“Last night was not an example of America!” replied the township manager bitterly.
The town solicitor tried to reason with the group: “You know as well as I do that the state constitution or the federal Constitution contain no words that mark out people for black or white . . . The federal courts have ruled in this matter. This question is not in the scope of the legal limitations of the commissioners.”
Lefcourt agreed, “Let’s end it here and now. We are a duly elected body. Our responsibility is to defend to the best of our ability the protection of property regardless of race, religion, or creed.”
But the mob wasn’t having any of it. “There’s no law in this land that says we have to live alongside of them,” said the mob’s spokesman. “The family that moved into Dogwood Hollow caused the riot, not us.”
“I abhor mob rule,” Lefcourt replied, “and my advice to you people is to go back to your homes and try to work this out peacefully.”
But the shouts continued. Minutes later, another group poured in, filling the room beyond capacity, with more than one hundred people. In the front row, Lefcourt saw the pinched face of a Levittown woman. “You tell that black cocksucking son of a bitch to get the hell out of here!” she shouted. “We’re coming after her and we want her out of here!”
Lefcourt stared at her for a second, then glanced over to his lawyer for approval. They exchanged nods; whatever Lefcourt was going to say was fine by him. Lefcourt burst out, “You punk! Get out of here! Every one of ya, get outta here! You want her out, go get her out!” Lefcourt began to cry as he said the words, as he realized that this town, this great place he had taken so much pride in, was crumbling. “She lives in America where I live,” he cried, “and she has a right to live wherever she wishes!”
There was a call for order and a slam of the gavel. But there was no way they could continue their regular meeting, and at eleven P.M., it was adjourned.
Lefcourt went home, shaken. What was happening to his Levittown? How had this nightmare replaced the dream? His telephone rang. “Lef-court?” said a man with a thick Southern accent on the other end. It was James Newell, the flattopped leader of the mob who had been riling up the crowd at the mailbox on Deepgreen Lane on the night the Myerses moved in. Lefcourt knew Newell well. Newell was a Democratic committeeman, but also, Lefcourt thought privately, “a no-good, bigoted son of a bitch.” And now he was inflamed that his group couldn’t convene. “They won’t let us meet,” Newell said.
“Put a flag on top of your house then,” Lefcourt screamed into his phone, “and go meet!”
The next day, an emergency meeting of the Human Relations Council, along with members of the local clergy, took place at the William Penn Center, the building where their plan was first hatched. Forty-five people from town organizations including synagogues, the women’s league, and the Levittown Civic Association were in attendance. Because this was August, many clergymen were away on vacation, but their colleagues put out the urgent word to get back to Levittown immediately to help quell the crisis. Together they drew up a statement:
“We regret the violence, mob gatherings, and other unfortunate actions directed as a protest against the arrival of the William Myers family to our community. We know that many other residents feel as we do that the maintenance of human decency, law and order, and religious morality are of primary importance to the well being of our community. The events of the past few days have thrust our Levittown into such prominence that we now find ourselves responsible to our state, our nation, and to the world at large for the achievement of a solution worthy of us as Americans. Demonstrations of racial and religious bigotry have no place in our community, and we know that future developments in Levittown will keep faith with the wholesome democratic traditions of our nation.”
They weren’t the only ones pleading for help. That afternoon, Pennsylvania governor George Leader had been heading from his office in Harrisburg to his home when his secretary handed him a telegram from Levittown’s chief of police. “The citizens of Levittown are out of control,” the wire read. “The police have done all they can to quell the violence in which the Negro’s home was stoned and two picture windows broken.” As a result, the Levittown police urgently needed help from the state police so that the situation can be “quelled without bloodshed,” Leader was told.
The telegram had come to the right man. Leader, a dapper forty-year-old with round glasses, was riding a crest of popularity. After winning election in an upset as the second-youngest governor in U.S. history and second Democrat to win the post in Pennsylvania in fifty years, he was featured on the cover of Time magazine, interlocking his hands victoriously over his head. He was also a native of York, Bill Myers’s hometown.
Horrified by the events at Levittown, Leader condemned the disturbances during a county meeting with one hundred party leaders. “I am ashamed that this occurred in Pennsylvania,” he told them. “The stoning of the home of the first Negro family in Levittown is completely alien to the historic principles on which Pennsylvania was built. Any family has the right to live where it can obtain the right of legal possession—on any street, road, or highway in the Commonwealth. Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers as a haven to all oppressed peoples.”
While just a few dozen people showed up to support the Myerses, the mob had no problem outsizing them. Six hundred protesters gathered in the parking lot outside the John Billington VFW Post on Haines Road, just one mile from the Myerses’ home. Cars crawled, and people were coming and going. The police lingered outside directing traffic, but little more. People from throughout the crowd took to the stage to denounce the Myerses. Some had come from as far as Philadelphia, they said, to make their voices heard. But the crowd considered this a town affair and resoundingly booed any outsiders. Finally their leader, Newell, took the stage to applause.
As the former commander of the post and the county’s VFW, Newell had rented the post this night for one dollar. Dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt, the hulking man towered onstage over the crowd. Newell had trouble speaking over them, and he and his peers onstage tried in vain to quiet the boisterous crowd. One by one he fielded questions and comments from the crowd. It was said that the Myerses were being served by a local oil company, whom Newell suggested they boycott in protest. When some said boycotts were illegal, Newell said they should just cancel their contracts instead. The crowd cheered.
Five clergymen from throughout the community had shown up to talk sense in the group, but found only simmering hatred. One man in the mob even tried to pick a fight with one of the clergy, then announced that he was the chairman of the group they called the Levittown Betterment Committee. The purpose: “to protect betterment of our homes, community, family and investment and to organize interested active citizens in a legal and peaceful manner.” Volunteers were picked, two from each of four major sections of Levittown—Area One, Area Two, Area Three, and Area Four—to go door-to-door soliciting members who would help them drive the Myerses from their home.
When they announced that they needed a volunteer in the Appletree Hill section, a hand shot up from the crowd. It belonged to John Bentley, a Democratic committeeman in town and onetime zoning officer for Bristol Township. He was not the only civic leader in the mob; he was also joined by the tax collector for Falls Township, who became the head of Area One, as well as a candidate for commissioner. Bentley was also a charter member and incorporator of the Levittown Fire Company Number 2. He, like the others, felt the Levittown Civic Association was not taking enough action against the Myerses’ moving in. He stepped to the stage and was asked if he would pledge membership to the group. “Yes,” he said, “I would.” Anyone who wanted to join the group could do so for the membership fee of one dollar.
One of the men elected as an area chief, John Piechowski, spoke up. He held an article from Collier’s magazine that recounted William Levitt’s reasons for not selling to blacks. “ ‘The Negroes were trying to do in six years what
the Jews had not been able to completely do in six thousand,’ ” Piechowski quoted Levitt as saying, “ ‘and, being a Jew myself, I have no racial prejudice whatsoever, but if I sold to Negroes, ninety percent of the white people now buying homes would not buy.’ According to Levitt’s statement, the Betterment Committee must represent ninety to ninety-five percent of the people in Levittown.” Piechowski concluded by saying, “The Prohibition was passed by Congress, and was repealed, so why can’t the Civil Rights Bill also be repealed?”
As the crowd roared in approval, Newell spoke up again. “We will do everything within legal and peaceful means to get the Myers family out of the community,” he explained in his Southern accent, looking down on the sea of the white faces. White men in horn-rimmed glasses. White women with wavy, dark hair. White teenagers in jeans. “But if it doesn’t work, then we will have to do something else.”
Others in the crowd weren’t so subtle. There were only two ways to get the Myerses out, one man said, “We can vote them out, or we can force them out.” The crowd had already made up its mind. One person replied, “Voting won’t do any good.” Others suggested alternatives. One man shouted, “Burn them out!”
Into the night, the angry crowd of hundreds marched down the lanes. What was once the model community didn’t look like Levitt’s sketches anymore. The hateful mob filed past the ranch homes like something out of a Frankenstein movie, as fearful faces peered out picture windows. When the mob arrived at Deepgreen Lane, however, they met resistance. A foot detail of twenty-one Pennsylvania state troopers stood outside with their clubs to greet them. They were led by Captain Alfred Verbecken, a veteran of the police for thirty-four years. They would stay, as ordered, for twenty-four hours, then with order restored they would leave.
This night, the Myerses were not there. They had driven up to York to get away from the insanity and visit Bill’s parents. But as the Wechslers and their friends could see, the presence of the state police was not breaking up the crowd. The Levittowners were ripping a page from Bill Levitt’s book and defying the law despite the orders. Lew jokingly called them the “Levittown Bitterment Committee.” Drawing from union techniques, they formed a giant picket line, marching in pairs of two side by side, teenagers and parents, mothers with babies in strollers, clapping their hands in rhythm. They started in front of the Myers and Wechsler homes and circled around the block.
Down the street, Barney Bell, the Wechslers’ truck-driving Texan neighbor, decided he had had enough. If the police weren’t going to stop the violence, then he would. He stormed outside, jumped into his car, flipped the ignition, and floored it right over his perfectly mowed lawn toward the mob of racists—slamming on the brakes just a few feet away from them. The mob scurried from his lawn, but, as Bell told a reporter, he was the one aghast.
“This don’t make any sense,” he said. “This won’t accomplish anything. These people don’t have any right to do this.” The mob was defying the Myerses’ right to live where they wanted to live, he added, “and my right to sleep.” Across the street, the mob closed in again on the Myerses’ home. Someone hurled a rock the size of a baseball through the air, smashing it into the side of the house.
Before long the damage and chaos were spreading outside the neighborhood. Late that night, a police officer was driving near the Walt Disney Elementary School. Just two years before, Disney had come to inaugurate the school and its special role in this town. But now, under the dark skies, something else rose up in the place of that promise: an eight-foot-high bamboo cross wrapped in turpentine-soaked rags. And it was burning.
Eleven
THE BABY WON’T KNOW
THE BABY WAS fussing again. Daisy held Lynda, the month-old child bundled in white, in her arms as the blue-and-white Mercury hit a bump in the highway. Bill was behind the wheel, jazz music on the radio. Stephen and William, the boys, were fidgeting and playing in the back. It was Thursday morning, August 15, two days after the riots had started in Levittown, and they were escaping to York, back to the hometown they had left behind.
Though it only took two hours to get there, York felt like a world away. As Daisy looked out the window at the old familiar buildings, her mind reeled. Not long before, she had felt so alien here, so disappointed over the racism in the town that Bill had described with such great promise. They had left to seek a freer life near Philadelphia, away from the neighbor who was banging their door when the Myerses moved in. Daisy had always imagined that her life would have some kind of upward arc, that things would get better, for herself, her husband, her kids. But now, as they escaped the chaos of Levittown, York took on a new light, a beacon, a place to rest. And it was a place, they had decided, to leave the boys temporarily behind. They didn’t want Stephen and William to have to endure the troubles in Levittown and had arranged to leave them with Bill’s parents until things settled down. But no sooner had they walked into Bill’s parents’ house then came a knock at the door. Bill’s father opened it to find a sea of reporters, cameras flashing, notebooks flapping in the air.
“Now let’s have the Levittown story!” the reporters said.
Daisy and Bill eyed each other. Daisy’s heart sank, as she instinctively held Lynda tight. There was no escape at all. What had happened to the Myers family I knew last week? Daisy wondered, feeling empty and confused.
Bill squeezed her hand as the reporters came in, shouting questions. While Bill had been quiet for so long, always wanting to stay out of the fray, there was no lying low anymore. “Nothing whatever will prevent me from living in the house,” he told the newspeople. “I bought the home and I intend to live there.” The photographers began snapping photos of the family on the couch. Bill propped Stephen, dressed in a crisp white shirt and striped pants, up on his leg, while Daisy held baby Lynda awkwardly aloft. The baby was crying as the bulb flashed, freezing them there, Bill’s and Daisy’s eyes on the baby, little Stephen reaching his arm toward her to help.
After a fitful night’s sleep, Bill called upon their contacts within York to seek some kind of intervention in Levittown. A family friend knew someone in the House of Representatives who had just the guy for them to meet. The next morning, Daisy and Bill left the children and drove to the state capitol in Harrisburg to meet with Attorney General Thomas McBride. Daisy and Bill warmed to the tall, handsome man from the start. McBride’s ancestors, like the Quakers, had come from a long line of people who fought for their civil rights. After emigrating from Ireland, he told them, his grandfather pulled a shotgun to ward off rioters from the Know-Nothing Party who had come to burn down a Catholic church that had just been built.
McBride told them how, when he was a young man in the National Guard in the 1920s, racists had several times burned crosses on his lawn because of his fights on behalf of blacks. It wouldn’t be the last time. His wife, a schoolteacher in Bensalem, had once told her students that the Ku Klux Klan were cowards. News spread, and she came to school one morning to find a cross burning on the lawn.
Now they were facing the specter of such violence in the suburb of Levittown. Just that morning, a telegram had come to the governor’s office from the Citizens Committee of Levittown warning that “violence is a probability,” and that they needed help.
McBride listened attentively, then looked at Daisy and Bill. “I have one question. Do you want to stay in Levittown?”
Daisy and Bill replied, “Yes.”
That was all McBride needed to hear. The state police had already gone once to Levittown to try to quell the uprising and left, but now he would send them back. “The state police will be there when you return and will remain there as long as necessary,” he said.
While Daisy and Bill sought help in Harrisburg, Bea and Lew hunkered inside their home for the fight of their lives in Levittown. After years of protesting and leading union battles, they called on all their organizational skills. The house was a bustle of activity as the mob jeered and hollered outside. Reporters and TV crews poured into the
ir home. Katy and Nick were busy making ice-cold lemonade and serving the glasses to their guests.
The director of civil rights for the AFL-CIO sat at their kitchen table, working the phones to supporters from Philadelphia to New York. “Our committee works as the human rights arm of the labor movement,” he told a reporter. “All people regardless of race, creed, or color are entitled to the decencies of human life. The right to a good home is one of these rights, and we propose to do everything possible to help the Myers family enjoy these rights.”
Lew came over and chimed in saying that he was “shocked” at the treatment the Myerses had received and blamed the police. “If the police had done a more efficient job,” he said, things would not have “gone this way.”
For Bea and Lew, this was not just the fight of the town, this was a fight for the country, and for their neighbors. “Mrs. Myers is a wonderful woman,” Bea told the reporter. “She has been a teacher in Bristol Township’s Recreation Department. It is a shame that this has happened, but I still believe that we will live in peace.” The reporter scribbled in her notebook. Bea had one more bit to add: “Please say how proud I am of my daughter, Katy, because although I wasn’t home when the Myerses moved in, my little girl brought them over here to get a cold drink and a chance to rest. I am proud of her because she acted in an American manner.”
Outside the Wechslers’ window, the mob forming in plain view of the police told a different story of America. Ordinarily, the Levittowners would be home tonight watching Dragnet or The Lone Ranger. This evening, James Newell and his cronies at the Levittown Betterment Committee had called another meeting at six P.M., but it wouldn’t be at the VFW. After the negative attention, the commander of the Department of Pennsylvania VFW announced that they were investigating the matter. “I personally and officially denounced association of our organization’s name with this matter, regret its occurrence, and forbid any such meetings at the Levittown post, or at any other VFW post,” he said.
Levittown Page 13
