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7

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 when the urban industrial economy was booming.

Whatever hopes the Birmingham movement had kindled the previous year had been curdled into anger by the intransigence of white-dominated institutions, the pervasive sense of losing ground amid prosperity, and, above all, the ruthless iron heel of the LAPD. The real question was whether that anger would be displaced into intra-community violence or unleashed as a unifying wrath. The danger of the former was illustrated by the upward trend in gang warfare. In January, outside a basketball match between Dorsey and Manual Arts Highs, a former star athlete from Dorsey was stabbed to death in a fight with members of the Gladiators gang. A month later, after several weekends of confrontations between the Parks and Businessmen gangs, a member of the latter (famous for their flashy suits and homburg hats) was shot outside the gym at Jefferson High School.⁸

Before spring 1963, a veteran unit of the probation department known as Group Guidance (GG), would have immediately stepped in and attempted to negotiate a truce between the warring gangs. But Chief Parker, loudly supported by Sheriff Peter Pitchess, had convinced the board of supervisors to disband the unit. Indeed, he had blamed increased gang conflict on the “dangerous activities” of the nine men and three women of GG. The gangs with whom they worked, Parker had claimed, committed three to four times the crimes of non-supervised gangs: proof, in the LAPD’s eyes, that peace talks and other GG interventions were somehow incentives to violence. Raymond Herbert, the director of the probation department’s delinquency prevention services, had scoffed at Parker’s logic, pointing out that GG’s mission was precisely to target the most violent or criminally involved gangs. “You see a lot of firemen at the worst fires but no one blames the fire department for starting the fires.”⁹ But Parker’s use of sham statistics had little to do with the specifics of GG’s work; his real aim was to evict the unit from LAPD turf and reinforce the dogma that Black youth were “junior criminals” warranting incarceration. Ironically, by removing GG from the streets and ratcheting up police pressure on youth, he inadvertently sowed the seeds (as did Daryl Gates a quarter century later) for the cessation of gang warfare. That came in August 1964, not as a result of Parker’s autocratic policing, but rather as the fruit of a massive uprising against the LAPD.

The revolt was portended by a series of neighborhood riots in April that displayed a new fighting mood in the community. The first fray followed a track meet at Jefferson High School on Friday, April 10, when four plainclothes LAPD officers, moonlighting as event security, roughly arrested a spectator for drinking and placed him in a patrol car. Hundreds of students and other youth surrounded the car and began throwing rocks and sticks. One of the cops was knocked unconscious by a brick and two others injured. An ambulance rushed to the scene only to collide with a speeding police car, resulting in three more injuries. “More than 100 officers were summoned,” the Times reported, “before the crowd, estimated at 600 persons, was dispersed.” Early the next morning a Greyhound bus smashed into a car at Forty-Sixth and Avalon in South Central, killing the driver. Enraged by the delay in the arrival of an ambulance, an estimated 250 onlookers jeered the police, then started stoning them. The battle resumed that evening when police arrested a man near Sixty-Eighth and Central, during or just before (the accounts vary) a massive vice raid by sheriffs. A crowd of approximately one hundred attempted to rescue him and fought the police.¹⁰

The weekend’s spontaneous disorder mocked the confident reassurances of the blue-ribbon committee on community-police relations and led to a new confrontation between civil rights groups and Parker’s institutional supporters. South Central’s council member Billy Mills told the press that he had been stopped by the LAPD seventeen times in the previous year “because they saw me at night driving a car provided by the city”; he demanded the police immediately undergo more training in community relations. On the other hand, the Times praised the LAPD, “whose record in recent years has been remarkably free of prejudicial conduct,” warning that “the current soft attitude on the part of the public to crime and civil rights demonstrations could lead to anarchy.” At his weekly press conference, Mayor Yorty declared that “if anything, the police have been too lenient.”¹¹ How the police actually conducted themselves was revealed two weeks later when a traffic stop for a defective taillight escalated into a riot involving eighty to one hundred residents of the Pacoima area, the Black ghetto of the San Fernando Valley. As the Eagle summarized its interviews with witnesses: “They placed full blame on the two officers involved in the original arrest attempt, accused them of using vile racial epithets, knocking a young mother to the ground, grabbing a teenager by the hair, punching her and bashing her head against a car,” the Eagle reported. “They claimed further that one of the officers drew his pistol and threatened to kill the man accused of a traffic violation.”¹² The same weekend the LAPD arrested ten people on “riot” charges in the aftermath of a serious traffic accident at Fiftieth Street and Ascot in South Central. Following heckling and scuffles with police at the scene, a group of residents followed the ambulances to the Central Receiving Hospital, just west of downtown, where the “unruly, cursing mob” (Times) knocked down a cop.¹³

James Farmer was in town that week and, with local CORE chair Art Silvers, immediately called for the resignation of Chief Parker (who was rumored to be sick and considering retirement). He also joined a picket line outside the Newton Street Station protesting the surprise arrest of the N-VAC leadership—Mari Goldman, Robert Hall, Woodrow Coleman and Danny Gray—for a protest at a Van de Kamp’s bakery earlier in the month.¹⁴ In an interview with the Sentinel, Silvers, while reiterating CORE’s commitment to nonviolence, warned that the patience of the community “is nearing an end. The forces of hate and love are lining up.”¹⁵ Calling for Chief Parker to step down immediately made CORE the target of vilification from all sides. First the city council voted thirteen to two to express its full support for Parker (with Bradley in favor, and Mills and Gilbert Lindsay, the city’s first Black council member, in opposition), as did the police commission (including Elbert Hudson, the sole Black member).¹⁶ This coincided with a column by nationally syndicated journalists Rowland Evans and Bob Novak charging that CORE protests, both in California and at the opening of the World’s Fair in New York, had become the movement’s own worst enemy: “If militant demonstrations persist,” they wrote, “the vote in November promises to be a debacle for civil rights not only here but in the whole nation.”¹⁷ Then, Maurice Dawkins, the former NAACP head and UCRC founder, now moving rapidly toward the right, convinced three other religious leaders to join him in denouncing CORE for its peaceful sit-in at the Southwest Realty Board, a nerve center of the campaign to repeal the Rumford Act. “We oppose that type of demonstration in Los Angeles which violates law and order in our community.”¹⁸

Two weeks elapsed before the UCRC’s Dr. Taylor finally endorsed CORE’s call for Parker’s resignation.¹⁹ But Taylor, besieged by critics of his administrative competence as well as of his tolerance for CORE’s direct action methods, was soon forced to step aside for the more dynamic and politically astute Reverend H. H. Brookins.²⁰ The UCRC’s new chairman, tacitly acknowledging the failure of protest, outlined a more elitist vision of the coalition’s future—particularly, the need to refocus on educating and winning support from L.A.’s corporate powers. “The white community,” he told the Times’s Paul Weeks in a lengthy interview, “must be made to understand that the vast majority of Negroes does not want to demonstrate, agitate and put on a show to feed the needs of pseudo-liberals, white or black. I want to bring more specialized, professional personnel into our work, lessening the influence of some of the more radical activists on whom we have had to depend.” Although Brookins did not repudiate CORE per se, he made it clear that UCRC would only selectively endorse those of the group’s actions that were congruent with its new strategy.²¹ (Yes, for instance, to a demonstration against the formation of a local white citizens council; but no to CORE’s Bank of America campaign and its sit-ins at realtors’ offices.)

Meanwhile, all the real thunder was on the right. As California stumbled toward the June presidential primary, the confluence of the Goldwater and Proposition 14 campaigns, each supercharging the other, brought armies of conservative activists into the field. The John Birch Society, headquartered in the millionaire suburb of San Marino and generaled by John Rousselot, a former congressman from Orange County, shocked old guard Republicans by running candidates not only in every primary (where they emphasized support for Proposition 14) but also in every election for district and county Republican committees in Southern California. One of the society’s chief constituencies was the LAPD, where under the benign eye of Chief Parker, officers openly wore Goldwater badges and distributed anti-communist tracts such as None Dare Call It Treason, a favorite among Birchers, from station houses. It was widely believed that the Fire and Police Research Association (Fi-Po), formally a subsidiary of the LA Fire and Police Preventive League, was a front for the Birch Society. During the 1964 elections, Fi-Po leaders circulated forged documents claiming that Senator Thomas Kuchel, California’s last remaining liberal Republican and a foe of Proposition 14, had been arrested in 1950 for sodomy and drunk driving. (The principal author of the forgery was indicted by a grand jury, but the charge was ultimately reduced to a misdemeanor.)²²

As white supremacism seemed to emerge from under every suburban rock, so did the White Citizens’ Councils movement, the principal organizer of “massive resistance” to integration in the South. Louis Hollis, the national director of the Mississippi-based councils, announced that Kent Steffgen, a former Birch staffer, had been appointed to lead a Los Angeles–area organizing campaign. “Irresponsible and lawless activities by the racial agitators and Negro pressure groups,” he declared, “have awakened thousands of Californians to the dangers of permitting these groups to control their state.”²³ Journalists and civil rights groups, however, found it difficult to believe that the proposed council was not simply another franchise of the Birch Society—created, in this instance, to exploit the racial polarization generated by Proposition 14. In addition to Steffgen, Hollis was a well-known Bircher, as was the national administrator, W. Simmons.²⁴ The continuity of personnel between all the anti-integrationist camps became even more evident in January, when the California Real Estate Association hired William K. Shearer, a frequent contributor to the councils’ magazine, for its Proposition 14 campaign. When CREA was later challenged to repudiate support from the Greater LA Citizens’ Council, its president, Art Leitch, characterized the demand as “ridiculous.”²⁵

The inaugural meeting of the Greater LA White Citizens’ Council was held on June 30 in Pasadena’s Civic Auditorium, a week after the local school board had rejected an integration plan. Council leader W. Simmons of Jackson, Mississippi, brought the audience to its feet with his declaration that “integration is not inevitable. It is impossible.”²⁶ But the 500 enthusiastic attendees were considerably outnumbered by the 800 chanting CORE and UCRC supporters picketing outside. Simmons reassured the press that “such a demonstration wouldn’t happen in Jackson. We have an anti-picketing law.” The LA Council announced that its next activity would be to bring George Wallace to the Sports Arena.²⁷ Meanwhile back in Mississippi, searchers were still dredging the swamps for the bodies of three missing Freedom Summer volunteers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner.

A toxic rumor arrived in Los Angeles around the same time as the Mississippi segregationists did, although it will always be unclear who actually released it: the Birchers, the council people, the camp followers of Goldwater, or perhaps all three. By the eve of the November election, it had spread virally across the entire country and infected political debate everywhere. The story, variously set in South Gate or Culver City, was that a group of adult Black males had castrated a three-year-old white child in a public bathroom. “Everyone” (white, that is) knew someone who knew someone else who verified the story (supposedly being covered up by liberals).²⁸ But columnist Paul Coates of the Times stumbled upon what he believed was the true genealogy of the evil fable. According to a letter he received from a reader who had been in secondary school in Germany in the 1930s, the “same story” had been used by Nazi leaders to enrage Hitler Youth before pogroms. “Only then, the ‘little white boy’ was a German boy, and the ‘colored hoodlums’ were Jews.”²⁹

A Meddlesome Priest³⁰

The organizational core of the Proposition 14 campaign was the CREA and its 45,000 local realtors, all of whom were expected to canvas the vote in their sales areas. Flying the banner of the so-called Committee for Home Protection—a name first used in a 1948 initiative campaign against public housing—the realtors were joined by the California Apartment House Owners Association, the Homebuilders’ Association, taxpayer groups, the Times, the California Committee for Equal Rights for the White Race, and the entire sprawling conservative wing of the Republican Party, including the co-chair of the statewide Goldwater campaign, Ronald Reagan.³¹ But the realtors’ greatest ally, according to historian Darren Dochuk, was the large population of Southern evangelicals in Southern California, roused in revivals and mobilized in their churches by leading Christian anti-communists and civil rights opponents such as Billy James Hargis, Fred Schwarz, Carl McIntire, and Senator Strom Thurmond (a frequent visitor to California in 1964). “Blending fears of communism and racial integration with biblical exegesis, conservative clerics in the Committee for Home Protection camp argued that the Rumford [Fair Housing] Act was a rejection of both New Testament teachings and Old Testament laws,” Dochuk writes. “Pro-Rumford people were not only on a slippery slope to communism but also in violation of the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s housing.’”³² Or as Dr. Nolan Frizzelle, president of the California Republican Assembly and a leader of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, put it: “The Rumford Act violates the right of the people to discriminate. Proposition 14 returns this right back to the people.”³³

In opposition to Proposition 14 were hundreds of progressive Protestant clergy (Episcopalian and Presbyterian especially), most rabbis, and all but one of California’s Catholic bishops. That sole exception was Cardinal James McIntyre of Los Angeles, the single most powerful churchman in the state. McIntyre, consigliere to supreme Cold Warrior Cardinal Spellman in New York before moving to Los Angeles, was better known for his passion for real estate than his concern for human rights. He was also the chief supporter of L.A.’s most well-known Catholic layman, Chief Parker, and shared most of the latter’s views on creeping socialism, moral degeneracy, and minority criminality. He was also an utter autocrat who stalled the Second Vatican Council reforms and outlawed any discussion of civil rights issues by priests and seminarians, despite the large number of Black Catholics, mainly ex-Louisianans, in the archdiocese.³⁴ When sixty theological students at the archdiocese’s seminary in Camarillo held an informal discussion with John Howard Griffin, a Catholic civil rights advocate and author of Black Like Me, they were disciplined by McIntyre and several were forced to leave the seminary.

In May, a group of parishioners opposed to Proposition 14, Catholics United for Racial Equality (CURE), marched on McIntyre’s Fremont Place mansion, only to be turned away by security guards. A few weeks later, Ramparts magazine (then a Catholic lay journal) published an article by an unnamed Los Angeles priest who condemned the “aura of fear of reprisal” in the archdiocese. “The feeling among the priests was that if they preached on racial justice they would be moved, as the doctrine is unwelcome and they are afraid.” “Cardinal McIntyre,” the cleric went on, “can continue to say that there is no racial problem in his archdiocese, an incredible statement. No one who is in touch, who reads, who knows what is going on could make it with a straight face.”³⁵

Twenty-nine-year-old Father William DuBay, an assistant pastor at the largely Black St. Albert the Great parish in Compton, became “the first priest since Luther to challenge his Cardinal in public.”³⁶ Earlier, DuBay had been transferred out of his original parish in the ultra-segregated San Fernando Valley after publishing excerpts from Catholic writings on racial justice in the church bulletin. He later told the Times about a meeting he had with McIntyre: “He denied that there was a racial issue here and said it was not a moral issue. He said there were many other reasons for discrimination besides race. ‘After all, white parents have a right to protect their daughters.’”³⁷ Now in a long telegram to Pope Paul VI, DuBay charged that McIntyre had “conducted a vicious program of intimidation and repression against priests, seminarians, and laity who have tried to reach the consciences of white Catholics in his archdiocese.” The young priest, backed by his parishioners, asked the pope to remove the cardinal for his “inexcusable abuses” of church doctrine and his failure to redress “the insult and injury suffered by the several hundred thousand Los Angeles Negroes at the hands of white Catholics whom the local church refuses to instruct on their specific moral obligation.” “I regret,” he continued, “that I as a priest must accuse my bishop publicly, but all other means have failed. Letters, petitions, phone calls, and even sit-ins 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 prison in North America.

Gordon Parks, Malcolm X Holding up Black Muslim Newspaper, 1963. © The Gordon Parks Foundation.

In April 1962, after an altercation where a cop was shot, LAPD officers attacked the Black Muslim temple, a block away, where unarmed members were leaving after evening prayers. The final tally: one Muslim man dead, seven others seriously wounded, fourteen arraigned on felonies, and the temple ransacked. Malcolm, at the funeral, praised LA Black organizations for protesting the attack: “Our unity shocked them and we should continue to shock the white man by working together.”

Photo by Charles Williams, Courtesy of the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center, Delmar T. Oviatt Library, Special Collections and Archives, California State University, Northridge.

Demonstrators protesting the refusal of developer Don C. Wilson to sell homes in the Dominguez Hills tract in Gardena to African Americans. They were harassed by white residents as well as by the Glendale-based American Nazi Party, a frequent presence at demonstrations throughout the 1960s.

Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive. Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Women Strike for Peace members marching at Old Plaza in Los Angeles, 1966, calling for an end to the Vietnam War. The previous year the group sent a delegation to meet in Jakarta with women of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, which strengthened their standing to speak on war and peace, usually the preserve of men and “experts.”

Los Angeles Herald Examiner photo collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

Dorothy Healey, December 1, 1961. The unorthodox leader of the Communist Party in Los Angeles in the Fifties and Sixties, Dorothy was a key link between white and Black radicals—she mentored Angela Davis—and between the old and new lefts. She resigned from the Party in 1973 after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Courtesy of LAFreePress.com.

Watts Rebellion issue, LA Free Press, August 20, 1965. The nation’s first and most successful underground paper of the Sixties, the Freep published forty-eight pages every week at its peak in 1970 and boasted a “faithful readership” of a quarter of a million. The LA Times headlines for its Watts Uprising front page were “‘Get Whitey,’ Scream Blood-Hungry Mobs,” and an “expert” analysis, “Racial Unrest Laid to Negro Family Failure.”

Courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.

The Black Cat tavern protest against police raids on gay bars, February 11, 1967, two years before Stonewall. Los Angeles also had the first gay magazine, The Advocate, and, in 1970, the first official gay pride parade.