Historic Housing Discrimination on Long Island
By Michael Boyajian
Thomas J. Sugrue has written a groundbreaking book, Sweet Land of Liberty, which addresses historic housing discrimination in the nation’s suburbs in the 1960s.
At one point Sugrue states that William Levitt, the founder of Levittown, would not sell his homes to black families for fear that whites would not buy his homes knowing that blacks would also be living there. A high ranking official at the New York State Division of Human Rights states that to this day she often wonders how different her life would be if her father had been allowed to buy a home in Levittown.
I grew up on Long Island in the 1960s and can tell you first hand that it was an all white enclave but for a few pockets of black neighborhoods. My elementary school had three black students, all brothers. We never got to know them though; they all drowned in a sump soon after their enrollment in the school.
We had a sprawling county park adjacent to my neighborhood. It was used primarily by whites except for one set of basketball courts that was shared with blacks. The other basketball courts, handball courts, picnic areas, soccer fields, softball fields, golf course, driving range, playgrounds, ice skating rink and Olympic size pool where all used by whites only. At one point officials began busing in blacks to the swimming pool to the dismay of some who considered the pool to be their own private country club.
My High School graduating class had around 1,000 students. The 10th and 11th grade classes had roughly the same numbers as well. Yet we had only one black student in the entire school. But he wasn’t alone; there was one Asian student as well.
Residents of New York City poured into the suburbs of Long Island looking for the American Dream. But only whites found the dream or rather were most likely steered to it by greedy bigoted developers, realtors and mortgage lenders. Ten percent of the population, blacks, was made invisible to these white residents
Discrimination did not just involve race. I confronted it as well when I tried to find a rental apartment in western Nassau County after graduating college. On more than one occasion homeowner landlords would fearfully ask the realtor within my hearing if I were Jewish. Jewish friends have told me their own horror stories with one woman hearing a homeowner landlord tell the realtor I only want someone living here who sleeps with a cross over their bed.
I don’t know how it is on Long Island today. I moved to Brooklyn in 1990 but often wonder if two decades is enough time to heal the wounds of those who were wrongly denied access to Long Island and the nation’s suburbs. We certainly as a people must make sure it never happens again to those who were blocked from their path to the American Dream.
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