Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ John Muir and John Adams junior highs. They’re not arrested, say the Negro teenagers.”²⁷

      Bugging the Mayor

      1961 was an election year, and Parker, universally acknowledged as the most powerful public official in the city, was serene in the certainty that Mayor Poulson, who had been hoisted into office in 1953 by the Times and the Committee of Twenty-Five, would be back for another term. There was no love lost between the chief and the mayor. In 1950 Parker had bugged Congressman Poulson’s hotel room while he was meeting with a lobbyist who later turned out to have left-wing sympathies, and the appliance that he gave Poulson as a gift soon became known as the “Red refrigerator.” As the “downtown mayor,” however, Poulson had learned to sing in the chief’s choir and never criticize him in public.²⁸ Neither took seriously the wild card candidacy of Sam Yorty, a washed-up former congressman who had moved from the far left of the Democratic Party to its extreme right. His current stock among Democrats was particularly low since he was supporting Nixon and had just published a pamphlet (I Cannot Take Kennedy) denouncing JFK for, among other things, his religion. Bookmakers put him barely in third place in a field of nine.

      But Yorty retained a constituency among what Nathanael West and Edmund Wilson in the 1930s had denominated the “Folks,” the now-elderly Midwesterners who had flocked to Los Angeles in the early twentieth century and then politically oscillated between the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s and Upton Sinclair’s socialistic EPIC movement in the 1930s. Many were once again Republicans, but the mayoralty was nonpartisan, and Nebraska-born Yorty, although perhaps no William Jennings Bryan, was a persuasive, folksy speaker who could articulate liberal and conservative values in the same breath. He also enjoyed support from anti-communist AFL unions, who still considered him a labor candidate. Nonetheless, the addition of geriatric Iowans and trade union conservatives still left Yorty far behind Poulson, who enjoyed endorsements from establishment figures across the political spectrum as well as from all the major newspapers.

      Yorty’s evolving strategy during the campaign was to build a broad coalition of city hall outsiders, with emphasis on three issues: ending trash separation (an issue that appealed to housewives), supporting an additional council seat for the Valley, and firing the police commission (it was widely believed that he intended to get rid of Parker as well).²⁹ Most of the Black elite continued to back Poulson, but Celes King, who had been one of the famous Tuskegee Airmen and now owned an important bail bond agency, came out for Yorty, as did a majority of rank-and-file Black voters.³⁰ On the Eastside he had ardent support from one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the community, Dr. Francisco Bravo, the owner of health clinics and a bank. Parker meanwhile responded true to form: spying on the campaign and aiding Poulson with information about Sam’s alleged criminal connections.³¹ Then on Memorial Day, a carousel operator in Griffith Park accused a Black youth of boarding without a ticket; when the young man contested this, he was wrestled to the ground by white police officers and put into a squad car. A crowd of Black youth surrounded the car, liberated the suspect, and were soon scuffling with the police. One officer opened fire; the crowd replied with bottles. As LAPD reinforcements arrived with their sirens screaming, the teenagers shouted back: “This is not Alabama!” Black voters agreed and saw the election largely as a referendum on Parker.³²

      Yorty’s victory was an equal shock to Downtown Republicans and Westside Democrats, introducing an unexpected element of populist instability into municipal politics. The Committee of Twenty-Five types were unsure of Yorty’s support for Bunker Hill redevelopment, and with Norman Chandler’s retirement a few months earlier (in favor of his son Otis), they no longer had a veteran general who could keep city hall in line. Westside Democrats, meanwhile, feared that Yorty’s popularity in the Valley could tip the 1962 gubernatorial election to Nixon. Although he would one day become Los Angeles’s equivalent to Alabama’s George Wallace, in the immediate aftermath of the election, Yorty remained true to his campaign promises to sack the police commission (most resigned) and restrain police abuse in minority communities. “I expect Parker,” the new mayor avowed, “to enforce the law and stop making remarks about minority groups. We’re not living in the South.”³³ He denounced the chief’s “Gestapolike” methods and appointed Herbert Greenwood, the former police commissioner and Parker foe, to the city housing authority.

      But Yorty’s challenge to L.A.’s alpha wolf was short lived: by spring he was in lockstep with Parker’s war against the Black Muslims (the subject of the next chapter) and singing only praises of the chief and his policies. In February 1963 the mayor’s archfoe on the council, Karl Rundberg (Pacific Palisades), startled the members with the claim that he had been present when “Parker entered the mayor’s office with a briefcase. When Parker came out of that two-hour meeting, they have been sweethearts ever since. I’d like to get that file Parker has on him and make that public.” Rundberg believed that the dossier detailed Yorty’s hidden stake in the rubbish business, but others were convinced it contained an account of “assignations with women on Sunset Boulevard.”³⁴

      In a cool note to the council, Parker dismissed the story and began planning a suitable revenge against Rundberg. That summer Bill Stout, a local TV commentator who often substituted for Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News, broadcast accusations that Rundberg in his earlier career in St. Louis had passed bad checks and represented corrupt stock manipulators. Stout said that he had received the information from a community group advocating Rundberg’s recall; the councilman countered that it had actually come from Yorty and his éminence grise, executive assistant Robert Coe.³⁵ It’s not hard to figure out where they got it.

3

       L.A. to Mississippi, Goddamn: The Freedom Rides (1961)

      In April 1947, shortly after the Supreme Court outlawed segregated seating on interstate bus routes, sixteen members of the Congress of Racial Equality and its mother organization, the radical-pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, boarded buses to test the implementation of the ruling in the upper South. CORE had been started in 1942, the brainchild of James Farmer, a charismatic Black FOR organizer from East Texas. With a handful of others, he proposed planting the seeds of a freedom movement that would employ nonviolent direct action against segregation and inequality.¹ Although the philosophy of CORE was Gandhian (satyagraha), its methodology—sit-ins, jail-ins, wade-ins, boycotts—derived as much from the IWW and the CIO as it did from the Indian freedom movement. The primary organizer of the 1947 project was Bayard Rustin, then an assistant to FOR executive director A. J. Muste—a living legend of the American Left. Splitting into two teams to test both Greyhound and Trailways, the CORE riders avoided major violence, but twelve were arrested for defying the “back of the bus” rule. They called it a “Journey of Reconciliation.” Fourteen years later Farmer revived the tactic, renaming it the “Freedom Ride.”

      The 1961 Freedom Rides relentlessly tested the mettle of civil rights activists against mob violence, police brutality, and a federal government unwilling to enforce federal laws. They also transformed CORE from a tiny pacifist sect into a major actor in the civil rights movement: the only one organized to launch direct action campaigns in both the North and the South. (SNCC and the SCLC, of course, were regional cadres, while the NAACP, with notable local exceptions, was primarily committed to political lobbying and judicial activism.) The Rides, of course, were more than just the Riders: they centrally involved Black campuses and communities in almost every Southern state, as well as tens of thousands of active supporters north of the Mason-Dixon Line, who marched in support demonstrations, organized hundreds of meetings, and raised funds to meet the extortionate bails set by segregationist judges. They also constituted a reservoir of volunteers to keep the Rides on the road. Los Angeles ranked second among CORE’s “fodder cities“ in the North (New York was СКАЧАТЬ