Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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promptly hurled an ashtray at him, followed by a storm lamp and various other objects. St. Vincent was coldcocked, dazed and bleeding when the police arrived. Horne was fiercely unapologetic, and her defense of Black dignity was applauded in some mainstream newspapers as well as the Negro press. A few weeks later the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. visited LA churches to extoll nonviolence as “the most potent weapon of oppressed people in a struggle for freedom,” but not a few civil rights activists must have wondered if the occasional flying ashtray wasn’t a good idea as well.17
March: The Jive with Jobs
Johnny Otis, the “godfather of rhythm and blues,” seemed to be everywhere in 1960. He had his own weekly TV and radio shows, a famous band that showcased local talent, and a popular column in the Sentinel, the largest of the city’s three Black newspapers. In the early Fifties, however, his integrated concerts and dances had become the target of such intense LAPD harassment that he was forced to move them to an obscure venue in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. As an inadvertent result, the El Monte Legion Stadium became legendary as the birthplace of Chicano R&B. In 1958 “Willie and the Hand Jive” hit the top ten, introducing Otis to a new generation of teenagers. All the same, he was almost as ubiquitous as a civil rights activist as he was as a musician, songwriter, and R&B impresario. Recently he had picketed a downtown Woolworth’s in solidarity with the Southern lunch counter sit-ins, and he would soon file as a candidate in the race for the Sixty-Third District of the California State Assembly, with the support of Loren Miller’s Eagle.18
On the evening of March 14, he was at home with his four children, playing chess with a friend. His dog began to bark, and then the phone rang. “Listen, you nigger, if you keep on writing about niggers taking white men’s jobs, this is just a sample of what you’re going to get. Look out on your lawn.” There was a burning cross, Mississippi style. Otis grabbed a shotgun. Meanwhile in Compton, fifteen minutes later, rocks shattered the front windows of John T. Williams’s home, terrifying his three children. Williams, one of the great unsung heroes of the 1960s labor movement, was a Teamsters activist who had taken up the cause of Andrew Saunders, a veteran union member and beer truck driver recently arrived from Newark. Under the Teamsters constitution Saunders had the right to transfer into Los Angeles Beer Local 203 (and had been assured so over the phone), but when officials discovered he was Black, they sent him home. The Teamsters’ beer locals (bottlers as well as drivers) were already notorious for their opposition to Anheuser-Busch’s concession, after a nine-month consumer boycott by the NAACP, to allow Blacks to apply for jobs at its huge Van Nuys brewery.19 Williams, along with two other Black Teamsters, Richard Morris and Willie Herrón, strongly spoke up for Saunders at union hearings, which Otis attended and then wrote about in his Sentinel column. A few days before the attacks on Otis’s and Williams’s homes, Saunders received a death threat from the “White Citizens’ Council.”20 Although Saunders, unlike Emory Holmes, had the backing of courageous activists, his case demonstrated that resistance to equal employment opportunity in Los Angeles could become just as violent as opposition to open housing.
The jobs battlefield, however, was more complex than in the case of housing. Minorities sometimes had to fight unions as well as employers, and victories often proved hollow, as when Blacks and Chicanos were hired only to be segregated in low-skill and dangerous jobs. For example, there were approximately 1,500 Black autoworkers in L.A. circa 1960, but less than 40 craftsmen. The only Black studio employees were janitors and messengers. Even in factories or firms where minorities held skilled jobs, they were almost never seen in clerical or sales positions—an iron ceiling that especially affected minority women. Likewise, in public employment—the Postal Service, for example—integration tended to stop at the managerial level. Minority job markets, moreover, were ethnically segmented. Blacks were janitors, Mexicans dishwashers; Mexicans had an important foothold in the freight industry, Blacks none. Although their numbers were roughly equal in auto, rubber, building labor, meatpacking and the longshore, Mexicans, who had entered the manufacturing workforce earlier than Blacks, were more likely to hold skilled jobs or belong to craft unions. On the other hand, Blacks constituted a much larger percentage of the civil service workforce.21
Statutory relief was stubbornly elusive. In 1946, after Congress refused to renew the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), Augustus Hawkins had mobilized councils of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and chapters of the NAACP to support an initiative outlawing job discrimination by both employers and unions. Proposition 11, denounced by business groups, the Farm Bureau and the Times, was rejected by a stunning two-thirds majority of white voters.22 (Twenty years later the same proportion of the white vote would strike down the state’s new fair housing law.) Three further attempts to pass a law failed in the state senate. Meanwhile the Los Angeles City Council in the 1950s repeatedly rejected proposed municipal FEPC ordinances, although a major effort by a coalition of Jewish, Black and Mexican-American groups in 1958 came within one vote of success. They were opposed by the Chamber of Commerce, the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, and, again, the Times, whose political editor, Kyle Palmer, linked the proposed ordinance with the union shop as minority attacks on majority democracy.23
Without government oversight of hiring practices, only unions had the power to keep the door open to workers of color, but the 1949 national purge of the left wing of the CIO had been locally disastrous, removing many of Los Angeles’s most forceful advocates of fair employment and housing. Although the Packinghouse Workers’ large LA local remained a paragon of equality, Jim Crow had undiminished support in major craft unions such as the Machinists (who represented Lockheed and Vultee Aircraft workers), the super-nepotistic motion picture crafts, and the skilled construction trades. The Oil Workers, for their part, refused to implement their own nondiscriminatory constitution. Even the San Pedro local of the otherwise-left-wing International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was accused of systematic discrimination.24 As for the rapidly growing and increasingly powerful Teamsters, A. Philip Randolph, the legendary leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and architect of the wartime March on Washington Movement, had told a 1958 conference in Los Angeles that the conduct of its locals made Southern California “one of the worst spots in the United States for racial discrimination by unions.”25
Finally in 1959 there was a dramatic breakthrough in Sacramento, when “Big Daddy” Jesse Unruh, a Los Angeles state assembly member who chaired the crucial Ways and Means Committee, threw his weight behind FEPC legislation with the full support of recently elected Governor Pat Brown. The bill that Gus Hawkins and his Bay Area counterpart Byron Rumford had been pushing uphill for fourteen frustrating years finally become law. Unruh, a dirt-poor white Texan who had enrolled in USC after leaving the Navy in 1945, was brilliant, ruthless and genuinely committed to equal rights.26 After passage of the FEPC, confident that he could prevail over the conservative Senate, he authored a bill in his own name that straightforwardly banned discrimination by “all business establishments of every kind whatsoever.” The NAACP feared the bill was too radical to have any chance of passage, but Unruh, in a masterful demonstration of how to wield power in Sacramento, won the day. Still, it remained to be seen whether the nascent state FEPC could grow the teeth needed to actually enforce the new laws.27
Meanwhile the biggest industry in Los Angeles County was bleeding tens of thousands of entry-level semiskilled jobs. Blue-collar workers everywhere felt the tremors of the so-called Eisenhower Recession of 1958, but in Southern California the primary reason for layoffs was the advent of the Space Age. The metamorphosis of airframe manufacture, with its Detroit-like assembly lines, into the high-tech aerospace industry created an insatiable demand for engineers and technicians while sharply reducing the need for welders and assemblers. The transition was wrenching. Between 1957 and 1963, 80,000 workers were laid off in aircraft assembly while 90,000 new jobs were created in electronics and missiles. The rapid change in skill sets and required education raised new “nonracial” barriers to minority entry into the industry, as did the seniority system protecting older whites. Although minority engineers and technicians now faced few obstacles to employment (indeed they were migrating into L.A. from all parts of the country), it was little solace to those who had been fighting so long for a place on a North American or Lockheed assembly line. Affirmative action’s time had