The real birth of affirmative action

Commonweal, Feb 9, 1996 by John C. Gebhardt

One reason-not the only reason--that I'm in favor of affirmative action is that my family and 1, down to and including the third generation, have been among its beneficiaries. In our story, however, there's a difference: We're white.

It all began in 1952 in a former potato patch on Long Island that had been named Levittown in honor of the builder of tens of thousands of attractive and remarkably inexpensive four-room houses. Most of the purchasers were World War II veterans, as I was; but being a veteran was not a necessary qualification. Apart from being minimally creditworthy, there was only one requirement: To buy a house from Levitt in this area, one had to be a member of "the Caucasian race," which is to say, white. This sine qua non was written into a covenant that forbade even the resale of any Levitt house to a non-caucasian. (In this respect, the Levitt Corporation merely went along with local custom; most desirable residential areas in Long Island--and in many other places in the country--followed the same policy. Some years later, a Supreme Court decision nullified this clause in all deeds, but by that time Levittown had been established as an all-white community.

What a difference a clause makes. In Levittown, successful white applicants bought their houses with no down payment, only a good-faith deposit of $100 that was returned at closing. The federal government did its part by guaranteeing 4.5 percent mortgages for veterans; they flocked to the area by the thousands. By today's standards, mortgage payments then were laughably small: $57 a month paid off interest and principal over thirty years.

New schools sprang up in the area, so that my two children had the advantage of a safe and worry-free education, with lavish opportunities for participation in sports, musical groups, school plays, and field trips to museums in the city. There were sympathetic guidance counselors and special programs for both the gifted and the handicapped. When the time came, my children were ready for college, and both attended branches of the state university system at modest cost.

It was a quota system of sorts, with the figure for exclusion of blacks set at 100 percent. While we whites in Levittown enjoyed our short- and long-term advantages, with the sanction of society and assistance from the legal system and the United States Treasury, black veterans were consigned to rental apartments in the city, mainly on the mean streets of slum areas, breeding grounds for drug abuse and crime, where schools were hardly worthy of the name, where jobs--especially jobs with a future--were scarce and became scarcer.

For us whites, the benefits continue. In due time my children became college graduates, married, had children, established themselves in their own homes, having found it relatively easy, given their backgrounds, to find suitable employment. And, when the time came for me to sell the Long Island house and move to a co-op apartment in Manhattan, a crowning bonanza was realized: A house that had cost $8,000 in 1952 sold for $180,000 in 1986. As the third generation of the postwar Gebhardt family prepares to enter college, my grandchildren know that if help is needed for ever-growing educational costs, there is a reserve fund in place: one more benefit of affirmative action.

My ancestors never held slaves. My family never actively discriminated against African-americans. I personally never did anything meant to hold black people down. But, like most other white families, mine passively profited from the economic, social, and political preferences and opportunities that were granted to us but withheld from people of color for decades and centuries. It would shame us today to oppose programs that attempt in some small way to right the balance.

John C. Gebhardt retired as head of the English department at Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn after thirty-eight years in the New York City school system. He now keeps his hand in as a part-time teacher of aspiring teachers at Queens College.