Levittown

by David Kushner

  But Williams could not be restrained. On the heels of the police order not to gather on Deepgreen Lane, the Betterment Committee had been trying in vain to find public places to meet. Meetings were called, only to be canceled when the proprietors of the venues discovered the purpose. On Friday, August 30, Williams defied Newell’s rule and took it upon himself to act as a spokesperson for the group. He told the local papers that the Betterment Committee would convene after all: “It will be held someplace in Levittown, sometime tomorrow evening, weather permitting. The time and place will be announced later.”

  The next day, Williams hastily organized a meeting in the most public place of all: the baseball diamond behind the Levittown Shopping Center. More than three hundred people crowded the field as the police looked on, refusing to intervene. After the meeting, Newell ordered Williams thrown out of the group. But it was not to be. Williams had his followers too, and he would remain. During the Betterment’s next private gathering, Williams was told his contact from the KKK was on the phone at his house. Newell, Bentley, and the others followed him over to Williams’s house. No sooner had they stepped inside than they saw a stack of papers on a table.

  “What’s this?” Newell asked Williams.

  “Applications for the KKK,” Williams replied.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Newell told his crew, and they left.

  The telephone rang at two A.M. in the home of Sam Snipes, the Quaker attorney who’d represented the Myerses in their purchase of their home.

  Snipes was a soft-spoken man who, like others, found himself cast into this unexpected war.

  “Sam Snipes?” the voice snapped on the other end of the line.

  “Yes?” Snipes said calmly.

  “Are you a nigger-loving motherfucker?”

  Snipes considered the question for a moment. “Yes.”

  As infighting gripped the mob against the Myerses and Wechslers, the supporters of the nascent civil rights struggle were facing retribution. When the Myerses needed allergy medicine, a local druggist put the house on his delivery rounds. But he could barely make it to the front door without being branded a “nigger lover.” His business partner heard of the incident and insisted they stop servicing the Myerses, or lose their business. After repeated threats, the druggist suffered a nervous breakdown.

  After delivering bread to the Myerses one day, the local baker returned to work the next morning to find his truck vandalized. He didn’t return to their home. The milkman never came to the Myerses’ home at all, despite sending them their weekly bill. When the local oil company truck was spotted at the Myerses’ home, one of Newell’s followers urged the others to boycott the company; thirty families followed suit. But when it was discovered that the man who’d suggested the boycott didn’t comply, the others meekly rejoined.

  Soon, the police themselves began drawing lines within their own ranks. One day, a reporter passed three state troopers near the Myerses’ home. “Look at that house,” one of the troopers said skeptically. “Myers is at work. But how about that woman and the children? What if something happens? Who is she going to ask for help? Suppose the house catches fire?”

  The trooper added that some people had vowed to shoot Bill Myers on sight. They questioned why someone would remain under such conditions. The implication was clear: While some police officers respected their role in this conflict, others on the force would do only so much to protect the family.

  The tensions were forming divisions between the Myerses’ supporters too. Questions burned throughout the community about how—and why—the family had moved in. Leading the investigation was Ray Har-wick, the young pastor who was heading the Citizens Committee on the Myerses’ behalf. After taking his post, Harwick began researching the events that led up to the Myerses’ move-in. This included reviewing and interviewing the actions and members of the Human Relations Council and Friends Service Association.

  The more he looked, the more suspicious he became of the Myerses’ primary backers: the Wechslers. Rumors were spreading within the factions that they had Communist ties. One day, Harwick showed up at Bea and Lew’s home urging them to come clean “for the sake of the Myerses.” Bea and Lew had received a similar visit from two Levittown rabbis who were on the Citizens Committee. The Wechslers bristled at the suggestion and refused. Politics were not the issue here, they said. “The issue is that we have publicly befriended the Myers family and publicly supported their right to live next door to us,” Lew said.

  But Harwick didn’t back down—much to the Myerses’ dismay. Though the Myerses were not familiar with the Wechslers’ political background, Daisy bristled at how Harwick and his supporters were blaming Communism for the problems in town. Harwick, Daisy felt, had been “shoved” into his position of leadership simply because he was white and Christian—qualifications that didn’t necessarily make him the right person for the job. By his own admission, Harwick had no experience with the civil rights movement. “I knew Negroes were out there,” he said, “somewhere out there, but I was never affected.”

  The Wechslers and Myerses saw right through this. Daisy, who on the advice of Pearl Buck had begun keeping a journal of her experience, wrote, “A man may have all the [seemingly right] classifications and still be a failure as a leader. A leader must be genuine, have the cause at heart; he must be fully experienced with the situation and know for what he stands. He must possess the fundamental knowledge necessary. Here was an honest man who said he did not know what civil rights meant. He had never preached a sermon on brotherhood in his years of ministry. Yet he was leading the people along these paths. How could a man with his leadership ability be so unaware of the pressing problems of his day?”

  The Myerses and Wechslers bristled at Harwick’s red-baiting investigations in this light. Daisy was stunned when he showed up at her doorstep to tell her that she and Bill were cleared of any suspicious background. “You are clean as whistles,” Harwick told them.

  “What are you talking about?” Daisy said.

  “I had you and Bill investigated, and as far back as they could trace, they could find no wrong.”

  Daisy couldn’t believe his gall. But Harwick, in the name of their civil rights, continued on his mission. On August 21, he agreed to a public discussion with Newell at a local inn, sponsored by the Levittown Kiwanis Club. Newell had put on a coat and tie, and Harwick, dressed in a coat over his pastor’s apparel, smiled with him for newspaper photos. Harwick reported the findings of his inquiry into the lives of the Myerses, as if anyone deserved to be investigated simply for choosing a home. Once again he said he had “completely investigated the financial background of [Bill] Myers and the financial background of his parents and in-laws” and had found Myers “clean as a whistle.” He also said that he found “absolutely no evidence that the Myers move here was sponsored by the Friends, by the NAACP, or any other group.”

  Not everyone agreed. Joseph Segal, the head of the Levittown Civic Association, said there “seems to be a void in Reverend Harwick’s information about the Negro family moving here.” But Harwick was quick to make peace. To the shock of the Wechslers and other supporters, Har-wick, speaking for the group, broke away from the very people who had devoted their lives to breaking Levittown’s whites-only grip. The Citizens Committee, he declared, “has adopted a completely neutral stand on integration.” The Myerses, he suggested, were pawns in the hands of the town’s integrationists. “I don’t like what has been done to bring the man here,” he said, and characterized Bill Myers as having spoken with people who had given him “irresponsible advice.”

  However well-intentioned he might have been, Harwick could not escape the consequence of his actions. At home, his phone was now ringing throughout the day and night with harassing calls. It was shaking him and his family. On Saturday, August 24, at three fifteen A.M., the phone rang, and he answered it only to hear, “Nigger lover!” and veiled threats to his family. He turned to his wife. “Go home to your
parents,” he said, “and take the children.”

  The next morning, he watched his family leave. As soon as they walked out the door, the phone rang again. And it continued all through the night. Harwick began to grow increasingly scared and paranoid and began to search his house for signs of an intruder. Desperate for help, he called the operator and said, “Is there any way you can possibly trace these calls?”

  “No, sir, there’s none,” the operator replied.

  “I have got to get some means!” Harwick snapped.

  With Harwick and others under mounting pressure, the Wechslers and Myerses felt increasingly under siege as well. Days and nights passed without their leaving their homes. Dinner dates were canceled. Ordinary activities—shopping and movies—were cut back. They never knew what they would find when they opened the door.

  One day when the Wechslers’ bell rang, it was their neighbor and friend David Matza, a sociology professor at Temple University. Matza and his wife and young child lived directly behind the Myerses’ and Wechslers’ houses on 30 Darkleaf Lane. Matza was crying and distraught. He had been offered a job to teach at the University of California at Berkeley, he explained, and would be leaving Levittown in the midst of the conflagration. It pained him to think that the media might portray his move as white flight, which was anything but the case. Bea and Lew reassured him but, inside, had concerns of their own. With the Matzas gone, the crucial balance of the neighborhood was about to change.

  Lew grabbed a sheet of paper and sat down at his kitchen table sketching a map of Deepgreen Lane. Bea and the Myerses gathered around him. Lew made tiny boxes representing each of the eleven houses in the area. This was a war now, and it was time to assess the sides. When he was through, they surveyed the battle map: three friendly families, four neutrals, and two hostiles. But, as Lew circled one of the friendly houses, the Matzas’, the delicate balance was about to change. The house on 30 Darkleaf Lane was diagonally behind the Myerses’, and directly behind the Wechslers’. If a hostile family moved into such a strategically positioned house, Lew fretted, the circumstances could grow even more grim. All they could do was wait.

  The owner of the house, William Hughes, wasn’t having an easy time leasing the home. A family with three small children had agreed to take over the lease beginning September 2, but then the crisis with the Myers family had made them fear for the safety of their kids, and they abruptly backed out. One night at the end of August, just as he was fearing he would never lease the home, Hughes got a call from a woman who asked if he’d be interested in leasing the home to her. “I would,” he said; the price was ninety dollars per month.

  “I’ll be over right away,” she replied. Thirty minutes later, she showed up—but she wasn’t alone. Fifteen or sixteen people accompanied her as they made their way inside.

  Hughes was dubious. “What’s your purpose in leasing this home?”

  “We, the taxpayers and property owners of the Dogwood section of Levittown, have no place to meet,” she replied, “and we would like to go there and meet and talk over this situation about the Myerses’ moving into Levittown.”

  “Who’s going to be responsible for cutting the grass and looking after the property in general?” Hughes asked. “Because the people who had lived there before left it in a very poor condition. The house was very dirty, the grounds were very unkempt, the flower beds were all shook up.” They all knew the rules of Levittown, after all, and how much the Levitt family wanted the lawns nice and neat. Hughes didn’t want to have Levitt drive by in his big black Cadillac one day and stick him with a bill for a lawn-mowing service. “Who’s going to take care of the property?” Hughes said again.

  A thin, short man stepped up from behind the woman: Eldred Williams. “I live in the next block over, I’ll take care of the grounds.”

  Hughes agreed. Then he handed Williams the keys.

  Fourteen

  BACK TO SCHOOL

  NOW’S THE TIME to think about new clothing, shoes and school supplies of all kinds,” read the cover of the Levittown newspaper, “pens, pencils, books, typewriters, luggage and leather goods, jewelry, cameras, toilet goods, sporting goods, bikes, and student-room furniture and projects.” September had come, and Levittown, like the rest of America, was going back to school.

  But this would be no ordinary return. As the harried and happy parents filed through the Shop-O-Rama to stock up on goods, their whispers revealed that they had more on their minds than No. 2 pencils. Levittown was about to get its first African-American teacher ever. Donald Theodore Burton, a twenty-six-year-old educator from Philadelphia, had been hired by the Bristol Township School Board to teach fifth-grade classes at the new twenty-eight-room James Buchanan Elementary School, which was opening as soon as construction was complete on September 16. A small item in the local paper noted that the school would serve several sections in Levittown including the residents of Dogwood Hollow.

  This would be the school that Nick Wechsler would attend, and where, he still hoped, his parents would let him fulfill his dream of being a crossing guard. Nick had been working for the past year to become a crossing guard and had just learned that he’d got the position. Now he would get to wear the coveted uniform on the first day of school. Given the standoff over the Myerses, though, Bea and Lew, no matter how strong they had been in the past, couldn’t bear the thought of little Nick standing there like a target. And, though it broke their hearts, they urged him to give up the post. But Nick, who possessed the streak of Wechsler strength, said no. This is what he wanted to do, and, he assured them, he would be all right.

  A news bulletin from Little Rock, Arkansas, on the opening day of schools nationwide, however, suggested what violence might await. Since the Supreme Court had ruled to integrate schools in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Arkansas, like many states that were slowly preparing for the transition, had been simmering in anticipation. But Arkansas governor Orval Faubus had been battling to keep segregation intact—despite the orders of the courts. On September 3, the day before the first nine African-American students were to attend Little Rock Central High School, Faubus went on statewide television and said, “Blood will run in the streets if Negro people should attempt to enter Central High School.” And he was dispatching the National Guard to prevent them.

  The next morning as the nation watched on television, the first of the African-American children, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, arrived in a new white dress and sunglasses. Two hundred and fifty armed National Guardsmen stood on the sidewalks surrounding the school to greet her. As Eckford clutched her notebook, a mob of angry men and women trailed behind her shouting, “Lynch her! Lynch her!” Eckford was escorted safely away and the integration of the school was thwarted. Like the events surrounding Emmett Till and Rosa Parks, the scene burned indelibly into the hearts and minds of the world. The battle of the Little Rock Nine, as the children were dubbed, had begun.

  Back in Levittown, the Myerses and Wechslers received clippings of the Little Rock standoff in the mail—with racial epithets scrawled in the margins. The events in Arkansas ignited a new sense of hatred in the calls they received.

  “Hello,” Daisy said, picking up the receiver one day.

  “Governor Faubus is just the type of man we need in Levittown,” the caller snapped, then hung up.

  The message was clear: The world was watching Levittown too. Though overshadowed by Little Rock, the saga of Deepgreen Lane had become an international event. Papers from Moscow to London covered the standoff in what had long been viewed as America’s quintessential suburban dreamland. Life magazine had just run a long spread on the story that week, including dramatic photos of the Myerses and Wechslers under siege in their homes. The two families now had the state police at their homes on twenty-four-hour guard.

  The Wechslers hoped the day of September 5 would at least offer a little reprieve. This was the date of two special occasions for the family: Bea’s thirty-eighth birt
hday, and her and Lew’s seventeenth wedding anniversary. The two joyous events were always a big deal in the house, and Lew liked to commemorate them by making their favorite meal: a big pan of garlicky paella. One night they had invited Daisy and Bill over to sample the meal and had a good laugh when Bill, a finicky eater, goodnaturedly asked if they had some hot dogs instead.

  But this year there wouldn’t be anything to celebrate. At 5:05 A.M., Daisy was at her stove making breakfast for the family when she smelled something burning outside. She looked out the window into the darkness and fog and didn’t see anything.

  Next door, a pounding came on the Wechslers’ door. The family was still sleeping, and Lew stumbled for the door and opened it to find his friend Barney Bell, the Texan truck driver who had not long before driven his car at the mob congregating on his lawn. Bell was covered in soot. “They burned a cross on your lawn!” he said.

  Lew ran outside and saw the smoldering remains of the cross, which Bell had kicked over. It was five feet long and made out of tree branches, which had been bound by rags and held together with thick tape. It had been wired to the air vent of the oil heater on their front lawn. A broken jar of kerosene was lying on the driveway next to the mess.

  Lew called the police to report the crime. How had this happened, he demanded to know, when the state police were supposed to be watching his house twenty-four hours a day? They had no answer.

  Though there was no evidence, it seemed more and more clear that an invisible neighbor had come to their cookie-cutter town: the Ku Klux Klan. Four milk bottles filled with gasoline and taped with cotton-wad fuses were found down the block from the Wechslers’ home. Meanwhile, eleven hundred miles away that same morning, the mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, had a cross burning on his lawn too. A reporter misquoted Lew dismissing the cross burning as the work of prankish kids. Other rumors spread that the Wechslers had burned the cross themselves to gain sympathy and implicate the Levittown Betterment Committee. Such intimations infuriated Bea and Lew, who suspected it had to be Newell and Williams’s cronies.