Paul Von Blum

"That day or the day before, the local newspaper, the Levittown Times, had published an article that said something like, Levittown's first negro family to move in. And as I've explained many times, they might as well have said, the riot will begin here, because precisely that's what happened. As soon as the Meyers moved in, a group of white racists gathered at the house. And as the evening went on, it got worse and worse and worse. Nobody had expected that level of violence. And I, to this day, sitting here in Brno, I have very vivid recollections in my mind of a vicious white racist mob outside the home on Deep Green Lane in Levittown, screaming racial invective, the worst kinds of things you can imagine. The word was used thousands of times, horrible profanity, Rocks were thrown, the windows shattered."

"He told me that it was a very difficult time in his life. But he was extremely revealing. He confirmed to me what I had already figured out. He told me that once he came back and he realized that his parents and so many other people uh in the Jewish community, not only in Berlin but throughout Germany, that they had been massacred by then um the worst racism of the 20th century. And he realized uh through some of his army experiences with some of the people he had met in the army that the same racism that had killed his parents and everybody else was being uh implemented against black Americans. Uh he really saw that uh it was I think intuitive on his part. He saw that the same racism there was universal and uh that became his crusade. Uh I think maybe it had psychological significance so it could keep him from not having to think about what happened to his family. But he became a very very vigorous civil rights activist as a very young man."