by Josh Levin
The Oakland police detained Connie Fay Harbaugh for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor that could stem from abetting a child’s exposure to “any house of prostitution or assignation” or placing him “in danger of leading an idle, dissolute, lewd, or immoral life.” The case history stated that “Gilbert Ortiz admitted that he had a venereal disease which he contracted only last Sunday.” The woman at 778 Tenth Street, apartment number two, was deemed the probable culprit.
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Nearly everyone in Martha Louise White’s family—her mother, stepfather, and grandmother and most of her aunts, uncles, and cousins—chose to stay in the South forever. Even so, her decision to start over someplace new was far from uncommon. As many as 21 percent of Arkansans abandoned the state in the 1940s, the largest proportion in the nation, with California their most popular destination. The teenager from Mississippi County was somewhat unusual in that those who left Arkansas tended to be more well-to-do and better educated than those who stayed behind. But like most people who relocated, Martha Louise White was young and from a rural area. Race also played a major role in one’s willingness to pick up stakes. Between 14 and 18 percent of white Arkansans moved beyond the state’s borders in the 1940s. Estimates of the departure rate for black residents ranged from 24 to 33 percent.
Black migrants saw the Pacific Coast as both a gateway to economic prosperity and an escape from the degradations of the Jim Crow South. Among those who made the journey to California was a teenage Maya Angelou, who fled to Oakland from Stamps, Arkansas, shortly after a white man forced her older brother to carry the body of a “rotten dead Negro”—possibly the victim of an unreported lynching.
Oakland, San Francisco, and most everywhere else in the Bay Area flourished during World War II, buoyed by billions of dollars in government shipbuilding contracts. An essay published in the NAACP magazine the Crisis depicted California as a Shangri-la for black Americans, a place where black “children go to the same schools as other children” and black men “can walk down the street without having to move toward the curb when a white man passes.” Oakland also offered a bounty of opportunities for working women, thanks to massive growth in national defense spending and the dearth of men in the labor market. The around-the-clock nature of wartime shift work fostered a kind of leisure free-for-all in which restaurants, dance halls, and movie theaters stayed open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In the Golden State, it seemed, the rules governing all types of social behavior were subject to change, and the past didn’t necessarily have to be prologue.
In 1944, Fortune magazine sent Dorothea Lange—whose photograph Migrant Mother came to embody the hardships suffered by those who’d gone west in the 1930s—to document the wartime boom in Richmond, twelve miles north of Oakland along San Francisco Bay. One of the images from that series featured a young black woman standing in front of a café, her smiling face drawing attention away from a poster advertising a “free war show” at Berkeley Memorial Stadium. She had a small handbag tucked beneath her left arm, a long beaded necklace wrapped around her neck, and a mid-length fur jacket draped over her shoulders. The caption: “It Was Never Like This Back Home.”
The reality of life in California, however, often didn’t live up to that dreamy vision. Shipyards mostly passed over black women when hiring for high-paying, skilled jobs, instead offering them less remunerative positions as custodians and cafeteria workers. Connie Harbaugh’s rat-infested West Oakland apartment building was abysmal but not atypical. Between 1940 and 1947, Oakland grew by a hundred thousand people and developed fewer than fourteen thousand new housing units. War workers and their families slept on park benches, in chicken shacks and sheds, and in the passageways of Oakland’s city hall. Some rooming houses offered beds by the hour. Others rented out chairs for laborers to sleep in.
The housing shortage was most acute in West Oakland, a 6.5-square-mile neighborhood that city policy makers quickly transformed from an integrated working-class enclave into a black ghetto. In 1940, there were 8,462 black people in all of Oakland. By 1950, that figure had risen to 47,562. This rapid influx of black migrants inspired local officials to impose the type of segregation that these newcomers had moved to California to escape. The construction of black-only housing projects in West Oakland, as well as the enforcement of restrictive real estate covenants in nearby communities, meant that, in the words of one Oaklander, there was “such a small part of the city that black folk could live in that they were sleeping on top of each other.” As of 1950, 85 percent of the city’s black residents had been partitioned off in West Oakland, many of them bunking in cramped single-occupancy hotel rooms and Victorian houses jam-packed with boarders. Angelou lived with her brother, mother, grandmother, and two uncles in an overstuffed apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. The place shook all day long, rocking back and forth whenever a Southern Pacific train rolled past.
That railroad-adjacent apartment was on the western edge of West Oakland, not far from one of the nation’s most prominent black boulevards. On Seventh Street, Angelou wrote in her autobiography, “dusty bars and smoke shops sat in the laps of storefront churches.” The strip also housed Harold “Slim” Jenkins’s nightclub—an elegant establishment that Angelou called “pretentious”—which attracted mixed-race crowds for performances by the Ink Spots, Duke Ellington, and Sarah Vaughan. A few miles to the east, the five-thousand-plus-seat Oakland Auditorium held separate “colored dances” on Monday nights, a policy enacted in 1944 following a skirmish outside a sold-out Cab Calloway concert. Although the city’s police chief declared that it “was not a race riot,” the conservative Oakland Observer blamed the arena fracas on “the influx of what might be called socially-liberated or uninhibited Negroes who are not bound by the old and peaceful understanding between the Negro and the white in Oakland.” These new arrivals, the newspaper explained, do “not concede that the white man has the right to be alone with his kind.”
In the 1940s, Oakland business owners responded to this influx by posting signs reading “White Trade Only” and “We Refuse Service to Negroes.” These public displays were most prevalent in the stretch of downtown abutting the eastern border of West Oakland. This was the area, almost exactly halfway between Slim Jenkins’s nightclub and the Oakland Auditorium, where the city’s white ruling class came in closest contact with the thousands of black men, women, and children who’d put down roots in California in the 1940s. The apartment where the Oakland police arrested Connie Harbaugh in 1948 was situated in this contested space. So was the sidewalk where she bumped into her Uncle Hubert in the summer of 1945.
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Hubert Mooney hadn’t planned to end up in California. The Alabama native had enlisted in the navy in July 1942 and been assigned to the cruiser USS Portland. Two months after he’d come aboard, the Pacific-based ship was struck by a torpedo during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. The Portland had then been towed to Sydney, Australia, where it stayed in dry dock while undergoing repairs. Mooney went AWOL for more than nine days during this extended shore leave, got court-martialed, then vanished for another three days. When the ship made it to San Francisco in March 1943, he was booted out of the navy with a bad conduct discharge—a fact that wouldn’t get mentioned when he’d assail his niece’s character in court two decades later.
After his unscheduled exit from the armed forces, Mooney drove a Yellow cab in Oakland and lived around the corner from Swan’s 10th Street Market, a massive downtown shopping emporium that employed clerks who’d answered ads for white-only positions. He would testify in Chicago that he’d “never thought about running into” his sister’s daughter in the Bay Area: “I will guarantee you, not there.” But on an afternoon in late July 1945, the ex-sailor heard a familiar voice shouting his name. Mooney had turned twenty-four a few months earlier. His niece was now nineteen. The two of them would spend the rest of the day cavorting and reminiscing, a couple of young adults exulting in the coincidence of
finding each other eighteen hundred miles away from the plantations where they’d played as children.
The night’s revelry began at the Army and Navy Cafe on Franklin Street, where they posted up in a booth with a pair of friends—one of his and one of hers—had a few beers, and talked about the relatives they hadn’t seen in ages. The quartet then drove off to Big Bear Tavern, a roadhouse across from a horse stable in the Oakland hills. “We wound up in Redwood Canyon that night,” Mooney would report in 1964, “drinking whiskey and anything in the book.” They stayed out for six to eight hours, finally parting ways at two o’clock in the morning. Mooney left his niece at her friend’s place in West Oakland, then headed back to his apartment downtown, on the other side of a border that was at once invisible and impossible not to see.
A week after their night out together, Mooney got a phone message at the Army and Navy Cafe. It was his niece. She needed him to bail her out of jail.
On the afternoon of Saturday, August 4, two days before the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, the police had responded to a call about a derelict tenant in West Oakland. The landlord of the eight-unit building at 1131 Market Street told the cops that a woman named Connie Reed owed him rent, and that he “intended to hold all of her clothing until she paid.” The police had tried to broker a compromise, asking the complainant to hang on to only part of the woman’s wardrobe. She’d ended those negotiations when, in view of the officers, she grabbed a pancake turner and started scraping the paint off her bedposts.
The woman who’d wielded that spatula would tell a very different version of this story during the Wakefield heirship hearing. “The landlord came into my apartment, to my building, and was going to get into bed with me,” she’d explain. “I took a butcher knife and hit him, and when I did I cut the bed.”
The booking report from August 4, 1945, didn’t say anything about a butcher knife or an attempted sexual assault. The police arrested Connie Reed for malicious mischief, and they confiscated her purse and its contents. The sepia-toned booking photos the Oakland police snapped that night showed a young woman in a girlish checked blouse with a notched collar. Her eyebrows were pencil thin, and her dark, curly hair was piled into a pompadour that crested several inches above her forehead. In the picture taken from straight on, her lips were clasped into the thinnest of smiles. In the one showing her face in profile, the corners of the teenager’s mouth tilted a few degrees downward, and her eyes wandered to a place well outside the frame.
As soon as he got his niece’s call, Mooney made the half-mile trip to the city jail, located in the upper reaches of Oakland’s towering granite and terra-cotta city hall. While he’d never known Martha to use the name Connie, he’d later profess that he hadn’t been surprised to hear she’d been arrested. He didn’t ask her to pay back the bail money, he’d say, “because that’s useless.” He also didn’t get her address, because he “didn’t want it.”
On that whiskey-soaked evening in Redwood Canyon, Mooney had allowed himself to lose his bearings. Now he remembered who Martha Louise White was supposed to be. He wouldn’t forget again.
* * *
Hubert Mooney’s niece had a criminal record before she made it to Oakland. In January 1943, when she was sixteen or seventeen years old, the Seattle police had booked her for disorderly conduct under the name Martha Davis. A year and a half later, the sheriff’s office in Port Orchard, Washington—a small town thirteen miles due west of Seattle, across Puget Sound—had arrested her for vagrancy, identifying her as Martha Gordon. Less than a month after that, in November 1944, the Seattle police again brought her in for disorderly conduct.
The circumstances of those three arrests reveal the trap she fell into upon arriving in the Pacific Northwest. In every instance, she violated an expansive statute used to detain those suspected of lewd or undesirable behavior. In 1943 and 1944, the U.S. Army tallied more than 250,000 cases of gonorrhea and 165,000 cases of syphilis among its stateside personnel. Journalists and government propagandists blamed “loose women” for the VD scourge, casting male soldiers as their innocent victims. “She may look clean—but,” read the top of a poster depicting a wholesome-looking lass. The message at the bottom: “Pick-ups, ‘good time’ girls, prostitutes spread syphilis and gonorrhea. You can’t beat the Axis if you get VD.”
Local and federal authorities sought to control VD by controlling women. In April 1943, Agnes E. Meyer published a two-part series in the Washington Post on the exhaustive efforts to rid the state of Washington—home of the Fort Lewis army base, outside Tacoma, as well as the Puget Sound Navy Yard, near Port Orchard—of both “out-and-out prostitutes” and “girls with a curiously perverted sense of patriotism…[who] scorn to accept money.”* The Seattle Department of Health and Sanitation noted that summer that the “chief source of infection at present is the promiscuous woman who hangs around taverns and loiters on the streets, ‘picking up’ with strangers, frequently referred to as an ‘amateur’ though she is rapidly losing that standing.”
In the first few weeks of 1943, the City of Seattle branded Martha Davis a promiscuous woman. After her disorderly conduct arrest, she was denied bail and referred to the health department for a compulsory blood test. That test was administered at the city jail, an unsanitary, overcrowded facility in which women suspected of being infected with venereal diseases were locked up alongside those who’d been convicted of crimes.
The municipal court docket doesn’t indicate the result of Martha Davis’s VD screening. It does show that she was forced to undergo another blood test the following year, after her second disorderly conduct arrest. By that time, the city had opened a venereal disease treatment center in what had formerly been a home for “unfortunate unmarried mothers.” A judge told the Seattle Times that the arrestees quarantined at the facility were first-time offenders, and that there was “nothing to remind the girls of jail or even a hospital. It’s run more like a girls’ club.”
Martha Davis was likely confined in this “girls’ club” regardless of whether she had gonorrhea or syphilis. A social worker at the Seattle treatment center determined that just 17 percent of the more than two thousand women housed there during one eight-month period had any kind of venereal disease. That didn’t matter to the Seattle police, who believed they were containing a moral crisis as much as a public health one. A “large proportion” of the women in the facility, the head of the department’s vice squad would explain, consisted of “prostitutes, alcoholics, feeble-minded, and extremely unstable persons.”
In the 1940s, Seattle, like Oakland, swelled with war workers, men and women who traveled great distances to secure jobs in shipyards and factories and often found themselves with no place to live. In between her various involuntary confinements, the teenager from Arkansas lived in Orchard Heights, a temporary housing project built to accommodate those who worked shifts at the Puget Sound Navy Yard. That’s where she was arrested for vagrancy on October 24, 1944. Her name was written in cursive on the front of her booking card: “Gordon—Martha—Ms. (Spanish).” The accompanying photo, which was taken after midnight, showed a young woman with curly hair, thin eyebrows, and puffy eyes. Martha Gordon looked exhausted.
* * *
The back of that booking card from Port Orchard said that Martha Gordon had been found guilty, and that she’d been given a thirty-day suspended sentence on the condition that she leave Kitsap County for good. While she did decamp from Washington not long after that vagrancy arrest, she didn’t pick up a new line of work. At 4 a.m. on April 25, 1946, nine months after Hubert Mooney had bailed his niece out of jail, the Oakland police arrested her as Betty Smith, taking her “into custody after complaints from several sailors that she was soliciting in the Station Hotel.”
The panic over dissolute, disease-riddled tramps hadn’t abated after World War II. The police report laying out the evidence against Betty Smith noted that she might be infected with a venereal disease; on account of that presumption, sh
e was held for four days before being released. Two years later, when she was arrested as Connie Harbaugh after being found with a man in her West Oakland apartment, she was again locked up until she received a clean bill of health. There’s no indication that her sexual partner Gilbert Ortiz, who’d admitted to having VD, was either jailed or forced to see a doctor.
The Oakland police arrested 753 people for prostitution in 1946, more than double the figure from 1942. The department’s sudden emphasis on vice investigations drove illicit sexual activity indoors, to places like the Station Hotel in downtown Oakland. The three officers who arrested Betty Smith reported that “she had occupied 4 different rooms [at the hotel] since her arrival in Oakland.” She’d lied about how long she’d been in the city, saying she’d just turned up the previous week. The police also said she’d “told conflicting stories regarding her whereabouts and her activities.”
Betty Smith—also known as Martha Lee Davis, Martha Gordon, Connie Reed, and Connie Fay Harbaugh—used a different name on the occasion of each of her five known arrests in the 1940s. She also assigned herself a unique birth date—December 25, 1924; January 24, 1926; and December 25, 1927—and place of birth—Tennessee, Missouri, and Hawaii—every time she got booked by the Oakland Police Department. Four of her five arrests in Washington and California, though, did have a common thread: allegations of prostitution.
The facts laid out in that 1946 arrest report—the description of “complaints from several sailors”—suggested that Martha/Connie had gotten into a dispute (or a series of disputes) with her clientele. The paper trail she generated in Oakland also indicated that she was making some effort to pick up on-the-books employment. In 1945, the police marked her occupation as “laundry.” The next year, she was reportedly an usherette, a position that entailed taking moviegoers’ tickets, escorting them to their seats, and padding down the aisles with refreshments. In 1948, the cops had her down as an apartment manager. And many years after she’d left the Bay Area, she’d claim to have worked at the H. J. Heinz Co. factory in Berkeley as a temperature taker.
