Kushner organizes his narrative around the efforts to integrate Levittown, Pa., in 1957. Even though the Supreme Court had ruled "restrictive covenants" barring minorities from purchasing specific homes unconstitutional some nine years earlier in Shelley v. Kraemer, Levittown still managed to bar blacks from owning homes. Daisy and Bill Myers, a young African-American couple, had not set out to become civil rights crusaders when they tested that rule. They simply sought a bigger home for their growing family in a nice neighborhood.
Their arrival ignited a storm of protest. Hundreds of white Levittown residents organized in opposition, hurling racial epithets at the newcomers, throwing rocks through their windows, waving Confederate flags, painting "KKK" on the side of their home and burning crosses, all this despite ostensible police protection for the Myerses.
The Myerses didn't endure their ordeal alone, however, for they were aided by their immediate neighbors, the former Communists Bea and Lew Wechsler, who had planted their roots in suburbia after leaving the party. For their support, they, too, received threats and harassing phone calls and were ostracized by former friends and neighbors.
The story, unlike so many, ended happily. Not just the Wechslers but others - white liberals, Quakers and Jews, for instance - came to the Myerses' aid. The "flip side of hate" was the "love and support" of those who defended the Myerses in word and deed. (During one tense period, Kushner notes in passing, volunteer guards "stood watch at the Myerses' " day and night, while white couples volunteered to baby-sit their children and clean up the mob-inflicted damage).
That story is often ignored by academic historians, who are more interested in white violence than white support.
The Pennsylvania attorney general prosecuted the Myerses' tormentors, breaking the back of the opposition. When the next black family moved in, few took notice.
As for celebrity magnate Bill Levitt, his star fell rapidly. A name once associated with fulfilling the American dream for a generation of veterans became a code word for racism.
Protesters and politicians objected to his all-white communities, and former allies denounced him for his persistent bigotry. His economic fortune collapsed, and he eventually died bankrupt.
The integration of suburbia went only so far. Decades later, the Levittowns in Pennsylvania and Long Island remain heavily if not exclusively white. Explaining the persistence of residential segregation - which cannot be reduced solely to discriminatory real estate practices - lies beyond the scope of Kushner's book.
But the sheer drama of the integration saga that Kushner recounts makes Levittown a compelling read, the one-dimensional character of his heroes and villains notwithstanding.
