Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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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