The “Undesirable Element”
George D. McDowell/Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia, Pa.The crowd outside of the Myers’ family home would sing old Southern songs like “Dixie” to try to scare the Myers family off. Levittown, Pa. 1957.
“He’s probably a nice guy,” one of Bill Myers’ neighbors told a reporter after hurling a rock through his window, “but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”
William Levitt, it seems, agreed. Even after the press turned against him and the NAACP filed charges for discrimination against him, Levitt kept fighting to keep his community segregated, clinging to his policies of racial exclusion until the day he died.
Those who wanted him to let black people live in his towns, William Levitt insisted, were anti-American Bolsheviks.
But, like his customers, William Levitt probably cared about the money more than anything else. Having a black family in one of his communities meant he had introduced, in the Home Owners Loan Corporation’s words, an “undesirable element,” and that was a surefire way to drive customers away.
Nevertheless, the Myers family stayed, even when their neighbors burned eight-foot-tall crosses on their yard and threatened to kill them. They felt they had a right to live where they wanted — and, for better or worse, they’d chosen Levittown.
