The first homes were available for rent only, with an option to buy after one year for $6,990. Rent was $60 a month. In March 1949, Levitt & Sons began selling the houses upfront, and more than 1,000 couples arrived at the sales office. Levitt plastered the newspapers with advertisements designed to attract one and all, especially young war veterans. The first homes were just 4 1/2 rooms: 2 bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, bathroom and an “expansion attic”—not much bigger than some of the city apartments the GIs were leaving behind. As one reporter put it, “They might not be considered the ‘dream homes’ soldiers thought about in the foxholes across the world a few years back,” but they were enough. The Cape Cods and each successive Ranch remodel offered in 1949, 1950 and 1951 sold out even before the developers finished building them.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

In some ways, Levittown resembled the ethnic composition of the military during World War II: Jews, Italians, Irish and Poles living side-by-side. But also like most of the military, African Americans were unable to enter this melting pot. As with many homebuilders in his era, William Levitt didn’t question the demands of his financial backers, the FHA, which supported nationwide racial covenants and “redlining”—or devaluing—racially mixed communities. Every Levittown rental lease and homeowner’s contract barred those that were “not member(s) of the Caucasian race.”

Levitt defended the housing restrictions long after the first residents moved into Levittown, stating that he was just following the social customs of the times. “This is their [the white customers] attitude, not ours,” he once wrote. “As a company our position is simply this: ‘We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.’ ”

Even after the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelley v. Kraemer made racial covenants unconstitutional, the FHA continued to underwrite loans only to white neighborhoods. Although Levitt dropped the restrictive language from his leases, he kept up the policy in practice and fought the court’s ruling for years afterward. “The elimination of the clause has changed absolutely nothing,” he announced in the Levittown Tribune in 1949. In 1958, a lawsuit charging discrimination was brought against Levitt in New Jersey, where his third planned community, Willingboro, was being built. In 1960, to avoid public hearings on the case, he agreed to desegregate Willingboro, though the sale of homes to blacks was highly orchestrated. Racial covenants were not specifically criminalized until the Civil Rights’ Fair Housing Act of 1968.

At least some of the incoming white residents were uncomfortable with the restrictions. Betty Spector, who had lived in an interracial neighborhood in Washington Heights, N.Y., remembered thinking, “ ‘My God, I’ve moved to Bigot Town!’ ” Spector found the lack of diversity appalling, and she was hardly the only one. As early as 1947, a committee to end discrimination was formed in the community and such efforts, while failing to change William Levitt’s policies, continued well into the 1950s. Gertrude Novik, a renter who faced eviction in 1950 because she had begun an interracial play group, recalled, “We really had no place to live….Sometimes your hands are tied, and you hope you can get in and change the world a little bit.”

Eugene Burnett, a young black ex-GI, and his wife Bernice drove out to Levittown in 1950, unaware of the ban on African Americans. “It’s not me, but the owners of this development have not yet decided to sell to Negroes,” said the salesman. Burnett eventually moved his family to the Suffolk County suburbs and became a police officer and small businessman. Like many black professionals, he chose a racially mixed community, Ronek Park, in Amityville, which was advertised especially to people who had been turned away from Levittown. Still, for Burnett, the sting of the blow stayed with him. “I think that William Levitt and Levittown had an opportunity to do something here. In fact, not only an opportunity but a responsibility,” he said some 50 years later.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to