During the 1950s and 1960s California’s minority groups and women became increasingly assertive of their rights. These groups made headway during Pat Brown’s governorship. His journey to appreciation of ethnic diversity and gender justice had been a long one. Growing up and as a young man he reflected the prejudices of his times. He recalled as a boy throwing bricks at Chinese laundry wagons. As a prosecutor he ridiculed San Francisco’s gays and lesbians, and until becoming governor had given little “thought about women with respect to equal rights.” As times changed, so did his views on rights for minorities and women.
African Americans, who continued moving into California in the 1950s, were the most vocal minority. Those who left the American South, where segregationist Jim Crow laws restricted black people’s seating on city buses and use of public facilities, encountered a somewhat different set of challenges in California. Once resettled in the Golden State, a land supposedly brimming with opportunities, blacks found that they needed to insist on equal rights in jobs, housing, and education. In the Bay Area city of Richmond in 1950, for example, 29 percent of non-white workers were unemployed while only 13 percent of white workers were jobless. In southern California, where most of the state’s incoming blacks settled, conditions were worse. Jobs were hard to get, in that factories had moved out of Los Angeles to the suburbs. Black city dwellers, numbering some 500,000 by 1960, did not have rapid transit systems to get them to and from work. For more than a decade after its opening in 1955, Disneyland in Orange County refused to hire blacks in “people contact” positions, except for the one African American who played Aunt Jemima for visitors reliving “the days of the Old South.” Racially restrictive housing covenants (though declared unenforceable in a 1948 Supreme Court decision) slowed blacks’ moving into white neighborhoods, while banks refused to lend to African Americans attempting to buy houses in such areas.
African Americans and their white supporters fought back, but ingrained racism gave little ground. In 1959 the Sacramento legislature passed the Unruh Civil Rights Act, named for the assembly speaker. The measure prohibited businesses from discriminating on the
Basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and medical condition and disability; it provided for the collection of damages through the courts in instances where unfair treatment could be proven. With help from white liberals, many of them Jewish, African Americans Gilbert Lindsay, Tom Bradley, and Billy Mills won Los Angeles city council seats in the early 1960s. Incensed by restrictive covenants in housing, Governor Brown insisted: “No man should be deprived of the right of acquiring a home of his own because of the color of his skin.” In 1963 the state legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, advocated by black Berkeley Assemblyman Byron Rumford, barring racial discrimination in the sale and rental of real estate. Passage of Proposition 14 the following year repealed the Rumford Act, to the frustration of blacks. Amid these gains and setbacks, discrimination persisted in housing and the job market, fueling black anger.
Racial tension exploded into deadly riots in Watts, a crowded black neighborhood in southeast Los Angeles, during the summer of 1965. The uprising was touched off by a police arrest of a young black man for drunken driving. At the arrest scene a rumor spread that two African American women had been mistreated by police. Six days of rioting, burning, and looting followed, capturing coast-to-coast television coverage. Brown sent his aide, William Becker, to Watts to find out what residents wanted. Becker summed up their complaints in one sentence: “We want the kind of life the white man has.” In the wake of the violence, finally quelled by National Guard forces, 34 deaths and 1,000 injuries were reported, while some 4,000 people were arrested. Property damage amounted to $40 million.
After the Watts riots, as before, progress toward racial equality remained halting. In 1966 the state supreme court declared Proposition 14 unconstitutional, a decision validated by the U. S. Supreme Court a year later. Still, neighborhoods and schools reflected de facto segregation. In 1970, nearly two decades after the U. S. Supreme Court struck down “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 90 percent of the black students in the Los Angeles Unified School District attended all-black public schools.
Angry and dismissive of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent approach to securing social justice, two black radicals in Oakland - Huey P. Newton and Bobby G. Seale - organized the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966. Armed with guns and law books, they followed police cars, making sure African Americans who were pulled over did not become victims of racialized mistreatment. Influenced by the teachings of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, and especially Malcolm X, they adopted a platform calling for “black power,” community self-help, and militant self-protection from police and other government agents. In the late 1960s, Panthers were involved in a number of Bay Area shootouts with police resulting in deaths on both sides. By then the Panther organization was at the peak of its strength, claiming thousands of members in 40 states and known throughout the world. Eldridge Cleaver, the Panther’s minister of information, ran for president on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in 1968. An even more radical, left-wing group, the Sym-bionese Liberation Army (SLA), saw itself as being in the vanguard of the black power movement. It was particularly active in the Bay Area from 1973 to 1975, during which time its members murdered Oakland superintendent of schools Marcus Foster, abducted wealthy heiress Patricia Hearst, robbed banks, and engaged in numerous shootouts with police. A fierce gun battle with the authorities in Los Angeles in 1975 resulted in the deaths of many of its leaders and the demise of the SLA.
Inspired by African Americans and the charismatic labor organizer Cesar Chavez, Mexican Americans, California’s largest ethnic minority in the latter half of the twentieth century, championed “brown power” in the fields and cities of the state. In 1962 Chavez, along with Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla, and others, founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Led by Chavez, the union stressed nonviolent resistance, such as marches, boycotts, and strikes, as the path to securing higher wages and better working conditions. Once the bracero program ended in 1964, the new union had the benefit of greatly reduced competition from a low-paid foreign labor force.
The Delano Grape Strike, launched on September 8, 1965, by Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers’ Organizing Committee (AWOC), an AFL-CIO affiliate, drew in Chavez and the NFWA. The work stoppage put a national spotlight on the grim labor conditions endured by California field workers, whose contracts did not allow for collective bargaining, payment of the legally sanctioned minimum wage, social security benefits, or unemployment insurance. Carrying banners bearing images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Mexican flags, in spring 1966 workers and their supporters marched 300 miles from Delano to Sacramento. These Mexican symbols bore testimony to the labor connection between California and its Pacific Rim neighbor republic to the south. Media coverage of the pilgrimage spoke to the consciences of Americans, many of whom supported the workers’ demands by boycotting California wines and table grapes. During the next five years the major California winemakers signed union contracts with the by then combined NFWA and AWOC, renamed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee. In 1966 the powerful DiGiorgio Fruit Company, which had claimed repeatedly that its workers did not want to be unionized, finally allowed its field hands to vote on union membership. Its laborers voted overwhelmingly in favor of unionizing. Chavez paid tribute to the sacrifices and rewards represented by these victories: “Ninety five percent of the strikers lost their homes and cars. But I think that in losing those worldly possessions they found themselves, and theyfound that only. . . through serving mankind, and. . . the poor, and those. . . struggling for justice, only in that way could they really find themselves.”
In the cities, where 85 percent of California’s 75,000 Spanish-surnamed people lived in the mid-1960s, a more rhetorically militant form of Mexican American pride characterized the Chicano/a movement. Tracing their roots southward along the Pacific Rim to Mexico’s Aztec civilization, the youth who started and dominated this movement accentuated differences between themselves - “La Raza,” literally the race that supposedly still carried Aztec bloodlines - and Anglos.
Daunting problems confronted urban Mexican Americans and their Chicano/a leaders. They had twice as many families living below the official federal poverty line as families in any other ethnic group. Twice as many Latino/a students dropped out of high school as Anglos. Worse still, voter turnout for Mexican Americans was extremely low. Many Chicanos/as viewed the Vietnam War as a major problem for them in the late 1960s, pointing out that Mexican Americans were grossly overrepresented among the war dead.
Asian Americans, whose numbers increased dramatically after passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality (Hart-Cellar) Act, fared better than any ethnic minority group during these times. This law was pivotal. By removing immigrants’ “national origins” as the basis of entry into the United States, it resulted in Asia replacing the western hemisphere
Figure 12.3 Farm labor organizer Dolores Huerta speaking to workers at end of the 300-mile march from Delano to Sacramento. Photo: John Kouns (b. 1929). Courtesy of the Phillip & Sala Burton Center for Human Rights; image provided by Farmworker Movement Documentation Project R2011.1301.003.
As the major source of most of America’s newcomers. Located on the Pacific Rim, California received a disproportionate share of Asian immigrants. Those of Chinese and Japanese descent did particularly well. They lived on average seven years longer than native whites; these two groups also outranked native whites and all other ethnic minorities in education level and earnings, and had lower levels of juvenile delinquency. Thus, to a good many whites Asians seemed the model minority, provoking relatively little Anglo racist prejudice even after the early 1970s when Southeast Asian refugees, mainly Vietnamese, began arriving in California. During that decade some 80,000 fled Vietnam after the communist takeover in 1975, and came to the Golden State; most of these had been supporters of the defeated South Vietnam government and anticipated being tortured and forced into “reeducation” (brainwashing) centers if they did not escape their homeland. They resettled in California, especially Orange County, because they were accustomed to a warm climate and preferred living near other Vietnamese, who had established themselves in and around the City of Westminster.
No ethnic group in California has suffered longer and with more devastating consequences than Indians, who remained the state’s most impoverished minority. Throughout much of the twentieth century, their unemployment rate more than tripled that of whites.
Numbering 75,000 in 1965, they approved a settlement of their land claims in the state for a little more than $29 million for 64 million acres of land. After paying lawyers, this amounted to about 45 cents an acre, or $600 per eligible recipient.
Meanwhile, in the 1950s the federal government implemented its new policy of “termination,” which ended its custodial responsibility for holding Indian lands in trust. Thereafter, those lands were to be sold. In 1958 Congress passed a measure abolishing 41 California reservations. Native Americans were to move into America’s cities. Relocation was followed by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs’ withdrawal of all health services for California’s Indians, who were thereafter expected to fend for themselves like all other citizens in vying for local, county, and state assistance.
California’s Indians in the 1960s found ways to publicly express their group identity and assert what they regarded as their long-ignored rights. Invoking “Red Power” and joined by tribespeople from other parts of the nation, they occupied Alcatraz Island, situated in San Francisco Bay, from 1969 to 1971. Since then, American Indian Studies centers and departments have been established on university campuses, San Francisco State University’s being among the first in 1969.
Gays and lesbians, too, struggled for equal rights and better treatment in the 1960s. By then same-sex bars had been spreading into cities across America since the 1940s. In 1964 Life magazine described San Francisco as America’s “gay capital,” touching off a nationwide gay/ lesbian migration to the City by the Bay. Homosexuals in San Francisco’s Castro District and Los Angeles County’s West Hollywood area were particularly public about their lifestyles and active in what came to be called the “gay liberation” movement that began in the late 1960s.
Finally, California’s women evidenced a higher degree of political activism in the 1950s and 1960s than at any time since the Progressive Era. The salient point about this activism is that it was divided between liberal and conservative causes.
Comprising nearly one-third of California’s workforce in 1950 while earning 40 percent less than their male counterparts, women with center-left political leanings grew increasingly concerned about hiring opportunities, equal pay for equal work, maternity leave, and chances for promotion. Accordingly, a reluctant Governor Pat Brown appointed a state Commission on the Status of Women in 1964. The commission’s report, submitted in 1967 to Brown’s successor, Ronald Reagan, went far beyond workplace matters to include findings on childcare, abortion, and divorce while offering proposals for legislation. Reagan was considerably less supportive of feminist causes than Brown, and, therefore, little came of the recommendations.
Taking advantage of a greater social acceptance of female involvement in the public sphere, largely suburban white women joined Republican-dominated women’s clubs, where they worked for conservative causes, including guidance of public school policies. These women became an important component of a rising conservatism in the state in the late 1960s.
World History
