“The Friendly Caucasian City”: Lynwood's Fight for Homogeny

The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce sent out a survey to incorporated cities looking to understand city perspectives on growth and other demographic shifts. Respondents from Lynwood responded by noting that "Lynwood, being restricted to the white race, can furnish ample labor of the better class.”

In My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965, author Becky Nicolaides provides a glimpse into the mindset of early homeowners in South Gate, California. South Gate is another working class suburb that sits directly to the north of Lynwood. As her work opens she keys in on the importance of the home to the identity of white residents in the city:

Homes represent the heart of this picture. For residents of South Gate, a suburb in southern Los Angeles, the home was key to their status, their history, and their very identity. 

The suburbs were to represent for the white settler an escape from the chaos and, frankly, the color of the central city. Cities like Lynwood, Compton and South Gate got to work almost immediately mobilizing their vision for what they hoped to become: all white enclaves. As became the norm, if direct acts of social exclusion weren’t sufficient, many properties carried with them restrictive covenants that forbade the ability to sell and/or rent to African Americans or other frowned upon classes. In her work, Nicolaides found that South Gate even went a step further by “inserting a local clause into the city charter that limited the local population to Caucasians.”

Henry and Texanna Laws, an African American couple, found themselves confronted with this system of exclusion after they purchased a property that carried with it restrictive covenants. The couple would stand strong, even as their defense team from the NAACP grew nervous, and were eventually vindicated in a court of law. Whereas African Americans who migrated to Southern California saw the region as an opportunity to escape the explicit oppression of the South, white residents who also largely migrated from the South, saw the challenges of restrictive covenants as a threat to the implicit order of segregation that they so desperately hoped to maintain. This sentiment came through in a statement Henry Laws made during trial:

Why should I move? I bought this property 13 years ago and I built this house.... I am a free-born American citizen. My sons are fighting ... in the South Pacific. I buy war bonds. I am working for a defense plant, and so is the rest of my family. No judge will ever put me out, and the United States government will never put me out.

Despite glimmers of hope for African Americans looking to challenge restrictive covenants, Lynwood continued to identify itself as “the friendly Caucasian city” into the 1950s. Would-be Black residents would find themselves terrorized by racist whites looking to go a step further in their efforts to maintain racial homogeny. One such group, The Spook Hunters, had the backing of the LAPD as they went about antagonizing young blacks in South Gate, Lynwood and other surrounding cities. Some African Americans began to form “street clubs” as a response to groups like The Spook Hunters. Members of The Spook Hunters would wear a jacket with caricatured Black face with a noose around its neck. As a direct counter, one group of young Blacks started a group called The Devil Hunters.  

It should also be noted that even when there weren’t explicit efforts at terrorizing Blacks, real estate agents and lenders provided the segregationist assist by simply declining to give African Americans an opportunity to integrate certain neighborhoods; effectively urging them to remain in communities filled with people that looked just like them. 

In 1964, during the heart of the Civil Rights Movement that was gripping the nation and placing America’s mistreatment of Blacks on display for the world to see, California’s voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 14 with over 66% of the vote. In doing so, the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 - which worked to prevent landlords from using racial, ethnic, religious and/or other markers to deny housing - was essentially negated. 

The runup to the Proposition 14 vote received heavy coverage from newspapers across the state. Numerous organizations began voicing their positions in support or in opposition of the measure. Many of those groups, like the Catholics Against Prop. 14, felt that the bill was ultimately one motivated by a desire to enable racist behaviors in California’s housing market. Amidst all of the panel discussions and town halls in the September before the election, Governor Edmund Brown reaffirmed his opposition to the measure in the Los Angeles Times. Governor Brown was quite forthright in stating:

I submit that it is not the governor who is inflammatory. It is Proposition 14. And I submit that tit is not the opponents of Proposition 14 who encourage the racists and bigots in this state, but those who support Proposition 14.

Given the paper’s supportive position on the measure, offense was certainly taken and expressed in responses to the Governor’s writeup. On October 18th, 1964, the Times Editorial Board decided to further speak to its endorsement of Proposition 14, all at once reaffirming the paper’s commitment to the advancement of civil rights while also questioning “whether social, as distinct from civil, justice can properly be achieved at the expense of still another basic right.”

Around the same time, the Lynwood Chamber of Commerce would come out in support of the measure.

Why should the people of California now take a long step backwards by writing into our State Constitution a virtually untouchable authority to practice racial or religious bigotry in real estate transactions within our State? Senator Thomas Kuchel, 1964

Nonetheless, cases like the Laws case would eventually set the stage for federal action on the matter of housing discrimination. The case of Shelley v. Kraemer, brought by an African American family in St. Louis, would eventually make its way to the Supreme Court. And while the Justices would not rule outright that the covenants themselves were problematic, they did find the covenants to be unenforceable as any state enforcement actions would constitute a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. With what was arguably the number one weapon in the arsenal of White segregationists no longer available, the systems of routine exclusion gave way to blockbusting by Black residents and White real estate agents. Albert Camarillo observed this pattern in cities throughout the state and identified the changing tide as one of the primary catalysts of what would prove to be a rapid and seemingly absolute period of White Flight.

Over the course of the 1970s, Lynwood’s white residents would go from representing nearly 100% to less than 40% of the overall population. With the stronghold of whiteness in the city quickly fading, Proposition 13 passed on June 6th, 1978. 55% of voters in Lynwood supported the proposition. In what would surely lead to diminishment of local services, a vote of yes on Prop 13 represented to white home owners a strike against taxes that were being unduly doled out to minorities via government handout programs. As the author notes, “How we feel about paying a tax depends on how we feel about its beneficiaries.” Much like the “welfare queen” catchphrase popularized by Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail in 1976, the supporting evidence was irrelevant. White residents would rather pay fewer taxes not because they didn’t believe they could benefit from the ways in which government agencies spent those funds, but more specifically because they wanted to prevent non-whites from benefiting from the ways in which government agencies spent those funds. 

A 1975 article from the Times zoomed in on the “white exodus.” By the author’s estimation, the city was quickly losing many of its civic leaders. A gentleman named Al Evan expressed his dismay to the author, Mary Barber, when he noted that he “stuck it out as long as [he] could” in Lynwood, “but it’s changing - it’s really changing.” Another described it as the “summer to fly” - presumably away from the city. Another respondent named Don Snavely had worked in the city as Director of Lynwood Recreation and Parks noted that he’d been an “optimist”, yet his relocation to La Mirada ended “a lot of [his] credibility.” Respondents pointed at deteriorating properties that had been acquired for the freeway. However, the more salient theme was the fact that in the view of the cities fleeing white residents, the prospects for harmonious integration were long gone. “Lily white” Lynwood was becoming the “ghetto” that racist groups like The Spook Hunters had worked so long to prevent it from becoming. 

By 1983, the local funding cracks were beginning to show. So much so that the city council issued a resolution requesting that the State Legislature refrain from making further cuts to subventions Lynwood was to receive from Sacramento. Without the carte blanche that the local tax assessor was accustomed to enjoying, cities like Lynwood would find it increasingly difficult to prioritize expenditures. For Lynwood, this was made even more complex by the visible corridor scars that had not yet started to heal.