ ” said one member of the Board of Education. “I’d like to ask them if they’ll let their daughter marry a colored fellow and see what they’ll say.” The song was never banned, but the fires had been stoked against the integrationists and others who wanted to meddle with the “human relations” in town.

  The legacy of Joe McCarthy, the senator who had once walked the streets of Levittown with Bill Levitt and who died in disgrace on May 2, 1957, still loomed large. Now the supporters of the fight against excluding African-Americans from Levittown, Pennsylvania, were fanning the Communist fears. Pearl Buck saw Levittown’s racial covenant and uniformity as ominous reminders of Communist China. “When I walked through Levittown one day and saw hundreds of houses being built, all for white families and not one for Negroes,” she wrote, “I saw a straight line of connection between those houses and the fact that Communism won China away from us, that it threatens at this moment in Indo-China, that because of it thousands of American boys lie dead in Korean soil.” Local author James Michener agreed. “Any evidence of racial discrimination in the United States is carefully searched out by Communists and transmitted to Asiatic newspapers for widespread publicity,” he said at a meeting of the Human Relations Council in the area.

  As Bea and Lew busied themselves with their daily lives, the raising of their kids, their jobs, their home, they grieved for the cause they were leaving behind. Lew wasn’t getting far with the unions in town, which were considerably more conservative than he had been accustomed to in the past. It began to seem as if the promise the Wechslers had believed in for so long—the promise of a new world, a new home, a new life—was fading. Even the Human Relations Council’s efforts to integrate Levittown seemed hopeless.

  Every so often, an African-American family would make contact with the group and they would all meet at the local William Penn Center, a community gathering place, to discuss if and how the family might move into the town. But it wouldn’t take long for the sense of futility to spread. “Where will the house come from?” someone would say. “Where will they buy?” another would want to know. “Who will the neighbors be? How will they react?” With so many obstacles being thrown up by the group, invariably the prospective buyer would back away.

  One night after such a discussion deteriorated again, Lew finally spoke up in frustration. If they were going to change the town, they had to start somewhere, he said. “I don’t see that it should be such a problem,” Lew said. “Levittown houses are being sold every day. Any one of us could buy the house next door, move into it, and sell our house to the family. This would be aboveboard and would avoid two negatives: the deception of the ‘straw buyer’; and the sense of a ‘spite sale’ in which the white seller disappears into another all-white community.” Lew looked around the room and waited to see if someone would volunteer to step up, to take action, to put into place a plan that would tear down Levitt’s wall once and for all.

  No one did—not even the Wechslers. They had real violence to fear. As one member of the group wrote in a newsletter, “We must be realistic and recognize, good friends, that the more effective we are, at least in the first instance, the more opposition may arise. Our existence thus far has been fairly serene perhaps because our accomplishments are so few. No one of us can say how well we will be able to stand up when the heat is on.” Even in America’s most famous suburb, Levittown, there was no telling what their neighbors were capable of doing.

  Seven

  NEIGHBORS

  IF YOUR CAR breaks down in Levittown, residents liked to boast, you don’t have to look far for a neighbor to help. And if you lived on Timber Lane, the neighbor to ask was George Capps. A twenty-two-year-old Korean war veteran and worker at a Trenton wire-manufacturing company, Capps was an amiable handyman about town who lived with his twenty-one-year-old pregnant wife. Like most Levittowners, they were young and eager to start a new life.

  Capps had been living in Virginia and traveling up the coast in a carnival when his troupe arrived at Levittown to put on a fair at a local church. Capps, however, hurt himself during the event and was hospitalized—forced to remain after his colleagues pulled out of town. Hearing of the story, a Levittowner named Betty Peart organized the local Girl Scouts to send get-well cards to Capps in his room.

  But, they discovered, Capps couldn’t read the cards. He was illiterate. This moved Peart, who dispatched Girl Scouts to the hospital to read the cards to him in person. Capps decided to stay in Levittown for good, buying a little house just down the block from the Pearts’. The neighbors took to him and his wife and discovered Capps was good with machines. He became known as the guy who could fix anything that broke.

  One night that winter, on Friday, January 22, 1954, Capps headed down his street for a walk. A car had broken down in front of the house of his neighbors, the Gibbonses, and he was going to lend a hand. But no one was home at the Gibbonses’ house that night. Mr. and Mrs. Gibbons were spending the night in Philadelphia, where Mrs. Gibbons was hospitalized with a heart condition. Their daughter Marta, a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore, and her seven-year-old half sister, Sue, were babysitting at their neighbors’ across the street. When Capps called earlier to ask if he could help with their dad’s broken-down car, Marta told him her parents were away and he’d have to do it later.

  At about ten P.M. that night after Marta came home and her half sister went to bed, Capps phoned again about the car. Then he came over.

  Capps then either forced or talked Marta into leaving her sister and taking a drive in his 1937 Ford. They went to the frozen Curtis Lake, near the intersection of two busy highways, Route 1 and Route 13. On a cold night like this, the lake and surrounding woods were empty. There alone on the edge of Levittown, Capps raped the girl twice. When he was through, he said, “Suppose I get you pregnant like I did my wife?” Marta vomited and burst into tears. She told Capps she was going to tell her stepfather what he had done to her. Bolting from the car, crying and hysterical, she ran from the lake. Capps leapt after her, striking her down. Then he ran back to his car to get his gun.

  He only chased her for a few feet before squeezing the trigger of his .32-caliber pistol, firing a bullet into the back of her head. Marta hit the ground. Capps, in a panic, decided to get rid of the body. He grabbed the dead girl’s legs and dragged her two hundred feet into a ditch. As he sped off into the night, he tossed her clothes from the window and disappeared back into Levittown’s winding streets.

  It was two days before the police found Marta’s green sweater hanging from the branch of a tree. Before long, they had traced the evidence back to Capps, who confessed. News of the sensational crime shocked the community. Neighbors barred their doors. Parents refused to let their daughters babysit. It was a defining moment for Levittown, an eruption of evil in their perfectly planned world. “It could have happened anywhere in the world,” the local paper wrote, “but IT HAPPENED HERE!” Betty Peart, stunned that a man she had helped had done this, sank into despair—unable even to change her baby’s diapers.

  In May, a jury sentenced Capps to death. The district attorney summed up the murder by comparing Capps to a rabid dog, “a beast of prey . . . stalking your child as its victim.” Marta’s grief-stricken stepfather said, “I thought he was a good neighbor.”


  It was September 24, 1955, and the Levittowners needed a reason to celebrate. They had one: Walt Disney was coming to town. The iconic entertainer stepped off a train in nearby Tullytown, climbed into a black limousine, and headed for their community. He wasn’t just there to honor this world-famous suburb, he was giving his name to the community by dedicating the first-ever school to bear his name: Walt Disney Elementary.

  Disney had reason to be interested in the utopian plan. As early as 1948, he had started talking about his distaste for urban chaos, traffic, and noise—and the promise of life in a supportive, planned garden community. He quoted from books such as Garden Cities of Tomorrow and Out of a Fair, a City, which mapped out ideas for new kinds of living centers. Like Alfred Levitt, he saw the promise fulfilled in the dreams of science fiction writers such as his friend Ray Bradbury. One time when Bradbury suggested Disney run for mayor of Los Angeles, Disney replied, with Bill Levitt–style bombast, “Why should I run for mayor when I am already king?”

  As Disney pulled into Levittown, enthusiastic fans crowded to greet him with homemade signs. DISNEY DAY IN LEVITTOWN read one banner. LEVITTOWN WELCOMES WALT DISNEY read another, alongside a drawing of Mickey Mouse. After introductions by fifth- and sixth-grade students, Disney took the stage in his gray suit and dark tie to inaugurate the school and set down the symbolic cornerstone. A camera perched atop a car filmed the news. As the newly formed Walt Disney School Band played, and the Girl Scouts Brownie Troop #184 stood by Uncle Walt’s side, the crowd watched as the American flag was raised over the school.

  Behind the scenes, however, the Levitt’s fantasy world was beginning to crack. While the nation still had a love affair with the veteran-friendly suburbs, artists and critics began taking the towns to task. The science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which chronicled a town of people taken over by an alien virus, played up the soul-sucking uniformity of the cookie-cutter existence. Rebel Without a Cause, the movie starring James Dean, dramatized the frustration teenagers felt with stifling 1950s conformity.