Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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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