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

couldn’t buy into the development. When you grow up and live in a place,
you know what the rules are.”
Nonetheless one nephew who worked for the trucking business tried.
Like most of those who moved into Levittown, Vince Mereday was a
veteran. He’d been in the navy during World War II, stationed at the Great
Lakes Naval Training Center outside Chicago. Just before the war, Secretary
of the Navy Frank Knox had told President Roosevelt he would resign if the
navy were forced to take African Americans in roles other than their
traditional ones in food service and as personal servants to officers.
However, when it became widely known that the most heroic American
sailor at Pearl Harbor was Private Dorie Miller, an African American kitchen
worker—he had run through flaming oil to carry his ship’s captain to safety
and then grabbed a machine gun and shot down Japanese aircraft—public
pressure forced Knox to accede. At Great Lakes, however, African American
recruits were not permitted to train with whites, and the navy established a
segregated training camp for them. Vince Mereday passed tests to be a pilot,
but because African Americans were barred from entering flight training, he
was assigned to mechanic duty for the war’s duration.
After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Vince Mereday went to work for his
uncle delivering material to Levittown. When he attempted to buy a house in
the development, his application was refused. Instead he bought a house in
an almost all-black neighboring suburb, Lakeview. Although Levittowners
could buy property with no down payments and low-interest Veterans
Administration (VA) mortgages, Vince Mereday had to make a substantial
down payment in Lakeview and get an uninsured mortgage with higher
market interest rates. His experiences of discrimination in the navy and in
the housing market permanently embittered him.
William Levitt’s refusal to sell a home to Vince Mereday was not a mere
reflection of the builder’s prejudicial views. Had he felt differently and
chosen to integrate Levittown, the federal government would have refused to
subsidize him. In the decades following World War II, suburbs across the
country—as in Milpitas and Palo Alto and Levittown—were created in this
way, with the FHA administering an explicit racial policy that solidified
segregation in every one of our metropolitan areas.