Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
added Manuel Lopez, editor of the East Los Angeles Almanac.18 This was a victory for Reverend H. H. Brookins of the UCRC, an advocate of “a stronger alliance between Negro and Mexican communities,” but unity was precarious at best.19
Chicano organizations refused to participate in the sweeping integration lawsuit that the ACLU and the NAACP had assembled (Crawford v. Board of Education), even though it was a class action on behalf of “all Negro and Mexican-American pupils.” With the sole exception of MAPA, Eastside organizations opposed the UCRC’s four-part integration campaign. A month earlier, Ray Nora of the California Democratic Central Committee had testified to the LA County Commission on Human Relations that “the pressures Negroes are applying on employers has had this effect: When Negroes apply for jobs, employers are afraid not to hire them for fear of retaliation, and, so, in some cases they fire the Mexican-Americans to make room for the Negro.”20 Although veterans of the 1947 Roybal campaign might retain the vision of a united front that advanced the interests of both communities, Nora was expressing an attitude widely shared by Mexican-American business and political leaders, one that kept many tightly bound to the Yorty machine. One can only speculate about how LA history might have played out if the Southside and the Eastside had been able to unite around a common agenda in 1963.
The school integration campaign, relaunched by the big UCRC demonstration on August 8, followed the script from fall 1962, when the NAACP had attempted to enroll Black students at two almost all-white high schools, part of the LA Unified School District (LAUSD) system but located in the industrial suburbs of South Gate and Huntington Park, east of Alameda Boulevard, the principal freight route from downtown to the harbor. Underenrolled South Gate High, in particular, was only a mile from all-Black and grotesquely overcrowded Jordan High in Watts, on the other side of what civil rights activists had begun to call the “Alameda Wall.” The NAACP and the ACLU argued that the board of education should redraw attendance boundaries to allow the Jordan overflow to register at South Gate.21
But the backlash was beginning. This feeble attempt at integration fueled the white backlash that cost the Democrats the Twenty-Third Congressional District in the Alameda corridor.22 A month later the board of education majority voted down a modest proposal to allow the experimental transfer of 400 students from Fremont to Huntington Park; Jordan to South Gate; and Manual Arts to Westchester high schools. Marnesba Tackett of the UCRC countered by citing examples where the board had in fact transferred students to maintain de facto segregation. But even the UCRC was beginning to back away from the Alameda Wall and the angry white hordes behind it. Mary Tinglof, the pro-integration school board leader, warned her civil rights allies that if they kept pressing for integration at South Gate High, the community and its neighbors might secede from LAUSD and form their own strictly white (“San Antonio”) school district. A more realistic short-term alternative, she suggested, was to shift the focus to the more liberal Westside, where underenrolled white high schools like Westchester and Hamilton had room to accommodate transfers from majority Black schools on half-day sessions. Her board colleagues, however, rejected this modest scheme.23 An already-existing transfer program for individual students, which had no programmatic intent whatsoever, did allow a handful of Black students to attend white high schools, but its larger effect was to increase segregation by making it easy for white students to flee schools with increasing minority enrollments.
Nevertheless, a time bomb had been planted under the foundations of school segregation by the ACLU and the NAACP in the form of a lawsuit filed on the behalf of Watts high school students Mary Ellen Crawford and Inita Watson. Crawford, as the case was known, challenged a board plan to renovate and enlarge Jordan High while preserving segregated attendance boundaries. As Tackett later explained, “We noticed that the school board kept expanding Jordan’s boundary as more black children moved into it instead of sending them to South Gate. On that basis we felt Jordan was the strategic school to target.”24 Crawford, variously modified over time, would not be heard by the superior court until October 1967, but the resultant finding by Judge Alfred Gitelson (of Torrance fame) was an integration order that would draw battle lines that lasted more than a decade.
As the board hearings dragged on, Tackett and Tinglof expressed their growing frustration, not only with the two right-wing members, but also with moderate and liberal ones. One area of contention was the refusal of the board to allow a racial census of the district in order to establish the extent of segregation. The absence of statistics allowed the two conservative board members to deny racial imbalance existed. It was a maddening situation. “We’ve talked long enough,” Tackett said, which “clearly indicates that the Los Angeles board, like Birmingham, will have to be forced to provide integrated class rooms.” She warned that the coalition was ready to oppose all school bond issues and the reelection bids of all members of the board, aside from Tinglof.
A long-awaited report on integration from an ad hoc committee of the board was released on September 14 and greeted with a hailstorm of criticism from the NAACP and CORE. “The recommendations,” complained Tackett, “don’t go far enough and the findings are absolutely nil … There were no constructive suggestions about boundary changes. Nothing specific—just further study—and no urgency.”25 The board had discovered that studying and restudying the problem of segregation could postpone for years the imperative to do anything about it.
Meanwhile eight CORE members, led by Anthony Quinn’s brother-in-law, the screenwriter Martin Goldsmith, began an eleven-day hunger strike at the board offices.26 Their dedication to the fast was redoubled when news arrived of the Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, which killed four young girls. On September 19, 400 to 500 supporters of the hunger strike trekked five miles to the board offices from a rally at Wrigley Field. It was a school day, and Jordan High School was placed on lockdown to prevent its increasingly militant students from participating in the march. But many did anyway, along with hundreds of other determined truants from high schools across the city. Plainclothes police photographers carefully documented members of the demonstration as part of a plan by Chief Parker, announced two days later, to charge older demonstrators with “contributing to the delinquency of minors.”27
The struggle against the board was, to a large extent, becoming a youth crusade led by CORE. College students and some faculty participated, including 28-year Jerry Farber, a lecturer at Cal State LA who headed CORE’s education action committee; in 1967 he wrote “The Student as Nigger,” first published in the LA Free Press, which became one of the defining texts of the era. But what was most striking was the high school contingent, which included seven students from Birmingham High School in Van Nuys. One of them told the Times that “members of her group felt they particularly could show sympathy for the bomb victims of Birmingham.”28 In the weeks that followed, L.A.’s high school activists were encouraged by the examples of similar but much larger protests in other cities, especially Chicago, where a quarter of a million kids, half of the total enrollment, boycotted their public schools on October 22 to attend “freedom schools” and demonstrate in the downtown Loop.29
One novel tactic adopted by LA students was a “study-in” at the board offices on Fort Moore Hill at the beginning of October. Wearing black CORE armbands, 300 high school and college students marched up from the Old Plaza, finding the entrance barred by a fire captain who warned them they were about to violate the law. The group, led by Farber, ignored him and entered the building where they sat in the corridors silently doing their homework, while board members in their chamber continued their usual bickering and fruitless discussion.30 Three other study-ins were held in October, the last followed by an all-night vigil with over one hundred participants. “We have to keep finding dramatic ways to keep the board’s eyes on the problem of segregation,” Farber told reporters. “I’m sure that if we didn’t they would forget the entire issue as soon as possible.”31 The next “drama” was the arrest of Farber and two other CORE members for supposedly injuring two security guards as they attempted to open a locked door to allow more demonstrators to join the all-night vigil.32 But the movement was running out of steam. As fair housing advocate John Caughey summed up the situation: the board “would not take a racial census, it would not release what information it had on minority