FEBRUARY 2022 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 71
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
LEVITT SAYS “LEAVE IT”
BY ANNIE WILKINSON
The idyllic Long Island suburb of Levittown
developed by William J. Levitt
in the late 1940s made history. His experiment
gave war-weary veterans the
chance to own a home in the first massproduced
American suburb.
But the so-called “King of Suburbia”
gained a different kind of fame when he
tried to turn Blacks and other minorities
away from living their American
Dream. At one point, his company’s policies
forced a Black family who had rented
one of his homes to leave.
He counted on the muscle of a government
policy for support as he followed a
restrictive covenant “which kept Blacks
out of what Levitt intended to be a White
veterans’ paradise,” as the Long Island
Press would report in November 1972.
His customers were mostly World War
II soldiers who had fought against the
forces of Adolf Hitler, the racist and tyrannical
madman who exterminated minorities.
Ironically, as the grandson of a
rabbi, Levitt fought prejudice as a U.S.
Navy lieutenant during the war.
Another irony: Before building Levittown,
Levitt developed his Strathmore
Vanderbilt property in Manhasset on the
North Shore — but despite being Jewish,
he wouldn’t sell to Jews, African Americans,
or anyone who was not White.
GOVERNMENT SEGREGATION
The Levittown housing boom began in
the spring of 1947: Levitt would build
2,000 houses on 300 acres of potato and
onion fields in Hempstead Town. Ex-GIs
and others lined up to occupy their own
home for under $8,000 with 5% down
(0% down for veterans), in the country’s
first large-scale development of onefamily
homes. Initially, they could rent
with the option to buy, according to the
company’s standard lease.
Many may not have understood what
the leases actually stated: “No dwelling
shall be used or occupied by members of
other than the Caucasian race, but the
employment and maintenance of other
than Caucasian domestic servants shall
be permitted,” according to Clause 25 of
the original Levitt contract.
Levitt was following guidelines from
the U.S. government’s Federal Housing
Administration (FHA), which provided
mortgage insurance on loans.
The FHA recommended including restrictive
covenants in the deeds of the
homes it insured, meaning segregated
neighborhoods.
“The FHA wouldn’t underwrite a development
that wasn’t segregated,” said
Barbara Kelly, curator of Long Island
Studies at Hofstra University, in a 1997
Washington Post interview.
While Levitt was creating suburbia, the
U.S. Supreme Court in 1948 declared
that such restrictions were “unenforceable
as law and contrary to public policy.”
According to The New York Times,
this meant that the clause couldn’t be
enforced — not that it couldn’t be used.
Also in 1948, then-President Harry S.
Truman signed an executive order integrating
the military, which had been
segregated for 170 years.
Still, Levitt ignored the changing policies
and kept building. When Levittown
was completed in November 1951,
using assembly-line construction that
earned him the title “The Henry Ford of
Housing,” his company had built 17,447
houses.
GOOD NEIGHBORS
While those houses were being built,
William Cotter, an African American
and former president of the Great Neck
National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), had
been working to fight segregation. As
Newsday reported, Cotter formed an
organization to “halt Levitt’s discriminatory
practices,” according to the flyer
Cotter signed and distributed in 1951.
When Cotter managed to sublet a Levittown
house from its private owner
rather than from a realtor, he moved
his family to 26 Butternut Lane. When
their lease expired in 1953, reported
Newsday, their landlord, Mid-Island
Properties, would not renew the lease
or sell them the home. The Cotters filed
a suit in New York State Supreme Court
based on racial discrimination but were
unsuccessful.
Nassau County marshals showed up to
evict the family in December, discarding
the Cotters’ possessions outside in
the rain. Neighbors protested, about 60
of them, reported Newsday. They posted
signs reading “Brotherhood Begins
at Home,” and “Sell the Cotters Their
House,” put the family’s possessions
back inside the house, and sat or stood
on the furnishings. Still, the Cotters
were evicted.
Cotter’s organization worked with a
homeowner next door, an “eligible white
man who then sold it to Cotter,” reported
the Long Island Press. The Cotters
were back on Butternut Lane, living the
American Dream of home ownership.
Many observers praised Levitt as a visionary,
while some critics, wrote Bruce
Lambert in The New York Times, said
Levitt’s company “branded integrationists
as Communist rabble-rousers and
barred them from meeting on Levittown
property. It also evicted two residents
who had invited black children from a
neighboring community to their homes.”
In December 1955, two years after the
Cotter family became homeowners, the
modern civil rights movement began
when Rosa Parks, an African American
woman, refused to move to the back of
the bus and was arrested, in Montgomery,
Ala. In 1968, the Fair Housing Act
made racial covenants illegal.
REAR VIEW
“No dwelling shall be
used or occupied by
members of other than
the Caucasian race,”
according to Clause
25 of the original
Levitt contract.
Levittown residents protest the eviction of their neighbor William Cotter, seated.
/LONGISLANDPRESS.COM
