By 1963, the civil rights movement extended from Birmingham to Los Angeles. Its principles, strategies, and organizations empowered local students and community members to further struggles against discrimination within the Los Angeles area. That year, Assemblyman William Byron Rumford’s Fair Housing Act empowered the California Fair Employment Practices Commission to intervene against residential segregation by forcing discriminatory home and apartment owners to open their properties to minority residents.¹ Segregationist realtors, politicians, and White residents soon waged a campaign to overturn the law and earlier housing legislation, however, by placing Proposition 14 on the ballot. Local leaders like Marnesba Tackett of the United Civil Rights Council led the struggle to defend the Rumford Act while also fighting discriminatory developers like Torrance’s Don Wilson. The movement against Proposition 14 and discriminatory housing was defeated in the 1964 election, but it influenced local struggles for racial justice for years to come.

Some of the most fervent advocates for the Rumford Act were the religious leaders of the Civil Rights movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr. In June 1963 activists traveled to Sacramento to address a subcommittee on fair housing legislation. They included Unitarian-Universalist Rev. Paul Sawyer, whose congregation helped to found the Fair Housing Council of the San Fernando Valley, on the far left. He was joined by Methodist theologian Rev. Nathanie Lacy, Jr. of Los Angeles’ Metropolitan Urban Mission of the United Methodist Church and social worker Ernie Dillard, on the right.²

Students also played a crucial role in Los Angeles’ burgeoning civil rights movement. Organizations like the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) supported the Southern movement while simultaneously applying its strategy to Los Angeles’ particular forms of discrimination, including housing segregation. In April 1962 months of CORE pickets succeeded in forcing a Monterey Park developer to allow Black physicist Bobby Liley to purchase a home.³ On June 23, 1963, 125 CORE members picketed and occupied discriminatory developments in Torrance. Developer Don Wilson filed a complaint that resulted in the arrest of 16 CORE members who occupied his sales office.⁴

United Civil Rights Council leader Marnesba Tackett described the demonstration against Don Wilson and the methods realtors used to keep minorities from purchasing homes in an oral history interview with the UCLA Center for Oral History Research: “It was interesting that it was in Torrance that there was a counterdemonstration against us. At the same time that we were marching, they came facing us. However, there was no confrontation.Thomas [G.] Neusom, who now has passed away, was very active in the United Civil Rights Council, in its organization and as an attorney for UCRC. One who volunteered a lot of time. And a young attorney who worked in his office offered to purchase one of the homes, Don Wilson’s 93 homes, there in Torrance. And it was interesting, the number of things that they did to try to actually keep him out. I think there was a little something about the check, whether the money was all in the bank at the time he wrote the check, and various things. I think he finally gave up on trying to get the house there. But that case may have been a part of the suit that ACLU filed against— In fact I think it was a part of the suit that was filed against Don Wilson.In those suits we always prevailed, but even that did not make it possible. I had a friend that was looking for a home. It was interesting. These people had the money, had the cash to pay, and looked in several of the new sections that were being built up. And it was interesting how they could come and sometimes stand for a long time and just were ignored. And then they were showed, finally, the model home. They were discouraged from making an application. They insisted. When they insisted they just found reasons why they could not qualify for the home. And yet we knew of friends, Caucasian friends, who did not have the cash that they had, did not have any more stability as far as employment was concerned. And this couple already owned property, rental property, but they couldn’t qualify to buy a single home. It was interesting. They tried several places. They finally gave up, bought additional rental property, moved some rental property from other sections of the city and built that up on a lot that they purchased. And they’re doing quite well. Retired now.”

Born in 1908 in St. Louis, Missouri, Marnesba Tackett migrated to Los Angeles from Kansas in 1952. She soon became the education chair of the Los Angeles NAACP, where she fought to add Black writers to the curriculum in place of racist images and stereotypes. Her work reached far beyond the classroom into the streets, when she helped lead the United Civil Rights Council (UCRC), formed in 1963, which struggled against discrimination in both education and housing.⁵

In 1964, the California Real Estate Association and other opponents of housing integration took aim at the Rumford Act and prior fair housing legislation by drafting a new ballot initiative, Proposition 14. The constitutional amendment invalidated all prior fair housing legislation by exempting realtors, apartment owners, and individual homeowners. At first, civil rights activists in groups like the NAACP, CORE, the United Civil Rights Council (UCRC), and the Western Christian Leadership Conference attempted to keep Proposition 14 off the ballot, but, when that failed, they rallied to oppose its passage.⁶ Religious institutions like Los Angeles’ Second Baptist Church and First African Methodist Episcopal Church (FAME) supported the movement by providing organizational and fundraising capacity and space for public gatherings.⁷ FAME Reverend Hamel Hartford Brookins (at the front on the far left) led the UCRC from its founding in 1963. Brookins grew up in Yazzo, Mississippi as the seventh child of sharecroppers, and moved to Los Angeles from a prior position in Wichita, Kansas, in 1960.⁸

In her oral history interview, Tackett recalls the misleading language of the measure itself and attempts to keep it off the ballot. Advocates of Proposition 14 claimed that fair housing laws violated property rights and that the Rumford Act was a “forced housing act.”⁹ “Well, of course, that was in the days of the United Civil Rights Council, UCRC. We had a housing committee that was headed by [S.] Wendell Green and by Florence Vaughn Jackson. We had had many demonstrations in Torrance and in the eastern section of Los Angeles County, in the Covina area, for fair housing. We were using the Rumford fair-housing law as the basis for our actions, really. When Proposition 14 came, naturally UCRC attempted, one, to keep it from getting on the ballot. And when we found that it did get on the ballot, of course we launched, along with many others in the city, the “No on 14” campaign. You remember that that was written in such a way that when you read the proposition you would think, “Well, this is all right, and this is what it should be.” Because they had approached it from the idea that whoever is going to sell a house can decide who they want to sell it to, and they can discriminate in the sale of their home. They did not put it in such words that the layman could clearly understand what they were about, which was to keep chiefly blacks and other minorities from moving into neighborhoods that they wanted to keep all white.I can recall when [former Congressman James Charles] Corman in the [San Fernando] Valley was running for office. He had a dinner that I attended with a number of others. Table 14 had a large sign on it saying, “No on 14.” We also were anxious to have Governor [Edmund G.] Brown [Sr.] at that time come out strongly for integrated housing. We were not able to get him to do that because he was afraid of not being reelected. And in attending a meeting in Sacramento of civil rights people, it was a large interracial meeting, the question came up as to whether we should, in order to be sure that Brown would be reelected, 88 whether we shouldn’t soft-pedal some of the things that we wanted in civil rights. My position there was—and I stood up and said so, and kept them from moving to a soft-pedal on civil rights—I felt that we should become stronger. Because you cannot appease the enemy, and there is no point in trying. Of course, we lost on that, but Al [Abraham Lincoln] Wirin of the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] took the decision on Proposition 14 to the Supreme Court and it was finally declared unconstitutional.”

Activists boycotted the Southwest Realty Board and picketed at offices like the Valley Board of Realtors, seen here:

Tackett also describes her work at the Housing Opportunity Center, a fair housing organization which successfully forced developers to rent to minorities by training organizers in fair housing law and appealing to the Fair Employment Practices Commission. “Well, we were very much involved with attempting to have the laws obeyed, and through CRCSC [Community Relations Conference of Southern California] we developed the fair-housing groups. And these fair-housing groups were in various sections of Los Angeles and in the surrounding part of Los Angeles. This was back in the late sixties when the fair-housing groups really came into prominence. I worked for the Housing Opportunity Center [HOC], and my first job with the Housing Opportunity Center was in working with, and helping to organize, fair-housing groups.We had groups in Orange County, we had groups all over Los Angeles County and the San Fernando Valley, in the Covina area, in the Pasadena area, and I met with those groups. We trained them to 91 be checkers where a minority had gone in to rent a place that was supposedly available and found for various reasons that it was not available. They used excuses that it has been rented, my mother-in-law has decided to move in, we are taking it off the market because we have to do some refurbishing. There were just many, many excuses. Then they also had an application that certain people had to fill out, and then it would take three or four days before you would hear from the application. Now, the checkers followed that up by going in and assuming all of the posture of the minority. And we found often that the unit was available without an application, without even checking on the job, and asking people to move in immediately. They would go so far as to write the check for the deposit and then say, “Do you know about the fair housing laws?,” and attempt to persuade them to rent it, and very often the minority was sitting out in the car waiting. The second person—they went by twos—would go out to the car to bring the minority person in and very often they rented it. If they didn’t rent it, of course, we had FEPC [Fair Employment Practices Commission] that you could appeal to. We had attorneys who volunteered their services, and they would go to court and could win up to ten thousand dollars. Well, a few of those kinds of victories actually made people more cautious about saying that they would not rent to Negroes, or they would not rent a mixed couple, or they would not rent to a foreigner.” pg 91.

Martin Luther King Jr. made numerous trips to Los Angeles where he fundraised for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference but also exposed the deep connections between Southern segregation and discrimination in Los Angeles. On May 26th, 1963 he headlined a “Rally for Freedom” at Wrigley Field stadium. He urged the crowd of 30,000 not only to join the March on Washington but to join the local civil rights movement. “You asked me what Los Angeles can do to help us in Birmingham. The most important thing that you can do is to set Los Angeles free because you have segregation and discrimination here, and police brutality.”¹⁰

King traveled to Los Angeles in February of 1964 to rally Californians against Proposition 14; if it passed it would be “one of the most shameful developments in our nation’s history.” He visited communities like the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts. On June 1st, he urged a crowd of 15,000 to vote against Proposition 14 at the “Religious Witness for Human Dignity” rally. King believed the law would harm not only Californians but African Americans across the country by influencing similar policies.¹¹

The same year that Californians overwhelmingly voted for Lyndon Johnson, Proposition 14 passed with 65% approval. In an August 20th 1965 interview, African American psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint argued this defeat deeply influenced the Watts uprising.¹² The Supreme Court overturned the measure in 1967, but its passage demonstrates the profound barriers to housing integration in California.¹³

Participants in the Los Angeles civil rights movement understood their local battles against housing discrimination as part of a national struggle for equality and freedom. Members of the United Civil Rights Council and CORE took influence from the Southern movement as they occupied discriminatory housing developments and lobbied for fair housing legislation. After decades of struggle, African American and Latinx Angelenos lost a key battle against residential segregation when Proposition 14 passed. The language of property rights convinced white Californians to repeal housing legislation in the face of sustained opposition from people of color.

Decades of struggle against both housing segregation and police brutality boiled over when the brutal police beating of Marquette Frye incited the Watts uprising on August 11th 1965.¹⁴ The rebellion, and the subsequent trial of the Frye family, brought national attention and a renewed determination to local movements for racial justice within communities of color. By the close of that decade, much of the public housing stock constructed in the postwar period was in disrepair, and in 1974 President Richard Nixon ended urban renewal programs at the federal level.¹⁵ Real estate speculation and other economic forces continued to reshape Los Angeles neighborhoods nonetheless, and activists throughout the city redoubled their struggles for the right to a home and an equitable city.

Additional Materials

Roybal Papers Arechiga family protest signs https://calisphere.org/collections/18788/ Mayor Poulson, George Beavers, etc discuss public housing proposals https://calisphere.org/item/3449fef4-2bae-41ca-a1d8-2fe245b62bc8/

Music (Strachwitz Frontera Collection) Lalo Guerrero y su Mariachi – “Nunca Jamás”, 1956 (first 45 rpm release, likely recorded earlier) http://frontera.library.ucla.edu/recordings/nunca-jam%C3%A1s-17 Tucson-born and raised, but Guerrero spent some of his peak years performing and recording in Los Angeles (East LA in particular) and became one of the most famous musical advocates for pachuco slang/culture and early Chicano music. “Nunca” was a hit bolero in the mid-50s.

Notes