Mike Davis:

"In the summer of 1959 a psychologist named Emory Holmes bought a house in the northeastern San Fernando Valley from an engineer known only as ‘Mr T’. The transaction would have been utterly unremarkable except that Holmes was Black, Mr T was white, and the home was in a previously all-white neighbourhood in Pacoima. According to an investigation by the naacp, the Holmes family was welcomed in the following manner:

A life insurance salesman, sent by a neighbour, came to the house to sell a policy. A dairy delivered milk without having received an order. A group of people with spades and shovels started digging up their garden, claiming a local paper had advertised a free plant giveaway. A drinking water company started delivery—though no order had been received for same. A television set repairman called at 11 pm one night without having been sent for. A taxi came to the house at 11:30 pm one night without having been called. An undertaker called at the home to pick up the body of the dead homeowner. Delivery of a Los Angeles newspaper was stopped, without any request from the Holmes’. A veterinary doctor came to the house, saying that he was answering a call for a sick horse. A sink repairman paid an unsolicited home call. A termite exterminator showed up, though not requested. An unsolicited pool company agent called to install a pool. Someone painted on the walls of the house the epithet: ‘Black cancer here. Don’t let it spread!’ Tacks were scattered in the driveway. A window was broken by a pellet from an air gun. Rocks were thrown at the house. A second undertaker showed up . . .

All of this happened during the first two weeks and the harassment—the Holmes’ cited one hundred separate incidents—continued relentlessly for months.

Although ‘massive resistance’ to integration was not an organized movement as in the South, it was a spontaneous reality everywhere in LA’s booming ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ suburbs. As the naacp underscored in testimony to the US Commission on Civil Rights on 25–26 January 1960, more than 10,000 people, many of them workers at the new gm Van Nuys Assembly Plant, were squeezed into the segregated Black part of Pacoima. Meanwhile there were fewer than twenty Negro families (presumably all undergoing experiences similar to the Holmes household) in the entire San Fernando Valley, living in so-called ‘white neighbourhoods’. Although apartment owners in the Valley groaned about high vacancy rates, only one was found who was willing to rent to Blacks.

1957: In its Los Angeles hearings, the Commission on Civil Rights, established by Congress in 1957 after the Montgomery bus boycott, focused principally on the housing problems of minorities.

Mayor Norris Poulson welcomed the Commission with the assurance that Los Angeles had an ‘excellent record in the treatment of minority groups and in the lack of intergroup tension or friction’. He also patted himself on the back for establishing an advisory committee on human relations whose major priority was to work with minority newcomers ‘to raise their appreciation for sanitation’. After this comic relief, the Commission accepted several hundred pages of dense reports and two days of testimony about housing segregation from the Community Relations Conference of Southern California, an umbrella group that included the naacp, core, the Urban League, the Jewish Labor League, American Friends Service Committee and the la County Commission on Human Relations."

The result was the concentration of the African-American population in a single super-ghetto or ‘black belt’, in an otherwise rapidly decentralizing and suburbanizing metropolis. Some 75 per cent of Los Angeles County’s Black population was unwillingly concentrated in the urban core between Olympic Boulevard to the north and Artesia Boulevard to the south. Alameda Street, the old highway and railroad route to the harbour, was called the ‘cotton curtain’ because Blacks could not live or be seen at night in any of the dozen or so industrial suburbs east of it. A clan of white gangs, the ‘Spookhunters’, patrolled racial boundaries, attacking Blacks with seeming impunity. Meanwhile the western edge of Black residence was roughly Figueroa Street in the south, but northward at Manchester Boulevard it began to bulge westward, ultimately as far as Crenshaw in the latitude of Slauson Avenue. South Central la also had an internal physical and socio-economic boundary. The Harbor Freeway, parallel to Main Street and finished as far south as 124th Street by 1958, ‘had created a massive structural and symbolic barrier between the Eastside and Westside [Black] communities’. By 1960, the old ‘main stem’ on Central Avenue was in decline, middle-class Blacks were moving as far west as Crenshaw, and the new business and entertainment axis of the Black community was Western Avenue.

Thus Black Los Angeles expanded with continuous friction and controversy, through white flight and ‘block busting’ on its southern and western peripheries where the housing stock dated primarily from the pre-war era. The westside with newer housing and often picturesque neighbourhoods—Leimert Park, for example—was favoured by more affluent Black families, while new arrivals from Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas typically ended up in the overcrowded eastside. Meanwhile the chief hot spots of white resistance were the city of Compton, south of Watts, where a racial transition had already begun, and all-white Inglewood, where police and residents were mobilized to defend the city’s eastern and northern boundaries against Black homebuyers. Only the Crenshaw area, with its mixture of Jews, Japanese-Americans and Blacks, qualified as a true multi-racial community.

Apart from South Central Los Angeles, there were also historical black neighbourhoods in Pasadena, Santa Monica/Venice, Long Beach and Monrovia, in the San Gabriel Valley—each of which could be accurately described as a ghetto. The rest of the older secondary cities—like Torrance, Hawthorne, Burbank and, above all, Glendale—were zero-Black-population ‘sundown towns’, where the local police enforced illegal curfews on Black shoppers and commuters. Meanwhile the eastern San Gabriel Valley, where tens of thousands of acres of citrus groves had been bulldozed over a decade before to create huge new commuter dormitories such as West Covina (50,300) and La Puente (25,000), was the mirror image of the segregated San Fernando Valley, as were the hundreds of racially exclusive new home tracts in the southwest and southeast quadrants of la County. According to John Buggs of the County Commission on Human Relations, segregation was rapidly increasing: between 1950 and 1959, the percentage of non-whites in 34 of the 54 county cities had declined; in 12 cases, the decrease was absolute.