The year is 1969. The setting is Dick Linton’s auto-body shop. Three white men, Linton, Frank Reis, and David Pedroza, discuss race relations and the state of affairs in their small town.
PEDROZA: Look at those riots. What the [expletive] do you think would happen to us if we went over there and started a riot? re is (grinning): They’d kill us. pedroza: [expletive] right they would.
REIS: Paint your face black and you can get a new Cadillac and the county will come in and feed your family. What do they call it? Prejudice or something? That’s all they’ve got to holler and they’ve got it made. Let a [expletive] policeman stop me and I’ve got to pay.
PEDROZA (angry): There’s only one way to solve this, and that’s gonna be with a revolution. I’m for fighting it out between us.
REIS: And I’d go for that. Just give me a machine gun.
LINTON: That’s why I went out and bought me some guns.
REIS: We should have a Hitler here to get rid of the troublemakers the way they did with the Jews in Germany.
I know what you’re probably thinking. The above exchange took place in Birmingham, right? Or Providence, Rhode Island. Sometimes, even I get confused. But the above exchange actually took place in San Leandro, California, in 1969. Newsweek magazine came to town as part of a cover story on Richard Nixon’s “forgotten white majority.” Which is ridiculous on its face: How do you forget the majority? They’re everywhere. That’s why they’re called “the majority.” Newsweek talked to these charming gentlemen for its October 6, 1969 edition. The above exchange is quoted verbatim.
San Leandro borders Oakland, to the south. According to the demographic breakdown in the 1970 census, Oakland was nearly half black. San Leandro was 99.99 percent white. That demo hadn’t changed since the I960 census. Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent.
Ivory Soap looked at that number and went, “WOW!!”
At the Oakland-San Leandro border, at the corner of Durant Street and East 14th Street, there used to be an archway that read, WELCOME TO SAN LEANDRO: THE FRIENDLY CITY. (Interestingly, East 14th is now called International Boulevard, because the city of Oakland was concerned about the fact that East 14th Street was well known for its drug dealers. The city decided something had to be done, so the city council voted to change the name to “International Boulevard.” Voila, no more drug dealers on East 14th Street. And the phrase “Just say ‘no’” ended all substance abuse among teens. I’ll take simple solutions to complex problems for a hundred, Alex.) The “Friendly City” archway was unofficially known by the black residents of East Oakland as “the invisible wall.”
A San Leandro patrolman used to sit inside that archway. It was his job to follow any black pedestrian, motorist, or cyclist who crossed over into the city limits. Black drivers had police cars in their rearview mirrors from the moment that they entered town until the moment they left. If they committed the slightest vehicle-code infraction, real or imaginary, they were stopped and directed back across the border to Oakland, “where they belonged.” Black children naive enough to breach the wall would find themselves paced by San Leandro P.D. until they retreated.
This was San Leandro, California, located in the “liberal” Bay Area, just twenty miles from San Francisco. Fifteen miles from the U.C. Berkeley campus. Six years after the Summer of Love.
In the mid 1960s, a black doctor who moved to town was greeted with a shotgun blast through his front door. A few years later, the mother of seventeen-year-old Alicia Fields, a white teenager who circulated a petition among the student body of her high school in favor of integrating the campus, wrote a letter to the local paper publicly disowning the girl for daring to suggest such an appalling idea. In 1971, the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing called San Leandro “a racist bastion of White Supremacy.” On Thanksgiving Day of that year, CBS/Westinghouse aired The Suburban Wall, a one-hour documentary that highlighted San Leandro’s racist practices and blatant, organized campaign to skirt federal fair-housing laws. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights actually conducted hearings to determine why there existed such a racial disparity between San Leandro and its neighbor to the north.
And then, we moved to town.
We moved to San Leandro on August 2, 1972. It was the city’s centennial celebration, commemorating one hundred years since the town was incorporated. It had been a long journey. Like much of what we now know as the United States, San Leandro had started as Indian territory. In the late 1700s, the Spanish arrived and decided that the “savage” native inhabitants needed a conversion to Christianity. The indigenous residents were moved to one of two missions (Mission San Jose and San Francisco’s Mission Delores) where their inability to fight off European diseases killed the vast majority ofthem.
Once the natives were marginalized, various land grants divided the territory into ranches, or ranchos, which were deeded to the Spanish settlers. The ranchos were subsequently bought or squatted on by white settlers from the East looking to make their fortunes supplying goods and services to the people of the burgeoning city of San Francisco. Eventually, this predominantly white population took over, founding businesses and planting orchards. The territory was incorporated as the city of San Leandro on March 21, 1872. Later, Portuguese immigrants—who were willing to work hard and be gouged by grossly inflated prices for land—came to dominate the city. Their descendants populate San Leandro to this day.
San Leandro boasts two claims to fame in the world of entertainment. The first is Hal Peary, who originated the role of Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve on radio in the Fibber McGee and Molly show and later on his own program, The Great Gildersleeve. Peary was born a third generation San Leandran and raised in the city. The second entertainer was Lloyd Bridges, a versatile film and TV actor best known for the television show Sea Hunt. I suppose that an argument could be made that with my choice of profession, I’m carrying on a great tradition. Look at me and my delusions of grandeur.
The city was also ground zero for a major civil rights challenge during World War II. In 1942, San Leandro police arrested a young Japanese-American man named Fred Korematsu for failing to report for internment. After being convicted for knowingly violating the Civilian Exclusion Order, Korematsu appealed his conviction all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The high court upheld the conviction, thus ending all potential challenges to Japanese internment across America. Four decades later, during more tolerant times, Korematsu finally succeeded in having his conviction overturned, receiving an official apology from the U.S. government and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton for his persistence in fighting prejudice.
To this day, I don’t know how much my mother knew about San Leandro and its reputation when she moved us there. From what I’ve been able to ascertain, San Leandro’s hostility toward blacks was well known among the African-American populations of the neighboring communities of Hayward and Oakland. They spoke of the border as though it were enemy territory.
As one resident of 1970s East Oakland told me, “You just knew not to go there.”
Then again, my mother didn’t really associate with the black community. She truly could have been oblivious to the hostility blacks faced in the city; on the other hand, San Leandro may have been as close to her vision of Providence, Rhode Island, as she could find in the East Bay. “I’m not one of those blacks.”
The place my mother had found was located in Washington Manor, a tract of homes in the southwestern part of town that was developed to accommodate the large number of young families migrating to the suburbs following World War II. Most of the breadwinners brought home their bacon by working in manufacturing jobs at one of the many plants in the city, including Caterpillar Tractor (founded in San Leandro) and Golden Grain. For a long time, Rice-A-Roni, “the San Francisco treat,” was actually made in San Leandro. (I suppose “the San Leandro treat” doesn’t have quite the same cachet.)
By the 1960s, many of San Leandro’s residents had moved there from Oakland, where they’d grown up prior to the war. Before World War II, Oakland had been primarily white, but once the conflict ended, scores of Southern blacks who had been stationed in the Bay Area decided to stay. This, of course, meant that they had to have some place to live. This provided a golden opportunity for enterprising Realtors: blockbusting. It’s almost hard to believe this practice existed as I write this at the dawn of the twenty-first century, but at that time, blockbusting was a common practice in many parts of America. The way it worked was brilliant in its simplicity.
A Realtor would go into a white neighborhood and offer a homeowner an inflated price for his house. The homeowner, feeling as though he’d just won the lottery, would jump at the quick profit. The Realtor would then sell the house (often at a loss) to the first black home-buyer he could find. The remaining white homeowners in the neighborhood would be aghast at the prospect of “undesirables” moving in and “lowering the property values,” so they would dump their homes to the Realtor at a discount. The Realtor would then resell to black home-buyers. The resulting “white flight” would make the Realtor a fortune, while turning the fear of falling property values into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Once they sold their homes, the white population needed a place to go. That’s where San Leandro came in.
M.C. Friel, a white real estate broker from the neighboring town of Hayward, had made a fortune with his plan to create and maintain lily-white communities. Race covenants, which barred the transfer of property to nonwhites, had been in place in California since the turn of the twentieth century. Back then, there had been a great migration of Chinese immigrants moving into San Francisco, working to build the railroads and other industrial businesses. Many white citizens did not particularly care for the idea of Chinese neighbors, so these covenants were put on the deeds of many of the properties. Although a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling (Shelly v. Kraemer) invalidated such covenants, many California homes continue to have the unenforceable restrictions on their titles.
Friel came up with a way to get around the Supreme Court by forming homeowners’ associations in communities throughout the Bay Area. Through legal mumbo jumbo, these associations held the authority to arbitrarily decide who was a suitable homeowner for their respective areas and who wasn’t. In 1948, Friel was able to convince the San Leandro Chamber of Commerce to get on board with his plans to ban “the great influx” of Negro families locating in the area since the war.
San Leandro’s ten homeowners’ associations, representing nearly two-thirds of all property owners, colluded to restrict the presence of blacks in the city. The associations decided who would be on the city council and then pressured council members to reject any proposal that would make it easier for people of color to locate there. Their restrictive practices included agreements by member homeowners not to sell or show their homes to blacks. San Leandro’s homeowners’ associations would keep a stranglehold on the city council and public policy for more than a generation.
In fairness, San Leandro was not the only California town struggling with the issue of integration during this time. In 1963, W. Byron Rumford, a Berkeley pharmacist and the third African American elected to the State Assembly in California, got the state legislature to pass the Rumford Act, which made it illegal to discriminate in housing on the basis of race, creed, or color. When Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown signed the legislation into law, Realtors across the state went ballistic.
The real estate industry created the Proposition 14 initiative and got it on the 1964 ballot. Prop 14 repealed Rumford. The rationale used to help bigots feel better about being bigots was that this was a “property rights” issue. The government has no business telling you that you can’t sell or rent to whomever you wish. Proposition 14 passed by a 2-to-1 margin statewide. The only city to reject it was Berkeley. In 1966, the California State Supreme Court invalidated the initiative when it ruled Prop 14 unconstitutional and in violation of the Civil Rights Act of1964.
While you may be able to legislate behavior, you can’t legislate sentiments or attitudes. As Martin Luther King Jr. once said during the Civil Rights Movement, “The law can’t make a man love me but it can sure stop him from lynching me.”
When Ronald Reagan ran for California governor in 1966, one of the centerpieces of his campaign was a pledge to overturn Rumford. In other words, “Vote for me and I’ll make it legal for you to discriminate.” He won, but was unable to circumvent federal law to keep that pledge. That didn’t, however, stop communities like San Leandro from using other methods to maintain their all-white status.
Well, almost all-white, that is. Until August 2, 1972, when the Copelands moved to town.