Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ wracked since May by accusations that it had been infiltrated by Communists; and the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs, the reliable old guard in any peace or civil rights demonstration. A new group also announced itself at the demonstration: the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth wing of the Socialist Workers Party (the main Trotskyist group in the United States). YSA members would become indefatigable, if sometimes sectarian, builders of the local and national anti-war movements from 1965 onward.

      The big event, however, was a rally of 7,500 people at the Shrine Auditorium, which Loren Miller described in the Eagle as the largest Negro political gathering since the 1940s. The Eagle had polled a sample of the community, finding universal opposition to LBJ and some support for Kennedy. Stevenson, however, remained far and away the most popular choice. When Kennedy arrived at the Shrine, the crowd, which had been jeering the names of Truman and Johnson, continued to boo, very disconcertingly, as he entered the auditorium. In contrast, “tumultuous, whistling standing ovations were given to Senator Hubert Humphrey [far down the list in the delegate count] and later, Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King.” Powell, Harlem’s outlaw congressman, stole the show, as he almost always did with urban Black audiences. After the speeches and lofty promises, 5,000 people marched down Figueroa to the Sports Arena, where Democratic Party chairman Paul Butler declared, “We dedicate ourselves to the elimination of all discriminatory practices at the earliest possible moment without violence.” Black voices chanted, “No! No! Now—not later!”³⁷

      August: Moving Mountains and Neighborhoods

      In August the California Division of Highways began to excavate the tonnage equivalent of the Panama Canal in the Sepulveda Pass between West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. This segment of the San Diego Freeway—supplanting Sepulveda Boulevard and its infamous “Dead Man’s Curve”—would uncork the worst traffic bottleneck in Southern California and humanize (for a few years at least) the drive between the aerospace plants around LAX and the homes of engineers and technicians in Sherman Oaks and Reseda. If the giant Caterpillar earthmovers were symbols of liberation to middle-class commuters, they had more sinister significance for the communities they divided or destroyed. Ground zero of residential displacement in Southern California was the star-shaped ring of freeways around downtown that sliced the Eastside into half a dozen pieces, consuming 20 percent of its land area and forever enshrouding its playgrounds and schools in carcinogenic pollution. The great stacked interchanges, still engineering wonders of the world in the early 1960s, had been sited on residential and park land to avoid any conflict with adjacent railroad yards or the huge Sears Roebuck distribution center in Boyle Heights. In any event, inner-city residential property was easier to condemn, cheaper to buy and risked less of a political backlash.³⁸

      Affluent neighborhoods, on the other hand, had dismaying clout. Although the Division of Highways wanted to construct freeways down Olympic Boulevard, across Beverly Hills, and through Laurel Canyon, wealthy homeowners and celebrities eventually nixed the latter two projects and forced planners to reroute the Santa Monica Freeway southward to avoid country clubs and exclusive white neighborhoods. Instead of tony white Cheviot Hills, “Sugar Hill,” the elite Black neighborhood in West Adams, was sacrificed to the bulldozers, while angry Black and Chicano residents of Santa Monica’s Pico neighborhood protested throughout fall 1960 against the demolition of most of their homes by a final alignment. By its opening in 1965 the Santa Monica Freeway had displaced 15,000 people; all the freeways, perhaps 150,000.³⁹ The priorities of suburban mobility translated into housing disasters for segregated inner-city populations, whose own transport situation simultaneously deteriorated with the extinction of metropolitan rail transit. 1960 was the last full year of operation for Pacific Electric’s famous Red Cars along their remaining route from downtown L.A. to downtown Long Beach. They would trundle down the tracks for the last time in April 1961. The streetcars would disappear a few years later, and their diesel-powered replacements never fully compensated for the loss of faster electric transit routes to work and shopping.

      September: Toxic Bohemia

      Stinking, muck-filled canals; tired pumpjacks dribbling oil; abandoned bungalows; semi-derelict arcades; kids shooting heroin in the alleys; “hobo jungles”; beatnik coffeehouses; outlaw bikers—Mayor Norris Poulson said it was finally time to clean up Venice, L.A.’s dilapidated Coney Island. The city would begin by chasing the bums off the beach and scouring the toxic canals. The first goal dovetailed nicely with the LAPD’s war on nocturnal beach parties and nonconformists, while the second—so the street maintenance department told the mayor—would just require flushing out the canals with seawater. When the ocean gates were opened, however, the reaction of the seawater with the bacteria and organic matter in the stagnant canals produced, the Times reported, a “vile gas … peeling paint off of many homes and changing colors of others.” Within a few days, the gas had seeped through kitchen and bathroom vents and was discoloring interior walls and furniture. At least 150 homes were damaged, and stunned residents found it difficult to accept official reassurances that chemicals that dissolved paint would not harm their children and pets. They sued the city.⁴⁰

      The gas attack, however, was not an unmitigated disaster. Venice’s toxic pollution raised the costs and slowed the pace of redevelopment, thus keeping rents down and making it the most affordable beach community in California until the early 1970s. Lawrence Lipton’s The Holy Barbarians, published in June 1959, had advertised Venice as the counterpart of San Francisco’s North Beach or Greenwich Village, a paradise of sexual promiscuity, mind-expanding drugs, and stream-of-consciousness poetry. In fact, as John Arthur Maynard shows in his history of the Beats in Southern California, Venice bohemia in the 1950s had never involved more than thirty or forty people, most of whom had passed from the scene by 1960. But Lipton was a superb booster, and the Holy Barbarians became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.⁴¹ In the early Sixties the Venice West coffeehouse, owned by John and Anna Haag, became a hub for a growing radical community of artists, folk singers, communist carpenters, runaways, blacklisted writers, war resisters, and, of course, scribblers of all kinds. Police harassment, as we shall see, was unremitting, but so was community resistance. Venice’s new golden age was still to come.

      October: The Immovable Object

      This month local American Federation of Teachers leader Henry Zivitz accused the LA County Board of Education of blatant discrimination for refusing to assign or transfer Black teachers to schools in majority white areas. “Our present policy,” he asserted, “helps to perpetuate a de facto segregation of teachers to the degree that in vast areas … the number of Negro teachers may be counted on the fingers of one hand, while in other areas, the concentration of Negro teachers bears a disturbing relationship to the concentration of Negro students.” His charges echoed those made a year earlier by the Black educator Wilson Riles to the California Advisory Committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights. According to Riles, in the midst of an acute teacher shortage, there were hundreds of fully credentialed Black teachers who could not find jobs. Rather than hiring experienced Blacks to teach in suburban schools, California was giving thousands of provisional credentials to unqualified whites, half of whom had not yet completed college. “Out of the 108 school districts in Los Angeles County,” Riles had reported, “only 12 employ Negroes.” (One district, Hermosa Beach, also refused to hire Jews.)⁴²

      As for school integration, the school board insisted that the racial composition of schools was strictly a reflection of housing patterns; in any event, it no longer collected data about such matters. But as UCLA history professor John Caughey would repeatedly point out: “On the residential segregation of minorities largely brought on by court-enforced restrictive covenants, the school authorities superimposed its set of enrollment regulations that implacably resulted in segregated schooling.” Although a small minority of schools would meet latter-day standards of “racial balance,” including Dorsey High School in the Crenshaw District, the overall racial isolation of students was extreme: more than 90 percent of Black students and two-thirds of Mexican students were assigned to segregated schools.⁴³ The campaign for integrated schools in СКАЧАТЬ