By Major W. Cox
In the past few years, the nation has marked several note-worthy fifty-year anniversaries. One significant event was the fiftieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s entry into Major League baseball. Another is President Harry Truman’s 1948 executive order desegregating the military.
Last year, Maxwell AFB hosted a Grand Ball celebrating the Air Force’s Fiftieth Anniversary, at the Montgomery Civic Center. This was truly an awesome event and I don’t think that anyone in attendance worried about the color of anyone’s skin. I mention this just to show how far we have traveled toward eliminating racial discrimination in the military.
Sports is another sector of society where we have made great progress toward eliminating race-based discrimination. It has been fifty years since Branch Ricky signed Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke Major League baseball’s color-barrier. Today, an athlete’s skin color is officially a non-issue.
Both Branch Ricky and Harry Truman possessed a unique and rare personal courage for their time. They broke with the racial orthodoxy to rise above their peers and take unilateral actions. Their actions would eliminate official race discrimination in Major League baseball and the U.S. Armed Forces.
Fifty years ago, another man had the power, the vision and the opportunity, to make an even larger contribution toward eliminating racial discrimination. "It was a visionary’s dream," Hugh Price, president at the National Urban League wrote in a February 1998 article, "The Legacy of Levittown."
The dream was "Massed-produced, single-family, tract housing that, at a cost of $7,000 or $60 a month, ordinary working people could afford." In 1947, visionary, William J. Levitt, using federal funds, built the first Levittown, near New York City, as a low-cost housing development for World War II veterans and their families.
Levittown was the American dream come-true for the families that purchased the more than 17,000 two-bedroom homes. Each Levittown home was built with identical floor plans and constructed using prefabricated units and assembly-line techniques. Levittown was widely imitated and came to symbolize postwar suburbia.
William Levitt, the visionary developer, went on to build Levittown, PA between 1952 and 1958, which he modeled after the community in New York. In 1958, he started building Levittown, NJ and completed it in 1963, when the residents renamed it Willingboro.
However, unlike Branch W. Ricky and Harry S. Truman, William J. Levitt didn’t possess the courage to confront the racial orthodoxy and, "do the right thing," to use the words of a Spike Lee movie title.
From the start, pressure of the racial orthodoxy clouded Levitt’s vision. He towed the race-line and built Levittown, which is near New York City, arguably America’s most racially diverse city, for whites only. When Levitt built the Levittown in New Jersey and the one in Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, he also excluded blacks.
There is more to the history of Levittown than a story of a racist developer. This is an American tragedy with major consequences. Levittown became the model which real estate developers used all across the country. Fifty years later, we continue to live with the consequences of Levittown’s missed opportunity.
Economist Wilhelmina Leigh, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, wrote in the 1996 issue of "The State Of Black America" that the "entrenched patterns of racial segregation and the associated lessened access to opportunities for schooling and employment by Black Americans are the continued legacy of ‘separate but equal’ treatment in both the private sector and federal housing assistance programs that made such developments as Levittown possible."
Levittown was truly a lost American opportunity. Because "there was such a demand for housing," says history professor, Kenneth Jackson, "they had people waiting in lines. Even if they said that there will be some black people living there, white people would have moved in."
When compared with Harry Truman and Branch Ricky, William Levitt could have left a legacy equally as great, if only he had done the right thing fifty years ago. The master builder could have left a legacy of racially integrated, massed-produced, suburban housing.
Then, none of us would have ever known the meaning of ‘busing’ or the demographic phenomenon called ‘white-flight.’ Mayor Folmar’s Montgomery Team would be as racially diverse as the Jeff Davis football team. And majority/minority schools would be an oxymoron.
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Originally Published: 11 March 1998, Montgomery Advertiser.
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