Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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       Setting the Agenda (1960)

      E. P. Thompson, one of the auteurs of the New Left, characterized the 1950s as the “apathetic decade” when people “looked to private solutions to public evils.” “Private ambitions,” he wrote, “have displaced social aspirations. And people have come to feel their grievances as personal to themselves, and, similarly, the grievances of other people are felt to be the affair of other people. If a connection between the two is made, people tend to feel—in the prevailing apathy—that they are impotent to effect any change.”¹ 1960 will always be remembered as the birth year of a new social consciousness that repudiated this culture of moral apathy fed by resigned powerlessness. “Our political task,” wrote the veteran pacifist A. J. Muste that year, “is precisely, in Martin Buber’s magnificent formulation, ‘to drive the plowshare of the normative principle into the hard soil of political reality.’”² The method was direct action, nonviolent but unyielding.

      First behind the plow were Black students in the South, whose movement would name itself the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The lunch counter sit-ins in February began as quiet protests but soon became thunderclaps heralding the arrival of a new, uncompromising generation on the frontline of the battle against segregation. The continuing eruption of student protest across the South reinvigorated the wounded movement led by Dr. King and was echoed in the North by picket lines, boycotts and the growth of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).³ Separately, the Nation of Islam grew rapidly, and the powerful voice of Malcolm X began to be heard nationally. Meanwhile, as the United States continued to install ICBMs in Europe, the growing revolt against nuclear weapons, as historian Lawrence Wittner put it, “signaled an end to the Cold War lockstep among sizable segments of the American population … the peace movement by 1960 had been reestablished as a significant social movement.” The same could be said for student activism and radical scholarship at some of the major Cold War universities. Progressive campus organizations such as SLATE at UC Berkeley (the precursor of the Free Speech Movement) and VOICE at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor dramatically broke the ice of student apathy, while journals like Studies on the Left (founded in 1959 in Madison) and New University Thought (Ann Arbor/Detroit 1960) gave voice to what everyone was soon calling the “New Left.”

      A young generation was waking up in Southern California as well, despite the stunted character of political and intellectual life in most of the region, and the year 1960 previewed the social forces, ideas, and issues that would coalesce into “movements” over the course of the next decade. This chapter follows month by month the emergence of a new agenda for social change and introduces some of the key actors and organizations. “Agenda” in this case meant something more than a simple menu of issues and causes. Indeed, events and protests in 1960 also delineated the “issue of issues”: the dynamic tectonics of racial segregation that were shaping the future of Southern California. With the benediction of federal lenders and the full complicity of the real estate and construction industries, racially exclusive suburbanization was creating a monochromatic society from which Blacks were excluded and in which Chicanos had only a marginal place. The legal victories for civil rights won in the late 1940s and early 1950s had yet to yield edible fruit. In a booming regional economy, irrigated by billions of dollars of military spending, minorities possessed little more than low-skill toeholds in the region’s three major industries: aerospace/electronics, motion pictures, and construction. Los Angeles schools, meanwhile, segregated more students than any Southern city, and as far as most residents of South Central L.A. were concerned, the LAPD might as well have flown a Confederate battle flag outside its new “glass house.”

      January: The US Commission on Civil Rights

      In the summer of 1959 a psychologist named Emory Holmes bought a house in the northeastern San Fernando Valley from an engineer known only as “Mr. T.” The transaction would have been utterly unremarkable except that Holmes was Black, “Mr. T” was white, and the home was in a previously all-white neighborhood in Pacoima. According to an investigation by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Holmes’ family was welcomed in the following manner:

      —A group of people with spades and shovels started digging up their garden, claiming a local paper had advertised a free plant giveaway.

      —A drinking water company started delivery—though no order had been received for same.

      —A television set repairman called at 11 pm one night without having been sent for.

      —A taxi came to the house at 11:30 pm one night without having been called.

      —An undertaker called at the home to pick up the body of the dead homeowner.

      —Delivery of a Los Angeles newspaper was stopped, without any request from the Holmes.

      —A veterinary doctor came to the house, saying that he was answering a call for a sick horse.

      —A sink repairman paid an unsolicited home call.

      —A termite exterminator showed up, though not requested.

      —An unsolicited pool company agent called to install a pool.

      —Someone painted on the walls of the house the epithet: “Black cancer here. Don’t let it spread!”

      —Tacks were found in the driveway.

      —A window was broken by a pellet from an air gun.

      —Rocks were thrown at the house.

      —A second undertaker showed up.

      All of this happened during the first two weeks, and the harassment (the Holmeses cited one hundred separate incidents) continued relentlessly for months. However, they were luckier than the seller, “Mr. T,” whom white homeowners tracked in vigilante fashion. He was fired from his job as a direct result of the sale, and the LAPD had to be called in when a demonstration in front of his new home in Northridge threatened to turn into a mini-riot. Although “massive resistance” to integration was not an organized movement as in the South, it was a spontaneous reality everywhere in L.A.’s booming “Ozzie and Harriet” suburbs. As the NAACP underscored in testimony to the US Commission on Civil Rights on January 25 and 26, 1960, more than 10,000 people, many of them workers at the new GM Van Nuys Assembly Plant, were squeezed into the segregated Black part of Pacoima. Meanwhile there were only “15 to 18 Negro families [presumably all undergoing experiences similar to the Holmes family] in the entire San Fernando Valley, living in so-called “white neighborhoods.” Although apartment owners in the valley groaned about high vacancy rates, only one was found who was willing to rent to Blacks.⁴

      In its Los Angeles hearings, the Commission on Civil Rights, established by Congress in 1957 after the Montgomery bus boycott, focused principally on the housing problems of minorities.⁵ Mayor Norris Poulson welcomed the commission with the assurance that Los Angeles had an “excellent record in the treatment of minority groups and in the lack of intergroup tension or friction.” He also patted himself on the back for establishing an advisory СКАЧАТЬ