The real birth of affirmative action

...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...

...When the time came, my children were ready for college, and both attended branches of the state university system at modest cost...

...By today's standards, mortgage payments then were laughably small: $57 a month paid off interest and principal over thirty years...

...What a difference a clause makes...

...they flocked to the area by the thousands...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...most desirable residential areas in Long Island-and in many other places in the country-followed the same policy...

...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...

...In our story, however, there's a difference: We're white...

...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...

...For us whites, the benefits continue...

...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...

...My ancestors never held slaves...

...In this respect, the Levitt Corporation merely went along with local custom...

...I personally never did anything meant to hold black people down...

...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...

...It was a quota system of sorts, with the figure for exclusion of blacks set at 100 percent...

...There were sympathetic guidance counselors and special programs for both the gifted and the handicapped...

...THE REAL BIRTH OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION John C. Gebhardt One reason-not the only reason-that I'm in favor of affirmative action is that my family and I, down to and including the third generation, have been among its beneficiaries...

...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 people of color for decades and centuries...

...My family never actively discriminated against African-Americans...

...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...

...This sine qua non was written into a covenant that forbade even the resale of any Levitt house to a non-Caucasian...

...It would shame us today to oppose programs that attempt in some small way to right the balance...