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“Not Tomorrow—but Now!”: L.A.’s United Civil Rights Movement (1963)

In his book Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King proclaimed 1963 “the year of the Negro Revolution.” James Baldwin, A. Philip Randolph, and Roy Wilkins echoed the phrase, as did Newsweek, Time, and the New York Times. On the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the civil rights movement crossed the Mason-Dixon Line to become a truly national uprising. Its fulcrum, still Southern, was the great struggle in Birmingham—the “most segregated city in America” according to King—where a united Black community, including its children, confronted police dogs, fire hoses, jail beatings and church bombings.¹ Solidarity demonstrations in the North, however, soon led to emulation, as protest groups, often with CORE in the vanguard, embraced the Birmingham strategy of a “package deal”—demanding immediate progress toward integration on multiple fronts.

In his celebrated essay “The Meaning of Birmingham,” Bayard Rustin wrote that

unlike the period of the Montgomery boycott, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had to be organized to stimulate similar action elsewhere, the response to Birmingham has been immediate and spontaneous. City after city has come into the fight, from Jackson, Mississippi, to Chestertown, Maryland … frustration has now given way to an open and publicly declared war on segregation and racial discrimination throughout the nation. The aim is simple. It is directed at all white Americans—the President of the United States, his brother, Robert, the trade-union movement, the power elite, and every living white soul the Negro meets. The war cry is “unconditional surrender—end all Jim Crow now.” Not next week, not tomorrow—but now.²

If not “now,” a growing number of national leaders began to recognize, the likely alternative might be an abandonment of nonviolence by the Black community. Thus James Nabrit Jr., the president of Howard University, warned in June that unless Washington took immediate action to enforce equal rights, the country would explode, “including the wholesale killing of people.” The SCLC’s George Lawrence called the situation a “powder keg,” emphasizing that it “was no longer just a Southern thing. [It was] exploding all over the country.”³ And in July, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther predicted, at an Urban League convention in Los Angeles, that the failure to meet Black demands would lead to “civil war.”⁴ Although some of this apocalyptic rhetoric was generated in support of a new civil rights bill, the warnings were for the most part accurate and predicted the ghetto insurrections that rocked US cities for six consecutive summers beginning in 1964.

Los Angeles became a major, if unsuccessful, arena for the application of the “Birmingham strategy.” At the end of May the SCLC organized a huge rally for King at Wrigley Field, the 22,000-seat baseball stadium east of USC that had been the old home of the Los Angeles Angels minor league team. The city’s leading equal rights advocates—including the ACLU, NAACP, CORE, Jewish Labor Committee, and the UAW—joined together as the United Civil Rights Committee (later Council) (UCRC) to challenge discrimination in housing, jobs, policing and schools. Similar freedom movements, some far more militant, emerged in Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago and San Francisco, and on a smaller scale in Seattle and other cities. This was a unique moment—too often forgotten in a civil rights hagiography that neglects the role of CORE and James Farmer, not to mention Black nationalists like Albert Cleage in Detroit and Cecil Moore in Philadelphia—when mass protest over discrimination in the North was synchronized with the life-and-death struggle of the nonviolent Southern civil rights movement in cities (to invert Atlanta’s slogan) that were “not too busy to hate,” and did so with relentless ferocity. Behind their liberal facade, as King emphasized in his Wrigley Field speech, many Northern urban power structures and political machines were just as unyielding as Birmingham’s, and de facto segregation was, if anything, more intractable than de jure. If civil rights supporters had any illusions on this score, they quickly vanished in a long summer of protest.

Operation Windowshop

The Birmingham campaign and the “Negro Revolution” it launched were responses to a string of defeats. 1962 had been a dismal year for the Southern freedom movement. SNCC’s voter registration campaign in Mississippi, another exercise in almost-suicidal courage by young organizers and the Black farmers who sheltered them, barely survived a reign of terror that included assassinations, church bombings, ambushes, vicious beatings, “criminal anarchy” prosecutions, and a food blockade that brought tens of thousands of poor sharecroppers to the edge of starvation. Meanwhile the year’s most ambitious attempts to break down urban segregation—CORE’s campaign in Baton Rouge and the Albany Freedom Movement in Georgia (which SCLC more or less usurped from SNCC)—filled the jails for months but failed to win significant concessions from local elites or protection from Washington. Neither movement, moreover, received any sustained attention in a national media obsessed with the space race and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Malcolm X’s estimation, “when Martin Luther King failed to desegregate Albany, Georgia, the civil-rights struggle in America reached its low point. King became bankrupt almost, as a leader.”⁵ The Kennedy administration’s only significant intervention in the Deep South was to send 300 federal marshals to register James Meredith at Ole Miss, as ordered by a federal judge. In nightmare scenes, more insurrection than riot, armed mobs murdered two people and wounded 200 of the marshals and national guardsmen defending Meredith. Thousands of regular troops finally quelled the uprising, but it was a strategic victory for the segregationists who had raised the cost of federal police action to a level that the White House was unwilling to pay.⁶

In the North, on the other hand, CORE, mantled by the heroism of the Freedom Rides, succeeded in laying foundations for a score of direct action campaigns that would reach their crescendo in the summer of 1963. The problem for the still tiny and decentralized organization was deciding where to focus its new energies: public accommodation, employment, housing, or education? Local chapters made different choices. L.A. CORE vigorously supported John T. Williams and other Black teamsters in their ongoing fight to break down job barriers in the trucking industry and at Greyhound. Token hirings (two at Greyhound in 1962, for example), however, tended to take the steam out of the struggles.⁷ Although it continued to fight job discrimination, most notably in campaigns against the Bank of America in 1963 and several local restaurant chains in 1964, the group’s strategic focus shifted toward what the LA County Commission on Human Relations called “the keystone supporting the arch of segregation and discrimination”: racial exclusion in L.A.’s fast-growing suburbs.⁸ Banks and savings and loan associations, such as Howard Ahmanson’s behemoth Home Savings, were the ultimate decision makers, but developers and, most vocally, realtors were the public guardians of the white suburb. In October 1961, for instance, Charles Shattuck, former president of the National Association of Realtors and senior statesman of Los Angeles brokers, told an assembly committee that the Los Angeles Realty Board didn’t allow Black brokers to join because it wanted to “preserve neighborhoods” and would not “be a party to the salt and peppering of the whole community.” Moreover, he added acidly, “the Negro lacks social privileges because he has not earned them.”⁹ Shattuck, whose brother Edward was a patriarch of California Republicanism, had unwittingly thrown a gauntlet at CORE’s feet.

The first target of “Operation Windowshop,” as CORE called it, was a new 567-home subdivision—Monterey Highlands—in the foothills of Monterey Park, a small city east of downtown near Los Angeles State College. A Black physicist, Robert Liley, down payment in hand, had tried to purchase a mid-market $25,000 house for his young family but was told the tract was sold out. CORE then sent a white couple, who were immediately offered a choice of available homes. The ensuing campaign lasted from February through April 1962, culminating in a thirty-five-day sit-in at the tract office whose participants included three veterans of the Freedom Rides. Montgomery Fisher, the developer, preferred to commit financial suicide rather than yield to protest and was foreclosed by his lenders. The new developer (actually, the original landowner) quickly turned over the keys to Liley and his wife. Although the effort had been exhausting, CORE received encouraging support from the tract’s white residents, some of whom were faculty at Cal State LA, as well as from Monterey Park councilman Alfred Song, a Korean-American lawyer who later became the first Asian in the California Assembly.¹⁰

Such allies were sorely missed when CORE tried, in the fall, to open the Sun-Ray Wilmington tract, in the LA harbor area, where a Black postal worker and his wife, the McLennans, had been turned away. The house they had been told was sold was subsequently offered to a white CORE “tester,” Charlotte Allikas, who immediately put down a deposit to hold the home. “We decided to conduct a ‘Dwell-In,’” she explained, “to ensure the McLennans a chance to renegotiate their loan.” A CORE crew, led by Mari Goldman, housing chair, and Woodrow Coleman, vice chapter chair, occupied the property twenty-four hours a day until they were arrested.¹¹ After their release, they returned to the house, camped on the lawn (a “dwell-out”) and were arrested again. Two of the jailed activists were Freedom Riders Ronald La Bostrie and Charles Berrard, who may have been reminded of their previous encounters with “Southern hospitality” when Sun-Ray neighbors repeatedly harassed, assaulted, and stoned CORE members. But the Superior Court proved to be surprisingly sympathetic to the McLennans. Their counsel, ACLU senior attorney A. L. Wirin, won a rare ruling from Judge Alfred Gitelson that enjoined the developer from discriminating.¹² (Gitelson would later become the bête noire of the New Right for his historic 1970 decision in Crawford v. Board of Education that LA schools practiced segregation and must integrate immediately.) Although the builder-developer retaliated in early 1963 by suing CORE, the McLennans eventually moved into their (tarnished) dream home.¹³

Simultaneously CORE was probing the defenses of one of the country’s largest suburban builders, Don Wilson. With 50,000 family homes under his belt by fall 1962, Wilson was a major presence throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties, but the signature of his Gardena-based firm was most indelible in the South Bay.¹⁴ Roughly bordered by LAX in the North, the Harbor Freeway in the East, and the Port of Los Angeles in the South, this area included much of L.A.’s aerospace and oil industry, as well as some heavy industry—steel and aluminum—in Torrance. Wilson’s formidable political clout in county and local government was often employed to rezone undeveloped industrial parcels into more valuable residential land: an alchemy that converted cow pastures, auto junkyards and former marshes into lucrative ticky-tacky.¹⁵ His Leave-It-to-Beaver communities were anointed, almost tongue-in-cheek, with names seemingly more appropriate to Beverly Hills or Brentwood, such as “Southwood Riviera Royale,” the Torrance tract that would be the site of CORE pickets and mass arrests for the next year and a half. Given his regional prominence and scale of operation, Wilson was an obvious target; but he also recommended himself as a symbol of discrimination because he was building a colored-only subdivision—Centerview in Compton—to exploit the desperate demand from Black homebuyers while keeping his other tracts totally segregated.¹⁶ Although lionized regularly in the real estate section of the Times as one of the West’s most visionary developers, Wilson, as CORE saw him, was a builder and major shareholder in the “Hate Wall” that kept Blacks penned within a super-ghetto.¹⁷

Demonstrations at Wilson’s housing developments in Torrance (white only), Compton (“the Jim Crow tract”) and Dominguez Hills (whites, Mexican-Americans and Asians, but no Blacks) began simultaneously at the end of July, but the confrontations were immediately most tense at the Dominguez site near 190th Street and Avalon Boulevard. The white residents as well as the Glendale–based American Nazi Party (a frequent presence at demonstrations throughout the 1960s) harassed picket lines and even attacked CORE chairman Earl Walter. Walter’s wife Mildred, later a celebrated writer of Black children’s books, recalled one incident: “About four cars drove up, full of white men dressed like Nazis. They had on Nazi uniforms, including the swastika … and their placards read, ‘Ovens too good for niggers,’ ‘Niggers, go back to the trees,’ ‘You monkeys, go back to the trees.’” After one of her fellow protestors, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, left because his anger was overcoming his commitment to nonviolence, Walter asked herself: “‘Why am I doing this? Why do I want people thinking that I want to live beside white people? Why am I here?’ And somebody start[ed] singing, ‘Oh, Freedom’ … And I thought, ‘Well, I’m not here because I want to live beside white people. I’m here because I want us to be able to decide where it is we want to live, and we can have the freedom to do that.’”¹⁸

When CORE members staged a sit-in at the Dominguez project office, two of them were kicked and beaten by one of Wilson’s parttime salesmen, a Torrance police sergeant. In Compton, by contrast, community members applauded a fifty-mile march to the picket line by twenty CORE members from the San Fernando Valley, and some became regular members of the protest.¹⁹ That fall both James Farmer and Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers came to L.A. with stirring stories of the South to bolster local CORE fighters, and after a half year of demonstrations, California Attorney General Stanley Mosk sued Wilson under the Unruh Civil Rights Act of 1959 for six separate instances where Black homebuyers were turned away from Dominguez. Gitelson was again the judge and quickly indicated that he had little sympathy with the argument made by Wilson’s lawyers that the state’s highest law officer didn’t have jurisdiction in such cases. He issued a temporary restraining order against any further discrimination. While Wilson appealed the Dominguez decision, CORE concentrated all its efforts on his Southwood project, advertised as located in “the country club section of the southwest area.”²⁰

Torrance was no country club, but it was an excellent theater for confrontation. As its mayor unblinkingly put it: “Torrance has no Negro problem. We only have three Negroes in the city.” It was also a throne of sorts for Wilson, known as “Mr. Torrance,” since he had built more than one-third of the homes in the city.²¹ Indeed, it was one of the most dynamic local housing markets on the West Coast—with an astonishing 21,500 new units added in 1962 alone. ²² Founded as a union-free haven for Llewellyn Steel and the repair shops of the Pacific Electric Railroad in 1912, Torrance had grown in little more than a decade from a population of 20,000 to over 115,000.²³ Awarded the National Civic League’s “All-American City” designation in 1956, it was famed for its city-sponsored “Decency Crusade” and annual “Stamp Out Smut Month.”²⁴ This municipal inquisition, which targeted the Weekly People (the ancient paper of the Socialist Labor Party sold in news racks across the country) as well as Nabokov’s Lolita, disguised only thinly the city’s notorious vice industries. As Hal Keating of the Times recalled in 1965 after city hall scandals had rocked Torrance to its foundations, “A few years ago it wasn’t difficult to find a narcotics pusher, a high stakes crap game or a bookmaker in this city.” Its politicians, Keating might have added, were the recipients of lavish gifts from contractors and developers—a swimming pool in the case of the city manager. At the center of corruption was a police force that not only kept Blacks out of the subdivisions, but also broke strikes, protected gamblers, harassed surfers, spied on dissident city council members, chauffeured the chronic drunk who was mayor, and moonlighted not only as salesmen for Don Wilson, but on occasion as armed robbers and burglars.²⁵

United Civil Rights Committee

The next phase of CORE’s direct action in Torrance was subsumed, however, in a broader campaign of protest that tracked events in both California and Alabama. On April 2, after a vicious campaign heavily financed by the California Real Estate Association, a majority of Berkeley’s white residents voted to repeal the city’s new fair housing ordinance, which had been adopted after a long crusade by CORE, the NAACP and local Democratic Clubs.²⁶ But the initiative, as law scholars warned, went beyond repeal, effectively establishing “that housing segregation and housing discrimination should be legal in Berkeley.”²⁷ The Berkeley vote—a forewarning of the coming deluge a year later of Proposition 14, the statewide initiative to repeal the fair housing law—greatly stiffened the resistance of segregating builders like Wilson and segregated cities such as Torrance, while it forced the civil rights movement to place all of its chips on the fair housing bill that Assemblyman Byron Rumford, with strong support from Attorney General Mosk and Governor Brown, was trying to force through the legislature.²⁸ CORE chapters throughout California prepared to send demonstrators—and soon, campers—to Sacramento.

April 3, meanwhile, was “Project C Day” (C for “confrontation”) in Birmingham. The SCLC leadership had kept the planning for the campaign as secretive as possible in order to prevent a preemptive strike by Bull Connor (now an angry lame duck after passage of a new city charter that abolished his position); but Governor Wallace and his lieutenants in Montgomery, with rich intelligence sources that might or might not have included the FBI, had already rehearsed tactics that they hoped would defeat Martin Luther King for good, including injunctions and a special law, only applicable in Birmingham, that would hike misdemeanor bails and hopefully break the almost-depleted SCLC treasury. In the event, the marches on city hall and sit-ins in downtown restaurants failed to generate the community momentum that King had expected, and he was soon jailed and out of contact with the day-to-day planning of the struggle. (Isolation, however, did prompt him to begin writing his famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” attacking white “moderates,” especially churchmen, who refused to support the civil rights movement.)²⁹

Reverend James Bevel, who had originally come to the campaign from SNCC, assumed a larger role in the leadership and implored the older ministers to let him reinforce the protests with high school, even primary school, students—an idea they initially rejected. In the meantime, a white CORE member from Baltimore, a postman and ex-marine named William Moore, had been murdered outside Gadsden while on a solo march from Chattanooga to Jackson wearing a sandwich-board sign that said “End Segregation Now!” With national attention again briefly focused on Alabama, Bevel once more pleaded with his colleagues to allow the students to defy the injunction against demonstrations. “Any child old enough to belong to a church,” he argued, “should be eligible to march to jail.” King, torn and reluctant but without any viable alternative, finally “committed his cause to the witness of schoolchildren.”³⁰

Newsweek called it “the Children’s Crusade.” On Thursday, May 2, wave after wave of Black kids poured exuberantly but peacefully into the streets of downtown Birmingham. Bull Connor’s startled cops managed to arrest 600 of the nearly 1,000 kids who had signed up to be arrested on the first day, but the commissioner of public safety’s stupefaction soon turned into fury. The next day, in full view of the press corps, he used fire hoses and police dogs on the student marchers, some of whom were only first graders. The photographs and films of these disturbing scenes and those that followed over the next few days focused the attention of the entire world on Alabama, making King (but, unfairly, neither Shuttlesworth nor Bevel) a universal hero. Birmingham’s business elite, known locally as the “Big Mules,” who for decades had pulled the strings of vigilantism to fight unionization as well as civil rights, were finally shaken out of their intransigence, and they quickly agreed to a phased integration of downtown lunch counters and sales jobs (schools would follow in the fall). When their former henchmen, the Ku Klux Klan, fought back with bombs, the Kennedys were forced to send federal troops to the city. The president, who had devoted a meager two sentences to civil rights in his earlier State of the Union address, asked Congress in mid June for a comprehensive ban on discrimination in public accommodation.³¹

The unexpected breakthrough in Birmingham galvanized Black communities across the country to follow its example. “The police dogs and fire hoses,” the Eagle’s Grace Simons pointed out, “did more in a day to advance the movement of revolt than had a thousand sermons.”³² Indeed, if mass activism is measured by the sheer number of protests and arrests, the summer of 1963 was unquestionably the high point of the civil rights struggle. From June to September, the Department of Justice “catalogued a total of 1,412 separate civil rights demonstrations around the country.”³³ The national NAACP—faced with demands from its own youth for more militancy and fearing that CORE might seize civil rights leadership in key cities—uncharacteristically moved into a direct action mode in May.

In Los Angeles, nonetheless, CORE was first to act, organizing a four-mile march on May 10 from Vernon and Central Avenues in South Central (the location of the legendary “Dolphin’s of Hollywood” record store) to city hall, where James Baldwin, then on a grueling CORE-sponsored speaking tour, told the crowd of 2,000 that “discrimination against the Negro is the central fact of American life.” With other speakers, he condemned the Justice Department for watching from the sidelines while Bull Connor’s storm troopers terrorized and jailed children. In a telegram sent from L.A., he reminded the attorney general that “those who bear the greatest responsibility for the chaos in Birmingham are not in Birmingham. Among those responsible are J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Eastland, the power structure which has given Bull Connor such license, and President Kennedy who has not used the great prestige of his office as the moral forum which it can be.”³⁴ (Two weeks later he aggressively confronted the younger Kennedy during a meeting at Harry Belafonte’s apartment in Manhattan. Bobby was so unsettled by the exchange that he ordered J. Edgar Hoover to tap Baldwin’s phone.)³⁵

CORE suddenly found itself with scores of new members. “Birmingham,” one LA organizer wrote to the national office, “has done the recruiting for us.”³⁶ It also attracted unexpected new allies. The Cal Tech YMCA, for example, voted to participate in CORE’s campaign against housing segregation in Torrance and Dominguez Hills, while a group of young women teachers organized the “Friendship Guild” to organize dances and other fundraisers for CORE.³⁷

L.A.’s NAACP chapter, for its part, began planning a massive Freedom Rally for Birmingham on May 26 at Wrigley Field. Dr. Christopher Taylor, the dentist who had succeeded Reverend Maurice Dawkins as the president of the local NAACP, sent a telegram to Bull Connor asking him to relay a speaking invitation (“send reply collect”) to the jailed comedian and movement stalwart Dick Gregory. Gregory promptly made bail and flew to L.A. Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy changed tour schedules to attend the LA rally, and Governor Pat Brown acted as honorary chair, as he had when King spoke at the Sports Arena in 1961. Sammy Davis Jr. agreed to wrangle celebrities (Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Rita Moreno, Dorothy Dandridge, Tony Franciosa and Mel Ferrer, among others), while Burt Lancaster volunteered to organize an after-rally party in Beverly Hills to squeeze money out of them. That Sunday’s turnout of 35,000 to 40,000 was phenomenal, dwarfing the legendary King rallies of November 1960 and June 1961.

In King’s “The Time Is Now” speech, he called upon President Kennedy to personally escort onto campus the two Black students that the courts had ordered admitted to the University of Alabama but Governor Wallace had blocked from entering. He received his most rapturous applause, however, when he urged the crowd to emulate Birmingham and unite to fight every form of segregation and discrimination in Los Angeles: “Birmingham or Los Angeles, the cry is always the same: We want to be free.”³⁸ In making the equation between the two cities, King only echoed what Malcolm X had said the year before, and Baldwin a few weeks earlier. (Baldwin: “There is not one step, one inch … no distance between Birmingham and Los Angeles.”³⁹)

The interracial committee that organized the rally was soon nominated to lead such a struggle when Reverend Dawkins warned the Times that if immediate steps were not taken to desegregate L.A., the NAACP and its allies would launch a “Birmingham-type drive.” “We are not just asking for a small specific adjustment,” he declared, “but a total community integration.” Whether Dawkins, who constantly sought the limelight of the media, actually spoke with the full permission of the coalition is unclear, but his statement was catalytic.⁴⁰ The official founding of the UCRC took place at a closed meeting of numerous groups under NAACP auspices on June 4. Predictably, Dr. Taylor was elected chairperson, although he would often be upstaged by the coalition’s president: the dynamic young African Methodist Episcopal minister H. H. Brookins, who, through his close alliance with newly elected council member Tom Bradley and his success in building a superchurch with an estimated 19,500 members, eventually became one of the city’s most important power brokers.⁴¹

Although the united front was originally called the NAACP-UCRC, the ACLU was an equally important player. Indeed, ACLU director Eason Monroe claimed in his 1974 oral history that

[we] played a dominant role in organizing [it], and a dominant role in holding [it] together for a period of a year and a half or two years, when other groupings in the community had more limited resources than the ACLU had by that time, and when, as a matter of fact, the fate of that organization [UCRC] rested, in a very important sense, upon ACLU involvement.

He also emphasized the failure of the UCRC to bring to the fore any leader of real stature apart from Reverend Brookins, clearly implying the incompetence of Dr. Taylor.⁴² Monroe, however, did not clarify in these interviews whether this critique was one he had directly expressed in executive meetings of the UCRC or simply the wisdom of hindsight. CORE, in contrast, was openly skeptical of the NAACP from the beginning. Irked by the NAACP’s sudden assertion of seniority, spokesman Danny Grey pointedly reminded a Times reporter that CORE was already waging a “Birmingham-type” campaign. But he could hardly demur when Taylor, acknowledging the “tremendous pressures from the Negro community ‘to do something right now,’” promised that the UCRC was “determined to mount an all-out offensive in the areas of racial discrimination in job opportunities and housing, de facto school segregation and the abuse of police.”⁴³

Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, the elder of what would become Los Angeles’s most important political dynasty, represented a large portion of the Black community and was the first to react to the UCRC’s emergence. He urged the County Human Relations Commission to set up an emergency meeting between the organizers and the Los Angeles “power structure” (the CHRC’s term). With city government almost paralyzed by relentless warfare between Yorty and a majority of the council, the county Board of Supervisors became the sponsors of a summit at the Statler Hilton on June 7 in order “to avert a spread of racial tension”: a euphemism for the large-scale urban disorder or violence that they feared might be imminent.⁴⁴ About half of the 150 civic and business leaders invited to the Hilton conference actually attended, mostly to sit in uncomfortable silence as Wendell Green, editor of the Sentinel, “asserted there is more racial segregation in Los Angeles than in any city in the South and more than in any large Northern city except Chicago and Cleveland.”

Dr. Taylor, in turn, outlined proposals for a citizens review board for the LAPD, revision of school district boundaries to achieve integration, and a nondiscrimination clause in all government contracting. The attendees were urged to support the Rumford fair housing bill in the legislature, and if it failed to pass, to adopt muscular city and county fair housing ordinances. “Birmingham-style demonstrations,” Taylor explained, would be postponed for ten days to allow business and government leaders to respond with concrete proposals for ending discrimination in their respective areas of education, law enforcement, housing and employment. Task forces in each area, coordinated by CHRC, were set up.⁴⁵ But the newly born UCRC was making demands from the cradle without proof that it could actually organize civil disobedience on a Birmingham scale, or, conversely, keep control over spontaneous protest in the community. Certainly a new Black middle class was flexing its muscles in electoral and activist politics, but, as Loren Miller had sagely warned at a statewide Black leadership 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