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Jericho Stands: The Beginning of the Backlash (Summer and Fall 1963)

As summer 1963 approached, police across the country, from Baton Rouge to Philadelphia, went on a buying spree. Pennsylvania-based Federal Enterprises, the leading supplier of tear gas, was overwhelmed with new orders, as were makers of nightsticks and breeders of police dogs. Meanwhile law enforcement agencies were hastily training special “commando units” (Detroit PD), “riot companies” (Alabama state police), and “subversive squads” (Shreveport PD) to quell the expected Negro unrest. A United Press survey confirmed that police almost everywhere were girding themselves for riots—a tribute, in a perverse way, to the nationalization of the civil rights struggle. Meanwhile, the Chicago Defender, the nation’s largest-circulation Black paper, worried about polarization within the movement as CORE and SNCC pressed ahead with protests while the NAACP, always worried about disorder, balked. Even the SCLC’s charismatic leaders were put on the defensive during visits to Northern ghettoes. (“Rev. Martin Luther King,” reported the Defender, “watched incredulously as militant hecklers pelted his car with eggs and shouted ‘Uncle Tom’ at him when he arrived for a rally at a church in New York’s 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 (MAPA), “we extend the hand of friendship and solidarity.” “We must join hands like brothers,” 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 enrollment or employment, and, except for most nominal steps, it would not 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.