California Crucible. Jonathan Bell
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matter of fact, there were only two or three communities in which the welcome mat was there. The real estate people would only show in certain areas of San Francisco. You still had to buy through a dummy buyer.”49 The report compiled for Adlai Stevenson's campaign team in 1952 on San Francisco stated that all “past public housing is segregated. The city has one of the worst private housing shortages for minority families.” A new public housing development in Diamond Heights was planned that would be open to all, but it would not solve the racial divisions in the city's employment and housing situation. The local NAACP had had to go to court to overturn a housing authority ruling that a new housing project could not rent to African Americans because ethnic uniformity was the “neighborhood pattern.”50 The Yellow Cab Company in the city openly refused to hire African Americans. “Employment and housing are still the main problems which confront Negroes in the Bay Area,” wrote the president of the Urban League in 1957.51 “There are in California about 500,000 Negroes, 800,000 Mexican Americans, 85,000 Japanese Americans, 60,000 Chinese Americans, 400,000 Jews, over 2 million Catholics and a million foreign born,” stated a report of the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices in 1955. “There are some employment restrictions against all of these groups in California. The records of the California State Employment Service in Los Angeles three years ago showed that 67.5% of all job orders were discriminatory.”52 Economic development and tacit racism appeared entwined in California life in the 1950s.
As elsewhere in the country, a movement to enact a state fair employment practices law had been gaining momentum after the nation's experience of a national law during World War II and the passage of a landmark state law in New York in 1945. By 1949 seven states had enacted antidiscrimination laws, two of them—Oregon and Washington—on the West Coast.53 The NAACP had set up its West Coast Regional Office in San Francisco toward the end of the war, and Assemblyman Gus Hawkins had begun to push fair employment in Sacramento during the 1940s. The lobbying campaign was led by East Bay NAACP leaders C. L. Dellums and Tarea Hall Pittman, first through the NAACP itself, and later in the 1950s through the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices. Dellums was also International Vice President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and member of the Alameda County Central Labor Council, as well as the Alameda County Democratic Council. He thus crossed the boundaries between party activism, organized labor, and civil rights movement, and was a central figure in the formation of a statewide organization to lobby for major changes in the relationship between California politics and wider society.54 The struggle mounted by Dellums and others for legislation to mitigate against discrimination in employment during the 1950s pointed up the growing influence of groups pushing for social change over the political process, but it also demonstrated the fact that the Republican power structure was ill-equipped to deal with the demands of the postwar era, and that a major shift in the balance of power in party politics was imminent. underlying this political shift was an implicit recognition that the enemies of fair employment were part of a broader attack on state regulation of the economy that by its very nature was both antigovernment and racist. Whether Dellums and his allies liked it or not, their struggle was not merely one of civil rights; it was a basic fight for economic rights as well, meaning that the fair employment movement was participating in the same ideological reading of social democracy as politicians and intellectuals on the California left.
In March 1953 hundreds of Californians, among them Dellums, Pittman, Los Angeles city councilman Edward Roybal, Berkeley assemblyman Byron Rumford, and John Despol of the California CIO, gathered in Sacramento to lobby the legislature to pass fair employment legislation. Angry at the repeated failure of the Republican legislature to act on the proposed legislation, the gathering hoped that a show of solidarity and strength would force the elected representatives to change their perspective: “This session of the legislature has not distinguished itself by any concern for civil liberties,” argued a sympathetic piece in the Los Angeles Daily News. “Rather, it has gone to the other extreme in an effort to destroy labor unions and check up on the loyalty of public employees, most of whom are conceded to be loyal. The FEPC mobilization may have had the effect, however, of convincing the lawmakers that a large segment of the population is not supine or indifferent to what goes on in the capital. It may stay the hands of the more reactionary solons and lay the groundwork for future legislation of a better kind.”55 Certainly the newly formed lobbying group the California Committee for Fair Employment Practices was keen to relay an optimistic message to its sponsors. Tarea Hall Pittman claimed that the Sacramento mobilization was “very successful. We feel that we have impressed upon members of the Legislature the importance of taking official notice of employment discrimination in California and the need for corrective action.”56
The Committee for Fair Employment had no choice but to assume that the Republican Party was the cradle of power in California and that all lobbying had to concentrate on persuading its leadership to support the legislation. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, that the Republican establishment was not going to act. Dellums's attempts to take the matter to Washington got a polite brush-off, a representative of the Republican National Committee stating that the feeling there was that it was a “local matter.” His attempts to arrange a meeting with Governor Warren in early 1953 failed. His letter in March to California GOP National Committeeman McIntyre Faries smacked of desperation: “As one who wants to see the Republican Party retain its control in 1954, I thought it advisable to seek your help. The last Fair Employment Practices Bill before the California legislature was killed in the committee on a strictly partisan vote…. We are very conscious of the fact that this is a Republican state and that this bill can only be put through by the Republicans, and they shall receive full credit for what is done.”57 Unfortunately for the fair employment movement, the issue was a matter of party politics: both Republican senators refused to intervene, and the Committee on Governmental Efficiency and Economy of the State Assembly, in which the FEPC bill was bottled up, was dominated by conservative Republicans, all but two of whom were from wealthy, white districts of Los Angeles. The chairman of the committee, Albert I. Stewart, represented Pasadena, not an area in which FEPC ranked high on his constituents' wish list.58 All FEPC bills were in fact introduced by Democrats and representatives of organized labor and the NAACP: the principal effort in 1953 was AB 900, introduced by the Assembly's two African American members, Byron Rumford of Berkeley and Augustus Hawkins of Los Angeles. Dellums attempted to get the state and national Republican leadership on board in order to broaden the bill's appeal, claiming that Rumford and Hawkins had sponsored AB 900 “not because they are Democrats but because they are Negroes.”59 The very existence of an antidiscrimination movement in California, with its demand for governmental oversight over employment and economic relationships, unwittingly contributed toward a political polarization that meant party and political ideology would become more interconnected.
The fair employment campaign coincided with a growing effort on the part of business interests and their Republican allies to resist efforts to regulate the private economy in any way. Fair employment as a concept was bound up with bigger themes of economic relationships between employer and employee, between homeowner and prospective buyer, between private individuals and the state. It was simply impossible in the 1950s to disentangle economic and civil rights issues, let alone attempt to argue that party politics did not matter. The State Chamber of Commerce, Associated Farmers, and the Merchants Manufacturing Association of Southern California all spearheaded efforts to kill FEPC, and funded Republican assemblymen who killed it in committee. The California Real Estate Association, which would become an enormously powerful antiregulatory lobby group once Democrats gained power in Sacramento and attempted to prevent discrimination in house sales, understood early on the interrelationship between economic rights and civil rights. In a direct attack on the fair employment movement, an article in the Association's magazine in September 1953 observed that “tricky phrases with favorable meanings and emotional appeals are being used today to imply a distinction between property rights and human rights…. Expressed more accurately, the issue is not one of property rights versus human rights, but of the human rights of one person in the community versus the human rights of another.” If government could interfere in private economic relationships on the side of one individual's rights to a job or a home against another's rights to decide how to disburse the fruits of his company's profits or how to sell his private home, what other