The following is from a work-in-progress about the history of Fullerton. You can support my ongoing research and writing on Patreon.
In his book Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California scholar Daniel Martinez HoSang presents a realistic and unglamorized portrait of the messy struggle for civil rights in California through the lens of ballot initiatives. Today, California is seen as a liberal stronghold, but it wasn’t always that way.
One of the main insights of the book is to dispel the myth that California “figured out” and “fixed” social injustices and inequality back in the 1960s. A closer look at California’s schools and communities reveals lingering social, housing, employment, and educational segregation and inequality.
HoSang also demonstrates how, in the post-Civil Rights era, the language of “colorblindness” has been used by politicians to squash efforts at undoing the harmful legacy of discriminatory policies and to maintain the status quo.
HoSang’s book is helping me to peel back the layers of the onion and really try to understand how we got where we are, and how things might be different.
Prop 11 and the Struggle for Fair Employment
In 1946, Californians voted on Proposition 11, which sought to create a state Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), which would officially ban discrimination based on race, religion, color, or national origin in the workplace. It was inspired by President Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, which was created at the outset of World War II.
At the time, employment discrimination was widespread in California. Hosang writes, “At the time, California’s burgeoning defense industry, from the sprawling Kaiser shipyards along the San Francisco Bay to the massive Lockheed airplane factories in Los Angeles County, routinely consigned black and Mexican American workers to the lowest paid jobs, if they hired them at all.”
The champion of Prop 11 was Assemblyman Augustus Hawkins, who at the time was the only African American in the California state assembly (he was very light-skinned). Other groups lent their support: The NAACP, the Urban League, the American Council on Race Relations, the California Federation for Civic Unity, as well as union organizations like the CIO.
Those opposed to Prop 11 included Frank Doherty, former president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, as well as powerful agricultural lobbyists who had relied on cheap immigrant labor for decades. The ballot argument against Prop 11 stated that “certain minority racial groups are the most efficient agricultural labor.”
Another tactic to defeat Prop 11 was red-baiting. Doherty called it a “communist-inspired scheme.”
But the chief argument of those opposed to Prop 11 was one that would resonate in future civil rights debates, that discrimination was an individual choice which could not be “coerced” by legislation. A Los Angeles Times editorial explained, “Admirable as it might be if race and religious prejudice ceased to exist, The Times does not believe that the disappearance of either can be helped by compulsion…prejudices by their very nature are matters of emotion rather than logic or reason.”
This argument, clothed in the language of individual rights, has proved a powerful one against large-scale civil rights legislation in California and elsewhere.
Ultimately, Prop 11 was “crushed on election day, capturing less than 30 percent of the vote.” The FEPC would not be created until 1959, with the passage of the passage of the California Fair Employment Practices Act of the state legislature.
The 1946 defeat of Prop 11 led one historian to write, “The public was definitely not ready for fair employment.”
Prop 14 and the Struggle for Fair Housing
“Men hate each other because they fear, they fear because they do not know one another, and they do not know one another because they are separated.”
–Martin Luther King Jr, speaking in Los Angeles at a 1964 anti-prop 14 rally
In 1963, the California State Legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which sought to address widespread housing discrimination and segregation in California. For years, non-whites had been excluded from buying or renting property in many neighborhoods across California by racially restrictive housing covenants, which were created and enforced by realtors and homeowners associations, because non-whites were perceived to drive down property values.
According to HoSang, “Bodies like the Southwest Realty Board in Los Angeles formed ‘race restrictions committees’ to organize homeowners to maintain racial restrictions, publicizing their success in the California Real Estate Association magazine.” It was racist housing covenants that created the widespread housing segregation across cities in California, even in my own hometown of Fullerton.
To address this social problem/injustice, California legislators William Byron Rumford, with the support of others like Augustus Hawkins and Jesse Unruh, introduced the Fair Housing Bill, which sought to make racially restrictive housing covenants illegal. The bill passed in 1963.
In response, the National Association for Real Estate Boards and the California Real Estate Associaion mobilized their 45,000 members and 171 local realty boards to get a proposition on the ballot to overturn the Fair Housing Act. A 1964 advertisement in the Oakland Tribune spelled out their argument:
“RUMFORD ACT FORCED HOUSING”
COMMITTEE FOR HOME PROTECTION
“In September 1963, the Rumford Act became state law. Heretofore, a man’s home was his castle. The Rumford Act makes a man’s home subject to the whims of a politically appointed State Board…The politically appointed Commission can FORCE you to sell or rent your home to an individual NOT OF YOUR CHOICE. Most people believe that a man has the right to sell, rent, or lease his property to whomever he wishes; consequently they OPPOSE the Rumford Act…VOLUNTEERS NEEDED TO CIRCULATE PETITIONS.”
The realtors and their supporters were successful in getting Prop 14 on the 1964 ballot, and thus began a widely public debate over the issue of fair housing in California. Both sides used the language of “rights.” Those opposed to Prop 14 spoke of the rights of non-whites to rent or purchase property. Those in favor of Prop 14 spoke of property owners’ rights to choose whom to sell or rent to.
Many heavy-hitters in the Civil Rights Movement (which was in full force in 1964) weighed in on the issue. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at an anti-14 rally in Los Angeles, stating, “Men hate each other because they fear, they fear because they do not know one another, and they do not know one another because they are separated.”
Ultimately, Prop 14 passed by a margin of 65 to 35 percent, striking down the Fair Housing Act. According to Lucien Haas, the press secretary appointed by governor Pat Brown to work on the anti-14 campaign, “Proposition 14 shattered [the myth] for me,” as he realized, “My God, we’re facing racism in the state of California.”
In 1966, the California Supreme Court ruled in Mulkey vs. Reitman that Prop 14 was unconstitutional. One realtor who ultimately changed his mind about Prop 14 stated, “The right we are giving up is the right to discriminate on the basis of race. Is that a right we want to bat for? I don’t think this is a thing we should do a lot of breast-beating about. It is not a laudable right in the first place.” Another inquired, “I wonder if we are not in favor of this type of legislation because we are men of property and men who have not ever been discriminated against?”
Even though Prop 14 was ultimately struck down, it made clear the fact that California was deeply divided about the issue of housing integration, and remains so today. Today, despite what we tell our elves about civil rights progress, there remains widespread de facto housing segregation in many California cities, a legacy of both institutional and individual racism.
Prop 21 and the Struggle for School De-Segregation in California
In 1972, Californians voted on a ballot measure which seriously undermined school desegregation efforts. At the time, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, 95 percent of black students and 80 percent of white students were enrolled in highly segregated schools. The impetus for Prop 21 was the 1970 Crawford v. Los Angeles court case which “found the state’s largest school district [Los Angeles] to be deliberately segregated and ordered the [school] board to devise a far-reaching desegregation plan.” Soon after, the Bagley Act passed, which “formally established school desegregation as a policy goal of the state [of California].”
Proposition 21 (or the Wakefield Amendment), which sought to overturn the Bagley Act, was championed by a conservative Republican named Floyd Wakefield who “railed against the yoke of ‘forced integration.’” Wakefield represented the city of South Gate, “a working class city of fifty-seven thousand residents that, through the use of racial covenants and other restrictive practices, remained deeply segregated well into the 1960s. I recently read about South Gate in Luis Rodriguez’s memoir Always Running:
“One day my mother asked Rano and me to go to the grocery store. We decided to go across the railroad tracks into South Gate. In those days, South Gate was an Anglo neighborhood, filled with the families of workers from the auto plant, and other nearby industry. Like Lynwood or Huntington Park, it was forbidden territory for the people of Watts.
My brother insisted we go. I don’t know what possessed him, but then I never did. It was useless to argue; he’d force me anyway. He was nine then, I was six. So without ceremony, we started over the tracks, climbing over discarded market carts and tore-up sofas, across Alameda Street, into South Gate: all-white, all-American.
We entered the first small corner grocery store we found. Everything was cool at first. We bought some bread, milk, soup cans and candy. We each walked out with with a bag filled with food. We barely got a few feet, though, when five teenagers on bikes approached. We tried not to pay attention and proceeded to our side of the tracks. But the youths pulled up in front of us. While two of them stood nearby on their bikes, three of them jumped off theirs and walked over to us.
“What do we got here?” one of the boys said. “Spics to order–maybe with some beans?”
He pushed me to the ground; the groceries splattered onto the asphalt. I felt melted gum and chips of broken beer bottle on my lips and cheek. Then somebody picked me up and held me while the others seized my brother, tossed his groceries out, and pounded on him. They punched him in the face, in the stomach, then his face again, cutting his lip, causing him to vomit.
I remember the shrill, maddening laughter of one of the kids on a bike, this laughing like a raven’s wail, a harsh wind’s shriek, a laugh that I would hear in countless beatings thereafter. I watched the others take turns on my brother, this terror of a brother, and he doubled over, had blood and spew on his shirt, and tears down his face. I wanted to do something, but they held me and I just looked on, as every strike against Rano opened me up inside.
They finally let my brother go and he slid to the ground, like a rotten banana squeezed out of his peeling. They threw us back over the tracks. In the sunset I could see the Watts Towers, shimmers of 70,000 pieces of broken bottles, sea shells, ceramic and metal on spiraling points puncturing the heavens, with reflected back the rays of a falling sun. My brother and I then picked ourselves up, saw the teenagers take off, still laughing, still talking about those stupid greasers who dared to cross over to South Gate.”
Wakefield argued that “forced busing” and other desegregation efforts would infringe on people’s freedom of choice. Hosang describes a story board for a “Yes on 21” campaign commercial: “The storyboard showed a terrified young white girl being forced to board a school bus as her mother stood by helplessly, explaining, ‘The government says you and your little friends can’t go to school anymore in the neighborhood, honey.’ The girl’s forlorn and bewildered response, ‘Aren’t we people too?’ implicitly set the rights of white viewers–the ‘we’–against a racialized other receiving unwarranted advantages from, as the ad described, ‘that old government.’ The storyboard’s concluding panel, ‘Restore Freedom of Choice,’ was again explicitly racialized, for such a ‘freedom’ was only available to white parents–minority students assigned to inferior and segregated schools had no such choice.”
Many of the groups who sought to defeat prop 21 were the same who had rallied (unsuccessfully) against Prop 14, just eight years earlier: the NAACP, the ACLU, the California Teachers Association, the State Federation of Labor, the League of Women Voters, and several faith-based organizations.
Ultimately, Prop 21 passed by a wide margin: 63 percent of the vote. As with Proposition 14 (which overturned fair housing legislation) and Prop 11(which denied fair employment), Prop 21 demonstrated the fact that the struggle for Civil Rights was far from over in California. Schools would remain essentially segregated.
In 1975, the state supreme court overturned Prop 21, stating that it “involved the state in racial discrimination.” Though it was overturned, Prop 21 left a legacy of segregation, one which would be upheld in 1979 by Prop 1. Hosang describes the “chilling” legacy:
“Though it was only in effect for two years, Proposition 21 did have a chilling effect on many local school desegregation efforts. The Inglewood and Pasadena school boards immediately attempted to appeal their own desegregation orders, and in cities such as Whittier and Santa Ana planned desegregation measures were never put into effect. At the same time, the state auditor began monitoring whether school districts were complying with Proposition 21’s mandates. One state education official observed that ‘things have come to a dead halt in the area of desegregation since Proposition 21 passed…we have lost ground.’ Indeed, in early 1974, the state census revealed that 192,000 more students attended segregated schools in comparison to five years earlier.”
Floyd Wakefield’s political career ended shortly after Prop 21 passed, when his state assembly district was eliminated due to redistricting. In 1974, he moved to Anaheim to run in the newly-created 70th district, which included Anaheim, Brea, and Yorba Linda. Wakefield stated in an LA Times article that north Orange County was “the area most compatible with his own philosophies.” Ultimately, he lost the Republican primary, and his tenure in politics was over.
Hosang describes the decline of Floyd Wakefield, and what it suggests about the changing nature of Southern California politics at the time:
“The decline of Wakefield’s eight-year career in the state assembly paralleled important transformations in the political landscape of Southern California during the 1970s. Wakefield never tempered his ardent conservative postures. In the last months of his final term in the assembly, he sought to qualify a ballot measure to rescind the California Legislature’s 1972 ratification of the Equal Rights Act and sat at the head table of a John Birch Society political banquet where founder Robert Welch called for President Nixon’s impeachment. But Wakefield could no longer count on a constituency in South Gate to reliably support such appeals. The white working-class residents that a decade earlier had rallied behind Wakefield’s defense of Proposition 14 and segregated South Gate High School were rapidly abandoning the inner suburbs south of Los Angeles for new residential developments in the San Fernando Valley and Orange County. Wakefield was no innocent bystander in this retreat. By insisting that cities such as South Gate could never prosper if they became racially integrated, he implicitly endorsed the exodus of white residents that ultimately led to his own political demise. Wakefield’s uncompromising assertion of white rights anchored in the white working-class suburbs of South Los Angeles would give way to a more subtle and sophisticated defense racial inequality and segregation centered in the burgeoning San Fernando Valley.”
These are not all the propositions HoSang chronicles in his book. In a future post, I will discuss his analysis of anti-immigrant propositions in the 1990s (like Prop 187), propositions banning affirmative action (the OG DEI), and propositions banning bilingual education. Understanding the political ideology behind these propositions helps us better understand current movements to roll back civil rights gains.
Fullerton History 