California’s population, which had grown considerably during World War II, continued to swell afterward. In 1945 the state’s residents numbered 9.3 million; five years later that figure had increased to just below 10.6 million people. Returning servicemen, including those who had lived in other states before the war, comprised a large segment of the growth.
Figure 11.4 California's population has increased dramatically over time. Source: Cal Facts (December 2000), p. 13. Legislative Analyst's Office, State of California.
Millions
While accurate counts are lacking, a good many gay men and lesbians were among the returning veterans who settled in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where they found greater acceptance than elsewhere. Los Angeles in 1945 became the fourth largest U. S. city, and home to 1.9 million people blanketing 451 square miles. In 1962 Greater California eclipsed New York, becoming the most populous state in the nation.
Such a dramatic population increase put severe strains on the state’s infrastructure. Governor Earl Warren observed in August 1948: “The stampede has visited us with unprecedented civic problems, partly because we did not expect to digest so much population in so short a time, and partly because even if we had been forewarned we could have done but little to prepare for the shock during the stringent war years. So we have an appalling housing shortage, our schools are packed to suffocation, and our highways are inadequate and dangerous. We are short of water and short of power, and our sanitation and transportation systems are overtaxed. Our hospitals and our corrective institutions are bursting at the seams.” This lament, probably unintentionally, laid out California’s infrastructurebuilding agenda for the next two decades.
To alleviate the need for homes, the late 1940s saw the beginning of California’s tract housing boom. Tract houses usually were built on small, subdivided lots, adjacent to one another; developers simultaneously constructed multiple homes, using a small number of floor plans and prefabricated materials - all of which kept building costs and purchase prices down. Agricultural lands were encroached on, and new suburbs appeared up and down the state but mostly in the Southland. Lakewood, located 10 miles southeast of Los Angeles, arose in 1950 out of a former beet field and within three years boasted a population of 70,000 inhabitants living in affordable, detached, single-family tract homes. The construction industry profited enormously. As armed services veterans, a large number of Lakewood’s residents enjoyed federal GI Bill home financing and worked at the nearby Douglas plant. The so-called Lakewood Plan of retaining budgetary power in local matters while contracting with Los Angeles County for road repair, sewer services, and fire
Protection was adopted in new communities throughout many parts of the country. To the north, parts of the suburban Bay Area also registered a tract housing boom, especially in Santa Clara Valley communities like San Jose, where orchards were cleared for home-building.
While the state’s white suburbs thrived, its ethnic inner cities languished. African Americans, who constituted 1.8 percent of the state’s population in 1940 and 4.3 percent in 1950, lived largely in all-black neighborhoods in the Bay Area cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, and in Watts in the Los Angeles area. Whites in the suburbs used “restrictive covenants,” that is, homeowners’ agreements, to sell their properties only to Caucasians, to control home sales in their neighborhoods. Even after the U. S. Supreme Court struck down such contracts in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), realtors and home sellers resorted to other informal ploys to prevent the racial integration of suburban neighborhoods. To defend their interests, blacks formed chapters of the NAACP and organized political campaigns against housing discrimination and for equal employment opportunities.
Mexican Americans fared little better, often consigned to living in barrios in cities and some suburbs. Like blacks, Latinos fought discrimination against them by working through organizations like LULAC, the League of United Latin American Citizens. In one particularly notable instance of combating segregation in public schools, Orange County residents Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez brought a class action suit against the Westminster and several other Orange County school districts, charging discrimination against the couple’s young children who in 1943 were denied admission to the 17th Street School in Westminster. Officials said that the children were dark-skinned and could not speak English. The parents were told to enroll their children in a Mexican school 10 blocks away from the white school.
The Mendez parents refused, took their case to court, and won, first in the Los Angeles Federal District Court, and then in the federal judiciary’s 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In Mendez v. Westminster (1947), the judges held that the California constitution prohibited segregation of Mexican-origin children into separate schools. National (Mexican) origin, not race, was the issue in this case. Still it set a precedent in seemingly being the first case leading to the eventual overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine in public facilities. According to that doctrine, separate public facilities were legal or constitutional as long as the facilities in question were equal. In Plessy v. Ferguson the constitutionality of racially segregated train cars was at issue. Some of the arguments used by the plaintiffs’ attorneys in Mendez v. Westminster were used by plaintiff attorney Thurgood Marshall in the U. S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954), which struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine once and for all. Thereafter, white schools throughout the nation could no longer bar students of other ethnic backgrounds.
Meanwhile in 1949 Mexican American Edward Roybal won election to the Los Angeles city council, the first person of his ethnicity to do so since the late 1800s. With help from community organizer Fred Ross and the politically charged Community Service Organization of East Los Angeles, Roybal had campaigned on ending discrimination in housing, employment, and education. With his victory, Hispanics began to sense their political clout when they mobilized voters.
World History
