The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

He found lodging in Hempstead, not far from the racetrack, and soon sent
for a younger brother, Charles, who in turn persuaded brothers Arthur and
Robert, sister Lillie, and their parents to come north. Charles recruited
several classmates to join them. The extended Mereday family and other
Hamburg refugees all initially lived on a single street in Hempstead, an early
African American settlement on Long Island.
Robert Mereday, the youngest of the brothers, played the saxophone and
in the 1930s was part of a well-known jazz ensemble. During World War II
the federal government sponsored the United Service Organizations (USO)
to support the troops and workers in defense plants, and he joined a USO
band that entertained workers at the Grumman Aircraft plant in Bethpage,
Long Island. The contacts Robert Mereday made there led to the company
hiring him as one of its first African American employees. Grumman, like
the Ford Motor Company in Richmond, California, had exhausted the supply
of white workers available to meet its military contracts and had begun to
recruit African Americans for the first time.
At Grumman, Robert Mereday was able to save money to start a trucking
business when the war ended. He bought inexpensive army surplus trucks
and repurposed them himself for heavy hauling. In 1946, when William
Levitt was building houses for returning veterans in Roslyn, Long Island, the
Mereday company got work hauling cement blocks that lined the
development’s cesspools. Soon Levitt began to develop the massive
Levittown subdivision nearby, and Robert Mereday won a contract to deliver
drywall to the construction site. His business expanded to half a dozen
trucks; when several nephews returned from military service, they joined the
company.
Robert Mereday had a solid middle-class income in the late 1940s and
was able to pay his nephews decently. He had married and was raising a
family, but Levitt and other subdivision developers would not sell homes to
any of the Meredays or to other African Americans who were helping to
build the nation’s suburbs. African Americans did not lack the necessary
qualifications; the Meredays’ economic circumstances were similar to those
of the white workers and returning veterans who became Levittowners. But
as Robert Mereday’s son later recalled, his father and most other relatives
didn’t bother to file applications, although the Levittown homes were
attractive and well designed: “It was generally known that black people