Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
implement its so-called integration policy. The school year 1963–64 ran its course with school segregation still intact.”33
Los Angeles CORE meanwhile was breaking up as its members disagreed over whether to carry the board struggle to the next level with mass arrests. CORE had made huge investments during the past year in the campaigns for fair housing and school integration, but so far it had achieved little except publicity about its goals. Meanwhile other CORE members worried that the student influx was reinforcing a perception in the community that the organization was becoming more nationalist. (Some chapters across the country were in fact already purging white members or assigning them to secondary roles.) In Los Angeles there was no simple coincidence between advocates of greater militancy and those who wanted a more nationalist orientation. What emerged was a direct action faction of about forty members, led by veteran CORE leaders Woodrow Coleman and Danny Gray, but also including Farber and Housing Action Chair Mari Goldman, who proposed to set up a separate chapter on Central Avenue, in the heart of the ghetto. When they proceeded to do so, the new chapter was not recognized by the national CORE, and the insurgents were forced to organize independently as the Non-Violent Action Committee. Like the official CORE, N-VAC was primarily focused for the next year on employment issues and defeating the anti-Rumford backlash; both groups had some small successes on the former front.34
For all the millennial hopes aroused by Birmingham, 1963 ended dismally. It was Jericho in reverse: more walls went up than were torn down. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, in their masterful history of CORE, offer a bleak national balance sheet:
Aside from gains in employment projects, the northern CORE chapters seldom experienced substantial progress. School segregation and police brutality seemed almost immune to attack; rent strikes and urban renewal demonstrations produced at best only temporary relief; drives for suburban fair-housing, where successful, brought merely token victories for the middle class; and even in the case of jobs. The highly publicized construction-trade campaigns led only to broken promises.
Even in places with significant activism, “repressive actions effectively crushed even the most militant demonstrations, not only in southern communities like Gadsden, Tallahassee, Plaquemine, and Chapel Hill, but also in a number of northern cities.” Activists and others were realizing that “even where social change had occurred, CORE’s demonstrations had not significantly affected the life chances of the black poor.”35
In California, moreover, all the previous campaigns were overshadowed by what looked like an approaching civil rights Armageddon. In September, thanks to CORE’s long siege of the legislature, the Rumford Fair Housing Act was at last passed into law, although it was missing half of its teeth after an exemption was made for single-family homes. But before its proponents had time to celebrate, those guard dogs of residential segregation, the California Real Estate Association, announced a massive initiative campaign to repeal Rumford with Proposition 14 on the ballot for November 1964. Despite warnings from UCRC leaders that in the event of a repeal, “racial strife such as California has never seen before will erupt,” all the enemies of fair housing, from the American Nazi Party to the Los Angeles Times, rallied around the realtors’ banner. The white riot had begun.
Equality Scorned: The Repeal of Fair Housing (1964)
New Year’s 1964 was a Sisyphean moment for Los Angeles civil rights activists.
“We’re right back where we started from,” fumed Dr. Christopher Taylor. The leader of the United Civil Rights Committee and NAACP was responding to the release, on January 6, of a long-awaited report on the LAPD, prepared by a blue-ribbon committee appointed the previous June by the County Commission on Human Relations. Although the Special Citizens’ Law Enforcement Committee included two UCRC members (Reverend John Doggett of the Hamilton Methodist Church and Norman Houston, a wealthy insurance executive), its report, applauded in a Times editorial, rejected any need for a civilian review board—a chief demand of civil rights groups since the late 1940s. The improved procedures promised by the department, it contended, would be sufficient to ensure a fair hearing in the future for police brutality complaints. Instead, the committee urged the UCRC and its member groups to cooperate with the LAPD in recruiting minorities and improving the community image of the police and sheriffs. Taylor, normally mild-mannered, was outraged: “They have ignored all complaints of the community, and now they can keep on doing the same thing. They can keep right on whipping Negroes, shooting them—and then when a policeman is found guilty, they suspend him for two weeks without pay.”1
Similarly, “square one” aptly described the status of the UCRC campaign for integration to relieve overcrowding in ghetto schools. An “open permit” individual-transfer policy adopted by the board as an alternative to redrawing segregated attendance boundaries had, as activists predicted, actually increased segregation by letting white students bolt from minority-majority schools. Almost all of the remaining white students at Fremont High, for example, immediately transferred to South Gate.2 A plan to “de-ghettoize” the assignment of Black and Chicano teachers by allowing them to transfer within the district was blocked by the board in March, as was Mary Tinglof’s attempt in May to put the board on record opposing repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Finally, in late summer, after several stormy meetings, the board canceled a pilot program that bused a small number of elementary students from two overcrowded South Central schools to underenrolled campuses in Westchester.3 Over the course of fourteen months, every attempt by Tinglof, in coordination with Tackett of the UCRC, to garner a majority for some small step toward integration had been sabotaged by the defection of a self-proclaimed “liberal” or “moderate” board member to the other side. Until the composition of the board radically changed, or the Crawford case was adjudicated, there was little hope of progress.
Meanwhile, on the employment front, CORE, cutting its losses in Torrance and with the board of education, launched a statewide campaign to increase minority employment at the Bank of America and two major utilities. Its splinter group, N-VAC (Non-Violent Action Committee), targeted the Van de Kamp’s restaurant and bakery chain, while the UCRC picketed several supermarket chains. But these protests were overshadowed by the immense and unlikely task of organizing voter resistance to Proposition 14, the constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would not only repeal the Rumford Act but also prevent the legislature from taking any further action on behalf of fair housing.
April Riots
The real temper of the community, especially the outlook of Black youth, could not be measured by the state of mind of middle-class civil rights groups and their stalled campaign. Even CORE, which had produced some outstanding young Black leaders, remained three-quarters white, and despite the efforts of its Central Avenue splinter, N-VAC, it could hardly claim to have much influence on grassroots opinion.4 Moreover, the chasm between the ghetto and the rest of the city was deepening. At a time when realtors were talking about “super-prosperity”5 and economists were predicting miracle levels of employment growth, joblessness was growing in South Central neighborhoods on a scale that could not be ameliorated by a few hundred white-collar jobs at the Bank of America.
In May, 1,500 unemployed people gathered at Wrigley Field to sign a desperate petition to President Johnson: “We need some jobs!”6 One solution, offered by the LA County Board of Supervisors, was to turn the ghetto unemployed into replacement braceros. With the discontinuation of the program, which had brought contract labor from Mexico since 1942, California growers were eager to find new sources of farm labor, so Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, bemoaning the “tragedy that the small homeowner has to pay a large portion of his taxes to support able-bodied men,” proposed that male welfare recipients be forced to work on farms.7 The proposal was adopted by the board but quickly failed. The idea that people who had moved to Los Angeles to escape cotton peonage in Texas and Louisiana would meekly return to the fields of the Central Valley was patently absurd, especially