The passage of Pittsburgh’s first fair housing law in 1958, the second in the nation, and Pennsylvania’s in 1961 (also among the first statewide fair housing laws in the nation), were rare civil rights victories at a time when record numbers of African Americans were being relocated under the federal urban renewal program. The passage of these laws represented a colossal organizing effort over many years. Joe Trotter and Jared Day write in Race and Renaissance, “the struggle for better housing also included a campaign for new legislation to ensure fair housing in both the private and public sectors.”1
When the law was first proposed in 1957, fair housing had long been a problem for African Americans in Pittsburgh, as it was nationwide. As African Americans moved into the suburbs in small numbers in the 1950s, whites made sure they were not welcome. In 1957, not long after William Levitt constructed his second mass subdivision in Bucks County, outside of Philadelphia (Levittown, New York, was built in 1946), whites used “mob violence” to intimidate a Black family consisting of William Myers, a veteran, and his wife, Daisy. In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein describes the incident:
As many as 600 white demonstrators assembled in front of the house and pelted the family and its house with rocks. Some rented a unit next door to the Myerses and set up a clubhouse from which the Confederate flag flew and music blared all night. . . . For two months law enforcement stood by as rocks were thrown, crosses were burned, the Ku Klux Klan symbol was painted on the wall of the clubhouse next door, and the home of a family that had supported the Myerses was vandalized.2
Reporting on the violence in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mel Seidenberg wrote, “Consequently, there is no peace in Levittown today. It is a community under a cloud of unrest, tension, feat, bitterness. State troopers patrol its streets, ready to stop the mob violence which has threatened one innocent family.” He concluded that “Community strife and tension such as that occurring in Levittown would be non-existent if builders or realtors, at the very outset, sold or rented to all persons without regard to race.”3 Incidents like these were par for the course at a Levittown development and many other subdivisions across the country, which, thanks to the Federal Housing Administration, administered “an explicit racial policy that solidified segregation in every one of our metropolitan areas,” writes Rothstein.4