Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
and pickets at his office and residence have not moved the Cardinal.”38
DuBay was immediately relieved of his duties in Compton, but his audacious telegram drew public support from McIntyre’s bête noire, the Jesuits, as well as from some of the Holy Cross priests and a few progressive bishops. Members of the “Cardinal’s Carpet Club,” as previously reprimanded priests in the archdiocese informally called themselves, while not necessarily supporting DuBay’s tactic, confirmed the truth of his allegations, and rosary-carrying members of the Albert the Great congregation, Black and Chicano, conducted daily pickets at the chancery. “All we want,” they said, “is for the cardinal to commit himself on Pope John’s Encyclical, Pacem in Terris, which outlines justice for all.”39
Unsurprisingly, the foes of integration within the archdiocese quickly lashed back at the “unChristian” conduct of DuBay and CURE, citing a declaration of Pope Leo XIII’s from the 1890s—much loved by Proposition 14 forces—that “the first and most fundamental principle … must be the inviolability of private property.” McIntyre, for his part, kept a disdainful silence, although “someone close to the cardinal” warned DuBay that if he did not shut up, “the next step was that he would [be] defrocked and excommunicated.”40 Finally, in July, an intransigent McIntyre told the press that his mind was unchanged and that he would not take a stand on Proposition 14.41
He would, however, continue to enforce strict discipline within his ecclesiastical kingdom. In DuBay’s case, it involved the humiliation of signing a statement that reaffirmed his loyalty and obedience to the cardinal. The silenced priest was also ordered to avoid contact with his picketing parishioners and members of CURE.42 Meanwhile, a much-loved Eastside priest, Father John Coffield of the Ascension parish, whom McIntyre suspected of supporting DuBay because he too had taken a strong stand on civil rights, chose voluntarily exile as an urban missionary in Chicago over obsequious submission. “A Buddhist monk,” he said, “could use self-cremation as the strongest form of protest. It isn’t open to me.”43
Equality Scorned
The Brown administration marshaled the opposition under the umbrella of “Californians against Proposition 14” (CAP 14), but as Daniel HoSang emphasizes in an astute analysis, its focus on white Democratic voters marginalized civil groups like UCRC and MAPA. “Why would CAP 14 leaders,” he asks, “so committed to defeating Proposition 14, distance the campaign from the communities, organizations and leadership that bore the brunt of segregated and inferior housing?” The distancing, he argues, was largely intentional. “Early in the campaign, CAP 14 leaders made a strategic decision to attack the abstract ideas and extremist actors animating Proposition 14 rather than to defend the Rumford Act or assert the widespread prevalence of housing discrimination and segregation.” CAP 14 leaders soon became convinced that “specific references to the existence or prevalence of racism would only hurt the campaign’s fortunes among the white voters who dominated the electorate.” Thus, their strategy focused almost entirely on the dangers of Proposition 14, and they declined to “defend the original purpose of the Rumford Act in any meaningful way.” Liberal activists campaigning against Prop 14 “rarely mentioned the housing crisis that had driven civil rights organizations to demand the passage of the legislation in the first place; nor did they reference the overwhelming levels of discrimination many home buyers and renters still faced.” HoSang quotes from CAP 14 pamphlets reassuring white homeowners that, since only 1 to 2 percent of Blacks could actually afford to buy into newer subdivisions, they posed little threat to home values or neighborhood composition.44
CAP 14 failed disastrously. On November 3, with almost 90 percent of registered voters turning out at the polls, Proposition 14 won by a two-to-one margin—a 2 million vote majority—with white support ranging upward of 70 percent in much of Southern California. At the same time, Goldwater was crushed by LBJ, albeit by a smaller majority, as many Northern California Republicans defected from his extremist campaign. The composition of the legislature and congressional delegations remained almost the same, although a Bircher, John Schmitz, won a senate seat from Orange County. The election, in other words, neither registered a statewide swing to the right, nor did it evince any tendency toward a fundamental realignment. Various attempts were made to explain the overwhelming vote for Proposition 14 as a result of ballot error or confusion over its meaning, but detailed analyses of polling and vote data by two well-known political scientists dispelled these hypotheses. Voters clearly understood what they were voting for, and the result was a decisive affirmation of the right to discriminate by a majority of white Democrats and Republicans alike. Only in San Francisco and a few neighboring counties was the vote even close.45
The victory of Prop 14 (which was ultimately ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1967) brought the curtain down on the civil rights era in Los Angeles, at least as represented by nonviolent protest and broad coalition building. The shock and demoralization experienced by activists was not unlike what their grandchildren would confront in November 2016. Although judicial struggles would continue (the long simmering Crawford case, for instance), and renewed energy would eventually be poured into the mayoral campaign of Tom Bradley in 1969, the hope of winning ghetto youth to the strategies of any of the major civil rights groups—whatever those strategies now were—was defunct. White liberals on the Westside, of course, could find joy in the huge Johnson victory and the promises of the Great Society he claimed to be building, but this was little solace for the minorities who were in the direct path of the juggernaut of white supremacy unleashed by Proposition 14.
Meanwhile, L.A. CORE, heroic on so many occasions, was collapsing internally. Early in 1965, one member wrote: “This chapter is no longer able and/or willing to engage in meaningful direct action. We straggle up Broadway to the Federal Building every now and then; we call off membership meetings so we can picket the Citizens Council, thus avoiding an occasion for serious discussion of just what the hell we’re doing.”46 UCRC continued in existence for another year, but its “moderate” leadership became increasingly entangled in the quarrels of competing factions of Black Democrats that mirrored the Sacramento schism between governor Pat Brown and Jess Unruh, speaker of the state assembly (the feud continued later, between Brown and the California Democratic Clubs). Councilman Billy Mills, for instance, was an Unruh ally and would soon be ostracized by other Black politicos for supporting a liberal Chicano candidate for the board of education. Meanwhile, Eason Monroe of the ACLU quarreled with the NAACP, which in turn was grappling with its own internal factions.
Even the great finale of the Southern struggle in Selma in spring 1965 would fail to elicit more than a tepid demonstration or two from L.A.’s dying movement. In Northern California, by contrast, CORE veterans and Freedom Summer returnees at Berkeley unexpectedly found themselves leading the biggest student uprising since the 1930s. There was no counterpart, however, at UCLA or other Southern California campuses. Los Angeles at the end of 1964 seemed strangely pacified. For white youth, unaware of how Vietnam would soon change their lives, it was still the endless summer of beach parties, shining new UC campuses, and the promise of brilliant careers, or at least an abundance of unionized blue-collar jobs. For their generational counterparts in the ghettos, however, L.A. had proven once again that it was the Deep South.
Sam Yorty Collection, City Clerk’s Office © City of Los Angeles.
LAPD Chief William H. Parker, “warden of the ghetto,” and Mayor Sam Yorty at the Police Academy graduation ceremony, 1961. During Parker’s seventeen-year tenure (1950–66), he replaced boss rule with cop rule and was politically invulnerable—thanks to lifetime tenure, a Hollywood publicity machine, and a blackmail bureau that rivaled J. Edgar Hoover’s.
Valley Times Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.
Members of CORE raise funds in Pacoima for jailed Freedom Riders, July 24, 1961. LA CORE sent five integrated groups of Freedom Riders to challenge segregation in Southern train and bus terminals. Most of them were jailed at Mississippi’s Parchman Farm, perhaps the scariest