In 1947, entrepreneur Abraham Levitt and his two sons created a ground breaking community that was located in Long Island, New York. The land space underwent a major transformation from farmland to a suburb, that housed World War II veterans and their families. This community became the platform for many other suburban communities to replicate. However, this plan embodied a cancerous mentality of exclusion, segregation, and persecution of African Americans. Levittown became a plan that embodied the Americanized dream of life, but with it also came prejudice that plagued in destruction. David Kushner author of Two Families, One Tycoon, and the fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb, introduced a multitude of reasons for Levittown being established. Kushner argues, the…show more content… The massive shift in the techniques of construction for homes “revolutionized housing in America by creating quickly built and relatively inexpensive houses” (2). The Levitt and Sons development of 17,000 homes across 4,000 acres of land, became the biggest migration in modern America history, quotes David Kushner. The development consisted of 17,400 homes for 82,000 people, this mass production attempted to accommodate a multitude of homeless families. This plan was now being imitated across states such as, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Herbert Gans author of The Levittowns: Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community, coins Abraham Levitt as a master publicist that sought out a plan for better housing amongst the suburban communities. Gans mentions, Levitt felt that in order for Levittown to be successful “he needed to present it as a new form of ideal American life, one that combined the idealized middle-class life of the prewar suburban communities”, promoting a better lifestyle than what some families were accustomed. It was soon
