Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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built from 1950 to 1954 in the Los Angeles area were open to non-Caucasian occupancy.” More recent research by the Los Angeles Urban League concluded that less than 1 percent of new housing between 1950 and 1956 was occupied by minorities. In addition, “most of the housing that is open to non-Caucasian occupancy is located in subdivisions built expressly for Negro occupancy.” Miller reminded commissioners the contemporary ghetto was as much the deliberate product of federal policy as the organic result of local racism. Since the 1930s the FHA had underwritten exclusive practices and was continuing to subsidize mortgages in racially-restricted developments while allowing lenders to limit loans in minority areas.9
The result of government-sanctioned discrimination during the 1950s had been the creation of a super-ghetto: 75 percent of Los Angeles County’s Black population concentrated in the metropolitan core between Olympic Boulevard on the north and Artesia Boulevard on the south.10 Alameda Street, the old highway and railroad route to the harbor, was called the “cotton curtain” because Blacks could not live or be seen at night in any of the dozen or so industrial suburbs to its east. A clan of white gangs, the “Spookhunters,” patrolled racial boundaries, attacking Blacks with seeming impunity. Meanwhile the western edge of Black residence was roughly Figueroa Street on the south, but northward, at Manchester Boulevard, it began to bulge westward, ultimately as far as Crenshaw in the latitude of Slauson Avenue. South Central L.A. also had an internal physical and socioeconomic boundary: The Harbor Freeway, parallel to Main Street and completed as far south as 124th Street by 1958, “had created a massive structural and symbolic barrier between the Eastside and Westside [Black] communities.”11 By 1960, the old “main stem” on Central Avenue was in decline, middle-class Blacks were moving as far west as Crenshaw, and Western Avenue had become the business and entertainment axis of the Black community.
Thus Black Los Angeles expanded, with continuous friction and controversy, through white flight and “block busting” on its southern and western peripheries where the housing stock dated primarily from 1910 to 1940. The chief hot spots of white resistance were the city of Compton (south of Watts), where a racial transition had already begun, and all-white Inglewood, where police and residents were mobilized to defend the city’s eastern and northern boundaries against Black homebuyers. (Only the Crenshaw area, with its mixture of Jews, Japanese-Americans and Blacks, qualified as a true multiracial community.)
Apart from South Central Los Angeles, there were also historical Black neighborhoods in Pasadena, Santa Monica, Venice, Long Beach, and Monrovia in the San Gabriel Valley—each of which could be accurately described as a ghetto. The rest of the older secondary cities—like Torrance, Hawthorne, Burbank and, above all, Glendale—were zero-Black-population “sundown towns,” where the local police enforced illegal curfews on Black shoppers and commuters. Meanwhile in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, tens of thousands of acres of citrus groves had been bulldozed over the previous decade to create huge new commuter dormitories such as West Covina (which by 1960 already had a population of 50,300) and La Puente (pop. 25,000). It was a mirror image of the segregated San Fernando Valley, as were the hundreds of racially exclusive new home tracts in the southwest (the South Bay) and southeast quadrants of LA County.12 According to John Buggs of the LA County Commission on Human Relations, segregation was rapidly increasing: between 1950 and 1959 the percentage of nonwhites in thirty-four of the fifty-four county cities had declined; in twelve cases, the decrease was absolute.13
While realtors and white homeowners within the Los Angeles city limits confronted the threat—albeit still very small in 1960—that growing minority political clout might eventually pry open housing markets, the county suburbs were building invulnerable walls through home rule. Indeed, as political scientist Gregory Weiher illustrated in a 1991 study, after restrictive covenants had been ruled unconstitutional, the separate municipal incorporation of new suburbs (a practice upheld by California and federal courts) became the most effective method for excluding minorities.14 Lakewood was the pioneer. Faced with annexation by Long Beach in 1953–54, this mega-development of 17,500 new homes, Southern California’s counterpart to the Levittowns erected on the East Coast, had struck a deal to lease municipal services (police, fire, libraries, water, sewage, and so on) from the county. The so-called Lakewood Plan, subsequently reinforced by a law allowing municipalities to keep a portion of locally generated sales taxes, spurred thirty similar incorporations between 1954 and 1970. Through their control over land use, these “contract cities” could ensure residential homogeneity (for example, by excluding apartment construction), while attracting sales tax generators like malls and auto dealerships that enabled many to eliminate local property taxes.
“Promiscuous incorporations,” wrote two UCLA researchers, also prevented “the equalization of tax resources among local units of government. Areas possessing high property valuations, such as Commerce, Industry, and Irwindale, have incorporated as cities and have sought to withdraw from arrangements that distributed their taxable resources so as to assist less favored communities.” The Lakewood Plan quickly became the utopia of pioneer “public choice” theorists like Charles Tiebout, Robert Warren and Vincent Ostrom, who argued that a large number of competing local governments created a “quasi-market” that optimized consumer choice in public goods. Residents could, in theory, “vote with their feet” for the municipality with the best schools, the lowest taxes and the highest likely appreciation of home values. But minorities had no “foot vote” and could rarely use home equity to buy up into preferred housing; thus their capacity for wealth accumulation through homeownership was extremely limited. The political fragmentation of metropolitan Los Angeles, in other words, was an insidious and largely unassailable form of disfranchisement; one member of a 1959–60 commission studying Southern California’s urban issues aptly called it “apartheid.”15
February: Don’t Mess with Lena
At the beginning of February four Black college freshmen reignited a faltering Southern civil rights movement by sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and politely trying to order coffee and donuts.16 Two weeks later, as the sit-in protests spread wildfire-like across the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia, Lena Horne and her husband Lennie Hayton stopped by the Luau restaurant in Beverly Hills for a late-night meal with Lena’s old friend Kay Thompson, a big band singer who had recently won new fame with her Eloise children’s books (modeled after Thompson’s goddaughter, Liza Minnelli). Decorated like a stage set for South Pacific, the Luau on North Rodeo Drive was a popular hangout for the movie colony.
In the midst of a two-week run at the Cocoanut Grove, the 46-year-old Horne was one of the most famous entertainers in the world. Queen of the nightclub circuit, she moved seamlessly between the Moulin Rouge in Paris and the Sands in Vegas, thrilling audiences with her definitive interpretations of American standards. Since her teenage days in the chorus line at the Cotton Club in New York, moreover, her spectacularly integrated love life (including liaisons with Joe Louis, Orson Welles, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra, among others) had been the bread and butter of Hollywood gossip columns.
But despite occasional exposés, few white Americans realized that this regal woman—who never forgave Sinatra for once being rude to Eleanor Roosevelt—was also a militant Black progressive whose close friends included Paul Robeson and Harlem Communist leader Ben Davis. Because of her stubborn refusal to disavow these connections, she had been blacklisted by MGM, cheated out of Broadway roles that been written for her, and only appeared on television because Ed Sullivan, otherwise a noted conservative, had been willing to battle his network bosses. Within the year she would be fundraising for the young Southern activists behind the sit-ins, now coalesced as SNCC.
Back at the Luau, Thompson was late, so Hayton went to phone her while Horne waited for the food. At a neighboring table, a few feet below hers and hidden by a screen, a drunken 38-year-old white businessman named Harvey St. Vincent was impatient with the service. A waiter explained that he would be back as soon as he had served “Miss Horne’s table.” (Her fifteen-year marriage to Hayton, a white arranger, was still something of a public secret.) St. Vincent exploded. “Where is Lena Horne, anyway? She’s just another nigger.” When she leaned over the partition and confronted him, he answered, “Well, all niggers look alike to me and that includes you.” According to one account, he also called