• betelgeuse [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago

    $390,000 home in Levittown

    Holy shit. Levittown was a development created by a Jewish guy for white people. Basically it’s the model for the modern subdevelopment.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_Pennsylvania

    William Levitt had a career-long commitment to a whites-only policy in their developments.[dubious – discuss] Levitt & Sons would not sell homes to African Americans. Levitt did not consider himself to be a racist, considering housing and racial relations entirely separate matters. Initially, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) conditioned essential financing for this and similar projects on the restriction of home sales to those of “the Caucasian race”, as stipulated in housing rent and sales agreements and deed covenants.[12] This did not prevent Bea and Lew Wechsler, a Jewish couple from the Bronx, from connecting an African-American family to a neighbor who desired to sell his home. Levittown’s first Black couple, William and Daisy Myers, bought a home in the Dogwood Hollow section in 1957.[13] Their move to Levittown was marked with racist harassment and mob violence, which required intervention by state authorities.[14] This led to an injunction and criminal charges against the harassers while the Myerses and their supporters refused to surrender and received national acclaim for their efforts. For instance, Daisy Myers has been hailed as “The Rosa Parks of the North”,[15] who helped expose the northern states’ problems with racial inequality of that time. Daisy Myers later wrote a book about her family’s experiences.[16] She died Dec. 5, 2011, in York, Pa.[17] The NAACP and the ACLU opposed Levitt’s racist policies, and the Federal Housing Administration threatened to refuse mortgages on his next Levittown. Levitt still refused to sell to blacks, and developed plans for yet another whites-only Levittown—this one to be in Willingboro Township, N.J.—while fighting legal challenges in New Jersey courts. Ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case.[18]

    The community’s otherwise placid exterior was again disturbed during the so-called suburban gas riots of June 1979 in the wake of the Camp David Peace Accords, which resulted in a second embargo by Arab oil-producing nations. The unrest occurred June 24–25, 1979, as lines swelled and tempers flared in the heart of Levittown at an intersection known as Five Points, a location surrounded by six service stations, two of which were severely damaged by vandalism in the riots. The two days of riots made national headlines and were mentioned (although not directly by name) in the draft of an address to the nation that was to have been delivered by President Jimmy Carter on July 5, 1979.[19]

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9z2e1DwBFk