Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
conference in 1960, the elite should “not confuse their own middle-class attitudes with the needs of the people they purported to represent.”46
During the ten-day UCRC “grace period,” the national civil rights crisis deepened with the murder in Jackson, Mississippi, of Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary for that state. In L.A. a week later, 1,500 people sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they marched from Wrigley Field through South Central in a memorial procession for Evers organized by the UCRC; that same day in the east, NAACP director Roy Wilkins lashed out with startling vitriol against CORE, SNCC, and the SCLC for receiving “the publicity while the NAACP furnishes the manpower and pays the bills.”47 It was an unjust and selfish rant that immediately jeopardized the civil rights united fronts emerging across the country. From the point of view of other groups, local and even state NAACPs (as in Mississippi) might occasionally take the lead in direct action, but the national organization’s commitment to mass protest and civil disobedience remained equivocal at best. In Sacramento, meanwhile, it was CORE, not the NAACP, that mobilized the volunteers—including, for one day, Paul Newman and Marlon Brando—who occupied the rotunda while the Rumford Bill, even after being watered down by its author, remained bottled up in a Senate committee dominated by conservative Democrats. In order to break the deadlock, Mari Goldman of L.A. CORE led a “lie-in” in front of the Senate chamber until demonstrators were carried away “like lengths of cordwood” by the state police.48 New convoys of activists headed toward the capitol, but an ominous rebellion broke out among white working-class Democrats in LA County, who opposed Rumford.
Negotiation Fails
Then came a stunning electoral upset—one that was universally interpreted as a backlash against the anti-discrimination policies of Pat Brown in Sacramento and Kennedy in Washington. A special election had been called to fill the congressional seat left vacant by the death, in March, of Representative Clyde Doyle, a Democrat in the midst of his seventh term. The district, where registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans almost two to one, encompassed L.A.’s industrial heartland, including the blue-collar suburbs of Compton, Lynwood, South Gate, Huntington Park, Bell, Bell Gardens, Bellflower, Paramount, Maywood and Downey. Both the president and the governor had endorsed Carley Porter, a veteran assembly member, but the winner, endorsed by the Times, was Del Clawson, the Goldwaterite mayor of Compton and a leader in efforts to slow integration in the formerly all-white city just south of Watts.49 It was, as Becky Nicolaides emphasizes in her history of one of the cities in the district, the beginning of a major realignment in the political landscape of California—and later, thanks to Reagan, of the United States.
Meanwhile, the UCRC “waiting period” expired. The results were meager, to say the least. Sheriff Peter Pitchess expressed sympathy for the coalition’s demands in a confidential meeting with attorney Tom Neusom and other members of the coalition’s police practices committee, and as a result they showered him with praise for “his good posture in the community” and gave his department a free pass on civilian review—a unilateral action that infuriated CORE and anyone who had had encounters with racist sheriffs. Chief Parker, meanwhile, was predictably offended that the UCRC would even allege a “race problem.” Nevertheless, he reassured the Times that should disorder break out, there would be no need to use police dogs since his officers were so expert in mob control that the State Department had conscripted them as instructors to help the Dominican military junta deal with Communist street protests.50 (The San Bernardino County Sheriff, on the other hand, boasted that he would not hesitate to turn dogs on unruly crowds.)
Although Mary Tinglof, president of the LA Board of Education, was a vigorous advocate of integration, the majority of the board, even the two other “liberals,” adopted the same attitude as Parker: “What problem?”51 As Marnesba Tackett, NAACP stalwart and UCRC education committee chair, reported back to the coalition, the board majority refused even to discuss the demands for teacher and student transfers. She deplored as “unthinkable” that “an enlightened city like Los Angeles” would continue to “concentrate Negro, Mexican-American and other minorities into overcrowded and segregated schools” while there were numerous “under-enrolled schools in ‘white areas.’” In housing, meanwhile, a coordinated backlash against integration was rapidly gaining power among realtors, white homeowners and developers. Leading the charge was the Los Angeles Realty Board, which, with its counterparts in the rest of the state, campaigned vigorously against the Rumford Bill while advocating a “Property Owners’ Bill of Rights” (a California initiative adopted in early June by the National Association of Real Estate Boards) that would give realtors the constitutional right to discriminate. It would be repackaged in the fall as Proposition 14.52
On the employment front, Mayor Yorty, still trying to retain some Black support, applauded the UCRC’s commitment to nonviolence and bragged about some of his minor appointments, but he otherwise ignored widespread complaints about discrimination in the city agencies and departments. The UAW under District Director Paul Shrade was an active participant in the coalition, but the Teamsters, who obviously wanted to forestall their own minority members from using the leverage of the UCRC, refused to discuss the various color bars in its beverages, liquor and construction operations as long as any teamster participated on the coalition side. The major employer organizations—the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Business Men’s Association, and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association—had responded to the UCRC, but none were willing to go beyond hypocritical glad-handing and informal conversation about future Black job opportunities.
“We do not feel,” Dr. Taylor told reporters at a press conference at the Biltmore Hotel, “that those who call the shots in the fields of employment, housing, education and law enforcement really believe that we mean it when we say that we want integration now … We did not expect miracles, but we did expect some concrete progress as a result of negotiations.” Paul Weeks, the white Times reporter (later PR director for RAND) assigned to the civil rights beat, published a story about discord between CORE (“it will want to precipitate direct action”) and the NAACP (“willing to negotiate and conciliate longer”) with the shadow of Malcolm X looming over all the nonviolent groups. (As Woodrow Coleman, one of the more militant members of CORE in 1963, later told the LA Weekly: “If you stopped ten cats on the street and asked them where the NAACP office is, none of them would know, but four of five would know where the mosque is.”)53 Brookins, echoing King’s recent “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” leaned toward the CORE viewpoint. At a local conference of the California Democratic Clubs on June 22, he lamented that “to our great dismay, many informed, enlightened people appeared naive about segregation in Los Angeles.” The only alternative, he argued, was to embrace the example of the labor movement and take the struggle to the streets. “There is no road back,” he insisted. “There is nowhere else to go.”54
Jericho Stands: The Beginning of the Backlash (Summer and Fall 1963)
As summer 1963 approached, police across the country, from Baton Rouge to Philadelphia, went on a buying spree. Pennsylvania-based Federal Enterprises, the leading supplier of tear gas, was overwhelmed with new orders, as were makers of nightsticks and breeders of police dogs. Meanwhile law enforcement agencies were hastily training special “commando units” (Detroit PD), “riot companies” (Alabama state police), and “subversive squads” (Shreveport PD) to quell the expected Negro unrest. A United Press survey confirmed that police almost everywhere were girding themselves for riots—a tribute, in a perverse way, to the nationalization of the civil rights struggle. Meanwhile, the Chicago Defender, the nation’s largest-circulation Black paper, worried about polarization within the movement as CORE and SNCC pressed ahead with protests while the NAACP, always worried about disorder, balked. Even the SCLC’s charismatic leaders were put on the defensive during visits to Northern ghettoes. (“Rev. Martin Luther King,” reported the Defender, “watched incredulously as militant