Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ federal judge. In nightmare scenes, more insurrection than riot, armed mobs murdered two people and wounded 200 of the marshals and national guardsmen defending Meredith. Thousands of regular troops finally quelled the uprising, but it was a strategic victory for the segregationists who had raised the cost of federal police action to a level that the White House was unwilling to pay.⁶

      In the North, on the other hand, CORE, mantled by the heroism of the Freedom Rides, succeeded in laying foundations for a score of direct action campaigns that would reach their crescendo in the summer of 1963. The problem for the still tiny and decentralized organization was deciding where to focus its new energies: public accommodation, employment, housing, or education? Local chapters made different choices. L.A. CORE vigorously supported John T. Williams and other Black teamsters in their ongoing fight to break down job barriers in the trucking industry and at Greyhound. Token hirings (two at Greyhound in 1962, for example), however, tended to take the steam out of the struggles.⁷ Although it continued to fight job discrimination, most notably in campaigns against the Bank of America in 1963 and several local restaurant chains in 1964, the group’s strategic focus shifted toward what the LA County Commission on Human Relations called “the keystone supporting the arch of segregation and discrimination”: racial exclusion in L.A.’s fast-growing suburbs.⁸ Banks and savings and loan associations, such as Howard Ahmanson’s behemoth Home Savings, were the ultimate decision makers, but developers and, most vocally, realtors were the public guardians of the white suburb. In October 1961, for instance, Charles Shattuck, former president of the National Association of Realtors and senior statesman of Los Angeles brokers, told an assembly committee that the Los Angeles Realty Board didn’t allow Black brokers to join because it wanted to “preserve neighborhoods” and would not “be a party to the salt and peppering of the whole community.” Moreover, he added acidly, “the Negro lacks social privileges because he has not earned them.”⁹ Shattuck, whose brother Edward was a patriarch of California Republicanism, had unwittingly thrown a gauntlet at CORE’s feet.

      The first target of “Operation Windowshop,” as CORE called it, was a new 567-home subdivision—Monterey Highlands—in the foothills of Monterey Park, a small city east of downtown near Los Angeles State College. A Black physicist, Robert Liley, down payment in hand, had tried to purchase a mid-market $25,000 house for his young family but was told the tract was sold out. CORE then sent a white couple, who were immediately offered a choice of available homes. The ensuing campaign lasted from February through April 1962, culminating in a thirty-five-day sit-in at the tract office whose participants included three veterans of the Freedom Rides. Montgomery Fisher, the developer, preferred to commit financial suicide rather than yield to protest and was foreclosed by his lenders. The new developer (actually, the original landowner) quickly turned over the keys to Liley and his wife. Although the effort had been exhausting, CORE received encouraging support from the tract’s white residents, some of whom were faculty at Cal State LA, as well as from Monterey Park councilman Alfred Song, a Korean-American lawyer who later became the first Asian in the California Assembly.¹⁰

      Such allies were sorely missed when CORE tried, in the fall, to open the Sun-Ray Wilmington tract, in the LA harbor area, where a Black postal worker and his wife, the McLennans, had been turned away. The house they had been told was sold was subsequently offered to a white CORE “tester,” Charlotte Allikas, who immediately put down a deposit to hold the home. “We decided to conduct a ‘Dwell-In,’” she explained, “to ensure the McLennans a chance to renegotiate their loan.” A CORE crew, led by Mari Goldman, housing chair, and Woodrow Coleman, vice chapter chair, occupied the property twenty-four hours a day until they were arrested.¹¹ After their release, they returned to the house, camped on the lawn (a “dwell-out”) and were arrested again. Two of the jailed activists were Freedom Riders Ronald La Bostrie and Charles Berrard, who may have been reminded of their previous encounters with “Southern hospitality” when Sun-Ray neighbors repeatedly harassed, assaulted, and stoned CORE members. But the Superior Court proved to be surprisingly sympathetic to the McLennans. Their counsel, ACLU senior attorney A. L. Wirin, won a rare ruling from Judge Alfred Gitelson that enjoined the developer from discriminating.¹² (Gitelson would later become the bête noire of the New Right for his historic 1970 decision in Crawford v. Board of Education that LA schools practiced segregation and must integrate immediately.) Although the builder-developer retaliated in early 1963 by suing CORE, the McLennans eventually moved into their (tarnished) dream home.¹³

      Simultaneously CORE was probing the defenses of one of the country’s largest suburban builders, Don Wilson. With 50,000 family homes under his belt by fall 1962, Wilson was a major presence throughout Los Angeles and Orange Counties, but the signature of his Gardena-based firm was most indelible in the South Bay.¹⁴ Roughly bordered by LAX in the North, the Harbor Freeway in the East, and the Port of Los Angeles in the South, this area included much of L.A.’s aerospace and oil industry, as well as some heavy industry—steel and aluminum—in Torrance. Wilson’s formidable political clout in county and local government was often employed to rezone undeveloped industrial parcels into more valuable residential land: an alchemy that converted cow pastures, auto junkyards and former marshes into lucrative ticky-tacky.¹⁵ His Leave-It-to-Beaver communities were anointed, almost tongue-in-cheek, with names seemingly more appropriate to Beverly Hills or Brentwood, such as “Southwood Riviera Royale,” the Torrance tract that would be the site of CORE pickets and mass arrests for the next year and a half. Given his regional prominence and scale of operation, Wilson was an obvious target; but he also recommended himself as a symbol of discrimination because he was building a colored-only subdivision—Centerview in Compton—to exploit the desperate demand from Black homebuyers while keeping his other tracts totally segregated.¹⁶ Although lionized regularly in the real estate section of the Times as one of the West’s most visionary developers, Wilson, as CORE saw him, was a builder and major shareholder in the “Hate Wall” that kept Blacks penned within a super-ghetto.¹⁷

      Demonstrations at Wilson’s housing developments in Torrance (white only), Compton (“the Jim Crow tract”) and Dominguez Hills (whites, Mexican-Americans and Asians, but no Blacks) began simultaneously at the end of July, but the confrontations were immediately most tense at the Dominguez site near 190th Street and Avalon Boulevard. The white residents as well as the Glendale–based American Nazi Party (a frequent presence at demonstrations throughout the 1960s) harassed picket lines and even attacked CORE chairman Earl Walter. Walter’s wife Mildred, later a celebrated writer of Black children’s books, recalled one incident: “About four cars drove up, full of white men dressed like Nazis. They had on Nazi uniforms, including the swastika … and their placards read, ‘Ovens too good for niggers,’ ‘Niggers, go back to the trees,’ ‘You monkeys, go back to the trees.’” After one of her fellow protestors, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, left because his anger was overcoming his commitment to nonviolence, Walter asked herself: “‘Why am I doing this? Why do I want people thinking that I want to live beside white people? Why am I here?’ And somebody start[ed] singing, ‘Oh, Freedom’ … And I thought, ‘Well, I’m not here because I want to live beside white people. I’m here because I want us to be able to decide where it is we want to live, and we can have the freedom to do that.’”¹⁸

      When CORE members staged a sit-in at the Dominguez project office, two of them were kicked and beaten by one of Wilson’s parttime salesmen, a Torrance police sergeant. In Compton, by contrast, community members applauded a fifty-mile march to the picket line by twenty CORE members from the San Fernando Valley, and some became regular members of the protest.¹⁹ That fall both James Farmer and Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers came to L.A. with stirring stories of the South to bolster local CORE fighters, and after a half year of demonstrations, California Attorney General Stanley Mosk sued Wilson under the Unruh Civil Rights Act of 1959 for six separate instances where Black homebuyers were turned away from Dominguez. Gitelson was again the judge and quickly indicated that he had little sympathy with the argument made by Wilson’s lawyers that the state’s highest law officer didn’t have jurisdiction in such cases. He issued a temporary restraining order against any further discrimination. While Wilson appealed СКАЧАТЬ