Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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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