Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
Harlem.”)1 The organizers of the planned August March on Washington increasingly conceived of it as not only a means of putting pressure on the Kennedy administration, but also as a safety valve to vent some of the huge frustration that might otherwise spill into the streets. “Freedom Now,” to be blunt, was stalled by repression in the South and fiercely resisted in the North.
In Los Angeles the failed negotiations with the “power structure” forced the United Civil Rights Committee (UCRC) and the NAACP to announce a plan for a vigorous campaign that targeted the Los Angeles Board of Education and subdivision builder Don Wilson’s Southwood tract in Torrance. Parallel civil rights united fronts, with the same focus as UCRC on police, education, housing and jobs, were emerging in Pasadena and Long Beach.2 Of course, the UCRC’s two major campaigns—education and housing—overlapped and drew resources from each other, but their stories are best told separately, starting with Torrance.
At the end of June the UCRC organized a caravan of more than 200 cars to Torrance, where they were greeted by the city’s ready-to-rumble police department. As 700 to 900 people peacefully marched in front of Wilson’s Southwood sales office, they were taunted by members of the American Nazi Party and gangs of racist surfers who later joined counterdemonstrators from something called the “Committee against Integration and Intermarriage.”3 Still, the size of the protest and the participation of the NAACP made an impression. When county officials pressured Torrance to set up a human relations group, the mayor and police chief skirmished over the available pool of Black citizens. According to the Press Telegram, “Told that Torrance Mayor Albert Isen had been quoted as saying Torrance has two Negro residents, Chief Bennett questioned the figure. ‘I don’t know where he gets that. I know of only one.’”4 Instead, the city council, with hundreds of residents cheering them on, enacted an ordinance that made it illegal for “strangers” to be on the streets of Southwood on weekends or overnight. The ACLU immediately went to the superior court on CORE’s behalf.
But there was an unexpected breakthrough. Dr. Taylor announced on July 12 that he had reached a truce with Wilson, implying that CORE’s campaign had been too militant to allow negotiations. In exchange for a suspension of sit-ins and mass demonstrations, the developer promised to accept a deposit on one of the remaining unsold Southwood homes from any Black family that had adequate financial resources. Odis Jackson, a young lawyer who had previously been turned away, immediately renewed his offer and Wilson accepted his deposit. A week went by, and Jackson and the coalition heard nothing. Then Wilson suddenly announced that Jackson’s financial bona fides were unacceptable, and that the deal was off. Taylor had been played for a fool, and UCRC immediately asked Governor Brown to revoke Wilson’s builder’s license. CORE, many of its members irritated over what they regarded as yet another example of the NAACP’s foolish preference for negotiating with racists, resumed demonstrations despite the new curfew.5 They were joined on July 27 by Marlon Brando and TV star Pernell Roberts (Bonanza’s “Adam Cartwright”), who found few fans in Southwood. Quite the contrary, they were jeered by residents, and someone thrust a placard in front of Brando that read: “Marlon Brando is a Nigger-Loving Creep.”6 Brando retained his famous cool. Forty-seven CORE supporters, sitting on the sales-office driveway, meanwhile were carried away to police buses limp and singing.
At the end of the month, following the arrest of sixty-nine more protestors, a superior court judge, arguing that Southwood homeowners “had civil rights too,” upheld the anti-CORE curfew. The city immediately moved to clamp down on daytime demonstrations as well, filing a lawsuit against CORE and one hundred named individuals, including Brando and Roberts, and 1,000 “John Does.”7 For their part, Southwood residents tried to convince the press that they were the true victims, rather than the Black families kept out of suburban housing. One mother complained to the LA Times that her children were playing a new game: “picketing.” “The children ask, ‘Mommy, when are they coming again?’ Then they run outside, grab signs and walk up and down the street until their stunned parents order them away.”8 Meanwhile a new force emerged from the shadows. Scores of screaming John Birch Society members, claiming to be local residents, broke up a human relations meeting at Torrance High School.9
Undeterred by ordinances or Birchers, new and mostly younger recruits continued to reinforce the ranks of the CORE protest, including the Civil Rights Improvement Coordinating Committee, a cross-city student group organized by Jimmy Garrett, just twenty years old but a veteran of the Freedom Rides and Southern jails. CRICC members were arrested after they blocked the entrance to the Torrance police headquarters, while CORE started new picket lines at the downtown and Beverly Hills offices of Home Savings & Loan, the lender to Southwood purchasers and in CORE’s eyes the chief enabler of Wilson.10 But, despite the willingness of its supporters to fight on, CORE, $100,000 in hock for bail bonds, was financially at the end of its rope, and enthusiasm for the campaign inside the UCRC, and CORE itself, was waning.11 Many argued that it was better to concentrate scarce resources on efforts at the board of education. In any event, the superior court offered a face-saving way out: all 243 criminal charges against CORE members would be dropped; Wilson would post notices promising to abide by the Unruh Civil Rights Act; and CORE would end mass demonstrations. A nugatory number of pickets were allowed to remain.12
This second truce, in effect, conceded victory to Wilson since no one in CORE actually believed that he would comply with the law or ever actually sell a home to a Black family. After more than a year of protest, moreover, only a single Torrance resident, a brave Southwood housewife, had joined the picket line.13 But CORE members who had endured rough arrests and beatings could at least find a morsel of pleasure in the scandal that was engulfing the All-American City. On July 6, two local cops robbed clerks carrying a money bag in front of an LA bank and were arrested after a dramatic chase and gun battle. A few weeks later another of Torrance’s finest, this one a twelve-year veteran, was arrested for burglarizing a medical building. Agents from the DA’s office began prowling through the city’s underworld of drug dealers, prostitutes and gamblers; and, without notifying the Torrance police, the county sheriffs raided the city’s flourishing bookmaking parlors. California Attorney General Stanley Mosk opened a separate investigation of corruption in the issuance of building permits, zoning changes, and city contracts. Eventually all these probes would lead to the suicide of the city manager, the resignation of the mayor, and the filing of perjury charges against police brass. But Torrance remained white.14
The Alameda Wall
The full measure of CORE and UCRC’s defeat in Torrance would not be understood until the end of the year. In August there was exultation as some of Hollywood’s biggest stars joined the fight. West Side Story’s Rita Moreno, wearing spike heels and carrying a sign that read “Stop De Facto Segregation Now,” was at the front of the UCRC’s August 8 march on the board of education. (When after two blocks Morena was forced to take off her heels, SNCC leader James Forman gallantly carried them the rest of the way.)15 Nat King Cole performed a benefit concert at the Shrine for SCLC, SNCC, CORE and NAACP that brought out Edward G. Robinson, Gene Kelly, Natalie Wood, Edie Adams, Kirk Douglas, Cesar Romero (a longtime supporter of the NAACP) and even Jack Benny. A larger delegation, organized by Charlton Heston, left for the Washington March for Jobs and Freedom, scheduled for the twenty-eighth. It included Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin of the Rat Pack (who, with Sinatra, would later organize their own benefit concert for civil rights), Judy Garland, Debbie Reynolds, Gregory Peck, Robert Goulet, Burt Lancaster, and, of course, militant Lena Horne.16 Jazz musicians, some of whom had been active in local civil rights struggles since the late 1940s, organized a “Freedom Jazz Festival” for CORE in September that featured Stan Kenton, Buddy Collette, Hampton Hawes, Shelly Manne, Chico Hamilton, Gerald Wilson, and others.17
The day after the March on Washington, 5,000 civil rights supporters in L.A. marched down Broadway to city hall, again with an endorsement from vote-wrangling Sam Yorty. The speaker list—two of the six were Chicanos—brought back memories of the multiethnic civil rights coalition that had elected Edward R. Roybal to the city council fifteen years earlier. “On behalf of the Mexican-American community,” proclaimed attorney-activist Frank Muñoz, leader of the Mexican American Political Association