Rachelle James was born in Los Angeles, but her mother was a Creek freedwoman from Wewoka, and her father was from Ennis, Texas. One day, Rachelle’s father was walking after a long day at work in Dallas, and declined to cross to the opposite side of the street as a white man was walking down the same sidewalk toward him. He confronted Rachelle’s father and punched him. Rachelle’s father fought back and killed him. The attacker happened to be a KKK member, and soon after, Rachelle’s father escaped to Oklahoma City, where he “bottled and bonded.” Oklahoma was a dry state until 1959. Rachelle’s father and uncle smuggled alcohol into the state by the carload. Though especially dangerous for black bootleggers, the method was extremely lucrative and easier than making bathtub gin. Black Oklahomans loved scotch. The plan was simple: sell bottles of it at after-hours hangouts for fifteen or twenty bucks. Once Rachelle’s father had made enough money, he sought to marry a pretty girl and move to California. This pretty girl happened to be Rachelle’s mother, a beauty she compared to Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. After they married and moved to Los Angeles in 1945, Rachelle’s mother worked as a seamstress under Edith Head, the legendary Hollywood costume designer, and her father worked for a railroad company.
The end of the Great Depression in the 1930s helped enable the westward migration of African Americans in the 1940s. Between 1940 and 1950, the number of black Angelenos increased by a hundred thousand, but many had difficulty finding adequate-paying jobs. Rachelle’s family lived in the West Adams district, and the family soon realized that segregation and intimidation were old problems in the new place. When Rachelle was four, her parents wanted to buy a home in the Pico-Fairfax area, but no one would sell to them. This rejection was systemic, not case-specific. West Adams was white, and people were required to sign racially restrictive covenants as part of the deeds to their stately homes. The neighborhood’s white upper class readily agreed never to sell to African Americans. Black people were migrating to Los Angeles in overwhelming numbers during the first half of the twentieth century, and their upward mobility needed to be stopped. Because of the Depression, however, white homeowners were desperate, and some reneged on their covenants. Black people moved in, and white people fled to posher neighborhoods, like Beverly Hills and Bel Air.
Rachelle’s mother went into the real estate business, working for a prominent developer from Palm Springs who had an office at Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Drive.
The developer noticed how downtrodden Rachelle’s mother was about the rejection, bought the home and drafted the title papers, and the Jameses signed them. As the deal was closing, the Jameses’ new neighbors called Rachelle’s parents in the middle of the night to tell them that their new home was on fire. They dashed over there, but the house was severely damaged. The neighbors said that the fire chief, who lived down the street, had doused the house with gasoline and lit it. Despite the clear message—You do not belong here—Rachelle’s father fought back. “He said to move every gun in the house and move it high—hold it up in the air—let all the neighbors know. And I was taught as a child, it was just instinct, if somebody called me nigger, kick their ass. And if they were your size, fight ’em. If they were bigger than you, take a baseball bat.” I recalled my grandparents’ move to the suburb of Pomona, outside of Atlantic City, after which the KKK burned crosses in their backyard to try to intimidate them into leaving.
Rachelle and her family soon realized that California was no different from any other part of America. Geography made no difference for black people. For them there were only two regions in America: up south and down south. The hell that they fled was waiting for them in the City of Angels. This duplication of the Deep South in the Far West was by design, from the highest levels of infrastructure down to the bigotry on the streets.
In the 1920s and 1930s, about 10 percent of the police in every California city were Ku Klux Klan members. William Parker, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) from 1950 to 1966, recruited military and police veterans from the South, seeking the most racist cops he could find. While Los Angeles black churches were trying to lure black Southerners to flee to escape the KKK, white supremacists were already in control of the city, now dressed in blue instead of white. The “sundown towns” that black Southerners raced to escape reappeared in Los Angeles County—especially South Pasadena, Culver City, and Glendale. For white readers unfamiliar with the term, a sundown town was an officially racist municipality, usually with signs posted at the city limits saying something like NIGGER, DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOU HERE, letting everyone know that no one would be punished for murdering a nonwhite person.
Rachelle says, “I can remember when a black person had better not go to Glendale or Culver City and be there after five o’clock. I was in high school from ’67 and graduated in June of ’70. I was an outstanding journalism student at L.A. High. We were one of the few high schools in the country that produced a six-page-minimum weekly newspaper. The sponsor of the journalism program lived in Glendale, and we had different material that he had to approve that had to be done after school was out but before the next morning. We would sometimes have to drive to his house in Glendale to take it to him. Everyone would joke, because when we went to Glendale, I would say six or seven times out of ten the police would stop us. ‘What are you doing here?’ That kind of stuff. And same thing in Culver City. In the fifties, when we first lived in Pico-Fairfax, after we had started school, when we would ride our bicycles around the block, white people would turn their sprinklers on to try and wet us up.”
Besides the sundown towns and the KKK cops, there were the segregated spaces. While Jim Crow was not sanctioned by law, blacks were routinely kept out of certain neighborhoods like West Adams because whites feared the potential of black people’s class mobility and economic growth. In the 1910s, black people began settling in Los Angeles along the lower end of Central Avenue because of the low rents. By 1920, the thirty blocks of Central Avenue, “several blocks east to the railroad tracks,” and the neighborhoods around West Jefferson and Temple Street and the area south of Watts was populated mainly by black people. White resentment was already present. A letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times published in 1916 lamented “the insults one has to take from a northern nigger, especially a woman, let alone the property depreciation in the community where they settle.” Restrictive covenants were widespread. Sale, lease, or rental of certain lots by a white person to any nonwhite was illegal. Black people were confined to certain blocks and neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. The buildings they inhabited were left to deteriorate. There was inadequate water, poor sanitation, cramped housing, and “high sickness and death rates, high crime rate, police-resident hostility,” as Lawrence B. De Graaf, author of “The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890–1930” put it.2 Educational and recreational services were subpar.
This was all too familiar to me. In South Jersey, there were certain parts of Atlantic County at the Jersey shore where black people were barred from buying and renting. Maybe this is why my family, and many other black families of the sixties and seventies, were confined to the projects. Maybe this was also why my grandparents went through hell to move into a white suburb less than ten miles away. This wasn’t state-specific. This was a nationwide effort of white people to impede the movement of black people who were coming in droves to better their lives.
Before my flight took off from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles, I knew what this last, crucial part of my research would entail. This was less of a deep dive into my family history and more of an on-the-ground look at migrants from all of the United States who settled in the last place that they could go. I would study what turned Los Angeles into a powder keg—the result of squeezing black people into restricted territories. Using my family’s stories, I wanted to demonstrate how racist myths formed white beliefs about black people in California, and my relatives’ judgments were influenced by them. I wanted to show that, despite black people
’s distances from one another, we were in perpetual conversation through the mistreatment, displacement, and violence inflicted upon us. And I intended to be the interlocutor.
2
WHEN MY UNCLES were working at the Pacifique Recording Studio in Santa Monica, there was a homeless woman who would always come by, named Geraldine. She was in her fifties and from what my mom could recall, she was clean because she would dig through trash with gloves on. She would always joke to my mother that she wanted me as her child, most likely because we were both light-skinned and she thought I bore more of a resemblance to her than the rest of my family. Geraldine moved to California to become an actress, but her dreams were never realized. Upon learning more about her life, my family realized that she was from South Jersey, like us. Not only was she from South Jersey, but we also knew her family. My uncles tried to coax her into returning home, but she would not budge. She was too embarrassed to go back home and tell the truth about what happened to her. Even if she was homeless, being in California meant that she had made it and there would be no going back, no matter how much she’d been through. My mother and uncles didn’t understand her.
When I heard the story, I didn’t understand either. Why would she not want to go back to South Jersey, where she could be with her family and have a chance at a home? I didn’t know her history.
Geraldine migrated to Los Angeles in the sixties as the city was in sociopolitical turmoil. In 1965, Los Angeles was the scene of the Watts Riots, biggest in our nation’s history, a culmination of the rage black migrants felt after they’d settled in the City of Angels and found they couldn’t escape racism even there.
On August 11, 1965, twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye was pulled over on 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard in Watts for reckless driving. A crowd of fifty people watched as Frye failed sobriety tests. As the police were about to tow Marquette’s car, his older brother Ronald brought their mother, Rena, to the scene. Like Rachelle James’s family, the Fryes had also come from Oklahoma to Los Angeles for more opportunities. According to police reports, Marquette was respectful and compliant at first, but as soon as his mother and brother showed up, he turned spiteful, saying that they had to kill him to take him to jail. When the officers tried to arrest him, he resisted, and Rena jumped onto an officer’s back. An officer hit Marquette in the head with his baton, drawing blood. The crowd now swelled to almost a thousand people as Marquette, Ronald, and Rena were hauled off to jail. The chaos that ensued left 34 people dead, including 23 killed by LAPD officers or National Guard troops, as well as 1,032 injured, at least six hundred buildings damaged from fires or looting, another two hundred buildings completely destroyed, and around 3,500 people arrested. The event is now a specter that hovers over black Angelenos, the memory still vivid.
Depending on whom you ask, the Watts Riots may or may not be called an uprising or rebellion. Rachelle told me that black people were just sick and tired of being sick and tired. By the time they reached Los Angeles, they’d just about had it with racism, and the city served as a pressure cooker for black rage. In the 1960s, race riots were happening all over the country, in places like Birmingham and Tampa, but also in Northern cities, like New York (Harlem), Detroit, Chicago, and Newark. After World War II, as millions of black people were migrating north, many white people fled to the suburbs to escape the deterioration of the inner cities as unemployment and poverty due to systemic racism became the norm there. Collectively, the riots were one of the biggest and most destructive uprisings in this country’s history.
As in other states I visited, I connected with one black person, who then urged me to talk to another—exactly what Rachelle did. She wanted me to meet the woman who picked up the first call into the police station when Marquette Frye was being arrested; she has been dealing with the fallout ever since. No sooner did I land in Los Angeles and set down my bags in my hotel room than Regina called my cell phone and invited me to come to her home in Country Club Park to talk.
Regina is a first-generation Californian, born in 1942 and raised near Watts. She and Geraldine were close in age. Regina’s grandfather, as she succinctly put it, was “an uppity nigga.” He owned an insurance company and made so much money that whites considered him a threat. He was a good shooter, who could kill a fish in the water, but like Regina’s father, he had to flee a lynch mob. Regina’s grandfather gathered his wife and their eight children and moved to California. When Regina’s parents married (her father from Texas, her mom from Arkansas), her father, whom she described as “damaged by the war,” worked as an elevator starter at the Southern California Edison company, and her mother became a beautician after working as a maid. During Regina’s childhood, she tells me, there were some real gangsters there. In the 1940s, white gangs emerged to combat black migrants, and black gangs emerged to resist them and protect the newly formed black neighborhoods. It wasn’t so much about territories and knowing one’s place, as my mother was told prior to our move to Los Angeles. It wasn’t black-on-black crime. No, that shift happened later . . . after an incredible turning point.
By fifteen, Regina was married, and she had four children by the time she was nineteen. She became a police dispatcher because her husband had been employed in the same office previously and because she was not hired at the insurance company that her grandfather had founded. After applying, taking a test, and being hired in 1962, she worked at the Central Division, which is now the Parker Center, LAPD headquarters. During her probational period, she worked three months on the day shift, one month on night shift, and the last month on the graveyard shift. Naturally, with four small children, the hours took a toll on her, but not so much as the work culture. She would be put on disciplinary probation for letting her hair hang over one eye or wearing a sleeveless top, and coworkers would shut the door on her as she came through the entrance right behind them. The episode she recalls most vividly involves a dog. “At a different position, answering phones, this little old white lady . . . was sitting next to me, and she reached in her purse, and she said, ‘Have you ever seen my dog?’ I said no, and she pulled out a little picture of a little dog and showed it and asked, ‘Do you know what his name is?’ And I said ‘No, Ma’am,’ and she said, ‘Nigger—he’s black.’”
There were only 6 black employees out of 150. Her job was to answer phones for the Seventy-Seventh Street Division, responsible for a predominantly black neighborhood. Unlike the posh communities of Westwood or Beverly Hills, the district required diligent multitasking to alert police of crimes in the area.
“You know, normal nights, come to work at three o’clock in the afternoon. As the evening progresses, it got busier. All of a sudden, I hear that this officer needs help. I’m waiting, and nothing. Then an officer comes in on the radio. I say, ‘Please repeat yourself. Who are you? Where are you?’ Nothing. All the pains and knots of losing an officer who needs help. Finally I get him to come in, almost whispering, but it wasn’t much help because the call was so broken up. I guess he was regretting that he started with ‘Officer needs help’ versus ‘Officer needs assistance.’ Help means BAM (by any means). Assistance means to get another patrol car down there.” I figured that BAM was needed rather than waiting for a more orderly approach.
“At that point, I screamed out to the boys in the center, ‘I’ve got an Officer Needs Help such and such.’ I finally got his location out of him, and of course they sent another police car, and then they took over from me. But by then every officer in 12 (of the 77th Street division) had heard it and is going completely nuts trying to figure out what it is. So it unfolded in a weird, strange way. I knew though, ’cause, it was 116th and Avalon, and I lived at 118th and Central Avenue, which is not far, OK? So I knew the neighborhood. That’s my neighborhood.”
Regina tried to tell her superiors not to escalate the situation, but they did so anyway. To this day, she is haunted by a single question: “Why didn’t they listen to me?” After work, when Regina ran home, she saw that the groce
ry store around the corner had been burned down and sparks were still flying from the roof. She made her children stay in the bedroom in the back of the house, thinking it too dangerous for them to be in the front. People were running down the street and looting stores and policemen were shooting. On the second night of the riots, there were military guards right off the Interstate 110 freeway. These white male guards pointed guns in her face and searched her car. Down on Imperial Highway, cars were ablaze and people were screaming.
After the riots were over, Regina’s mental health suffered. She obsessed over her children’s safety and was often paralyzed by the stress. She would dream of answering phone calls at her job and talk in her sleep, ordering officers to return to the scene to find a missing limb.
When I asked her how she coped with it all, her face took on a solemnity that I have never beheld in any of my other interview subjects. Her eyes were unyielding and unblinking, but I was neither scared nor uncomfortable. I waited patiently for her to continue. Then she replied, “I didn’t think about it, and that’s a long story that I’m writing about to try and figure out now. I learned very early in life how to compartmentalize, so if something was uncomfortable or painful, I could put it in one section and go on—the point that stuff’s even coming up now that I’d forgotten. That’s part of the weight on the stomach, and I can feel the pain when it comes up, when I remember and write about it now. They’re all shut. All the horrors are shut.”
Wandering in Strange Lands Page 21
