Trump’s out. But our walls remain.

So many of us have living, harmful and hateful versions of Trump’s Wall in our own communities right now, and have yet to confront them

—

WILLINGBORO, NJ. 1969.

A HUSBAND AND A WIFE. FROM THE ARCHIVES

While his wife watched, he walked through the frames of the house he was about to buy, surveying the neighborhood. His sister and her husband, one of his best friends, moved to the town a couple of years before, and had said nothing but great things. Originally a Levittown, the recently-renamed Willingboro was made of fourteen “sections,” themselves made up of small, tree-lined streets all the same letter of the section name: streets with a “T” for the Twin Hills section, with a “M” for the Millbrook section, and so on. Each section a walkable neighborhood, possessed of its own elementary school and swimming pool; each resident automatically qualified to receive a swimming tag at their closest pool for free.

He surveyed his soon-to-be-community, smiled, and went back to Philadelphia to celebrate with his wife the step they were about to take, together, on behalf of the child they were about to adopt, together.

And, just after he left, some of his neighbors went from peering through closed blinds at him to undertaking every effort to erect their own wall, to try to keep him and his family out. Up and down the street they went, knocking on each door, asking, lamenting, pleading: “Did you know there’s a Negro family trying to move onto this street? Well? What are we going to do about it?”

— –

It wasn’t until about five years later, when my father had become reasonable acquaintances with a couple of neighbors on the men’s softball team — Jewish dads on the block, as it happens — that he found out from those friends what happened when he came to visit the construction site of what would become his home going on five decades now. It took him another thirty years to tell me, his son.

By that time I had enough experience with the building and maintaining of walls in communities to keep certain people out that I was not surprised. Disappointed, in the way that every kid who has what he saw as an idyllic childhood sundered from him as a notion, but not surprised. Indeed, any investigation into the history of my town — into any Levittown — would have revealed to me long ago the ways in which Levittowns — built to define suburbia, with an assembly-line process which allowed for the speedy construction of houses (150 per week, or one every 16 minutes of an eight-hour day) and the sale of them at an at-launch price of $6500 — were conceived in the very notion of a wall, of keeping people out. In this case, and as often is the case, the wall was race.

The August 7th, 1954 Saturday Evening Post, on page 72, quotes Levittown creator William Levitt thusly:

“As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice. But, by various means, I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours. We did not create it and we cannot cure it.”

What happened when the first Black family moved into the second-ever Levittown (in Pennsylvania; the first was in NY)?

THE FIRST BLACK FAMILY IN A LEVITTOWN: THE ABOVE PHOTO SHOWS THE MYERS FAMILY BEHIND THE BLINDS, IN THE HOME THEY PAID FOR, WHILE THEIR NEIGHBORS AND FELLOW COMMUNITY MEMBERS BUILD A HUMAN AND AUTOMOTIVE WALL, TRYING TO KEEP THEM IN OR, MORE LIKELY, SCARE THEM OUT, AND AWAY. (AUGUST 16, 1957; FROM THE GEORGE D. MCDOWELL/SPECIAL COLLECTIONS RESEARCH CENTER, TEMPLE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES)

Bill and Daisy Myers moved into their new home in 1957, having purchased their new home from a couple named the Wechslers. Indeed, this was an ostensible loophole to the developer Levitt’s “Caucasian race” sales clause; he could control initial sales, but couldn’t control re-sale. Levitt could not control homeowners from reselling their houses to whomever they wanted. And so, in 1957, 10 years after the first Levittown was built, the first black couple moved in.

The Wechlslers’ phone rang shortly after the town found out who was moving in. No longer subject to, or forced to suffer from, the process and culture of maintaining the wall, all that was left for the Wechlsler’s neighbors was screaming: specifically “You N*****-loving Jewish motherf*****s!”

Yes, Levittowns, in their very conception and creation, were delivered exclusively to whites with a wall intact: any violation along any part of the wall saw the very nature of it challenged. Of course much of this preceded the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which finally made Levitt’s discrimination on the basis of race a violation of federal law, and facilitated the acquisition of homes in towns like Levittown, NJ/Willingboro by women and men like my parents a dream more deeply realizable. Even if in the end the ability to legally keep them out gave way to cultural attempts, up and down the street, to maintain that wall; to deliver daily life in such a way as to make them uncomfortable living there.

I’ve lived across the nation, and come to see all kinds of walls in all kinds of communities; our challenge is to speak their truths aloud, specify their harms and demand that the wall where we are come down.

CARROLL COUNTY, MD. 2017.

She came home from school, and was quieter than usual. The father, aware that he was raising a teen-aged young woman, gave her wide berth at first; yet, as the afternoon wore on into evening, something told him to ask about the remaining consternation her countenance so fervently held.

“What happened at school today?” he asked.

“What happens everyday,” she deadpanned back.

He chuckled. She frowned. “Okay,” he said, “what happens everyday?”

She paused, weighing the worth of her next words. Then, it all just sort of tumbled out.

— –

MARYLAND ROADWAYS AND THE FLAG OF SUBJUGATING SLAVER-TRAITORS TO THE UNITED STATES

Confederate flags on student apparel. Confederate flags on student cars in the parking lot. Confederate flags on cellphone cases. License plate holders. Backpack stickers. Not everyone, but my daughter had just enough peers at school actively building a cultural wall to make each day.

In this case going to school then meant not only navigating regular old teen high school culture, but in addition to that each day included surmounting a cultural wall built of confederate flags, the most hateful symbol to Black people in America, our own National swastika.

I found this unacceptable at school; I participated in a movement to change it and, in large part thanks to the wider changes around the country removing confederate statues and the like, and a legal analysis and calculus that makes the change less sustainable over the longer-term than I would like, my daughter’s hometown school system rejected the promulgation of the flag of subjugating slaving traitors to the Union.

We won. Or did we? In Carroll County, the Confederate flag-as-adornment remains as popular as ever. Flown at homes, on cars, and as part of apparel, the flag that says to black Americans “We reflect with wistful nostalgia those days when you were property owned by the rich among us, and, at best 3/5th human” stays meaningful in the culture that surrounds my daughter.

But, at the very least, not in the space and place where both the practicalities and the semiotics of learning happen. Not there. We found a way, in that narrow sense, to break down that wall, at the most crucial juncture — lifelong learning — even as it is erected in other ways all around us.

BERGEN COUNTY, NJ. 2019.

My current job has me dialoguing with folks of all types in this bucolic Bergen County village town, one filled with shops, restaurants and green space. In the 1950’s main roads entering the town would have signage up that, according to some of the elders who were there as children, said things like “Ridgewood is a restricted town,” or “Ridgewood is a homogenous town,” or the like, intimations to Jews and others that, like many towns at the time, you may find yourself less than welcome (indeed, even today, the one synagogue in Ridgewood is just barely in Rdigewood, only one street into the town proper from the edge of its border).

Today, Ridgewood’s “walls” — its barriers to entry — are like most towns: do you have the cheddar to get here? The median value of homes in Ridgewood is $713,900, and the interest in mixed income dwellings is low. As much as the “wall” here is typical and economic, there’s also a fervent striving for a certain kind of community here, a kind of desperation reaching hard for, really, what was promised. What was promised to us by the ways in which we were educated about the American Dream; if you work hard enough you too can leave any unwashed masses behind and cross over into that place where everyone’s doing well, everyone’s lawn is well-kept and everyone knows your name.

Of course, this was always an illusion; every community has vulnerable populations. In my work we see those in need of help every day, and cannot afford the illusion that many here seek to craft for themselves. The wall here, today, tries to build itself just high enough that the homeless, or the folks one paycheck away from disaster, aren’t really seen, and its hard for them to even be present.

WILLINGBORO, NJ 2019.

Levitt was right. When black people came to Willingboro, white people left. In 1970, Willingboro’s population is 43,386, and about 88% of it was white. In 2000, only 24% was white, and in 2010 17.31% was white. White flight exploded out of Willingboro to places like Cherry Hill, Voorhees, Cinnaminson, Palmyra and Delran…anywhere that black people were not in meaningful numbers.

Today, my parents look out upon a community where most of the pools are closed, and most people of means do not use the public school system (the remaining high school, Willingboro High School, has a GreatSchools rating of 2 out of 10, 10 being the highest.) Black men stay meaningfully involved, but the support structures reflective of the wealth gap between whites and blacks went with white families when they left, girding and strengthening these other communities, who actually needed it less.

All because of the wall we place between ourselves, subverting the Americana notion of melting pot, and not even conceding the accommodating sense of a “salad bowl.” America is more segregated today than it was during Martin Luther King’s day.

More walls are being built.

Don’t just lament Trump and his commitment to a wall. Discover the walls — real, virtual, societal, economic — in your own community, and challenge those.