Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ for decades and precipitate an angry white backlash accompanied by flight from public education.

      November: Downtown in Question

      Contractors in November began pouring concrete for the 50,000-seat Dodger Stadium in what was once the Chavez Ravine barrio. In February the LA Housing Authority, which had originally cleared the area for public housing, had quit-deeded it to the city council, who in turn leased it to Dodger owner Walter O’Malley for ninety-nine years. Epic resistance by residents had ended the previous year when the Arechiga family, the last holdouts, were dragged literally kicking and screaming from their home. Meanwhile the 5,000 or so low-income residents of Bunker Hill, L.A.’s famously noir slum on a hill, awaited the final court decree that would allow the Community Redevelopment Agency to begin condemnations and evictions. Opponents of the project claimed that “the city government by one means or another—mostly illegal and arbitrary—has tried to keep Bunker Hill as a slum for the purpose of keeping prices low” for eminent domain purchases.⁴⁴ Whatever the case, the hope of transforming the neighborhood and its Victorian cliff dwellings into a shining acropolis of expensive apartment buildings and modernist office towers had become a cargo cult to the old LA dynasties and institutions (including the University of Southern California), whose fortunes were sunk in declining downtown real estate. Their high command was the notorious “Committee of Twenty-Five,” headed by insurance executive Asa Call and backed to the hilt by Times publisher Norman Chandler.

      But a future “downtown renaissance” anchored by Bunker Hill redevelopment seemed mortally threatened by the simultaneous ground-breaking of Century City—an immense high-rise office and residential center being constructed by Manhattan mega-developer William Zeckendorf and Aluminum giant Alcoa on the former back lot of Twentieth Century Fox, just south of Beverly Hills. Despite the LA Times–engineered conservative counterrevolution of 1953, economic and cultural power in the eyes of many observers was inexorably shifting away from the WASPish and Republican central city toward the Jewish and more liberal Westside. From the perspective of the old power structure—or at least its reactionary majority—downtown was becoming dangerously encircled by minority neighborhoods, and any weakening of the color line, whether by increased minority political clout and/or residential integration, would only hasten the decline of their power.

      December: The Eastside

      Among large American cities outside the South, Los Angeles until 1970 had the highest proportion of white Protestants. It was not an accident: Los Angeles industrial boosters in the 1920s did not favor a large “trouble-making” labor force of immigrant Slavs, Jews and Italians as in eastern cities. Employment preference at the new auto and rubber branch plants, as well as in the skilled trades, went to sober working-class Protestants with a mortgage. The exceptions were sweatshop industries like garment, food processing and furniture, as well as fishing and casual labor. In the first half of the twentieth century, the city’s only truly multiethnic districts were San Pedro and Boyle Heights. The latter was L.A.’s “Brooklyn” (even subsuming a neighborhood named Brooklyn Heights) and had no majority ethnicity. The biggest population groups were Jews and Mexicans, followed by Japanese, Blacks, Armenians, Yugoslavs, Italians, Molokans (a persecuted Russian religious sect), and Oakies. In contrast to other parts of L.A. and to nearby white suburbs, Boyle Heights had gloriously integrated schools, playgrounds, swimming pools and even a local cemetery. Edward Roybal, the only Mexican to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council between 1881 and 1985, had been the candidate of a 1949 popular front that included Jews and Blacks, as well as Mexicans.

      By 1960, however, the Eastside had decanted most of its Jewish population to the Westside, and Boyle Heights, although still surprisingly diverse, was majority Mexican and would become progressively more so over time. Despite the concerted voter registration efforts over the previous decade of the Community Services Organization (one of its organizers was Cesar Chavez), Los Angeles’s Mexican population (260,389) possessed only marginal political clout. When Roybal went to Congress in 1962, it would be twenty-three years before it again had representation on the city council (Richard Alatorre in 1985).⁴⁵ Freeway construction had displaced significant numbers of Mexican voters in Roybal’s district, leaving it with a Black political majority who subsequently elected Gilbert Lindsay, the future “emperor of downtown,” and kept him in office for the next twenty-seven years. Moreover, the impact of the Mexican-American vote was sabotaged by political boundaries: 70,000 Eastsiders lived on the other side of Indiana Street (where the pueblo grid became the Jeffersonian) in a county enclave called East Los Angeles.

      Unincorporated East L.A. had insignificant influence over a county government administered by five supervisors with huge electoral districts. Incorporated, however, East L.A. might become a power base for Chicano political aspirations—an idea that caught fire in the spring and summer of 1960. One prominent advocate for cityhood, Father William Hutson of the Catholic Youth Organization, even suggested that it might aid the United States in the Cold War: “In a time when Fidelismo is making strides among Latin Americans … the incorporation of East Los Angeles would make the residents better Americans.”⁴⁶ In August the Committee to Incorporate East Los Angeles, led by attorney Joseph Galea, submitted a petition signed by 7,000 property owners to the LA County Board of Supervisors; in December the board heard contending arguments. The enemies of cityhood included business owners along Atlantic and Whittier Boulevards (majority Anglo) who feared higher taxes, as well as white homeowners from a new tract in the area’s northwest corner (West Bella Vista) who were unwilling to accept Mexican-American dominance.⁴⁷

      What blindsided proponents, however, was the decision of labor leaders, led by IBEW Local 11, to oppose cityhood without even hearing the arguments for incorporation. “We state without qualification,” Galea and another community leader told a press conference, “that COPE, as the strategic right arm of political action for the AFLCIO, has in Southern California consistently supported those interests that have opposed the development of Mexican-American leadership and the expansion of Mexican-American influence. We would like to feel that this is not due to racial bias or prejudice. However, it’s a little hard to try to figure otherwise.”⁴⁸ In the event, cityhood was narrowly defeated in April 1960.

      Ruben Salazar later wrote in the Times: “At a time in Southern California when new cities are popping up like toadstools after a rain, East Los Angeles—which perhaps had better reasons to incorporate than other areas because of its supposed homogeneity—turned down incorporation by 340 votes.”⁴⁹ (Over the next half century there would be three more closely fought but failed attempts at incorporation.) In contrast to Los Angeles’s Black community, with its national civil rights organizations and incipient alliances with liberals on the Westside, Mexican-Americans (10 percent of the population) had no municipal representation, few allies, and a solitary voice (the young Salazar) in the English-language media. After 1965, ethnic competition for War on Poverty funds destroyed what little remained of the Black-Mexican political alliance. Eastsiders, spurned by city hall and Sacramento, would wander in the political wilderness for the next generation.

Part I

       A New Breed

2

       Warden of the Ghetto: LAPD Chief William H. Parker

      During its January 1960 hearing, the US Commission on Civil Rights tepidly attempted to open a window on the police abuse of minorities in Los Angeles. Chief William H. Parker, notorious for his explosive behavior under questioning, immediately slammed it shut: “There is no segregation or integration problem СКАЧАТЬ