Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ lives of Bass and Moreno are particularly instructive in understanding how, spatial temporal relations can be central to social justice.⁵² Bass and Moreno turned the material and discursive spaces available to them—print media and spaces of Latina congregation to name just two—into crucial terrains of struggle. They were not the first to do so, but they served as crucial links in the chain that connects the sites of struggle foundational to Black and Brown radical traditions. For example, Bass’s determination to use the Eagle to spread the word of her disappointment in 1949 inspires remembrance of two further examples of the ways that information was disseminated in aggrieved communities. First, one of the more understudied uses of space and mobility are those that were employed by Black Pullman porters in the 1930s and 1940s. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who would revolutionize Black social protest under A. Philip Randolph’s leadership, distributed African-American newspapers along their routes and often became conduits of information themselves. Second, a story C.L.R. James related after a meeting with Jomo Kenyatta, first president of independent Kenya, illuminates the role of newsprint as a social space. “In 1921,” James recounted, “Kenyan nationalists, unable to read, would gather round a reader of [Black nationalist leader Marcus] Garvey’s newspaper [The Negro World] . . . and listen to an article two or three times. Then they would run various ways through the forest, carefully to repeat the whole, which they had memorised, to Africans hungry for some doctrine which lifted them.”⁵³ Connecting the unofficial spaces created by Kenyans in the 1920s and Black Americans in the 1940s reflects a trans-historical, trans-generational, and trans-communal tradition among aggrieved communities: identifying traditional vehicles for use in extraordinary projects of intervention. When Bass’s mobility was curtailed, the Eagle became a proxy of sorts, an embodied spokesperson for the repression of spatial mobility. Bass rejected the silencing actions of government officials in this particular case by exercising an alternative means of moving through space, and because her own physical mobility was contained the urgency of her message was heightened. Bass also used the Eagle to forge a politics of interracial solidarity in postwar Los Angeles when those coalitions were systematically—and often violently—suppressed.

      Bass’s actions against the use of restrictive covenants to contain undesirable racial groups in particular areas of LA likewise represented an assertion of spatial entitlement in the context of asset acquisition, an articulation of the right to be spatially present and economically secure in the city and the nation. This is an articulation born of Blacks’ and Latinos’ widespread and long-standing inability to claim landed assets or permanent residence in a particular location. This struggle was a multifaceted undertaking that relied on intimate knowledge of the material effects of economic exclusion and debilitation. As one historian explains, homeownership is a fundamental source of wealth, and the ability to choose residential locations:

      [It] plays a crucial role in determining educational opportunities . . . because school funding based on property tax assessments in most localities gives better opportunities to white children than to children from minority communities. Opportunities for employment are also affected by housing choices, especially given the location of new places of employment in suburbs and reduced funding for public transportation. In addition, housing affects health conditions, with environmental and health hazards disproportionately located in minority communities.⁵⁴

      

      Bass refused to accept the idea of restrictive covenants as the sole burden of African Americans, explaining “since [this] question concerns such minorities as Asians, Mexican-Americans, Indians, the Jewish, Italian and Negro people, our discussion of the Negro people’s struggle against restrictive covenants applies to the struggle of all minority groups.”⁵⁵ In rejecting the issue as a single-group problem, Bass also revealed—and challenged—a sinister by-product of postwar spatial racism: interethnic tensions between Black and Brown peoples.

      For example, Watts was fairly racially balanced among whites, Blacks, and Mexican Americans. Originally part of a large Mexican land grant, the area that became Watts was first subdivided in the 1880s. Mexican laborers moved into the area to work on the Southern Pacific Railroad, forming the village of Tujuata. When Watts was incorporated in 1907, Tujuata disappeared. Blacks who moved into the area settled in a district called Mudtown, which, as part of Watts, was annexed by Los Angeles in 1926.⁵⁶ Later, the Federal Housing Administration sought to contain Blacks who were part of the increased WWII and postwar migration to Los Angeles and used the system of racially restrictive housing covenants; these covenants continued legally until 1948 (and de facto thereafter)⁵⁷ to designate Watts a “Negro area.” Between 1940 and 1960, therefore, the Black population of Watts increased eightfold. After WWII, returning Mexican veterans became resentful about the striking changes that had occurred during their absence, and in some cases they threatened to band together to expel the “Negro invaders.”⁵⁸

      Writing in 1947, Lloyd H. Fisher observed that there was “for the Negro and Mexican, inequality in income, employment opportunity, educational opportunity and housing, for the white, ignorance, prejudice, insecurity and a thousand and one personal frustrations. Add to these an irresponsible press, the policies of real estate agencies and mortgage companies and a prejudiced police force.” In Fisher’s formulation, these social forces heightened residential tensions between Black and Brown people, particularly as returning Mexican veterans—resentful over city officials’ selection of Watts as “an area of Negro segregation”—perceived the influx of Blacks into portions of Watts as a threat to employment and residential opportunities.⁵⁹

      The forced removal of Japanese Americans, restrictive covenants, industrialization, suburbanization, and migration patterns all affected the spatial geography and cultural politics of minority experiences, but they also gave rise to an interrogation of official postwar narratives of democracy. Bass rejected the divisiveness engendered by economic racism. She considered how civil disobedience and other forms of legal resistance might expose and question such practices.

      Regina Freer locates the beginning of Bass’s housing activism in the California Eagle’s organized response to a Black woman’s eviction from her home by her racist neighbors in 1914: Bass led a discussion with Black club women on the issue, and “‘that evening a brigade of a hundred women marched to the Johnson home. The women were ultimately successful in getting the sheriff to help Mrs. Johnson back into her home.”⁶⁰

      Bass remained involved in Black homeownership rights from this point forward, but her historic battle against restrictive covenants took full shape in the 1940s, as Black migration to Los Angeles increased and as white xenophobia received legal sanction through city officials’ containment of the growing Black community into 5 percent of the city’s residential space. Bass’s efforts and those of the LA National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) waged the restrictive covenant issue all the way to the California Supreme Court. Bass and her contemporaries in this struggle maintained pressure on local and federal authorities, in part shifting their focus to a fight for public housing and rent control because of their belief that aggrieved minority groups had the right to occupy the literal and figurative space of Los Angeles.

      The strategic philosophies of Luisa Moreno’s activism likewise provide us with understandings of the way that space can be used to both suppress and empower workers and women. Moreno’s work in the cigar rollers union in Texas, with the SLDC in Los Angeles, and with El Congreso in the Southwest constitutes a recuperation of the dignity and humanity of working-class women, namely Brown and Black women, and more broadly, the Mexican-American community. Her demand that Black and Brown women take themselves, and be taken, seriously suggests a symbolic spatial assertion that bell hooks articulated in her seminal book Feminism: From Margin to Center.⁶¹ Moreno’s legitimation of the production of valuable knowledge from the margin made it “much more than a site of deprivation . . . it [was] also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.” Moreno modeled one of the basic themes of Chicana feminism—leadership that empowers others—decades before people articulated it in those terms.⁶² Moreno, like Emma Tenayuca, Dorothy Healey, СКАЧАТЬ