In an interview with the New York Times, Myers explained that the “ tumult” took him by surprise.
His wife, Daisy Myers, was a graduate of Virginia Union College in Richmond and did graduate work at New York University. He planned to earn an engineering degree at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia while working as a laboratory technician for the C. After the war Myers returned to Hampton and completed his degree. William Myers Jr., who purchased the Levittown, PA home, was born in York, Pa., completed a year at the Hampton Institute in Virginia before he was drafted into the military in 1943. The Levittown protests were led by a group called the Levittown Betterment Association, which identified its main purpose as “restoring of our entire white community.” On August 15, 1957, Pennsylvania Governor George Leader ordered a State Police detachment to Levittown “to cope with an outbreak of bad feeling over the arrival of the first Negro homeowner.” For three consecutive nights, a mob of 200-350 white “men, women and children” stoned a house in the Dogwood Hollow sub-divisionpurchased by an African American family. The group smashed a window and at least six of the rioters were arrested. The articles also reported on efforts by some community members to welcome the new family.
#TRENDING NEWS IN LEVITTOWN PA SERIES#
Escalating racial attacks on a Black family that purchased a home in the community were documented in a series of New York Times articles from August 16 through December 10. In 1957, Levittown’s racial policy finally boiled over into Southern-style racial violence. Levittown, Pennsylvania, located about a half hour northeast of Philadelphia in southern Bucks County, boasted 15,500 ranch-type dwellings. Levitt denied having any anti-Black bias, but claimed “I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 per cent of our white customers will not buy into the community. Kraemer Supreme Court Case, the Levitts continued to use extra-legal means to keep the developments racially segregated. Clause 25 of the original lease for the Levitt houses, stated that the houses could not “be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.” Although the company was forced to remove the clause after the 1948 Shelly vs. In Levittown, Pennsylvania Northern racism escalated to the hateful and more overt levels of Southern white behavior towards Blacks. Taking advantage of federally subsidized mortgages for World War II veterans, Levitt & Sons built suburban Levittowns in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey that barred African Americans. In a September 1964 New York Times poll, a majority of White New Yorkers “believed the Negro civil rights movement had gone too far.” Almost half a million children stayed home from school. White New Yorkers opposed the boycott. In February 1964, civil rights activists in New York City led a one-day school boycott to highlight their demands to desegregate the city's schools and improve the conditions in schools predominantly attended by Black and Puerto Rican students. In Connecticut, a law permitting local and private control over Long Island Sound beaches kept the beaches racially segregated until the 1970s. Palisades Amusement Park in Fort Lee, New Jersey barred Blacks from using its swimming pool into the 1950s. Northern racism, while often less violent than that of the South, was endemic. In a 1960 essay in Esquire magazine, James Baldwin wrote that when Blacks migrated North during and after World War 2, “they do not escape Jim Crow: they merely encounter another, not-less-deadly variety.” Some believed Northern racism, while covert, was worse than racism in the South because “At least there, you haven't got to play any guessing games!” Rosa Parks, who moved from Alabama to Detroit in 1957, described that city as the “ northern promised land that wasn't.” The overt and covert racism that helped elect Donald Trump in 2016 is a deep-rooted phenomenon in both the Southern and Northern United States. Racially incendiary comments and actions by the Trump administration-including his attacks on undocumented immigrants and demand to build a wall to keep out Latino refugees from Central and South America-have escalated racial and ethnic tension in the United States.
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