Levittown Page 3

The media, hungry for good news, eagerly picked up the inspiring tale of the boot-strapped boys from Brooklyn who made good when all the country seemed to be going bad. The Saturday Evening Post called the Levitts “outstanding among the unnumbered thousands of housebuilders in America” and marveled at their prodigal success. “They were extraordinarily young when they started, and made an almost fabulous success at a time when practically all over the country the housebulding industry was in the doldrums.” The New York Times trumpeted in a headline for a story in 1934 about the Levitts: DEVELOPERS DEFY DEPRESSION YEARS.

  Abe Levitt and his kids—not even thirty years old—had become heroes and soon joined the ranks of the biggest builders in America. Word spread, and, as one reporter put it, Bill Levitt became “the young man to see for high-end housing along Long Island’s North Shore.” Assorted lawyers, bankers, engineers, and tobacco magnates of New York snatched up the Levitts’ two hundred Manhasset homes. Bill even boasted as much in his ads, citing “a good cross section” who had found happiness in his communities. But, under the radar, the cross section had its limits.

  As was commonly practiced in ritzy enclaves, Bill barred Jews from buying in Strathmore. He was a builder, and so what if they were the descendants of a rabbi; this is what builders did, they resolved. One Sunday after breakfast, Bill retired to his study, took pen in hand, and began to write his weekly copy. “No one realizes better than Levitt that an undesirable class can quickly ruin a community,” he wrote.

  Bill often told the legend of his own migration to suburbia in the 1930s. He would speak of Haeckel, his father’s favorite philosopher, and his thoughts on the essential way in which the world worked, the absence of free will, the cause and effect. “Okay,” Bill once explained to a reporter in the back of a limousine, “in the seventeenth century, in 1624 exactly, a man by the name of Captain John Hawkins, an Englishman, brought the first boatload of slaves to Virginia. Up until then there were no black people on this continent. By now the black people were here, they multiplied geometrically until finally a couple of centuries later, as they moved into the North, they moved onto the same street we lived on in Brooklyn. Next to us a black assistant DA moved in. Fearing a diminution of values if too many came in, we picked up and moved out. We then got into the suburbs, into building . . .”

  “Which started everything,” the reporter asked, “the whole—”

  “Exactly,” Bill replied.

  Two

  THE OTHER HARLEM

  EIGHT-YEAR-OLD DAISY DAILEY skipped out her front door one morning in 1933, schoolbooks in hand, took one look around, and thought, There’s no better community to live in the world than this one: Jackson Ward. Every block in this neighborhood where she lived near downtown Richmond, Virginia, promised a different architectural wonder. Redbrick homes and colorful awnings. Cast-iron porches as in New Orleans. A building shaped like a castle. And, most fantastic of all, the Richmond Dairy—a towering brick building on West Marshal with three gleaming white sixteen-foot-high milk bottles on three of the corners.

  Around the way on Second Street was the Hippodrome Theater, the bustling venue that would draw the biggest names in African-American entertainment: Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, and Ella Fitzgerald. The tap-dancing pioneer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, another Hippodrome regular, was a local who’d grown up just around the corner from Daisy on Third Street. The Hippodrome scene was such a sensation that people began calling Jackson Ward “the Harlem of the South.”

  Jackson Ward didn’t happen by accident. While whites fled the cities for manufactured suburbs, freed slaves left their masters far behind to create a rich and robust community in the early 1800s built on innovation and pride. Former slave Giles Jackson became the first black lawyer to address the Supreme Court of Virginia. Abner Clay, a green-thumbed civic leader, tended to the area’s parks.

  One of the America’s first black newspapers, the Richmond Planet, launched in 1894. The Southern Aid Society of Virginia, the first black-owned insurance company in the country, came soon after. The Ward’s most famous entrepreneur was Maggie L. Walker, the first African-American woman to become the president of a bank in U.S. history. Just as Jackson Ward thrived as an artistic center, its role as a center of commerce earned it the moniker “the Wall Street of Black America.” By the 1920s, 94 percent of Richmond’s black population lived here.

  For Daisy, who was born here on February 10, 1925, the spirit of community and enterprise was infectious. The only child of William Lester and Alma Hockett, a teenage domestic worker who was unable to care for her, Daisy was raised by a couple who lived across the street from her mother named the Daileys. Despite being the outsider, Daisy thrived in the two-story, three-bedroom house with her ten new brothers and sisters.

  The Dailey house bustled with activity. The man Daisy called her father, Myers Dailey, worked as a cooper on the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad. On weekends, Daisy’s father would use his free train passes to take the kids on trips to Washington, D.C., or other sites. His wife, Lottie, tended to the house and took great pride in her garden. She also made sure her kids stayed in line. All she had to do was cast “the look,” as Daisy called it, and everyone behaved. One time Daisy made the mistake of asking her mother why she was looking at her in such a stern way—and, after a swift punishment, never made that error again.

  Meals were boisterous and good-naturedly argumentative. On Sundays, the family would attend the Moore Street Baptist Church, where Myers Dailey worked as a deacon. On Sunday nights, they’d cozy up around the radio to hear the latest horror broadcast on the popular radio show Inner Sanctum Mysteries. On Christmas Daisy got exactly what she wanted: a red-and-white-striped bike with fat tires.

  Daisy, a bright, attentive, and sometimes precocious student, found just as strong a community at school. Because she was nearsighted, she sat close to the front of the class and grew to admire her teachers—whom she hoped one day to emulate. The kids playfully called her the “teacher’s pet.” Daisy delighted in her teachers’ sometimes eccentric personalities and quirks: the teacher who could never find his glasses because they were always on top of his head, the football coach who told her she looked better without red nail polish or lipstick, the cute but dim instructor whom all the boys pranked.

  Daisy played basketball, studied piano, and went to Girl Scout meetings every other week. The kids voted her the most popular in class. With her body changing, she began to worry more about how she looked, whether her clothes matched or fit the latest style, whether her hair was in place. Boys began paying more attention to her, and the attraction was mutual. Soon, she was old enough to be trusted by her parents to go visit their relative’s farm in Amelia, Virginia, by herself. There, she learned all the ways of the farm—churning butter from milk, feeding cows, riding horses. On sunny days, she’d run to the henhouse to gather eggs, then sell them to the local grocer for twelve cents a dozen, taking five cents to spring on a soda or candy bar.

  But despite her love of her home and neighborhood, Daisy knew a larger and more mysterious world was outside. She would catch glimpses of it flashing by on Fifth Street. Occasionally, a foreign vessel would appear and vanish—a trolley full of white people passing quickly through the neighborhood. Though she viewed her life in Jackson Ward as a kind of childhood paradise, the blur of white faces on the trolley suggested another reality.

  One day when her mother woke her to go get a new outfit for Easter, Daisy caught her first glimpse. From the moment she boarded the trolley, everything changed. The world inverted like the negative of a photo. Stoic white faces stared up at her and her mother from the seats, while the conductor waited indifferently. Daisy saw open seats in the front, but her mother took her firmly by the arm and walked her, instead, to the back. Why couldn’t they just take the seats up front? Daisy wondered innocently.

  As they pulled out of Jackson Ward, the African-American faces in the street were soon replaced by white. Daisy looked out the window
and saw signs over water fountain labeled Colored. She saw whites sitting at lunch counters, while blacks ate their food outside. As they got off the trolley, they too went to lunch and had to join the other African-Americans away from the counters.

  By the time Daisy and her mother got to the clothing shop, Daisy became excited again to get her new threads. The shop was filled with all the fashions of the day, and she could picture herself walking into church and the boys taking notice. When a hat caught her attention on a rack, she reached for it eagerly. But the white clerk swiped it away and said, “She can’t try that on.” Though just a child, Daisy didn’t feel afraid, she felt bewildered. Why couldn’t she try on the hat? My head is round like anyone else’s, she thought. But the rules outside Jackson Ward were different, and arbitrary. Daisy’s mother looked the clerk in the eye and said, “If she can’t try it on, then we’re not buying it.” And they left.

  Though Daisy never dreamed of leaving her city behind, if she had, she couldn’t go far. Unlike the legions of wealthy whites who fled to the romantic suburbs during and after the housing boom of the 1920s, black Americans were routinely excluded from participating in the suburban dream. It started at the level of “gentlemen’s agreements” to restrict blacks from buying in white neighborhoods and soon became established in federally mandated guidelines.

  While the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled against municipal and residential segregation laws in 1917, an ugly but well-oiled machine churned behind the white-picket-fenced towns. The National Association of Real Estate Boards provided the power in 1914 when it implemented an ethics code that forbid members from “introducing into a neighborhood . . . members of any race or nationality . . . whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” Facing heavy fines for violations, those in the realty industry dutifully played along. Banks refused to provide mortgages to blacks, and community members signed contracts agreeing not to rent or sell their homes to “any person other than one of the Caucasian race.”

  Fines weren’t the only method of enforcement. Other practices also thrived in the burgeoning suburbs up North. One of the most egregious locations was just outside New York City on Long Island. There, Robert Moses, who had become president of the Long Island State Park Commission, kept African-Americans out of the beaches and public parks by requiring special permits. Believing that blacks were dirty and afraid of cold water, he had the pool at Jones Beach kept extracold to keep them out.

  The burgeoning Ku Klux Klan drove the sentiment home. In the early 1920s, one of eight white residents in Nassau and Suffolk counties in Long Island were members of the KKK—including the ministers and chief of police in Freeport. One Long Island march of the KKK drew more than thirty thousand people; it was held on July 4, Independence Day, 1924.

  As the Depression swept across America in the early 1930s, the exclusion of blacks from suburbia became more institutionalized. It started on June 13, 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Home Owners Loan Corporation into law to protect homeowners from foreclosure. The HOLC pumped billions of dollars into the market, refinancing tens of thousands of mortgages, long term and low interest. But it left a devastating legacy.

  As part of its due diligence, the HOLC implemented an elaborate means of appraising the communities in which the mortgages were financed. The plan assigned a letter grade corresponding to the determined value of a particular area. High marks were given to neighborhoods that were homogeneous, which was defined as containing “American business and professional men.” The lowest grade—assigned the letter D or the color red—went to neighborhoods that had declined with “an undesirable element.”

  Predominantly African-American inner-city communities such as Jackson Ward were redlined. A mixed-race section of Pasadena, California, for example, earned the lowest grade, despite the appraiser’s assessment of its having “all conveniences” and being “favorably located,” because of the presence of ten black homeowners. “Although the Negroes are said to be of the better class their presence has caused a wave of selling in the area and it seems inevitable that ownership and property values will drift to lower levels,” the report noted. A community in St. Louis without a “single foreigner or Negro” got the highest marks. Scholars and real-estate-textbook authors codified this notion that an influx of African-Americans would devalue a community. “Inharmonious groups of people,” as one popular textbook put it, was considered a “blighting influence” for a neighborhood on par with being built next to a factory.

  While the HOLC nevertheless provided financing for these low-grade communities, the damage was done—and racist beliefs, already deeply ingrained throughout the country, leached with even greater credence into business practices. Bankers and Realtors who completed the HOLC questionnaires evaluating their communities absorbed the equation that redlined areas were bad investments and denied mortgages accordingly.

  With the Federal Housing Administration’s creation in 1934, it adopted the HOLC plan, becoming, as one historian put it, “the most important single cause of residential segregation.” The FHA was established to protect and expand the housing industry. It did this by rescuing lenders and builders, issuing low-interest, long-term mortgages—as long as the recipients adhered to their HOLC-inspired standards.

  In its Underwriting Manual from 1936, the FHA mandated, “If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that its properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally leads to instability and a reduction in values.” The FHA had specific suggestions about how to enforce this. One way was with physical barriers. “Natural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences. Usually the protection against adverse influences afforded by these means include prevention of the infiltration of business and industrial uses, lower-class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups.”

  The FHA also recommended restrictive covenants. In 1938, there were eight suggested provisions. The seventh prohibited stables and pigpens. The next provision prohibited “the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended.” While the HOLC insured mixed-race neighborhoods despite its findings, the FHA wore its prejudices on its sleeves—in the simplest terms, those who didn’t play by the rules would not have their loans guaranteed.

  It was a sad turning point in American history, as Kenneth Jackson would note: “For perhaps the first time, the federal government embraced the discriminatory attitudes of the marketplace. Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy.” And the legacy would remain. “The national government . . . put its seal of approval on ethnic and racial discrimination and developed policies which had the result of the practical abandonment of large sections of older, industrial cities . . . The financial community saw blighted neighborhoods as physical evidence of the melting-pot mistake.”

  Daisy’s school had no cafeteria. No library. No gym. When the kids wanted to exercise, the teachers pushed aside the desks and let them jump around the classroom. As much as Daisy loved Jackson Ward, the older she grew—the more trips to the white part of town she took, the more she studied African-American history in school, the more train rides she rode through the suburbs of Virginia—the more she realized how differently people lived.

  While Daisy was familiar with the Jim Crow laws that called for “separate but equal” lives for black Americans, she struggled with that idea. She would hear people say that “the Virginia Negro seemed happiest,” but that rang untrue. She knew plenty of people who were bitter and resentful, but without, as she put it, “an escape hatch.” She would often think How we could sit anywhere in the North, but not here? What’s the difference? When she’d talk about it with her parents, they’d say, “There will be a time when this will all break down. One day, segregation will be over.”

  And th
ey were going to take part in the fight. When her father was denied a promotion because he was African-American, Daisy’s parents became more active in the community—signing up as early supporters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and urging others to pay the poll tax so that they could vote. Leading up to Elections Days, her parents would work the rows of her father’s church: “Are you making sure to vote?” Her parents would ask people, “Do you need transportation?” On Election Day, her parents would pile people into their car and take them to the voting sites. Her parents instilled their values in the girl. When Daisy complained that all her friends were going to a free dentist, her mother stood firm. “When I can’t afford something,” she said, “we do without.”

  At the same time, Daisy was growing into a strong young woman with a bright smile and easy laugh. She played basketball and piano, had plenty of friends, participated actively in the church. She struggled not to pine for the things she didn’t have. “People who long to be like someone else aren’t satisfied with who they are,” she’d say, “and I’m quite satisfied with who I am.” While the white people had a world at their disposal, Jackson Ward had its own black-run taxis and stores. “Everything they have,” she said, “we have too.”

  But it was hard to maintain her resolve for long. In 1945, after graduating from Virginia Union College, where she studied education and sociology and became the first in her family to get a college degree, she got a taste of life outside Jackson Ward. Just twenty, Daisy went to teach sixth grade in Amelia, where her mother had grown up. Kids played craps in the back of her classroom. Most students couldn’t afford books. The parents struggled to feed their families, working on farms long and hard to pay the bills.

  Surrounded by these conditions, Daisy’s childhood dream of being a teacher took on new meaning. One day, a student confessed that instead of drinking from the water fountain labeled Colored, he drank from the one marked White. He wanted to see if the water tasted different. Daisy taught the students black history, about the NAACP and the poll tax. She delighted in seeing a larger world open up in the children’s minds, and it soon became time for her to expand her world too.