Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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on the frontline of the battle against segregation. The continuing eruption of student protest across the South reinvigorated the wounded movement led by Dr. King and was echoed in the North by picket lines, boycotts and the growth of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).3 Separately, the Nation of Islam grew rapidly, and the powerful voice of Malcolm X began to be heard nationally. Meanwhile, as the United States continued to install ICBMs in Europe, the growing revolt against nuclear weapons, as historian Lawrence Wittner put it, “signaled an end to the Cold War lockstep among sizable segments of the American population … the peace movement by 1960 had been reestablished as a significant social movement.” The same could be said for student activism and radical scholarship at some of the major Cold War universities. Progressive campus organizations such as SLATE at UC Berkeley (the precursor of the Free Speech Movement) and VOICE at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor dramatically broke the ice of student apathy, while journals like Studies on the Left (founded in 1959 in Madison) and New University Thought (Ann Arbor/Detroit 1960) gave voice to what everyone was soon calling the “New Left.”
A young generation was waking up in Southern California as well, despite the stunted character of political and intellectual life in most of the region, and the year 1960 previewed the social forces, ideas, and issues that would coalesce into “movements” over the course of the next decade. This chapter follows month by month the emergence of a new agenda for social change and introduces some of the key actors and organizations. “Agenda” in this case meant something more than a simple menu of issues and causes. Indeed, events and protests in 1960 also delineated the “issue of issues”: the dynamic tectonics of racial segregation that were shaping the future of Southern California. With the benediction of federal lenders and the full complicity of the real estate and construction industries, racially exclusive suburbanization was creating a monochromatic society from which Blacks were excluded and in which Chicanos had only a marginal place. The legal victories for civil rights won in the late 1940s and early 1950s had yet to yield edible fruit. In a booming regional economy, irrigated by billions of dollars of military spending, minorities possessed little more than low-skill toeholds in the region’s three major industries: aerospace/electronics, motion pictures, and construction. Los Angeles schools, meanwhile, segregated more students than any Southern city, and as far as most residents of South Central L.A. were concerned, the LAPD might as well have flown a Confederate battle flag outside its new “glass house.”
January: The US Commission on Civil Rights
In the summer of 1959 a psychologist named Emory Holmes bought a house in the northeastern San Fernando Valley from an engineer known only as “Mr. T.” The transaction would have been utterly unremarkable except that Holmes was Black, “Mr. T” was white, and the home was in a previously all-white neighborhood in Pacoima. According to an investigation by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Holmes’ family was welcomed in the following manner:
—A group of people with spades and shovels started digging up their garden, claiming a local paper had advertised a free plant giveaway.
—A drinking water company started delivery—though no order had been received for same.
—A television set repairman called at 11 pm one night without having been sent for.
—A taxi came to the house at 11:30 pm one night without having been called.
—An undertaker called at the home to pick up the body of the dead homeowner.
—Delivery of a Los Angeles newspaper was stopped, without any request from the Holmes.
—A veterinary doctor came to the house, saying that he was answering a call for a sick horse.
—A sink repairman paid an unsolicited home call.
—A termite exterminator showed up, though not requested.
—An unsolicited pool company agent called to install a pool.
—Someone painted on the walls of the house the epithet: “Black cancer here. Don’t let it spread!”
—Tacks were found in the driveway.
—A window was broken by a pellet from an air gun.
—Rocks were thrown at the house.
—A second undertaker showed up.
All of this happened during the first two weeks, and the harassment (the Holmeses cited one hundred separate incidents) continued relentlessly for months. However, they were luckier than the seller, “Mr. T,” whom white homeowners tracked in vigilante fashion. He was fired from his job as a direct result of the sale, and the LAPD had to be called in when a demonstration in front of his new home in Northridge threatened to turn into a mini-riot. Although “massive resistance” to integration was not an organized movement as in the South, it was a spontaneous reality everywhere in L.A.’s booming “Ozzie and Harriet” suburbs. As the NAACP underscored in testimony to the US Commission on Civil Rights on January 25 and 26, 1960, more than 10,000 people, many of them workers at the new GM Van Nuys Assembly Plant, were squeezed into the segregated Black part of Pacoima. Meanwhile there were only “15 to 18 Negro families [presumably all undergoing experiences similar to the Holmes family] in the entire San Fernando Valley, living in so-called “white neighborhoods.” Although apartment owners in the valley groaned about high vacancy rates, only one was found who was willing to rent to Blacks.4
In its Los Angeles hearings, the Commission on Civil Rights, established by Congress in 1957 after the Montgomery bus boycott, focused principally on the housing problems of minorities.5 Mayor Norris Poulson welcomed the commission with the assurance that Los Angeles had an “excellent record in the treatment of minority groups and in the lack of intergroup tension or friction.” He also patted himself on the back for establishing an advisory committee on human relations whose major priority was to work with minority newcomers “to raise their appreciation for sanitation.”6 After this comic relief, the commission accepted several hundred pages of dense reports and two days of testimony about housing segregation from the Community Relations Conference of Southern California, an umbrella group that included the NAACP, CORE, the Urban League, the Jewish Labor League, American Friends Service Committee, and the LA County Commission on Human Relations.
Assembly member Augustus Hawkins, the sole representative of Black Los Angeles (13.7 percent of the city’s population) in any elected office, told commissioners that because Blacks were unable to buy homes financed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), growth was accommodated through the widespread construction of rental units or second homes on single-family lots, resulting in overcrowding and blight. He also talked about hugely discriminatory fire and car insurance rates where such insurance was even available in inner-city areas. Eloise Kloke, regional director of the President’s Committee on Government Contracts, testified about the racial consequences of the suburbanization of employment: “We find where Government contractors are located in geographical areas in which Negroes are unable to obtain housing, Negroes are found within the work force not at all or in very small numbers.” In a submission, the Community Relations Conference cited the example of a medium-sized LA manufacturer that relocated to Placentia in Orange County. A single Black employee had succeeded in buying a home in the area, only to have vandals break into his house, cut up all the carpets and pour cement in the plumbing. This was soon followed by a Molotov cocktail hurled against the front window.7
The definitive presence at the hearings, however, was Loren Miller, publisher of the California Eagle and the nation’s leading legal expert on housing discrimination.8 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Miller had won a stunning series of legal victories—including (with Thurgood Marshall) the landmark case of Shelley v. Kraemer before the Supreme Court—that had overthrown the legality of the restrictive covenants that excluded Blacks, but also sometimes Chicanos and Jews, from more than 90 percent of housing tracts in Los Angeles. But these constitutional victories, Miller emphasized, so far had not opened a single suburb to Black homebuyers or altered the relentlessly discriminatory practices of realtors, developers, and savings and loan institutions. He told the commission of