The Storm Breaks

The implosion of housing segregation in the United States after 1948 occurred because local property owners lost their constitutional authority and much of their direct, local governmental power to maintain the local social order against federal civil rights. To extend the New Deal's promise of home modernization and social modernization to racial minorities, racial custom—as Riverside illustrates—had to change. Watching the reorganization of real estate and succession of federal housing programs after 1932, Riverside's Anglo elite understood that the New Deal inverted the political ontology of the nation's historic freeholder society. The potential of the 1930s became the reality of the 1940s. Administrative elites began to use the new power of the federal government in regulating and insuring real estate, housing, and banking to modernize social policy. Federal bureaucracies interposed themselves between local white elites and discriminated minorities. Public hearing requirements gave minorities voice and influence in community dialogues in which they had not previously

participated. For local Anglo elites, the urban world they had known seemed out of control. Change began almost immediately after Roosevelt's death. Harry Truman's appointees ended Federal Housing Administration support for real estate racial covenants. Then Truman changed the federal government's position on African-American civil rights. As a first specific step, Truman moved the federal government against racial housing covenants. Finally, in his Fair Deal, Truman sought to increase significantly the federal government's commitment to public housing. These presidential initiatives extended the New Deal promise in housing. Believing strongly in the constitutional equality of all citizens and appealing to African-American voters for electoral success, Truman made the first presidential commitment to racial justice and integration in the nation's history.^[5]

The Federal Housing Administration's overt support for racial discrimination changed first. At its inception, the FHA linked housing modernization to racial segregation. To obtain FHA insurance for a dwelling or subdivision, a builder had to meet criteria to reduce the risk that the market value of the property would decline during the period of the mortgage. The FHA underwriters' manual repeatedly pointed to racial change in a neighborhood as one of the most serious threats to property values. "If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally contributes to instability and a decline in values." The FHA required racial restrictions on deeds to supplement zoning protection of property. Since the nation already consigned minorities of color to its worst housing, the FHA's requirement for segregation of new residences effectively locked minorities out of decent housing. The federal program that sought to modernize the nation's dwellings thereby imposed a barrier preventing African-Americans and other racial minorities from participating in federal home modernization programs. To obtain dwelling modernization, minorities had first to modernize their civil rights.^[6]

During the war, the NAACP tried to open housing in Northern industrial cities for African-American workers by breaking down racial covenants. The organization lobbied district FHA offices protesting discrimination and segregation. It prevailed on FHA directors to increase the assignment of priority housing to African-Americans. In 1944, the FHA also agreed to nondiscrimination in employment on FHA and Federal Public Housing projects, issuing administrative regulations to this effect. By the end of the war, African-Americans participated in nearly all public housing projects.^[7]

Truman built on the progress made during the war in changing FHA practices. He appointed Raymond M. Foley to be its commissioner in July 1945, and subsequently its administrator. In fall 1946, guided by the president's clear desire to modernize racial practices, Foley instructed all FHA personnel to take an active interest in the housing problems of minorities. He distributed a packet of special agency publications, "Material for F.H.A. Offices on Minority Group Housing," to assist field personnel. He assigned racial advisers to attend all re-

gional meetings conducted by the FHA for the building and real estate industry to speed construction of housing for veterans. In 1947, at the same time that the civil rights commission studied segregation around the nation, Foley ordered rewriting of the FHA's Underwriting Manual to remove FHA support for private racial covenants. The FHA continued to stress the desirability of homogeneous neighborhoods, but the agency now shifted its criterion to income, rather than racial, homogeneity. Implementation of nondiscrimination varied by locality, as it had during the war. In Los Angeles in 1946, for instance, local FHA officials stalled and weakened a Hollywood film union's application for financing for a biracial cooperative housing project, so that it eventually failed. Only in early 1948 did the FHA for the first time approve insurance for a biracial housing project (in Chicago).^[8]

Truman deplored the renewal of white violence against African-Americans that broke out around the nation after the war. Lobbied by the NAACP, in 1946 he appointed the Committee on Civil Rights, chaired by Charles E. Wilson, chairman of General Electric, to review the nation's racial relations. The committee report, To Secure These Rights, in October 1947 called for the end of segregation and suggested forty federal actions to secure that goal. The report pointed to substandard housing as the prevalent condition among the nation's African-American urban minority and identified racially restrictive covenants as the reason African-American families could not move to better housing. "One of the most common practices is the policy of landlords and real estate agents to prevent Negroes from renting outside of designated areas. Again, it is 'good business' to develop exclusive 'restricted' suburban developments which are barred to all but white gentiles." The report cited Chicago, Cleveland, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles for the large extent of their residential areas restricted to whites only. Investigators estimated that property owners of 80 percent of Chicago's residential property prohibited African-American residents. The committee invoked the Roosevelt heritage as one of the bases for federal action to end inadequate housing: "the right to housing." The committee also invoked the recent experience of war. American society should not deny returning African-American veterans the same housing open to white veterans, which they—along with white soldiers—had fought to protect. The committee specifically recommended that the federal government enter civil rights cases that sought to end the restrictive real estate covenant.^[9]

Following the committee's recommendation, the Truman administration supported African-American plaintiffs in the housing discrimination suits, later known collectively as Shelley v. Kraemer, that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear in June 1947. Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston, lawyers for the NAACP, wrote the briefs against racially restrictive real estate covenants for presentation to the Court. Other integration advocates approached U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark to request that the federal government support the plaintiffs by filing an amicus brief. A week after release of the Civil Rights Committee report, Clark, whom Truman appointed after requesting that FDR's attorney gen-

eral resign, agreed. The U.S. government for the first time entered a civil rights case involving only civil litigants. The federal attorneys argued that decent housing was a basic necessity of life and a fundamental right, equal opportunity to which the Fourteenth Amendment protected as a civil right. "Both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman have spoken of 'the right to a decent home' as part of 'a second Bill of Rights', and of the basic rights which every citizen in a truly democratic society must possess." Racially restrictive covenants denied African-Americans the opportunity to participate in social modernization through housing modernization. Indeed, by compelling African-Americans to live in overcrowded ghettos, the covenants imposed social disintegration, social pathology, and personal ill health on them. The legal brief addressed the modernization issue directly, in language that resonated with Franklin Roosevelt's vision of the meaning of the materially abundant life:

[Racially restrictive covenants] are responsible for the creation of isolated areas in which overcrowded racial minorities are confined, and in which living conditions are steadily worsened. The avenues of escape are being narrowed and reduced. As to the people so trapped, there is no life in the accepted sense of the word; liberty is a mockery, and the right to pursue happiness a phrase without meaning, empty of hope and reality. This situation cannot be reconciled with the spirit of mutual tolerance and respect for the dignity and rights of the individual which give vitality to our democratic way of life.

Since the war, new housing developments had begun to provide modern housing for veterans and to solve the nation's housing shortage for white Americans. Racially restrictive covenants prohibited African-Americans and other minorities (the brief also cited Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islanders, Arabic, and Jewish peoples) from having access to modern housing and thereby from participating in the new standard of living made possible by electrical modernization.^[10]

In its brief in Shelley v. Kraemer, the NAACP mounted two large arguments against state enforcement of racially restrictive real estate covenants. The legal argument rested on the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee to all citizens, regardless of color, of equal protection of the law. The amendment prohibited states from enforcing private contracts that denied equal treatment on the basis of race. The social argument claimed that housing discrimination prevented the social modernization of African-American households that white households took for granted. Robert Weaver's The Negro Ghetto stated the social thesis and provided empirical information for the social and economic brief submitted to the Court. The NAACP claimed first that restrictive covenants had kept the African-American population boxed in historic ghettos in major cities. The housing in these ghettos represented the antiquated housing stock abandoned by white households. Landlords cut these dwellings into smaller and smaller apartments, until many families were living in single rooms without private toilets or kitchens. In a word, restrictive covenants confined African-Americans to severely substandard and overcrowded housing. Population growth in the

African-American ghettos occurred at the same time that the federal government engaged in extensive home improvement programs and began public housing and defense housing for white households. Since the FHA supported restrictive covenants and the federal Public Housing Administration practiced discrimination, the federal government policy abetted widespread local policy in creating two categories of urban housing—homes being modernized under Federal programs for white households and substandard housing largely outside those programs for African-Americans (and Mexicans, as in Riverside).^[11]

The war brought many changes to African-Americans. The major positive change, Weaver argued, was the first glimpse for many of the possibility of a new way of life. Leaving rural lives of poverty behind, migrating to thriving and energetic Northern industrial cities, they foresaw the possibility of decent housing, healthful neighborhoods, and possession of a wide range of consumer goods. Weaver did not use the exact phrase that Franklin Roosevelt used in his 1936 campaign for reelection, but he meant exactly what Roosevelt had meant. Roosevelt said the New Deal was all about "the abundant way of life." Restrictive covenants, supported by federal housing policy, denied the "American ideal of a high standard of living" that Roosevelt said the nation owed every American.^[12]

In May 1948, Roosevelt's liberalized Supreme Court struck down state enforcement of private racially restrictive covenants. Without state enforcement, restrictions were useless. Private property, as lawyers are fond of pointing out, is a bundle of enforceable rights. After Shelley v. Kraemer, home owners and neighborhood associations could not obtain state enforcement of racial restriction on the sale of homes. The decision forced the FHA to complete rewriting of its administrative rules and put the federal bureaucracy behind social modernization of minority American homes. Responding to political pressure to implement Shelley v. Kraemer, the FHA adopted a new eligibility rule requiring applicants to establish that home owners filed no racial covenant on the subject property after the implementation date of the new eligibility rule.^[13]

The Supreme Court's decision in Shelley v. Kraemer took practical effect immediately. President Truman's efforts to obtain a large national public housing program reinforced the Court's decision in bringing the issue of minority housing modernization to all levels of politics. No one could miss the connection between advancement of minority civil rights, housing issues, and social modernization. Liberals unsuccessfully attempted to insert antisegregation clauses into the 1948 and 1949 housing acts. Truman placed extension of civil rights and public assistance for housing at the center of his 1948 campaign for reelection. After his close victory over Thomas Dewey, the president proposed major civil rights and housing bills to Congress in early 1949 as part of his Fair Deal. When Truman signed the National Housing Act in July 1949, the national storm over racial integration of neighborhoods broke with full force. In this situation—a liberal presidential administration pressing for housing and social modernization from the top of the governmental hierarchy and minority organizations, such as the NAACP, pressing for modernization at the local level—

Riversiders debated whether to allow federal public housing projects in the city. Earlier, the city rezoned a large portion of the city for apartments, recognizing that minority citizens would rent them.^[14]

Immediately upon passage of the National Housing Act in summer 1949, civic liberals in Riverside city called for public housing. Administrators of the County Housing Authority responded by starting the planning and review process. Since 1915, progressive civic groups had worried about the substandard dwellings occupied by immigrant Mexicans and African-Americans in Old East Side. In 1948, a group of social workers and volunteers conducted a housing survey of Old East Side, examining mainly the nonwhite blocks. The survey revealed dilapidation of overcrowded houses, lack of indoor plumbing, and failure of physical shelter. There was no question of approaching the electrical standard of living. In response, the executive director of the Riverside County Housing Authority applied for 765 new housing units for the city of Riverside under the 1949 National Housing Act.^[15]

Federal public housing raised three issues related to control: () federal power intruded directly into the local community; (2) the federal housing bureaucracy challenged the power of the local private real estate and housing industry and public housing diminished the rental income of the local bourgeoisie; (3) federal housing threatened the local white community with unwelcome racial values. The issue of the intrusion of federal power appeared as different themes. Procedurally, the act required local housing authorities to hold public hearings on proposed public housing. Though meeting constitutional requirements for municipal control over real property, the public hearings ironically opened a forum for new local voices to be heard, besides those of the white civic-commercial elite. In 1922, demonstrating Anglo imperiousness during a desegregation controversy over a public swimming pool, Riverside park commissioners left a public meeting rather than listen to African-American petitioners. '"The members walked out, leaving us sitting here like a row of checkers,'" one petitioner described. Federal presence prohibited such arrogant abrogation of local minority rights at postwar public housing hearings. Federal housing officials spoke in support of minority housing rights. Local officials and local Anglo citizens listened to minority community speakers.^[16]

Administratively, the federal housing programs broke old political arrangements by forcing creation of new governmental institutions and rearranging local elite coalitions. The City of Riverside did not have its own housing authority, for instance, and local administration of a federal housing program would be in the hands of the county government. The city's real estate industry did not have the same political clout with the County Board of Supervisors and its agencies, as it did in the city. Riverside County established its housing authority in 1942 to administer federally funded defense housing, which included several large developments to serve nearby military bases. Neither the City of Riverside nor the county took advantage of the short-lived 1937 Wagner Housing Act, which required establishment of local housing agencies to receive and manage

the federal dollars for subsidized low-rent housing. When the county created its housing agency, the Riverside City Council legislated that its authority could extend inside the city, since lack of defense housing caused many of the city's housing problems also. California voters turned down a statewide initiative for state-funded public housing in November 1948—clearly indicating their opposition to public housing. The 1949 National Housing Act created a different scale and permanence of federal presence. If the federal government fully funded the Riverside County Housing Authority's application, over $10 million would be spent inside the city. Once again, rather than establish the city's own housing agency, the city council contracted with the County Housing Authority for administration of federally funded public housing. The city's realtors moved to have the city establish its own housing agency. They organized themselves as the Riverside Rental and Property Owners' Association, clearly identifying retention of private rental property as a major goal. During the course of the controversy, the local chapter of the Building Contractors' Association and the Real Estate Board joined the coalition seeking a city housing authority. Though the realtors political squeeze did not succeed, it pressed the bile of controversy through nearly every other local issue involving contracting, siting, building, and letting federal public housing and extended to related issues such as removing rent controls and regulating citrus growers' smudging.^[17]

The second issue concerned the relative roles of the private housing market and the federal government in construction and control of the local dwelling stock. The real estate industry and some members of the local business and civic communities strongly believed that the private marketplace could and should determine housing stock and quality. They did not enjoy their experience with direct federal regulation of housing during the war. They pointed to the revival of housing construction in California in late 1948 as evidence that private capital could solve the housing problem, including providing adequate housing for lower income groups, except for the poorest families who could not afford mortgages. They saw the 1948 presidential contest between President Truman and Governor Dewey of New York as a referendum on "the issue of the New Deal." As southern California lurched conservatively into the epoch of the "red scare," they began to call government housing "socialism." Their major concerns leading to opposition to public housing had less to do with government ownership, however, than with what the government as owner might do with its property.^[18]

The third issue concerned federal imposition of progressive racial values on local communities. The increasing legislative successes of the Truman administration's Fair Deal, President Truman's commitment to racial fairness, organized labor's effort to integrate the nation's unions and workplaces, and the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Shelley v. Kraemer threatened the private property-based system of racial segregation in Riverside, in California, and elsewhere in the nation. Truman sought a civil rights provision in the 1949 refunding of the Federal Housing Administration. Though Congress struck out the provision, national progressive forces had declared their intentions. They wanted to use

the administrative power of the national government to end residential racial segregation.

The centrality of the racial issue to the local housing issue is clear. Realty groups' opposition to housing integration remained unflagging. White social reformers occupied an ambiguous position. They favored social relief and housing reform in Old East Side, and they called for public housing, but they did not visibly lobby to locate integrated public housing in all-white neighborhoods. Other organizations supporting public housing included the Riverside Council of Church Women (with a special action committee, the Christian Social Relations Committee), the officers of the board of directors of the YWCA, the Latin-American Club, the Casa Blanca American Legion Post 838, the Eastside Neighborhood Council, the Riverside Ministerial Association, and the Central Labor Council of Riverside County of the American Federation of Labor.^[19]

White Riversiders expressed racial fears when discussing tenant characteristics and site selection for public housing projects. Opponents of public housing disliked subsidization of lower-income tenants. Federal housing officials estimated that housing would cost about $10,000 per unit but would rent for no more than $25 a month. In addition, though the federal government would pay 10 percent of shelter rent in lieu of taxes to the city, public housing would not directly and fully pay for the municipal services it used, such as street improvements, schools, water, and fire protection. Public hearings in December 1949 brought the opposing factions together for a vociferous debate. Supporters argued that public housing improved the lives of tenants, thereby decreasing crime and indirect welfare costs; in terms of social accounting, the balance sheet of cost and benefit evened out. For them, the issue was clear. Americans of color had earned their right to a quality standard of living by fighting in the war. The federal government owed them enforcement of this right. Joseph Park, representing the Mexican community's Casa Blanca American Legion post, put it plainly: "'We carried a heavy burden during the war, and we can do it again.... There's been talk about the City taking care of housing by itself, but there's been talk before, and nothing has been done. This is our chance. We not going to sit by for 20 years. We going to do our utmost to get a share of it.'" John Sotelo, speaking for the Mexican and African-American East Side, erupted emotionally at a hearing: "'You people who are against the program, get hold of me. I'll take you to places there to be cleaned up. Just look at them and see if you don't think something should be done.'" Resentment seeped through civic dialogue about imputed subsidization. At a city council hearing, an opponent complained, "'These $10,000 homes are going to rent for $20 a month. Why rent a mansion for $20 a month and make the rest of us pay for it? The opponents of the housing program applauded loudly." At a meeting of the city's Optimist Club, the regional director of federal housing defended public housing against the charge that "'Mexicans and Negroes up out of this slum class'" would destroy the better housing provided by the government.^[20] (See pl. 9.)

The possibility that the federal government might site public housing proj-

Plate 9.
The Promise of the New Deal for the Nation's Minority Families—
Electrically Modern Public Housing. (Leonard Nadel, photographer. "L.A.—
Residences—Housing Projects—Aliso Village. The Louis Gillen family after
relocation into their new three-bedroom apartment [for $35/mo.] at Aliso Village."
Security Pacific National Bank Photograph Collection. Los Angeles Public Library.)

ects near white neighborhoods angered white Riverside opponents most of all. So many persons lived crowded together in several blocks of Riverside's Old East Side, federal agencies could not rehouse all of them in the same area after they erected new buildings. The realtors' association coordinating the opposition campaign focused on the siting issue. It called for housing improvement programs that kept slum residents in place while landlords improved their properties. At a meeting called by the association, a prominent realtor addressed the audience with the explosive charge, "'You may have a housing project next to where you live. How would you like that?'" The Riverside Daily Press later editorialized about the issue in less volatile, but nonetheless direct, language: "Public housing can change the character of a community."^[21]

Local opposition protracted the housing approval process so that Riverside did not get public housing until after the Korean War. Cities with blue-collar voting strength, such as nearby San Bernardino, quickly received public housing contracts. Riverside realtors pushed a local initiative that would require voter approval for siting public housing. Legal tacticians in the city maneuvered around

them, but the reasons then led a successful statewide initiative to achieve the same goal. Passage of the statewide initiative in 1950 pointedly measured white Californians' opposition to disruption of their community arrangements. Riverside realty interests led the statewide initiative (the president of the state building contractors' association was a Riverside who also led local opposition to public housing). The outbreak of the korean War forced the Truman administration to shift its housing programs from public housing to defense housing. The public housing controversy briefly died down.^[22]

The defeat of public housing left unresolved the issue of housing modernization for Riverside African-American and Mexican-American households. Riverside's private housing market boomed following the war. High prices for the new dwellings closed out for most of Old East Side's better-off residents the option of exercising their rights under Shelley v. Kraemer by buying new homes in white neighborhoods. In 1949, a few white property owners in neighborhoods bordering the Eastside began to move out, presumably in anticipation of integration and impending changes in the area. In these circumstances, the city's civic leaders decided to rezone a large neighborhood just north of the Eastside's district. Rezoning from a uniform single-family home district to an apartment zone would greatly enlarge the stock of better rental dwellings to the Eastside's residents. In arguing for the rezoning, Henry Coil, a member of the commission, predicted, "The area seemed to be headed away from first-class residential development." The planning commission "should plan ahead of the tendency by recommending a wholesale rezoning instead of waiting for individual owners to request the zoning on their own." Only one of 162 property owners in the area protested the proposed rezoning.^[23]

Within a few years of the rezoning in 1949, the racial and ethnic composition of the district began to shift. Although we lack racial identifications needed to track the migration of African-American residents by name, by February 1950 Longfellow Elementary School in the newly rezoned neighborhood enrolled 51 African-American children, 60 Mexican-American children, and 438 Anglo children. Presumably, the presence of these minority children in the school represented the movement of families into newly opened rental homes. We can observe the shift in Mexican-American residents by the appearance in the district of Spanish surnames. In 1947, of 213 households (listed in the city directory) in a small study area in North East Side, only two had Spanish surnames. In 1960, of 277 households, fourteen had spanish surnames. In 1969, of 312 households, twenty-eight had Spanish surnames. in 1965, half of Longfellow's students were minorities, about evenly divided between African-American and Mexican-American children. The racial integration of North East Side did not take place overnight; it required a decade. Most settled white residents did not flee in panic. Residential integration would not be unopposed in Riverside or elsewhere in the nation. local planning boards, the real estate industry, and white home owners had an arsenal of legal and nonlegal techniques to resist integration, including covertly antiracial zoning for design and health requirements,

state constitutional mandates for local option voting, redlining, neighborhood pressure on sellers, white flight, and violence. Nonetheless, Shelley v. Kraemer shifted the burden of racial residential segregation in a manner that strengthened its foes. The decision deprived local white communities of their main positive tool for racial planning, forcing them into defensive strategies. In 1948, Riverside and many other communities began to walk the long gauntlet of racial animosity toward residential modernization.^[24]