Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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      Torrance was no country club, but it was an excellent theater for confrontation. As its mayor unblinkingly put it: “Torrance has no Negro problem. We only have three Negroes in the city.” It was also a throne of sorts for Wilson, known as “Mr. Torrance,” since he had built more than one-third of the homes in the city.²¹ Indeed, it was one of the most dynamic local housing markets on the West Coast—with an astonishing 21,500 new units added in 1962 alone. ²² Founded as a union-free haven for Llewellyn Steel and the repair shops of the Pacific Electric Railroad in 1912, Torrance had grown in little more than a decade from a population of 20,000 to over 115,000.²³ Awarded the National Civic League’s “All-American City” designation in 1956, it was famed for its city-sponsored “Decency Crusade” and annual “Stamp Out Smut Month.”²⁴ This municipal inquisition, which targeted the Weekly People (the ancient paper of the Socialist Labor Party sold in news racks across the country) as well as Nabokov’s Lolita, disguised only thinly the city’s notorious vice industries. As Hal Keating of the Times recalled in 1965 after city hall scandals had rocked Torrance to its foundations, “A few years ago it wasn’t difficult to find a narcotics pusher, a high stakes crap game or a bookmaker in this city.” Its politicians, Keating might have added, were the recipients of lavish gifts from contractors and developers—a swimming pool in the case of the city manager. At the center of corruption was a police force that not only kept Blacks out of the subdivisions, but also broke strikes, protected gamblers, harassed surfers, spied on dissident city council members, chauffeured the chronic drunk who was mayor, and moonlighted not only as salesmen for Don Wilson, but on occasion as armed robbers and burglars.²⁵

      United Civil Rights Committee

      The next phase of CORE’s direct action in Torrance was subsumed, however, in a broader campaign of protest that tracked events in both California and Alabama. On April 2, after a vicious campaign heavily financed by the California Real Estate Association, a majority of Berkeley’s white residents voted to repeal the city’s new fair housing ordinance, which had been adopted after a long crusade by CORE, the NAACP and local Democratic Clubs.²⁶ But the initiative, as law scholars warned, went beyond repeal, effectively establishing “that housing segregation and housing discrimination should be legal in Berkeley.”²⁷ The Berkeley vote—a forewarning of the coming deluge a year later of Proposition 14, the statewide initiative to repeal the fair housing law—greatly stiffened the resistance of segregating builders like Wilson and segregated cities such as Torrance, while it forced the civil rights movement to place all of its chips on the fair housing bill that Assemblyman Byron Rumford, with strong support from Attorney General Mosk and Governor Brown, was trying to force through the legislature.²⁸ CORE chapters throughout California prepared to send demonstrators—and soon, campers—to Sacramento.

      April 3, meanwhile, was “Project C Day” (C for “confrontation”) in Birmingham. The SCLC leadership had kept the planning for the campaign as secretive as possible in order to prevent a preemptive strike by Bull Connor (now an angry lame duck after passage of a new city charter that abolished his position); but Governor Wallace and his lieutenants in Montgomery, with rich intelligence sources that might or might not have included the FBI, had already rehearsed tactics that they hoped would defeat Martin Luther King for good, including injunctions and a special law, only applicable in Birmingham, that would hike misdemeanor bails and hopefully break the almost-depleted SCLC treasury. In the event, the marches on city hall and sit-ins in downtown restaurants failed to generate the community momentum that King had expected, and he was soon jailed and out of contact with the day-to-day planning of the struggle. (Isolation, however, did prompt him to begin writing his famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” attacking white “moderates,” especially churchmen, who refused to support the civil rights movement.)²⁹

      Reverend James Bevel, who had originally come to the campaign from SNCC, assumed a larger role in the leadership and implored the older ministers to let him reinforce the protests with high school, even primary school, students—an idea they initially rejected. In the meantime, a white CORE member from Baltimore, a postman and ex-marine named William Moore, had been murdered outside Gadsden while on a solo march from Chattanooga to Jackson wearing a sandwich-board sign that said “End Segregation Now!” With national attention again briefly focused on Alabama, Bevel once more pleaded with his colleagues to allow the students to defy the injunction against demonstrations. “Any child old enough to belong to a church,” he argued, “should be eligible to march to jail.” King, torn and reluctant but without any viable alternative, finally “committed his cause to the witness of schoolchildren.”³⁰

      Newsweek called it “the Children’s Crusade.” On Thursday, May 2, wave after wave of Black kids poured exuberantly but peacefully into the streets of downtown Birmingham. Bull Connor’s startled cops managed to arrest 600 of the nearly 1,000 kids who had signed up to be arrested on the first day, but the commissioner of public safety’s stupefaction soon turned into fury. The next day, in full view of the press corps, he used fire hoses and police dogs on the student marchers, some of whom were only first graders. The photographs and films of these disturbing scenes and those that followed over the next few days focused the attention of the entire world on Alabama, making King (but, unfairly, neither Shuttlesworth nor Bevel) a universal hero. Birmingham’s business elite, known locally as the “Big Mules,” who for decades had pulled the strings of vigilantism to fight unionization as well as civil rights, were finally shaken out of their intransigence, and they quickly agreed to a phased integration of downtown lunch counters and sales jobs (schools would follow in the fall). When their former henchmen, the Ku Klux Klan, fought back with bombs, the Kennedys were forced to send federal troops to the city. The president, who had devoted a meager two sentences to civil rights in his earlier State of the Union address, asked Congress in mid June for a comprehensive ban on discrimination in public accommodation.³¹

      The unexpected breakthrough in Birmingham galvanized Black communities across the country to follow its example. “The police dogs and fire hoses,” the Eagle’s Grace Simons pointed out, “did more in a day to advance the movement of revolt than had a thousand sermons.”³² Indeed, if mass activism is measured by the sheer number of protests and arrests, the summer of 1963 was unquestionably the high point of the civil rights struggle. From June to September, the Department of Justice “catalogued a total of 1,412 separate civil rights demonstrations around the country.”³³ The national NAACP—faced with demands from its own youth for more militancy and fearing that CORE might seize civil rights leadership in key cities—uncharacteristically moved into a direct action mode in May.

      In Los Angeles, nonetheless, CORE was first to act, organizing a four-mile march on May 10 from Vernon and Central Avenues in South Central (the location of the legendary “Dolphin’s of Hollywood” record store) to city hall, where James Baldwin, then on a grueling CORE-sponsored speaking tour, told the crowd of 2,000 that “discrimination against the Negro is the central fact of American life.” With other speakers, he condemned the Justice Department for watching from the sidelines while Bull Connor’s storm troopers terrorized and jailed children. In a telegram sent from L.A., he reminded the attorney general that “those who bear the greatest responsibility for the chaos in Birmingham are not in Birmingham. Among those responsible are J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Eastland, the power structure which has given Bull Connor such license, and President Kennedy who has not used the great prestige of his office as the moral forum which it can be.”³⁴ (Two weeks later he aggressively confronted the younger Kennedy during a meeting at Harry Belafonte’s apartment in Manhattan. Bobby was so unsettled by the exchange that he ordered J. Edgar Hoover to tap Baldwin’s phone.)³⁵

      CORE suddenly found itself with scores of new members. “Birmingham,” one LA organizer wrote to the national office, “has done the recruiting for us.”³⁶ It also attracted unexpected new allies. The Cal Tech YMCA, for example, voted to participate in CORE’s campaign against housing segregation in Torrance and Dominguez Hills, while a group of young women teachers organized СКАЧАТЬ