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.