10: The Civil Rights Movement in the West, 1950–70

1.Steven F. Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Historical Review, 96:2 (April 1991), 456–59; Clayborne Carson, “Civil Rights Reform and the Black Freedom Struggle,” in Charles Eagles, ed., The Civil Rights Movement in America (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1986), 19–32; and Quintard Taylor, “The Civil Rights Movement in the Urban West: Black Protest in Seattle, 1960–1970,” Journal of Negro History 80:1 (Winter 1995), 1–14. There is a growing body of literature on the civil rights movement in the West. See, for example, Allan A. Saxe, “Protest and Reform: The Desegregation of Oklahoma City” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 1969); Larry S. Richardson, “Civil Rights in Seattle: A Rhetorical Analysis of a Social Movement” (Ph.D. dissertation, Washington State University, 1975); W. Edwin Derrick and J. Hershel Barnhill, “With ‘All’ Deliberate Speed: Desegregation of the Public Schools in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, 1954 to 1972,” Red River Valley Historical Review 6:2 (Spring 1981), 78–90; Robert A. Goldberg, “Racial Change on the Southern Periphery: The Case of San Antonio, Texas, 1960–1965,” Journal of Southern History 49:3 (August 1983), 349–74; Mary Melcher, “Blacks and Whites Together: Interracial Leadership in the Phoenix Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Arizona History 32:2 (Summer 1991), 195–216; F. Kenneth Jensen, “The Houston Sit-In Movement of 1960–61,” in Howard Beeth and Cary D. Wintz, eds., Black Dixie: Afro-Texan History and Culture in Houston (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992), 211–22; and Ronald Walters, “The Great Plains Sit-in Movement, 1958–60,” Great Plains Quarterly 16:2 (Spring 1996), 85–94. For an oral history of the civil rights movement in Nevada’s largest city, see Jamie Coughtry, ed., Woodrow Wilson: Race, Community and Politics in Las Vegas, 1940s–1980s (Reno: University of Nevada Oral History Program, 1990).

2.The Mahoney quotation appears in Melcher, “Blacks and Whites Together,” 198, while Nichols’s is in W.J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 53. The obvious optimism of Mahoney and Nichols in the 1950s was tempered by the Cold War-era attacks on progressive left-labor coalitions. Such attacks allowed more moderate reformers to dominate the civil rights agenda for much of the decade. For a discussion of the decline of the postwar left generally, see Gerald Horne, Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956 (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), ch. 10 and 11. For an analysis of the process in one city, see Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 181–85.

3.See Hayzel Burton Daniels, “A Black Magistrate’s Struggles,” in Anne Hodges Morgan and Rennard Strickland, eds., Arizona Memories (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), 336–38; Richard E. Harris, The First 100 Years: A History of Arizona Blacks (Apache Junction, Ariz.: Relmo Publishers, 1983), 72; and Bradford Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix: A Profile of Mexican American, Chinese American, and African American Communities, 1860–1992 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press), 161–63; the Struckmeyer quote appears on page 162. On Goldwater’s civil rights activity, see Robert Alan Goldberg, Barry Goldwater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 89–91. On the parallel Mexican American challenge to school segregation, see Gilbert G. González, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation (Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press, 1990), ch. 7, and Robert R. Alvarez, Jr., “The Lemon Grove Incident: The Nation’s First Successful Desegregation Court Case,” Journal of San Diego History 32:2 (Spring 1986), 116–35. See also Luckingham, Minorities in Phoenix, 49–50.

4.Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 372–77. The Scott quote appears on page 376.

5.Ibid., 375, 382. Four Topeka desegregation cases preceded Brown: Reynolds v. Board of Education, 1903, Thurman-Watts v. Board of Education, 1924, Wright v. Board of Education, 1929, and Graham v. Board of Education, 1941. The last case was a victory for junior high school desegregation. For background on the seventy-year struggle to integrate Kansas schools, see Randall B. Woods, “Integration, Exclusion, or Segregation? The ‘Color Line’ in Kansas,—1878–1900,” Western Historical Quarterly 14:2 (April 1983), 181–98, and Deborah Dandridge and others, Brown vs. Board of Education: In Pursuit of Freedom and Equality: Kansas and the African American Public School Experience, 1855–1955 (Topeka: Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research, 1993), 7.

6.The quote appears in Kluger, Simple Justice, 395. In an essay describing the significance of the Brown decision four decades later, Cheryl Brown Henderson, daughter of the Reverend Oliver Brown, concluded that sexism may have played a role in the naming of this historic case. Brown was not, as is often assumed, chosen because his name appeared first on the list of plaintiffs. Darlene Brown, another plaintiff, was listed ahead of Oliver Brown. See Cheryl Brown Henderson and Shariba Rivers, “The Legacy of Brown 40 Years Later,” in Charles Teddlie and Kofi Lomotey, eds., Forty Years after the Brown Decision: Implications of School Desegregation for U.S. Education (New York: AMS Press, 1996), vol. 14, pp. 373–82.

7.Ironically Sumner School was first used exclusively for African American children until 1885, when it was turned over to white pupils. The school was named after Boston attorney and later Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, who in 1849 argued for the plaintiffs in the nation’s first school desegregation case, Roberts v. City of Boston. For background on the controversy, see Cheryl Brown Henderson, “Landmark Decision: Remembering the Struggle for Equal Education,” Land and People 6:1 (Spring 1994), 2–5, and Kluger, Simple Justice, 408–09.

8.Kluger, Simple Justice, 390, 400–11; the Fleming quotation is on page 411. See also Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1994), ch. 10.

9.Kluger, Simple Justice, 411–24; the quote appears on page 424. For a discussion of the influence of expert testimony on the language of the U.S. Supreme Court decision, see Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 131–32.

10.Henderson, “Landmark Decision,” 5.

11.See August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 15, 27, 59–60, and Jeffrey Harrison Smith, “The Omaha De Porres Club” (M.A. thesis, Creighton University, 1967), ch. 3.

12.Kristine M. McCusker, “ ‘The Forgotten Years’ of America’s Civil Rights Movement: The University of Kansas, 1939–1961” (M.A. thesis, University of Kansas, 1994), 1–3, 128–34.

13.See George Long, “How Albuquerque Got Its Civil Rights Ordinance,” Crisis 60:11 (November 1953), 521–22; all quotes are from the student boycott clause, which appears on page 522. See also Marc Simmons, Albuquerque: A Narrative History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 371.

14.Long, “How Albuquerque Got Its Civil Rights Ordinance,” 521–24, and Simmons, Albuquerque, 371.

15.On the Wichita sit-ins, see Ronald Walters, “Standing Up in America’s Heartland: Sitting-in before Greensboro,” American Visions 8:1 (February 1993), 20–23, and Walters, “The Great Plains Sit-In Movement,” 87–88.

16.Carl R. Graves, “The Right to Be Served: Oklahoma City’s Lunch Counter Sit-ins, 1958–1964,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 59:2 (Summer 1981), 152–55.

17.The Oklahoma City ordinance was passed on the same day the 1964 Civil Rights Act went into effect. For a discussion of the Oklahoma City campaign, see Clara Luper, Behold the Walls (Oklahoma City: Jim Wire, 1979), 134–36, and Graves, “The Right to Be Served,” 155–60.

18.The quotation appears in Taylor, Forging, 198. For the variety of examples of civil disobedience protests in the West, see Meier and Rudwick, CORE, 233–34, 242–43; Lawrence P. Crouchett, Lonnie G. Bunch III, and Martha Kendall Winnacker, Visions toward Tomorrow: The History of the East Bay Afro-American Community, 1852–1977 (Oakland: Northern California Center for Afro-American History and Life, 1989), 57; F. Jensen, “The Houston Sit-In Movement of 1960–61,” 211–22; Goldberg, “Racial Change on the Southern Periphery, 355–59; Stuart McElderry, “Boundaries and Limits: Housing Segregation and Civil Rights Activism in Portland, Oregon, 1930–1962” unpublished paper in the author’s possession), 31–37; Michael Coray, “African-Americans in Nevada,” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 35:4 (Winter 1992), 251–53; Elmer Rusco, “Civil Rights Movement in Nevada,” Nevada Public Affairs Review: Ethnicity and Race in Nevada (1987), 75–77; Jamie Coughtry and R. T. King, eds., Lubertha Johnson: Civil Rights Efforts in Las Vegas: 1940s–1960s (Reno: University of Nevada Oral History Program, 1988), 40; and Taylor, Forging, ch. 7.

19.Hugh Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1994), 49–50, and Max Silverman, “Urban Redevelopment and Community Response: African Americans in San Francisco’s Western Addition” (M.A. thesis, San Francisco State University, 1994), 50–51, 64, 84.

20.The Ussery quote appeared in the San Francisco Sun-Reporter, August 3, 1963, and is quoted in Silverman, “Urban Redevelopment,” 92. On the Oakland protests, see Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 51–52.

21.San Francisco Sun-Reporter, May 23, 1963, quoted in Silverman, “Urban Redevelopment,” 87.

22.Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 52–53.

23.The shop-in was a typical CORE protest tactic wherein demonstrators filled shopping carts and went to the checkout stands, waited for the costs to be tallied, then left the store without taking or paying for the items. See David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement: Coming of Age in the 1960s (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1993), 85, for a description of a shop-in at a Lucky supermarket in 1964.

24.James Richardson, Willie Brown: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 86–87, and Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 57–59.

25.Quoted in Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 70. See also pages 59–60, 70.

26.Ibid., 71–73. The unidentified student quote is Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 20. For a detailed discussion of the Free Speech Movement and its roots in civil rights activism, see pages 18–37 and Goines, The Free Speech Movement, 161–36.

27.The quotations are from Goldberg, “Racial Change on the Southern Periphery,” 362, 370.

28.Quoted in ibid., 362; see also pages 352, 362–63. On the role of Henry B. González in civil rights efforts, see Juan Gómez-Quiñonez, Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940–1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 57–59. On the Mexican American civil rights movement in Texas and its relationship to the national black struggle, see Mario T. García, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology, & Identity, 1930–1960 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 46–59.

29.Taylor, Forging, 223.

30.Ibid., 224, 227. For a background discussion of Asian Americans in the civil rights era, see Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretative History (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 174–75.

31.The parent is quoted in the San Francisco Sun-Reporter, September 22, 1962. See Silverman, “Urban Redevelopment,” 89.

32.The Texas public schools were established and segregated with the adoption of a new state constitution in 1876. This segregation extended to “Mexican” children, the vast majority of whom lived in south Texas. For background on Texas segregation, see William Henry Kellar, “Make Haste Slowly: A History of School Desegregation in Houston, Texas” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Houston, 1994), 1, 5–6, 217.

33.Jensen, “The Houston Sit-In Movement,” 213–17.

34.Kellar, “Make Haste Slowly,” 299. On Tyronne Day, see page 322. There is now extensive literature on the role of business elites as reluctant supporters of desegregation. See, for example, Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn, Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982) and W. Marvin Dulaney, “Whatever Happened to the Civil Rights Movement in Dallas, Texas?,” in W. Marvin Dulaney and Kathleen Underwood, eds., Essays on the American Civil Rights Movement (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1993), 66–95.

35.Kellar, “Make Haste Slowly,” 343–71.

36.The statement appears in Berkeley Unified School District, “Integration of the Berkeley Elementary Schools: A Report to the Superintendent” (Berkeley: Berkeley Unified School District, 1967), 1. See also Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 54–57.

37.Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 62.

38.Ibid., 62–63.

39.Ibid., 63.

40.See Berkeley Citizens United Bulletin, November 1964, p. 3, and Neil V. Sullivan, Now Is the Time: Integration in the Berkeley Schools (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 32–33, 42–43, 64–65.

41.The quotations appear in Sullivan, Now Is the Time, 50, 88–90. The Berkeley desegregation plan is described in detail in Berkeley Unified School District, “Desegregation of the Berkeley Public Schools: Its Feasibility and Implementation,” (Berkeley: Berkeley Unified School District, 1964), 13–29.

42.Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 69. For a positive assessment of Berkeley’s desegregation, see Sullivan, Now Is the Time, ch. 8, 20.

43.All quotes are from Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 68. For a discussion of school desegregation in San Francisco, Seattle, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa, see Doris R. Fine, When Leadership Fails: Desegregation and Demoralization in the San Francisco Schools (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1986), ch. 2, 3, 9; Doris Pieroth, “With All Deliberate Caution: School Integration in Seattle, 1954–1968,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 73:2 (April 1982), 50–61; and Derrick and Barnhill, “With All Deliberate Speed,” 78–90.

44.See Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 96, and Jerry Cohen and William S. Murphy, Burn, Baby, Burn! The Los Angeles Race Riot, August 1965 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 25–41, 146, 213, 232, 256. Although Fire This Time is the most comprehensive study of the uprising, the post-Watts literature also includes Paul Bullock, Watts, the Aftermath: An Inside View of the Ghetto by the People of Watts, California (New York: Grove Press, 1969); Robert Conot, Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness (New York: Bantam Books, 1967); Bruce Michael Tyler, “Black Radicalism in Southern California, 1950–1982” (Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 1983); and Mark Baldassare, ed., The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994). See also Richard M. Elman, Ill-at-Ease in Compton (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967).

45.Cohen and Murphy, Burn, Baby, Burn!, 44.

46.Patricia Rae Adler, “Watts, from Suburb to Black Ghetto” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1977), 251–64.

47.The Bontemps quotation appears in Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Anyplace but Here (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 9. For the Weaver quotation, see Robert C. Weaver, The Negro Ghetto (New York: Russell and Russell, 1948 [reprinted 1967]), 87. See also Adler, “Watts,” 251, 255–65.

48.See Johnie Scott, “The Coming of the Hoodlum,” in Budd Schulberg, ed., From the Ashes: Voices of Watts (New York: World Publishing Co., 1969), 98, and Adler, “Watts,” 289, 291–94, 301, 303.

49.Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1968), 27. On the educational and income levels of blacks in Watts in 1950 and 1960, see Sally Jane Sandoval, “Ghetto Growing Pains: The Impact of Negro Migration on the City of Los Angeles, 1940–1960” (M.A. thesis, California State University, Fullerton, 1974), ch. 5.

50.Raphael J. Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 43–46, 55–56, and Tyler, “Black Radicalism,” 287.

51.Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White, 43–46.

52.On the Canton, Mississippi, speech, see Clayborne Carson, In Struggle, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), ch. 14. On the origins of black power, see Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage, 1967), ch. 2, and William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 31–34. Finally see Taylor, Forging, 216–23, for a discussion of the transition of black political leadership in Seattle from nonviolence to black power.

53.Tyler, “Black Radicalism,” 45, 221–22, and Horne, Fire This Time, 200–01.

54.John Gregory Dunne, “The Ugly Mood of Watts: Militant Leaders in Los Angeles’ Negro Ghetto Are Trying to Win Power by Threatening Whites With Violence—and behind Their Threats Lies Hatred,” Saturday Evening Post 239:15 (July 16, 1966), 85–86; Andrew Kopkind, “Watts—Waiting for D-Day,” New Republic 154:24 (June 11, 1966), 15–17. See also Tyler, “Black Radicalism,” 226.

55.Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 22. On Newton’s background, see pages 11–18, 45–50, 67–72, 105–09. See also Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 4–8; Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 5; and Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 2, 45–9.

56.Befitting their image as alliance-oriented revolutionaries, Newton and Seale received their first weapons from Richard Aoki, a self-styled Japanese American revolutionary, and later in 1966 sold Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung on the campus of UC-Berkeley. The sales generated revenue for more guns and introduced the Panthers to white radical students eager to support black revolutionaries. See Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 112–13. The BPP ten-point program appears in Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 116–19.

57.Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 114–36, 145–51; Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 119, 123–31.

58.Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, 154–57; Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 110; and Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 148–50.

59.Pearson, The Shadow of the Panther, 156, 167, 169, 209. On the COINTELPRO campaign, see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988), ch. 2, 3.

60.Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1969, pp. 1,17. See also Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), ch. 8. For the relationship between gangs and post-Watts militancy, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 296–98, and Tyler, “Black Radicalism,” 227–34.

61.See Jeffrey A. Scott “The Sixties Student Movement at San Francisco State College: A New Perspective,” Wazo Weusi Journal 1:1 (Fall 1992), 58–60, and Dikran Karagueuzian, Blow It Up! The Black Student Revolt at San Francisco State College and the Emergence of Dr. Hayakawa (Boston: Gambit, 1971), ch. 6–10. For a discussion of the Brown Berets and AIM, the largest of the 1960s-era ethnic defense organizations, see Rudolfo Acuna, Occupied America: The Chicano’s Struggle toward Liberation (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 231–33, and Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 148–55, 162–165.

62.On gender relations in the Black Panther Party, see Angela Darlean Brown, “Servants of the People: A History of Women in the Black Panther Party,” (A.B. thesis, Harvard University, 1992), ch. 3, and Brown, A Taste of Power, 108–10, 307–10, 357, 367–68, 438–50.

63.Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, ch. 11, 12, 19, and Brown, A Taste of Power, 135–37.

64.The full editorial appears in Los Angeles Sentinel, January 23, 1969, pp. B-1 and B-5. One consequence was the rapid expansion of western street gangs by the early 1970s with the Los Angeles–based Crips and Bloods as a eighty-thousand-member core of two rival confederations that eventually spread as far north as Seattle and as far east as Kansas City. For two interpretations of their growth in the post-Watts era, see Davis, City of Quartz, 267–84, 296–99, and Horne, Fire This Time, 189–204.

65.Quoted in Taylor, Forging, 191.

Conclusion

1.See Quintard Taylor, “From Esteban to Rodney King: Five Centuries of African American History in the West,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 46:4 (Winter 1996), 3–4.

2.Ibid., 3–4, 16–17. On the Rodney King uprising, see Mark Baldassare, ed., The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future (Boulder, C.: Westview Press, 1994).

3.See J. W. Smurr, “Jim Crow out West,” in J. W. Smurr and K. Ross Toole, eds., Historical Essays on Montana and the Northwest (Helena: Western Press, Historical Society of Montana, 1957), 194, and Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 577, 589.

4.For the complete Olvera statement, see George P. Hammond and Agapito Rey, eds., Don Juan de Oñate: Colonizer of New Mexico, 1595–1628 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1953), 560–62.

5.Quoted in Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 349.