We’re going to start publishing the occasional book review on the peaceCENTER’s Web site. This is the first:

Read this book: “Levittown: two families, one tycoon, and the fight for civil rights in America’s legendary suburb” by David Kushner (Walker & Co., 2009)

In the fall of 1957, as the eyes of the nation were focused on Little Rock High School, another integration drama was playing out up North, in Levittown Pennsylvania. Bill and Daisy Myers bought a house. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. Since 1952, when the Levitt brothers started building affordable postwar homes in the spinach fields in rural Bucks County, 17,311 families had moved in. The Myers new home, on Deepgreen lane, was exactly 12.5 miles east of the Philadelphia suburb my family moved to just two years before. We were greeted with a cake and a smile. Their welcome was a rock through the window and a burning cross on the front yard.

Although the US Supreme Court found housing segregation to be illegal in 1917, it continued. Indeed, during the Depression, New Deal policies encouraged separation of the races. Banks were penalized for lending money to African-Americans trying to buy homes in predominately white neighborhoods; real estate agents wouldn’t even show these homes to them. In their first planned development, on Long Island, and in this new Pennsylvania suburb, the Levitts advertised their neighborhoods as all-white. read more…