Racial propositions: genteel apartheid in postwar California

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RACIAL PROPOSITIONS: “GENTEEL APARTHEID”
IN POSTWAR CALIFORNIA

by

Daniel Wei HoSang

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2007

Copyright 2007 Daniel Wei HoSang

ii

DEDICATION

To Norma and Umai

iii
ACKNOWLDEGEMENTS

Wherever my professional career might take me, I will always consider the
University of Southern California’s Department of American Studies and Ethnicity
as my intellectual, academic and political home base. In a remarkably short period of
time, the Department has brought together a gifted and imaginative community of
scholars committed to ethical practices and social transformation within and beyond
the academy. I am grateful for the mentors, colleagues and friends this community
has provided.
The committee which guided this dissertation exemplifies all of these talents
and commitments. My advisor, Laura Pulido, has been unswerving in her support of
this project from the start, and I thank her for her thoughtful criticism and
engagement. Laura’s insistence that I write with clarity and conviction has improved
my writing and analysis immensely. Ruthie Gilmore, like Laura, has modeled for me
the ways that scholarship can and must be both rigorous and politically relevant.
Ruthie has been a singular influence on my intellectual and political development,
providing me with a framework to pose and answer questions and reminding me that
humor and generosity matter enormously.
I am proud to join the community of scholars mentored by George Sanchez
over the last two decades. As I watched the American Studies and Ethnicity Program
progress under George’s leadership, I came to appreciate the political importance of
systematic mentorship and development, and to value the personal ethics on which

iv
such relationships are based. George’s direction and counsel, which I relied upon
constantly, helped make graduate school infinitely more productive, and even
pleasurable.
Bill Deverell helped me to embed my study in the history of California and
the West. Bill’s far reaching command of this field, and his enthusiasm for
collaboration and public engagement, taught me to be both exacting and ambitious in
my own work.
Finally, Janelle Wong assured me early on that there was a place in Political
Science for my work, and was always ready with pragmatic, thoughtful advice. For
me and many others, Janelle has demonstrated how a junior faculty member can
produce top flight scholarship while remaining accessible and supportive to her
students, and I am thankful for her encouragement and support.
I owe considerable gratitude to talented staff of the Department of American
Studies and Ethnicity including Sonia Rodriguez, Kitty Lai, and especially Sandra
Hopwood, whose regular kindness and generosity always lifted me.
My dissertation group, Michan Connor, Jerry Gonzalez, Hilary Jenks, and
Phoung Nguyen read drafts of nearly the entire dissertation, and provided
meaningful, helpful ideas which strengthened every chapter. Laura Barraclough also
read several chapters, and has graciously shared her experiences and advice
throughout graduate school. As I raced to meet my deadline, Amy Cabrera
Rasmussen and Wendy Cheng also kindly honored my requests to read specific
sections.

v
The proposal for this study developed from an invaluable summer
dissertation workshop organized by Professor Sanchez in 2004. During the
workshop, I received valuable feedback from Eduardo-Bonilla Silva, Neil Gotanda,
Marta Lopez-Garza and all of the other workshop participants.
Portions of this dissertation were presented at several of the Annual
California Ethnic Studies Graduate Conferences, where I received helpful comments
form Janelle Wong, Evelyn Nakano-Glenn, and Eric Avila. I also presented parts of
the project at annual meetings of the Western Political Science Association and the
American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch, as well as the USC Center for
Law, History, and Culture, Whitsett Graduate Seminar in California History, and the
USC Institute on California and the West’s Brown Bag series. For their comments in
these and other forums, I thank Robert Self, Mark Brilliant, Michelle Nickerson,
Josh Sides, Ariela Gross, Daria Roithmayr and Luis Fraga.
At USC, seminars I took with Michael Preston, Dana Polan, Judith Stacey,
Lon Kurashige, Phil Ethington, Carolyn Cartier, and especially Dorinne Kondo
broadened my intellectual interests in critical ways. Ricardo Ramirez has also given
me helpful suggestions on my project throughout its development.
As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, a seminar with Nikhil Singh
introduced me to the politics and pleasure of scholarly research and writing. I
returned to Nikhil’s work many times in developing this study, and I thank him for
his assistance and encouragement, especially during my foray into the academic job
market. I also thank Vijay Prashad, Howard Winant and George Lipsitz for their

vi
scholarship and guidance.
Bob Wing and Jeff Chang kindly invited me to write several articles for
ColorLines magazine before graduate school that helped me to think about the
connection between political activism and writing. Gary Delgado, Francis Calpotura
and former colleagues at the Center for Third World Organizing trained me as an
organizer and taught me to think strategically about projects and interventions.
I thank archivists and staff at the University of Southern California’s
Department of Special Collections, The Huntington Library, UCLA’s Department of
Special Collections, the California State Archives, the Hoover Institution and
Department of Special Collections at Stanford University, Loyola Marymount
University’s Department of Archives and Special Collections, California State
University Northridge’s Urban Archives Center, the Bancroft Library and Institute
for Governmental Studies at the University of California Berkeley, and especially the
Southern California Library for Social Sciences and Research. Their service and
assistance often made long days in the archives much more pleasant.
I received generous fellowship support during graduate school from a
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, two fellowships from
the USC Graduate School, and grants from the USC Strategic Themes Fellowship,
the Historical Society of Southern California, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the
USC Center for Law, History and Culture, and the Huntington Library.
Colleagues at Californians for Justice, the Surdna Foundation, the Edward
Hazen Foundation, the Funders Collaborative on Youth Organizing, Asian

vii
Communities for Reproductive Justice, Oakland Kids First, the Philanthropic
Initiative on Racial Equity, and One Nation Enlightened invited me to work on
projects that kept me engaged with organizing and social justice work.
I thank Mimi Ho, Ernest Mark, and Leah Rothstein for opening their homes
to me during several research trips to Oakland. Ed Lee of Californians for Justice
shared materials and insights from the Coalition for an Informed California’s work
against Ward Connerly and Proposition 54 that will find its way into the next
iteration of this project.
My friend Paul Ching dispatched invaluable advice on the job search from
his post at the University of Minnesota Center for Teaching and Learning.
I have been sustained by a wonderful group of family and friends. I thank
Alex Li, Oneka LaBennett, Saeyun Lee, Nicole Davis, Niru Somasundaram, Diana
Ip, Larry Salomon, David Isenman, Laura Dansky and Robert HoSang for comfort
and encouragement. Friends and extended family including Yvonne Paul, Carolina
Martinez, Elizabeth Martinez, Sylvia and Mike Solis, Sylvia Martinez and nieces and
newphews Ethan and Zulema Solis, Mateo and Diego Martinez, and Carolina Leyva
have made Long Beach feel more like home. I think constantly about my cousin,
David Chong, and the family who miss him dearly, and my grandmother Dorothy
Isenman, whose commitments, clandestine and contradictory as they may have been,
reminded me that the way we look at the world is always conditioned by political
formations and movements.
My father Dennis HoSang, maintains an intellectual and political

viii
independence and criticism that I have always admired. I thank him and my step-
mother, Marjorie Brown-HoSang for their encouragement and love. My mother
Martha HoSang, seems to draw from an inexhaustible reservoir of energy that I can
never quite replicate. Her courage and determination are important to me, and I am
grateful for her support. In the last five years I have turned many times to my
brother, Robert HoSang, for advice, humor and friendship and I treasure his warmth
and irreverence.
Finally, I have been grateful to share each day with Umai Norris and Norma
Martinez-HoSang. Umai’s curiosity, humor, courage, and love nourish me, and make
it much easier to believe in myself. Norma is an enormously talented organizer who
understood the aspirations of my project from the beginning. Nearly every potential
idea I entertained for the dissertation was run by her—the ones that drew looks of
confusion or apathy have been left out, and my project is immeasurably stronger for
it. Norma also shared her own experiences and reflections with the Los Angeles
Unified School District’s busing program in the 1980s which helped to sharpen my
understanding of the issues explored in Chapter 4. She makes my life rich in ways I
continue to discover. Most importantly, through Norma’s labors, two weeks before
this dissertation was defended, we welcomed Isaac Martinez-HoSang to our family. I
dedicate this project to Norma and Umai, with gratitude and love.

ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Tables x
List of Figures xi
Abstract xii
Preface xiv
Introduction: “Genteel Apartheid”: Race Innocence and Power in
Postwar California
1
Chapter 1: Politics, Ideology, and Identification: Theorizing “Racial
Change”
42
Chapter 2: Fair Employment and the Vicissitudes of “Racial
Tolerance,”’ 1945-1960
68
Chapter 3: Fair Housing and the Logics of Apartheid, 1960-1972 129
Chapter 4: School Desegregation, Busing and the Triumph of Racial
Innocence, 1972-1982
214
Chapter 5: English Only and the Politics of Exclusion, 1982-1990 293
Conclusion: Blue State Racism 353
Bibliography 374
Appendix: Archival Collections Consulted 393

x

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Select Ballot Initiatives Examined, 1946-2003 6

Table 2: Proposition 21 and Proposition 1 vote in select cities. 282

Table 3: Polling Trends for Proposition 38 (1984). 319

xi

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Conceptual Framework

46
Figure 2: The CIO and Civil Rights.

89
Figure 3: “Don’t Mess It Up Now Buddy” Pro-FEPC flyer

92
Figure 4: “Support FAIR PLAY Oppose PROP 15”

110
Figure 5: “For FEP IN ‘53” Pro FEP image from People’s Weekly
World, 1953

119
Figure 6: Southwest Property Owners Association 1947 Flyer for
meeting

148
Figure 7: “Don’t Legalize Hate” Californians Against Proposition
14 campaign brochure

191
Figure 8: Comparison of Trends in California Poll for Proposition
14

200
Figure 9: “Stop Forced Busing.” Photographic storyboard for
television advertisement in support of 1972 Wakefield Amendment
(Proposition 21)

237
Figure 10: “We Love All Kids!” Bumper sticker for 1979 Robbins
Amendment (Proposition 1)

271
Figure 11: Percentage of Foreign Born in Major California Cities,
1940-1990

313

xii
ABSTRACT

This study examines the role of California ballot measures in the production
of racial identity and power in the post-World War II era. In the 1990s, a series of
controversial propositions renewed debate over the meaning of race and racism in
public life. As the nation looked on, California voters passed ballot initiatives
banning public services for undocumented immigrants, repealing public affirmative
action programs, outlawing bilingual education, and toughening criminal sentencing
laws for juveniles and adults.
Little focus has been placed on the historic soils that nourished these
conflicts. Indeed, across the postwar era, California’s system of direct democracy has
proved to be a reliable bulwark against many leading civil rights and anti-
discrimination issues: California voters rejected fair employment protections (1946),
repealed fair housing legislation (1964), overturned school desegregation plans
(1972, 1979), and adopted “English only” policies (1984, 1986).
The fervent discussions over these measures as they unfolded within the
media, at public debates, neighborhood meetings, and through campaign
advertisements has made them a central site for Californians to deliberate the
meaning of race, rights, and authority. Over time, these debates played a significant
role in allowing voters to disavow persistent patterns of racial hierarchy even as they
declared their commitment to equal rights and opportunity. Ultimately, this project
traces the origins and development of the current “colorblind consensus” on race,

xiii
which casts racism as a personal sentiment rather than a collective or structural
phenomenon, a feeling rather than a relation of power.
This is the first study to link together case studies of racialized California
ballot initiatives during the last 50 years within a singular historical narrative. I
examine the conflicts and relations of power which gave rise to these initiatives,
profile the significant political actors involved, examine the discourse generated by
the initiative debates, and explore the impact the measures had on the broader
political culture of the state. I analyze polling data, election returns, newspaper
accounts and a broad range of archival materials and oral histories related to these
events.

xiv

PREFACE

California’s gubernatorial recall election of October 2003 will be
remembered by most observers for the colorful cast of 135 candidates and the rise of
yet another Hollywood icon into the state’s highest office. But an equally
provocative if less spectacular political debate unfolded in the shadows of the
recall’s drama. On the same ballot, voters faced a ballot initiative sponsored by
Black conservative activist Ward Connerly seeking to prevent government agencies
from collecting certain race and ethnicity data about California’s 35 million
residents. In an an inversion of conventional political rhetoric, Connerly railed
against the history of arbitrary and oppressive state-authored racial classification
systems. Abandoning much of the openly antagonistic language he used to champion
a 1996 ballot measure eliminating public affirmative action programs, Connerly
instead denounced “Jim Crow-era race boxes” which failed to acknowledge the
“inherently private and complex nature of racial identity.”
1

In an equally striking rhetorical reversal, the opposing coalition of civil rights,
labor, and Democratic Party leaders affirmed Connerly’s aspiration for a “colorblind”
society but warned the electorate in a well-funded campaign about the threat his
Proposition 54 could pose to public health:
We use this [racial] information to identify groups at risk for infectious
disease. If there is an outbreak of disease in one group, we have to be able

1
Ward Connerly, "No More Race-Box Classification," Sacramento Bee, March 7 2001.

xv
to identify and contain it before it spreads to the general population.
2

The paradoxes revealed in this snapshot of California political discourse are
remarkable: A Black conservative attempts to eviscerate anti-discrimination policies
through an account of the historically contingent basis of racial categories while civil
rights advocates flirt with notions of biologism and genetically-conditioned racial
differences in their defense. Deepening this complexity, the debate unfolded
precisely at the moment when California became the first large state in the nation in
which those classified as white constituted a minority of the population. Finally,
while polls conducted by both Connerly and his adversaries suggested the electorate
strongly endorsed the visions of a colorblind state and polity which seemed to
animate the initiative, voters handed the measure a 26 point defeat on election day.
This dissertation began as an attempt to alleviate the analytic vertigo brought
about by the Proposition 54 debate. My decision to leave my colleagues in the
community organizing and social justice field for graduate school stemmed from
many of the vexing issues raised by the Connerly campaign. During the last 30 years,
a period Lisa Duggan has aptly named the “Twilight of Equality,” the prevailing
political wisdom has increasingly held that in the face of growing attacks on civil
rights and anti-discrimination policies, making robust appeals for racial justice and
shared possibility are naïve at best, and self-defeating at worst.
3
Following a decade
in which the California electorate took aim at affirmative action, benefits to

2
California Secretary of State, ""Ballot Argument Against Proposition 54" Statewide Special
Election, Official Voter Information Guide," (2003).
3
Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on
Democracy (Boston, 2003).

xvi
immigrants, and bilingual education, and in which prison building became the public
works project of choice, it seemed best to emphasize pragmatic messages thoroughly
vetted by “middle of the road” focus groups. From this perspective, it would be
foolish to publicly challenge Connerly’s assertion that state-sponsored anti-
discrimination efforts were a part of the problem, rather a part of the solution; ideals
of “colorblind individualism” had grown too potent in the prevailing political
discourse. Politics could not change ideology, especially when it came to race.
This study was written to explore the veracity of this claim, the contradictions
it displaces, and the opportunities it obscures. The narratives, ideas, and logics
rehearsed in the Proposition 54 contest have a complex genealogy, one deeply
embedded in the political culture of postwar California. I explore this history by
examining a series of statewide ballot initiatives from 1946 to 1986, which like
Proposition 54, were centrally concerned with the meaning of race and racism. I
examine these ballot propositions to explore a series of basic questions: How does
“racial change” occur? What is the relationship between political action—contests
for social power--and ideology—the way different social classes and groups
understand the world and their place in it? Ultimately, I hope to understand from this
history how assertions of “colorblindness” have managed to successfully organize
and structure debates about race and racism in the state today, and how alternative
visions of racial justice and redistribution might disorganize or disrupt this
hegemony.
.

1
INTRODUCTION:
GENTEEL APARTHEID—RACE, INNOCENCE AND POWER IN
POSTWAR CALIFORNIA

“One difference between the West and the South I came to realize…was this: in the
South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In
California we did not believe history could bloody the land, or even touch it.”
-Joan Didion
4

“Racism is … fundamentally a theory of history”
-Alexander Saxton
5

In the 1990s, a series of controversial California ballot initiatives renewed the
public debate over the meaning and significance of race and racism. Within a span of
seven years, as the nation looked on, California voters passed propositions banning
public education and services for many immigrants (1994), repealing public
affirmative action programs (1996), outlawing bilingual education (1998), and
toughening criminal sentencing for adults and juveniles (1994, 2000).
On first blush, California seemed an unlikely site to stage such contentious
struggles. During most of the 1990s, Democrats, traditional supporters of civil rights,
held a ten point lead in voter registration rates, capturing nearly all of the statewide
Constitutional offices by the end of the decade. Moreover, California voters appeared

4
Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York, 2003). 71.
5
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in
Nineteenth-Century America (1990). 14.

2
highly “liberal” on many other issues, approving ballot initiatives to increase the
minimum wage and to legalize medical marijuana while rejecting measures backed
by conservatives to establish a system of public school vouchers and to weaken the
political power of unions.
6
The sudden wave of “racial antipathy” on the part of the
overwhelmingly white electorate seems to be an exception in need of explanation.
What caused California’s electorate to depart from its historic commitment to
inclusion, tolerance and diversity?
Scholars and pundits have offered several explanations. Many have pointed
to the changing demographics of the state as the most obvious cause. As one study
critical of these initiatives explained, “In the last decade of the twentieth century,
California has become the battleground on which the dwindling white populace has
staged a last stand against an emerging non-white majority whom they view as a
growing threat to their Anglo-American culture, economic dominance, and political
control.”
7
Republican activist Ron Unz, the sponsor of the 1998 anti-bilingual
education initiative, similarly suggested that these initiatives passed because
“Californians of European ancestry… [recognized] that they were fast becoming a
minority within their own state--and their unease about this situation… [was]
reflected in the political landscape.”
8

6
According the California Secretary of State, in 2000, 46 percent of California voters registered as
Democrats and 35% registered as Republicans. See report at
http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/ror/county_10-00.pdf. Accessed April 25, 2007.
7
Jewelle Taylor Gibbs and Teiahsha Bankhead, Preserving Privilege: California Politics,
Propositions, and People of Color (Westport, CT, 2001). 1.
8
Ron Unz, "California and the End of White America," Commentary November 1999. For an
application of this explanation to Proposition 187, see Bruce Cain and Karin Mac Donald, "Nativism,
Partisanship, and Immigration: An Analysis of Prop. 187," in Racial and Ethnic Politics in California,

3
Others have cast their gaze towards a series of opportunistic political actors--
Governor Pete Wilson, affirmative action opponent Ward Connerly, Ron Unz—who
championed a brand of “wedge politics” to disorganize traditional liberal adversaries
for their own partisan gain. By cleverly appropriating the language of their
opposition—anti-affirmative action opponents named their measure the California
Civil Rights Initiative—these figures introduced a new “colorblind” race politics that
assured otherwise liberal voters that they were not abandoning their historic
commitment to equal rights and fair treatment.
9

Finally, considerable attention has focused on the electorate’s reaction to
transformations in the state’s political economy. The rapid loss of more than a
million aerospace, military and industrial jobs in the early 1990s, perpetual budget
shortfalls, and growing anxieties about the state’s crumbling transportation, health
care, and public education systems created a climate which favored rhetorical
appeals to “getting tough” on a wide range of issues. According to this perspective,
voters had grown tired of allegedly “permissive” immigration and criminal justice
policies, and had little use for compensatory programs such as affirmative action and

Volume II, ed. Michael Preston, Sandra Bass, and Bruce Cain (Berkeley, 1998), Rodney Hero and
Caroline Tolbert, "Race/Ethnicity and Direct Democracy: An Analysis of California's Illegal
Immigration Initiative," The Journal of Politics 58 (1996). On voter attitudes towards California’s
demographic changes in the 1990s see Mark Baldassare, California in the New Millenium: The
Changing Social and Political Landscape (Berkeley, 2000). Chapter 3.
9
See for example, on Proposition 209, Lydia Chavez, The Color Bind: California's Battle to End
Affirmative Action (Berkeley, 1998). On Unz, see James Crawford, At War With Diversity: US
Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety (Tonawada, NY, 2000). See also George Lipsitz, The
Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia,
PA, 1998). Chapter 3, Peter Schrag, Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future (New
York, 1998). 225-241. Jean Stefanic and Richard Delgado, No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks
and Foundations Changed America's Social Agenda (Philadelphia, 1996). Chapter 1.

4
bilingual education in a time when no one’s future seemed secure.
10

All of these lines of inquiry are worthy of attention, and indeed, each tells
part of the story. But in continuing to search for the exceptional forces which drove
the racialized ballot initiatives of the 1990s, these explanations each rest on an
important historical--and thus political—assumption that deserves scrutiny. By
tracing these conflicts to a unique set of contemporaneous economic, political and
social forces, we are left to understand them as a departure from broader historic
patterns or continuities. Here, Ward Connerly, Pete Wilson and their supporters
commandeer the field of direct democracy to usher in a new brand of racial politics,
marshalling a so-called colorblind discourse in order to “turn back the clock” on the
state’s history of racial progress. Indeed, in these narratives, white supremacy, the
ideological complex that explains hierarchy, fortune and indeed fatality as an
expression of human “difference,” is figured as an anachronistic and static force;
“progress” itself is racism’s greatest enemy.
But the demographic transformations, economic fluctuations, and inventive
political actors at work in the 1990s were hardly new to California politics. There is
an important history predating this period which can help us to understand why the
attacks on immigration, affirmative action, bilingual education and other policies
registered so powerfully with the electorate, and why the defenders of those policies
were unable to mobilize an effective opposition.

10
On Proposition 187 and the state’s fiscal crisis, see Michael Alvarez and Tara Butterfield, "The
Resurgence of Nativism in California? The Case of Proposition 187 and Illegal Immigration," (1997).
For other examples of such an analysis, see the essays in Michael Preston, Sandra Bass, and Bruce
Cain, eds., Racial and Ethnic Politics in California, Volume II (Berkeley, 1998).

5
This dissertation tills the soils of postwar California history in search of the
conflicts, alignments and political currents that preceded and gave rise to the
initiative politics of the 1990s. As Table 1 suggests, across the post-World War II
era, California’s system of direct democracy has proven to be a reliable bulwark
against many leading civil rights and anti-discrimination issues: California voters
rejected fair employment protections (1946), repealed anti-discrimination legislation
in real estate (1964), overturned school desegregation plans (1972, 1979), and
adopted “English only” policies (1984, 1986).
Taken together, this longer history of racialized ballot initiatives might
suggest an opposite conclusion—that postwar California political history is
characterized by an unchanging and undifferentiated racial domination, akin perhaps
to legal scholar Derrick Bell’s claims about the “permanence of racism.” Yet this
argument rests on equally ahistoric grounds, and reinforces the conception that
progress and racism are natural adversaries: Racism remains because we have made
no progress.
11

11
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York, 1992).

6

ISSUE DATE (PROP #) SUBJECT RESULT
Employment
discrimination
Nov. 1946 (Prop 11) Creates a fair employment
practices commission and prohibits racial
and other forms of discrimination by unions
and employers
Defeated
Public housing Nov 1948 (Prop 14) Establishes a state housing
authority to provide hundreds of thousands
of new public housing units
Defeated
Public housing Nov. 1950 (Prop 10) Requires local approval for
development of public housing projects
Approved
Housing
discrimination
Nov. 1964 (Prop 14). Protects landlord/owner’s right to
discriminate; nullifies 1963 Rumford Fair
Housing Act
Approved
School busing &
desegregation
Nov. 1972 (Prop 21) Ends mandatory busing, repeals
statue that sought racial and ethnic balance
in public schools
Approved
School busing &
desegregation
Nov. 1979 (Prop 1) Prevents state courts from issuing
school desegregation orders in excess of
federal requirements
Approved
Ballots in English
only
Nov 1984 (Prop 38) Places California on record
against multilingual ballot requirements
Approved
English Official
Language
Nov. 1986 (Prop 63) Establishes English as official
state language
Approved
“Three Strikes”
criminal sentencing
Nov. 1994 (Prop 184) Increased sentences for repeat
criminal offenders
Approved
Immigrant public
services
Nov. 1994 (Prop 187) Declares undocumented
immigrants ineligible for public social and
health services, public education
Approved
Public affirmative
action
Nov. 1996 (Prop 209) Ends affirmative action in public
hiring, contracting and public education
Approved
Bilingual education June. 1998 (Prop 227) Ends bilingual education in
public schools
Approved
Juvenile crime June 2000 (Prop 21) Increases penalties and sentencing
for juvenile offenders
Approved
Racial data collection Oct 2003 (Prop 54) Bans race data collection and
analysis by state and local governments
Defeated

Table 1: Select Ballot Initiatives Examined, 1946-2003

7
Could it be possible instead that white supremacy as an ideological formation
has been nourished, rather than attenuated, by notions of progress and political
development? What if we imagine racism as a dynamic and evolving force,
progressive rather than anachronistic, generative and fluid rather than conservative or
static? What if we understand white supremacy to be sustained by a broad array of
political actors, liberals as well as conservatives, and even, at times, by those placed
outside the fictive bounds of whiteness?
Indeed, in the postwar era, rights and opportunity rights have been the lingua
franca of California politics—the state has imagined itself at the forefront of not only
national but global progress and development, fettered only by the limits to its own
imagination. During this period, we can also locate many of the forces and dynamics
posited to be the engines of “racial progress”: A generally liberal political culture, a
relatively robust economy, an increasingly diverse populace, and well organized civil
rights leadership. Yet as Table 1 reveals, nearly every major civil rights and racial
justice issue put before a vote of the people in California during this period has
failed.
This project attempts to come to terms with this apparent contradiction. The
title, Racial Propositions, is meant to function on two levels. It refers first to the
history of racialized ballot initiatives in the postwar era which I bring together here
in a single narrative. To tell this story, I examine the conflicts and relations of power
which gave rise to these ballot measures, profile the significant political actors
involved, examine the discourse generated by the initiative debates, and explore the

8
impact the measures had on the broader political culture of the state. I analyze
polling data, election returns, newspaper accounts and a broad range of archival
materials and oral histories related to these political events.
“Racial propositions” also references a central argument of this study, that
that each of these ballot measures represented a proposition about the meaning of
race and racism. During the postwar era, debates on the significance of race have
been marked more by contradiction and transformation than by unity and coherence.
As the formal mechanisms of state sponsored segregation withered after World War
II, diverse political actors contended to interpret the meaning of “racial difference”
and the role of the government, private organizations, and individual citizens in
addressing the legacies of racial inequality. In California, a state which took pride in
its identity as a forward-thinking and pragmatic experiment in social possibility, no
single account could claim automatic authority. This study examines the role ballot
initiatives played in this process of proposing and generating racial meaning and
forging racialized political communities. The fervent discussions over these
measures as they unfolded on newspaper editorial pages, at public debates,
neighborhood meetings, and through campaign advertisements has made them a
central site for Californians to deliberate the meaning of race, rights, and authority.
Ultimately, this study explores the origins of the current “colorblind
consensus” on race, which casts racism as a personal, rather than a collective or
structural phenomenon, a feeling rather than a relation of power. It investigates how
this consensus has managed to successfully organize and structure debates about race

9
and racism in the state today in order to help us imagine how alternative visions of
justice and redistribution might challenge or disrupt this hegemony.
This study joins a lively scholarly and popular debate over why the nation’s
legacy of racial hierarchies and disparities has endured after World War II even as
the “American Creed” of equal rights and opportunity for all became has become
ever more widely embraced. As contributions to this debate can be found across
multiple disciplines, theoretical frameworks and modes of inquiry, this project is
broadly interdisciplinary—engaging at various times with cultural studies, political
theory, geography, critical race theory, political sociology, U.S. history, and the
scholarship on racial and ethnic politics. By bringing the theories and methods of
cultural analysis—a broad concern with the context, production, and reception of
meaning—to bear on the sphere of political debate, I demonstrate how various
political blocs have both reproduced and transformed political discourse on race and
racism in the postwar era.
12

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the use of “apartheid”
as a conceptual apparatus and heuristic device to understand the political culture of
postwar California. I then briefly discuss the three other terms significant to the
study—race, power, and innocence—explaining why I chose them and what I take
them to mean. Next, I offer an extended review of the recent historical literature on

12
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles
(2004), Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on
Democracy, Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White (New York, 2005), Matthew
Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, NJ, 2005), George
Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia, PA, 1998), Robert O. Self, American
Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ, 2003), Thomas Sugrue, Origins
of the Urban Crisis (Princeton, NJ, 1996).

10
race and the transformation of the postwar United States, explaining how my project
both responds to and extends a generative wave of scholarship produced within the
last decade. I conclude with brief summaries of the chapters which follow.

Apartheid in the Land of Sunshine?
In 1961, the historian Alexander Saxton wrote a story for Frontier Magazine
and its left-leaning readership about a state-sponsored skilled trades apprenticeship
program that maintained a “curious and almost unapproachable island of
segregation.” While the nation’s attention was fixed upon the struggles in the South,
the free lance journalist-—it would be two more years before Saxton entered
graduate school and a decade before the publication of his seminal The Indispensable
Enemy—cast his gaze west. Saxton explained that it was in “the free and sovereign
State of California” where a taxpayer-supported program training tens of thousands
of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, metal workers, masons, machinists and other
skilled workers remained almost exclusively white.
Saxton did not account for this exclusion solely in terms of individual
prejudice, bigotry and intolerance, though most observers understood the “massive
resistance” unfolding in the South at the time to be a function of precisely such
forces. Instead, Saxton explored the logics which guided the routine procedures and
preferences for admitting new applicants and hiring trained workers. The
apprenticeship programs had been built over many generations in order to sustain a
self-regulating “established pattern” of wages, employers and trained workers, and it

11
was precisely in sustaining this “established pattern” that rigid racial barriers were
erected. These barriers, and the logics that nourished them, endured even though the
state Legislature had formally prohibited racial discrimination in the program for
more than ten years.
Saxton pointed out that “California’s integrated taxpayers” were essentially
underwriting the discriminatory practices of unaccountable employers and unions,
which used informal, largely unspoken selection criteria to maintain their authority
over these programs and jobs. Moreover, state administrators, unions, and employers
either denied any discrimination existed or shifted responsibility to others in the
system, stymieing efforts of the newly created state Fair Employment Practices
Commission (FEPC) to address the problem. Saxton employed an evocative
juxtaposition to describe this vexing system: “genteel apartheid.”
13

“Apartheid” is a term few Californians would use during this period to
describe the racial life of their state. While racial segregation remained the rule,
rather than the exception, in most neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces through

13
Alexander Saxton, "Genteel Apartheid," Frontier Magazine, April 1960. For an interesting account
of Saxton’s intellectual development, see “Grand Crossings: The life and work of Alexander Saxton”
by Robert W Rydell in Rob Kroes edited Predecessors: Intellectual Lineages in American Studies, VU
University Press, The Netherlands Amerika Institute, 1999. For a discussion of California unions and
race, see Michael Kazin, "Reform. Utopia, and Racism: The Politics of California Craftsmen," in
Working People of California, ed. Daniel Cornford (Berkeley, 1995). Bruce Nelson, Divided We
Stand : American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, 2001). By the late 1950s
the California State Federation of Labor was actually regarded as one of the more progressive labor
groups in the country, and became staunch advocates of fair employment legislation. While the State
Federation continually endorsed anti-discrimination measures, and formally committed itself to
ending segregation within its own ranks, the patterns observed by Saxton endured. Saxton later
explored the roots of white working class support of racial exclusions in several important works.
Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California
(Berkeley, 1995), Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture
in Nineteenth-Century America.

12
World War II, unmistakable changes unfolded in the war’s aftermath. The Black
press frequently looked to California to imagine the early realization of the “Double
Victory” over fascism abroad and racism at home. In 1948, in the wake of recent
court decisions that struck down interracial marriage bans, racially restrictive
housing covenants, and segregated public schools, the Los Angeles Sentinel declared
that “Jim Crow is just about dead in California.”
14
A two page centerfold in the
Pittsburgh Courier in 1949 on life in San Diego showed photos of a multiracial cast
of citizens and workers enjoying an easy camaraderie: “Here in this thriving city
which can rightfully boast about its ‘heaven on earth climate,’ steady progress has
been made in interracial relations and increased job opportunities…The model set by
San Diego could be used as a fine model for future improvement in race relations in
many sections of the United States.”
15

These and many similar accounts anticipated the demise in California of a
powerful narrative within American political discourse. Historian Gary Gerstle uses
the term “racial nationalism” to describe political narratives in which domination and
hierarchy are explicitly justified and defended by assertions of racial kinship and
shared origin, cast in either “biological” or “cultural” terms: “race” as an adequate
explanation for inequality.
16
In the nearly 100 years between California’s admission
to the union and the end of World War II, examples of such racial nationalism were
prominent: organized lynchings, vigilante violence and mass killings, forms of

14
“Jim Crow is Dying” Los Angeles Sentinel, October 7, 1948.
15
“Courier Salutes San Diego” Pittsburgh Courier June 18, 1949 in California Federation for Civic
Unity (CFCU) Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
16
Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2002).

13
indentured servitude, restrictions on immigration and property ownership, minstrel
shows, segregated classrooms, hotels and restaurants, eugenics research, and mass-
based white supremacist movements.
17
While important examples of interracial
solidarity and anti-racist resistance can also be found, these efforts contended with a
dominant political culture which defended and justified racial inequality and
domination openly.
18

But at the end of World War II, a moment sociologist Howard Winant
describes as a “fundamental and historical shift, a global rupture or ‘break’” in the
worldwide regime of white supremacy, such policies and episodes went into rapid
decline in California.
19
Diverse political actors defined the character of the state as
fundamentally forward-thinking and open-minded; a station of perpetual opportunity
that had vanquished and disavowed all trappings of discrimination and prejudice.
Indeed, since the end of the War, political organizations and movements from across
the spectrum--from anti-tax groups and chambers of commerce to labor unions and
civil rights activists-- couched their claims in the rhetoric of “equal opportunity” and

17
On eugenics research, see Alexandra Stern. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better
Breeding in Modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. On lynching see Ken
Gonzales-Day Lynching in the West:1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006).
18
In noting these examples I do not mean to suggest that people of color found did not find any
opportunities in California, or that they offered little resistance to these measures. W.E.B. DuBois
described Los Angeles in glowing terms after a 1915 visit, and the communities built by African
Americans, Mexican Americans, and Japanese Americans in particular during this time sustained
important political opposition after the War. See Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los
Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley, CA, 2005), Ian Haney Lopez, Racism on Trial: The Chicano
Fight for Justice (Cambridge, MA, 2003), Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The
African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910-1963 (Berkeley, CA, 2000), George
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles,
1900-1945 (London, 1993), Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early
Twentieth Century Los Angeles (Berkeley, 2005).
19
Howard Winant, The World is A Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II (2001). [page]

14
“equal rights.” Rights and opportunity became leading narratives within California
political culture during this period, hardly the trademark of a society steeped in the
logics of apartheid.
But taking a cue from Saxton, I understand apartheid to mean more than open
declarations of white supremacy and the policies and violence which sustained
explicit segregation. South Africa’s post-1948 National Party era, the paradigmatic
example of an apartheid regime, was built upon a broad system of meaning-making
which constructed historically specific ideas about race, national identity and social
hierarchy as both natural and inevitable. By describing postwar California political
culture as shaped by apartheid, I am not suggesting that the state paralleled the
development of postwar South Africa; such a comparison is easily dismissed.
20

Indeed, as California passed legislation banning racial discrimination in the state
militia, in employment, public accommodations, and in housing sales and rentals,
and overturned laws banning interracial marriage and restricting land ownership
among Japanese Americans, the South African government adopted laws enforcing
deeper and wider regimes of segregation. But even in California, as the legal
architecture of racial segregation went into decline, the logics which naturalized
racial distinctions and hierarchies lingered. Here, I am not describing the transition

20
It is important to note, however, that key California based-figures in the early 20
th
century were
engaged with leaders of South Africa’s white supremacist regime. See Gray Brechin, Imperial San
Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley, 1999).. Moreover, during much of the postwar era,
with some notable exceptions, residential segregation by race in California remained stark. See for
example Philip J. Ethington, William H. Frey, and Dowell Myers, "The Racial Resegregation of Los
Angeles County, 1940-2000," (2001). The state also had numerous “Sundown Towns” which
threatened violence on African Americans within town limits after dark. See James Loewen, Sundown
Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York, 2005).

15
from de jure to de facto segregation, but the endurance and transformation of modes
of political reasoning and discourse that naturalized and reified specific ideas about
race, subordination and power.
21
That is, apartheid defined the state’s “political
culture:” the activities “through which individuals and groups in any society
articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce the competing claims they make upon
one another and upon the whole.”
22
As I will demonstrate, this political culture fixed
the meanings of racial identities and group conflicts in particular ways, constituting
an everyday political common sense for diverse Californians, including those who
resisted its demands and assignments.
23

To speak of apartheid then in postwar California is to inquire into a system of
meaning-making which constructed compelling ideas about the inevitability of racial
hierarchy and segregation even as the formal structures of racial exclusion waned

21
As Norval notes, there is extensive academic and popular debate over the meaning and history of
the term “apartheid”; it translates roughly into “apartness” in Afrikaner and Dutch though there are
critical distinctions between the post-1948 apartheid regime and earlier systems of segregation. I
follow Norval’s interest in the “political grammar” of apartheid as a hegemonic discourse,
investigating the way it constructed and symbolized a particular social and political reality, rather than
in making an inventory of its central policies and practices. See Aletta Norvall, Deconstructing
Apartheid Discourse (London, 1996). Other studies of apartheid discourse include Saul Dubow, "The
Elaboration of Segregationist Ideology," in Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South
Africa, ed. William Beinart and Saul Dubow (London, 1995), David Howarth, "The difficult
emergence of a democratic imaginary: Black Consciousness and non-racial democracy in South
Africa," in Discoure theory and political analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, ed.
David Howarth, Aletta Norval, and Yannis Stavrakakis (Manchester, 2000), Winant, The World is A
Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II. Chapter 8.
22
Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the
Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990). 5. Baker’s conceptualization of political culture, as “the set
of discourses or symbolic practices by which [competing political] claims are made” differs in
important ways from the prevalent definition used by political scientists emphasizing a more static
notion of values and attributes associated with particular political systems. For an important
discussion of these distinctions, see David Farber, "Political Culture and the Therapeutic Ideal,"
Reviews in American History 23 (1995), Glen Gendzel, "Political Culture: Genealogy of a Concept,"
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (Autumn, 1997).
23
On another use of apartheid to describe the postwar U.S., see Winston Grady-Willis, Challenging
U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960-1977.Duke University Press,
Durham.) xvii-xviii.

16
rapidly and ideas about rights and opportunity were publicly valorized. During this
period, California witnessed many of the forces which influential voices of the mid-
twentieth century argued would spell the demise of racial inequality: a rapidly
expanding non-white population that exercised growing economic and political
power, the adoption of extensive civil rights legislation (though such legislation
often became the subsequent target of ballot initiatives), the putative “liberalization”
of social attitudes among broad sectors of society, a political culture that celebrated
unfettered opportunity, a growing infrastructure of public resources and programs,
and an expanding economy that created jobs and wealth at a higher rate than any
other region in the nation.
Yet not only did race-based inequalities endure throughout this period, they
increasingly came to be understood as both acceptable and inevitable within the
same political discourse which so earnestly celebrated tolerance and condemned
racial prejudice. All of the major crises which beset the state today—the failures
within public education, housing, income, sustainable development, criminal justice
and the like--are imbricated in this system of genteel apartheid.
24
Race remains an

24
On inequalities and hierarchy within California’s prison system see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden
Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, 2006). To take a
few of many examples, California’s prison population increased 73 percent between 1990 and 2006,
and in that year ranked 17
th
among states in incarceration rates. African American men are
incarcerated at a rate of 5,125 per 100,000 in the population, compared to 1,142 for Latino men, 770
for white men, and 616 for the population as a whole. All of these figures are historic highs. Public
Policy Institute of California, "California's Changing Prison Population," (2006). at www.ppic.org. On
the crisis within public schools, see Education Institute for Democracy, and Access (IDEA), "Separate
and Unequal 50 Years After Brown: California's Racial "Opportunity Gap"," (Los Angeles, 2004).
IDEA reports that in 2004, 42 percent of predominantly non-white schools had serious “opportunity
gaps” demonstrated by a lack of qualified teachers, textbooks and instructional materials, and
facilities) compared to 7 percent of white students. This disparities have worsened as California has
plummeted to the bottom 20 percent in per capita student funding in the last two decades. See Schrag,

17
indispensable ideology and social prism through which to comprehend and appraise
the sources of and solutions to most of California’s crises.
25
To borrow Ruth Wilson
Gilmore’s formulation, race helps resolve a central contradiction of California—how
a state which so publicly reveres and symbolizes ideas of human development,
possibility and achievement consigns so many of its inhabitants to premature or
preventable death.
26
Understanding how this resolution was secured in California,
the quintessential “blue state” on the nation’s political map, offers important insight
into the broader story of story of race and nation in the postwar U.S.

Race, Power, and Innocence
Before situating this project in a broader historiographical context, three
terms central to my analysis—race, power, and innocence—deserve brief
explanation.
As critical race theorist Neil Gotanda explains, within contemporary racial
discourse, race is typically treated as a formal distinction and neutral signifier of
“skin color” or ancestral origin, a recognizable “attribute” possessed by the
individual. Gotanda argues that the imperative of “nonrecognition” of race turns on
an inherent paradox—one must know what race is (and recognize it as such) before

Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future.
25
To be sure, the racial diversity of California’s population extends into many realms of social,
political and economic leadership, and claiming or asserting a white identity does not automatically
guarantee security or mobility. The argument I develop here is that race remains critical to securing “a
society structured in dominance.” See Stuart Hall, "Race Articulation and Societies Structured in
Dominance," in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris, 1980).
26
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and
Geography," The Professional Geographer 54 (2002).

18
ignoring it—thus reifying race as a stable, fixed category of human existence.
27

While often identified with neoconservative political commentators, this discourse
actually shapes much of the scholarship on race and ethnicity within the social
sciences, where “race” is treated as a discrete, independent variable capable of
autonomously shaping political outcomes.
This study rejects the notion that the meaning of race is transparent and fixed. I
rely instead on more fluid theories of racialization which attend to the ongoing
process race performs in mediating and constituting specific social relations and
configurations of power. Steve Martinot describes racialization as “the way race is
produced and bestowed on people by institutional and social actions...something
people do, rather than what they are.”
28
Omi and Winant deploy the notion of “racial
formation” to explain “sociohistorical processes by which racial categories are
inhabited, created, transformed and destroyed.”
29
Gotanda extends this concept in
positing racial categories as “reifications of relations of subordination” which
become operationalized based on their linkages to cultural profiles in particular
social contexts.
30
Race thus becomes, following Paul Gilroy, a political category,
whose meaning is unfixed and subject to the outcomes of struggle.
31
I use this
framework of racialization to understand the ways in which California ballot

27
Neil Gotanda, "A Critique of "Our Constitution is Color-Blind"," Stanford Law Review 44 (1991):
18.
28
Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance (Philadelphia, PA, 2003).
13.
29
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York, NY,
1994). 54.
30
Neil Gotanda, "Comparative Racialization: Racial Profiling and the Case of Wen Ho Lee," UCLA
Law Review 47 (2000).
31
Paul Gilroy, Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (Chicago, 1987). 24.

19
initiatives were a critical site of “race making” in the postwar era.
32

In addition, conceptualizing race as a process forged within specific spatial and
temporal contexts allows me to address the multiple axes of racialization at work in
California during this period. Binary frameworks built around a singular notion of
racial difference are unable to adequately grasp the multiple axes of racialization at
work within this polyglot setting. A wave of recent scholarship has made rich use of
comparative frameworks to demonstrate that the meaning of the terms “African
American,” “Latino,” “Asian American,” “Native American” and most of all
“White” must always be understood as interdependent and mutually constituted. As I
will argue, the ballot initiatives examined here are one site which brings this process
into bold relief, demonstrating how these signifiers and identities are contested and
transformed over time and in relationship to one another.
33

“Power” is the second analytic category explored in this study. In racial
colorblind discourse, power (defined here as the capacity to achieve purpose in
relation to others) is typically divorced from conceptualizations of race.
34
But as
philosopher Charles Mills observes, in settler societies such as the United States,
race became a meaningful category of human differentiation precisely because of its

32
Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2000).
33
This project does not explicitly concern the process of comparative racialization, as a number of
other excellent recent studies have done. See for example Mark Brilliant, "Color Lines: Civil Rights
Struggles on America's Racial Frontier, 1945-75 (PhD diss)" (Stanford University, 2003), Neil Foley,
White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (1999), Claire Jean Kim,
Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven, CT, 2000), Natalia
Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940 (Berkeley, 2006),
Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles.
University of California Press, 2005. (Berkeley, 2005).
34
Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. 247-
248.

20
effectiveness in organizing and collectivizing relations of power. Mills proposes that
such settler societies constructed a foundational “Racial Contract”--“a set of formal
or informal agreements or meta-agreements”—to enact and categorize some subset
of the population as “white” and declare them to be “coextensive with the class of
full persons” while categorizing those outside this designation as of “a different and
inferior moral status, [and] subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil
standing” within the polity.
35
Mills thus explains: “Whiteness is not really a color at
all, but a set of power relations.”
36

In Stuart Hall’s conceptualization of racism as “the fatal coupling of power and
difference,” power functions in two ways. There is first the power to define (and thus
produce) what constitutes meaningful “difference” across the manifold “variations in
humankind.”
37
The second is the power to act on these alleged differences, creating
the group hierarchies which result. This project pays attention to both types of
power. Constructions of racial difference and distinction arise historically. As
Matthew Frye Jacobson has demonstrated, “whiteness” has been a remarkably elastic
and contested descriptor in the U.S. during the last two hundred years, shaped at
various times by state action and both elite and non-elite political actors.
38
In
postwar California, ballot initiatives and related political struggles became one arena

35
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY, 1997). 11.
36
Ibid. 127. Emphasis in original.
37
Hall is cited in Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Race and Globalization," in Geographies of Global Change,
ed. Johnson, Taylor, and Watts (2002), 261. The second quote is Gilmore’s, ibid.
38
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of
Race (Cambridge, 1999).

21
in which the power to describe and produce racial distinctions was exercised.
39

I explore the second type of power, the ability to use the racial distinctions thus
produced as a basis for collective action and political community, throughout this
study. I argue that many of the entrenched forms of inequality and hierarchy--
particularly in housing, education, employment and access to public services--are
derived from this type of group power. Through the ballot initiatives examined here,
we see the ways in which such power was criticized, defended, and ultimately
renewed.
Attention to the exercise of racial power leads to my concern for the third
conceptual category of innocence. Within anti-racist political discourse, in both its
left, right and centrist articulations, the categories of “guilt” and “innocence” have
played a central role in explaining and defining the meaning of racism. While the
rhetoric of (white) racial innocence is today more associated with the jurisprudence
used to undermine affirmative action, it did not originate with the political right.
40
In
the mid 1940’s, groups such as the American Council on Race Relations (ACCR),
the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the East and West Association, and
various local Councils for Civic Unity and Fair Play Committees framed “racial
prejudice” and “race relations” as questions of individual affect and conviction; one
either did or did not subscribe to beliefs in racial superiority. As we shall see, these

39
I am not exclusively referring here to ballot initiatives that deal explicitly with racial recognition;
only one measure addressed in this study (2003’s Proposition 54) concerns this issue. But most of the
initiatives explored here were rooted in an implicit analysis about what race meant and what racial
distinctions were meaningful.
40
See Thomas Ross, "Innocence and Affirmative Action," in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge,
ed. Richard Delgado (Philadelphia, 1990). Ross also points out that the rhetoric of white racial
innocence is meant to stand in contrast to the presumed guilt of the racial other.

22
organizations grew rapidly in California, in part as a response to the massive
internment and return of Japanese Americans during the War and the so-called “Zoot
Suit” riots in Los Angeles in 1943. Drawing from the broad anti-fascist, pro-
democratic discourse mobilized during the war, and influenced heavily by figures
including Ashley Montegue, Ruth Benedict, and above all Gunnar Myrdal, (who
famously described racial prejudice as “residing in the heart”) these groups
advocated for early anti-discrimination legislation and conducted broad civic
education campaigns.
41

As Chapter 2 explains, many of the leading advocates of civil rights
legislation in California in the 1950s and 1960s were centrally involved with these
“human relations” organizations.
42
It was their framing of these debates on the terms
of racial guilt versus innocence, setting bigotry against tolerance, which became the
authoritative discourse through which public deliberations over racial justice were
adjudicated. In some cases, including efforts to repeal the state’s alien land law
restrictions and to fight avowed white supremacists such as Gerald L.K. Smith, the
rhetoric of fair play and tolerance was persuasive. But when applied to controversies
over anti-discrimination policies in employment or housing, school integration,
affirmative action or immigrants’ rights, accusations of racial guilt proved much less
effective. Conversely, declarations of innocence became the most reliable bulwark

41
On Myrdal see especially Richard King, Race, Culture and the Intellectuals: 1940-1970
(Washington, DC, 2004). Chapter 1.
42
There was certainly political diversity within these alliances—they included CIO leaders,
community organizing advocates such as Fred Ross (an early staff person for the ACCR) and also
moderate organizations such as the National Urban League and future Los Angeles County Supervisor
John Anson Ford, who was active in Pearl Buck’s “East and West Association.”

23
against demands for racial justice claims in the later postwar era. These claims were
at their heart disavowals over the use and deployment of collective racial power.

Explaining the Decline of the “Second Reconstruction”
To inquire into the endurance of race as an axis of power in California raises
an immediate historical question: How do we account for the limitations of what C.
Van Woodward described as the “Second Reconstruction”—the postwar ensemble of
social movements, legislative efforts and related political projects which sought to
eliminate race as a category of oppression in general and anti-Black racism in
particular.
43
Historian Jacquline Dowd Hall offers an important reminder that the
enduring impact of the civil rights movement gets too easily dismissed when a
singular narrative of declension is used to recite its trajectory and fate—and that this
narrative is often deployed by civil rights opponents seeking to justify their own
claim to the movement’s legacies.
44
But if we take “Reconstruction” to mean a broad
structural transformation of society, rather than just the elimination of legally
authorized forms of exclusion, and if we consider the continued existence of vast
racial hierarchies and inequities in contemporary life and the declining public
commitment to affirmatively protect or promote racial justice, then we are more
specifically tasked with understanding the failure (or perhaps, limitations) of the

43
Woodward compared the postwar “Second Reconstruction” to the First Reconstruction which arose
in the aftermath of the Civil War and culminated in the regime of Jim Crow. C. Vann Woodward, The
Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford, 1965(1955)).
44
Jacqueline Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," The Journal
of American History 91 (2005).

24
Second Reconstruction to realize these transformations: How did the myriad forces
and political projects opposed to the Second Reconstruction successfully defend and
renew prevailing relations of power in the face of this enormous popular challenge?
45

The most influential answer to this question emerged in the shadows of
Ronald Reagan’s ascension and what appeared to be an unrelenting conservative turn
among white working class voters. These scholars explained their turn away from the
“New Deal Order” primarily as a product of “white backlash.”
46
In this account, the
beleaguered white voter/citizen/worker/—weary, angry or fearful of the looming
“threat” of racial justice, reflexively struck back to end progress of the Second
Reconstruction. This narrative situates the late 1960s and early 1970s as the key
period in this transition. As Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall explain in the definitive
account of this process: “As the civil rights movement became national, as it became

45 It is important to note that the increasingly dominant perspective is to dismiss altogether the role of
racism in contemporary life. Over the last thirty years, commentators from across the political
spectrum have increasingly sought to look “beyond race” to explain enduring patterns of inequality.
Writers as diverse as Dinesh D’Souza and William Julius Wilson have argued in different ways that
because the formal barriers to advancement and life fulfillment were indeed vanquished by the Civil
Rights Acts and the related Supreme Court desegregation imperatives, any remaining fetters to
opportunity result from individual or “group” deficiencies. While they offer competing policy
prescriptions, both agree that with the formal structures of racial exclusion eradicated, inquiring into
the racial dimension of social problems holds little promise. In fact, this position maintains, deliberate
engagements with race may actually foment division and animosity, summoning rather than excising
the ghosts of our racial past.
It remains an important project—in the realm of both scholarly discourse and public policy—
to challenge and discredit this perspective and to legitimize a discussion of racism within the broader
public debate. While this study seeks to contribute to this effort in the long-run, it is more
immediately focused upon and engaged with the critical group of scholars which seek to explain,
rather than reject, the relationship between racism and structures of inequality and dominance. See
Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism (New York, 1995), William Julius Wilson, The Declining
Signficance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Insitutions (Chicago, 1980).
46
On the New Deal Order in particular see Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser, eds., The Rise and Fall of
the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, NJ, 1989). There is a large body of literature on critical
elections and political realignment—for one important example see Walter Dean Burnham, Critical
elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York, 1970).

25
clearly associated with the Democratic party, and as it began to impinge on local
neighborhoods and schools, it served to crack the Democratic loyalties of key white
voters…Resentment of the civil rights movement among key white voters was
reinforced and enlarged by cultural and economic conflicts resulting from the rights
revolution.”
47

Local studies of the response of white “ethnic” communities to the crisis of
the 1960s further buttress this narrative. Sociologist Jonathon Rieder’s account of
“The Rise of the Silent Majority,” for example, places white backlash at the heart of
the political realignment of the late 1960s and early 1970s: “If there was any single
source of displeasure that shook the New Deal coalition to its core, it was the civil
rights revolution.”
48
Rieder contends that the main constituents of the New Deal
coalition remained unified from the 1930s to the early 1960s and that the Republican
Party failed in its attempts during this period to undermine popular support for the
benevolent state. It was only because the “whole tenor and turn of the Black
movement offended no less than the remedies it championed” that this coalition
disintegrated, as “frightened and offended provincial workers” ran for cover in a
revitalized Republican Party. To Rieder, preternatural fears of Black people and
panics over integration fueled a violent if predictable reaction. He explains, for
example, that “[b]using for racial integration heightened primal anxieties about

47
Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes
on American Politics (1992). 5.
48
Jonathon Rieder, "The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980," in The Rise and Fall of
the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser (Princeton, NJ, 1989), 244.

26
children’s safety and future.”
49
Rieder’s monograph-length study of the fight waged
by Jewish and Italian residents in Brooklyn’s Canarsie district against school and
neighborhood integration emphasizes similar themes: “Middle America felt molested
by formidable powers: Blacks and liberals and bureaucrats.”
50
Historian Ronald
Formisano employs a similar framework in his investigation of white opposition to
school desegregation and busing in Boston. He suggests, “Fear of blacks, specifically
of poor ghetto blacks, fed antibussers’ feelings of being trodden on, while their
outrage at injustice and feelings of powerlessness often fed their hostility to
blacks.”
51

In a similar vein, legal historian Michael Klarman has made an influential
argument that the most important and immediate legacy of the Brown decision was
to consolidate and motivate white Southern opposition in a period when racial
moderation was actually growing. Klarman contends that the “massive resistance”
which faced school desegregation efforts in the 1950s was driven by the symbolic

49
Ibid., 255.
50
Jonathon Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridg, MA,
1987). 3.
51
Ronald Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s.
(Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1991). 4. For similar accounts see Dennis A Deslippe, "'Do Whites
Have Rights?' :White Detroit Policemen and 'Reverse Discrimination' Protests in the 1970s'," Journal
of American History 91 (December, 2004), Kenneth Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class
Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980 (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2003), Arnold Hirsch, "Massive
Resistance in the Urban North: Trumball Park, Chicago, 1953-1966," Journal of American History 85
(1995). Durr and Hirsch trace the origins of the “backlash” to the 1940s and 1950s, which were a
continuation of long-standing politics of neighborhood and workplace protection and defense.
Deslippe points to the cross-racial and cross-gender alliances forged by white Detroit police officers
with other trade unionists in the 1970s to limit the scope and impact of affirmative action programs.
Backlash, for Deslippe, stems from the structures and politics of labor contracts as much as it does
from anti-Black animus. The California account that reflects a similar analysis, but with a much
deeper prewar context, is Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven : Life and Politics in the Working-
Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Chicago, IL, 2002).

27
import of the Brown decision, suggesting that a less sweeping and more gradual
approach to integration might have met with less defiance.
52

Studies of California politics have also made use of backlash as a central
analytic. As we shall see, the electorate’s embrace of a 1964 ballot initiative
enshrining in the state constitution a right to discriminate by race, color, religion or
national origin in housing has been described by several commentators as a populist
reaction to fair housing laws. Grassroots movements against busing to integrate
public schools in the 1970s and against property taxes in the late 1970s and early
1980s have been described in similar terms. Today, backlash remains the framework
of choice to describe public support for measures banning services to immigrants,
opposing affirmative action programs, and demanding the construction of new
prisons.
53

The backlash narrative has proved useful and appealing to commentators on
both the political right and left. For the former, it offers proof of the enduring
conservatism of the populace—it was the radicalism and violence of the “rights
revolution” and its coterie of feminists, student radicals, and Black nationalists that

52
M. Klarman, "How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis," The Journal of
American History 81 (1994). Klarman more specifically argues that the massive resistance
engendered by the Brown decision forced Northern white liberals to acknowledge and address the
deep-seated forms of racial oppression in the South, though he suggests that systems of racial
hierarchy in the South were already in rapid demise before the Brown ruling. The Civil Rights
Movement itself plays a minor role in Klarman’s explanation. See Michael Klarman, From Jim Crow
to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial equality (Oxford, 2004).
53
On the backlash narrative used in the housing initiative see Steven F Hayward, "Ronald Reagan and
the Transformation of Modern California," in The California Republic: Institutions, Statesmanship,
and Politics, ed. Brian Janiskee and Ken Masugi (Lanham, 2004), Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors:
The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ, 2001), Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven : Life and
Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. On affirmative action and
immigrant rights see Gibbs and Bankhead, Preserving Privilege: California Politics, Propositions,
and People of Color.

28
drove the innocent “silent majority” into the GOP. It demonstrates, this position
holds, the inexorable hostility most in the U.S. feel toward such “radical” claims.
54

To commentators more identified with the left, such as Todd Gitlin, the backlash
justifies the conviction that the New Left failed when it abandoned the “universality”
of class concerns and addressed itself instead to the “particularities” of race, gender,
sexuality and other narrow “interests.” White voters abandoned the Democratic Party
because the Democratic Party abandoned them.
55

Critiques of the Backlash Thesis
If the backlash thesis proves appealing as a political claim, it remains
inadequate as an historical explanation. As Jeanne Theoharis argues, its advocates
“elide white ethnic working-class alienation and political powerlessness with
opposition to desegregation, naturalizing racism as a response for politically
alienated working-class whites.”
56
She demonstrates, for example, that anti-busing
politics in Boston had broad and active support among sections of the white middle
class and among many of the city’s white politicians, challenging the assertion that a

54
See among many examples John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, The Right Nation:
Conservative Power in America (New York, 2004). Chapter 3, Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan
Thernstrom, America in Black and White (New York, 1997).
55
Centrist versions of this argument can be found in Arthur Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America
(1992). The critique from the left has been sounded by Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams:
Why America is Wracked By Culture Wars (New York, 1996), David Harvey, "Class Relations, Social
Justice and the Politics of Difference," in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. M Keith and S Pile
(London, 1993).
56
Jeanne Theoharis, "'We Saved the City': Black Struggles for Educational Equality in Boston, 1960-
1976," Radical History Review 81 (Fall, 2001): 63.

29
politics of working class neighborhood preservation in South Boston can fully
account for this conflict. Rieder, Formisano and others treat the racialized notions of
neighborhood, workplace, and school “protection” as trans-historical constructs; they
fail to interrogate how the very subject position of the “angry white male” became
constituted through the political conflicts they examine.
57
They do not take seriously
the possibility that large numbers of white Americans might have been attracted to
the civil rights movement’s demands for broad economic transformation and social
democracy. By always insisting on the particularity and distinctiveness of
“nonwhite” consciousness, interests, and demands, they treat the “white backlash”
which ensued as a fait accompli rather than the contingent outcome of historically
specific events.
This error rests on what Alexander Saxton describes as a circular logic in
explaining the causes and endurance of racism: “a system of ideas and attitudes that
allegedly causes differential treatment of non-whites is said to originate as a result of
such differential treatment.”
58
As historian Barbara Jeanne Fields reminds us “since
race is not genetically programmed, racial prejudice cannot be genetically
programmed either but, like race itself, must arise historically.” To posit then that
“race” or “racial prejudice” functions as a motive force of history does nothing
“more than repeat the question by way of answer.” Neither can race “take on a life of
its own,” once it has been magically conjured into existence. Fields suggests we must

57
Amy Ansell, New Right New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Britain (New
York, 1997). 40.
58
Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-
Century America. 4.

30
focus on the organization of social relations which seem to so self-evidently offer
race as the answer if we are to arrive at a genuinely historical explanation.
59

Rethinking Racial Inequality in the Postwar Era
In the last decade, a wave of generative historical scholarship has subjected
the backlash narrative to three important revisions, interventions which loom large in
this project. First, several studies have effectively refuted the claim that the New
Deal Order accommodated an equal coalition of working class Northern and
Southern white voters and African Americans until the conflagrations of the mid-to-
late 1960s upset its balance. Sugrue argues that Detroit’s once mighty industrial
economy was already in the process of a deep and irrevocable structural
transformation by the start of World War II. While the halcyon days of the 1950s are
often celebrated for Fordist-enabled promises of full employment and the expansion
of home ownership, African Americans faced severe discrimination in both labor and
housing markets during this time. As industrial employment hemorrhaged from the
high-wage, heavily unionized Midwest, and federal lending policies continued to
tacitly endorse residential segregation, many white residents concluded that
maintaining segregated communities and workplace hierarchies was essential to their
own security. Sugrue disrupts the traditional periodization which traces the urban
crisis and decline to the 1960s and 1970s, calling our attention to the long and steady
patterns of exclusion which both underwrote white privilege and sustained the

59
Barbara J. Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review
(May/June, 1990): 101.

31
marginal status of African Americans. The acute conflicts of the 1960s only brought
to the surface these deep-seated relationships of unequal power.
60
Sociologist Tony
Chen finds that attacks on quotas and group based remedies that would prove highly
effective by the early 1970s in stemming the tide of civil rights legislation nationally
were actually rehearsed decades earlier during a 1945 debate over fair employment
policies in the New York state legislature. The “backlash” witnessed in the 1960s
and 1970s was in fact a continued assertion of white racial power that had a long
history in the urban North. Katznelson and Kenneth Jackson explain that nearly all of
the social welfare programs associated with the New Deal and World War II were
implemented on a discriminatory basis: Social security legislation, collective
bargaining protections, federal mortgage guarantees, wartime hiring, and the massive
assistance directed towards returning veterans were overwhelmingly reserved for
white male recipients.
61
Understanding the long fetch of these antagonistic relations
prevents us from inferring that white opposition to the Second Reconstruction can be
blamed on the tactical aggressiveness and militancy of particular social movement
organizations. Collectively, these scholars suggest that the New Deal Order
collapsed not because the national Democratic Party reached “too far” to address

60
Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis. Hirsch similarly traces the forces of white working class
resistance to the immediate aftermath of the War, but he also seems to treat those forces as largely
inexorable, establishing its limits from the onset: “In a booming postwar economy, before urban
renewal had ravaged ethnic enclaves, before the civil rights movement devolved into riotous violence,
and before the draining Vietnam War helped spawn a debilitating political reaction, Chicago’s ethnic
communities had outlined the limits of Black advance.” Hirsch, "Massive Resistance in the Urban
North: Trumball Park, Chicago, 1953-1966," 523.
61
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford, 1987),
Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White. Canaday also demonstrates that veterans assistance
presumed and privileged the needs of straight white men in particular. Margot Canaday, "Building a
Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill," Journal of American
History 90 (2003).

32
civil rights and racial justice claims, but because it failed to thoroughly root out the
vast inequalities within its own ranks. Chapters 3 and 4 of this study explore how a
similar dynamic took root in California, with equally ruinous consequences.
A second important critique of the backlash thesis addresses the social and
economic bases which animated the conservative resurgence of the 1960s. In many
localities, it was professional middle class suburbanites, rather than working class
white ethnic voters, who led the attack against the claims for rights and redistribution
witnessed during the 1960s. Matthew Lassiter persuasively demonstrates that
beginning in the 1950s, the center of political power in the South shifted away from
the massive resistance of the Black Belt region and towards the burgeoning suburban
communities of cities like Charlotte and Atlanta. Adopting an early precursor to
contemporary colorblind rhetoric, this political movement accepted and even
facilitated modest efforts towards integration while rejecting more transformative
demands as an affront to their hard-earned standard of living.
62
Lisa McGirr
explores a similar dynamic within the bedroom communities of Orange County,
California. The conservatism which gripped so many in this region—nourished by
figures like Goldwater and Reagan—was not an atavistic reaction to the forces of

62
Lassiter also rejects the claim made by scholars such as Dan Carter that political figures such as
Wallace and Nixon expanded their base of political support by making racist appeals to white voters.
Lassiter suggests each time this strategy was attempted in the South after 1965 it largely failed. Dan
Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-
1994 (Baton Rouge, 1996), Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.
However, calling attention On the role of the conservative political leaders in this process more
generally see also Ansell, New Right New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and
Britain, Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY, 1998). Two
California accounts which do not emphasize the role of race as heavily in the postwar ascendance of
the right include Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive
Turning Point in American Politics (New York, NY, 2000), Kurt Schuparra, Triumph of the Right:
The Rise of the California Conservative Movement, 1945-1966 (1998).

33
modernity and social change, as the backlash narrative often suggests. Instead, it was
a renovated and updated political ethic that brought together a suspicious anti-statism
and a strident religious moralism into a similar defense of suburban privilege.
63

Again, Lassiter, Robert Self, George Lipsitz, Kenneth Jackson and others point out
the paradoxes of the anti-statist postures embraced in the these suburban
communities—with lavish federal and state spending on freeways, veterans
programs, mortgage subsidies, new suburban schools and particularly in the case of
Southern California, defense spending, these communities were hardly “self-
sufficient.” Yet as David Freund explains, they facilitated a shift in the defense of
segregation from “a discourse focusing on race and compatibility to one focusing on
markets and rights.” In the chapters which follow, I bring this insight to bear of the
ways in which “racial innocence” operated to disavow structures of racial power and
deny the endurance of racial privilege.
64

A final revision of the backlash thesis emphasizes the cultural logics and
political reasoning which animated opposition to the Second Reconstruction. This
scholarship calls attention to the interpretive frameworks and broader cultural milieu
through which opposition to demands for social and racial justice became
naturalized. Eric Avila explores the influential mid-century discourse that linked
race, blight and deviance, demonstrating how the racialized, menacing urbanity

63
McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right.
64
David Freund, "Marketing the Free Market," in The New Suburban History, ed. Kruse Kevin and
Thomas Sugrue (Chicago, 2006).Freund describes the massive marketing program undertaken by the
FHA in the 1930s to promote its new mortgage insurance initiatives. The FHA explained that the
programs merely unleashed the forces of private capital and individual enterprise, and were in no way
a form of state subsidy.

34
depicted in film noir contrasted to the buoyant optimism represented by Disneyland,
suburban malls, and other spaces of white consumption. Lizabeth Cohen describes
how the postwar “culture of consumption” promoted and invoked racial distinctions
and exclusions through the way it organized residential and commercial spaces.
65

George Lipsitz points out that the logics and character of this culture of consumption
played an important role in structuring the terms of the anti-tax and anti-busing
movements of the 1970s that struck a deep blow to educational equity efforts.
“Antitax sentiment revolved around preserving access to ‘consumption’ in the
broadest sense of the term, and did nothing to challenge corporate plans” or
authority. He continues: “The Age of Balanced Budget Conservativism placed its
greatest emphasis on American identities as consumers and accumulators.”
66

Similarly, Lisa Duggan, in an important critique of the cultural politics of
neoliberalism, argues that corporate interests “developed a wide-ranging political
and cultural project—the reconstruction of the everyday life of capitalism” as a way
to disarm growing calls for the redistribution of resources.
67
This study draws
extensively from the emphasis these scholars place on the cultural logics of
conservative political projects and the struggle they waged over political meaning
and identity.

65
Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles,
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
(New York, 2003).
66
George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
87.
67
Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy.
XI.

35
Towards a New Historical Synthesis
While I draw from the important revisions made to the backlash thesis, this
study offers three distinct interventions. First, much of the literature described above
relies heavily on an analytic divide between “racial conservatism” and “racial
liberalism.” Yet as I will demonstrate, such rubrics can often obscure as much as
they reveal. In California, the lines between racial conservatism and liberalism have
always been fraught. “Racial liberalism” itself is a broad and contradictory
discursive horizon which can be articulated to a range of competing policy positions
and objectives. The public debates over the initiatives examined here reveal
important convergences in the social visions and logics of these putative political
opponents. While the categories of racial conservatism and liberalism have some
heuristic utility, they also mask important convergences in the ways diverse political
actors and movements collaborated to racialize many of the critical policy debates in
the postwar era.
68

Second, much of the literature critical of the backlash thesis still
presumes and relies upon particularly stable notions of racial identity and
meaning, treating racial categories as transhistoric constructs, transparent in their
connotation. I follow Stuart Hall in cautioning against an analysis that treats
political struggle as “an arena which simply represents and reflects unified

68
Self defines “racial liberalism” as “racially equal opportunity in social and political life, as well as
some intervention to achieve an equal playing field.” As I argue, rubrics such as this, while reasonable
abstractions, offer little utility in parsing out the distinctions between the political actors examined in
this project, all of whom would have surely declared their support for “equal opportunity.” Self,
American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. 14.On racial liberalism, see also
Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, 1997).

36
collective political identities,” regarding “politics as a dependent sphere.”
69

Amending the familiar formula in which racial identity is explained to be
generative of political conflict, I argue that political conflict is also itself
generative of racial identity, that “politics makes race” as much as “race makes
politics.” By examining the political language, symbols, and modes of address
that fueled these initiative debates, I explore the role that contending campaigns
played in organizing and defining, rather than merely expressing, public
understanding of complex political controversies. Ballot initiatives are more than
plebiscites on transparent and fully decipherable policy issues; these contests
shape and condition the very terms with which people analyze and assess issues
in public life and the identity positions they claim for themselves and ascribe to
others. By situating the discourse fueling ballot initiatives within the broader
narratives marking life in postwar California--including nationalism, masculinity,
consumption, property, security, prosperity, and privatization--we can better
understand their role in constructing, rather than just expressing, the ideological
lineaments of this period. While there were diverse sites of racial production in
public life during this period, these initiatives played a prominent role in
condensing meaning and organizing and naturalizing particular configurations of
power.
Third, most of the literature on racial inequality in the postwar U.S. holds that
race and racism are only a problem for those placed outside the fictive boundaries of

69
Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the crisis of the Left (London, 1988).

37
whiteness; those who identify as white are presumed to have little investment in the
realization of racial justice. The ascension and authority of the colorblind discourse
that so effectively organizes and structures debates about race and racism in the state
today has consequences for wide segments of the populace as a whole, including
those who identify as white. In elaborating this argument I hope to challenge what
has become a central tenet in the common sense of many “progressive” political
activists and leaders today—that a deliberate focus on racial identity and race-based
oppression undermines the formation of a broad-based popular alignment necessary
to win political power. The study which follows suggests the opposite; without a
sustained and intentional effort to address the role that race plays in naturalizing and
animating expansive structures of inequality, the growing disparities in resources,
rights, and power witnessed today can only continue.

Chapter Summaries
Chapter 1, “Politics, Ideology, and Identification: Theorizing ‘Racial
Change’” maps out the conceptual framework used in this study. Drawing from
theorists including Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci and Ernesto
Laclau, I describe three spheres of analysis—“ideology,” “politics,” and
“identification”—and detail how I understand their relationships and articulations.
For what reasons do ideas about race, rights and authority win acceptance in some
periods and not others? What role do organized political actors and forces play in
this process of racial formation? How do the political identifications and

38
communities forged in any one historical moment shape the possibility for future
transformations? I argue that the racialized ballot initiatives explored in this study
provide a generative site to examine and contemplate these questions.
Chapter 2, “Fair Employment and the Vicissitudes of ‘Racial Tolerance,’
1945-1960” begins with a discussion of the dramatic transformations wrought by the
Second World War and the crisis it created in prevailing discourses of white
supremacy. Early civil rights advocates used this opening to advocate for the passage
of statewide fair employment initiative, collecting more than 300,000 signatures to
place the measure on the November 1946 ballot. But their appeals to anti-fascist “fair
play” sentiments failed in the face of an ingenuous campaign led by the Los Angeles
Chamber of Commerce, large scale farmers and other employers. Organizing as the
“Committee for Tolerance,” the group disavowed any racist intent, declaring that the
proposed fair employment measure would actually exacerbate racial tension and
intolerance. Yet while they defeated the fair employment initiative, their authority
would not go unchallenged. Over the next fifteen years, this business-led Republican
coalition faced growing challenges from an impressive alliance of labor, religious,
and “human relations” groups and Democratic Party activists, culminating in the
1958 election of Governor Pat Brown and the passage of anti-discrimination
measures in housing, employment and public accommodations. This chapter
explores the bearing, composition and ambition of these two competing political
alignments, arguing that at least through the early 1960s, “the triumph of the Right”
in California was hardly inexorable.

39
Chapter 3 “Fair Housing and the Logics of Apartheid, 1960-1972” offers
an extensive case study of Proposition 14, the 1964 measure sponsored by the real
estate industry which sought to enshrine within the State Constitution an
unprecedented “right to discriminate” in housing. The California Real Estate
Association, which since its founding in 1903 had fought every measure aimed at
housing desegregation, deftly adapted much of the emerging civil rights rhetoric,
committing to “equal opportunity” in serving prospective homebuyers while
deploring “forced housing” measures that would abridge “property rights.” An all-
volunteer petition effort involving tens of thousands of local realtors qualified the
measure, and the electorate passed Proposition 14 by more than 30 points in spite of
singular opposition among statewide elected officials (including many prominent
Republicans), local newspapers, labor unions, and churches. The opponents’ claim
that Proposition 14 “asks you to vote hatred and bigotry into our State Constitution”
held little sway in opposition to a discourse linking the sanctity of the family,
household and property rights against the “seizure of private property” and the
tyranny of the state. This chapter considers the enduring impact these formulations of
white property rights have had on contemporary notions of racial colorblindness.
Chapter 4, “School Desegregation, Busing and the Triumph of Racial
Innocence, 1972-1982” compares two ballot initiatives that sought to derail school
desegregation plans that relied on student reassignment and busing. The first
measure, sponsored by conservative South Gate Republican Floyd Wakefield—a key
figure in historian Becky Nicoalides’ study of that white Los Angeles suburb—raised

40
the specters of “forced busing” and threats to parental “freedom of choice” in
outlawing all race-based student assignments.
70
While the measure passed, it was
ultimately overturned by the state Supreme Court as violation of the Equal Protection
Clause. By contrast, the 1979 anti-busing measure was sponsored by a Democratic
lawmaker from a more multiracial district in the San Fernando Valley. Advocates of
the 1979 measure carefully recruited several Mexican American and African
American political figures that had grown dissatisfied with the direction of school
desegregation, and recast opposition to school busing in “race-neutral” terms,
attacking the remedy (busing) rather than the principle of integration. The 1979
initiative passed by a wide margin, was upheld by the Supreme Court, and helped
shape the Reagan administration’s subsequent challenge to school desegregation
orders nationally. This chapter examines the evolution of political narratives of
“racial innocence” which form a key element of contemporary racial colorblind
discourse.
Chapter 5, “English Only and the Politics of Exclusion, 1982-1990”
examines two statewide ballot initiatives over language policy that renewed political
debate over the meaning and significance of immigration. In 1983, Paul Gann, a
singular figure in the anti-tax movement, advised national anti-immigration activists
that the surest strategy to build support for their effort to declare English the
government’s “official language” was to qualify a ballot initiative in California. The
groups funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into successful “English Only”

70
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven : Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-
1965.

41
ballot measures in 1984 and 1986, arguing that America’s heritage was being
“threatened by language conflicts and ethnic separatism.” The initiatives had little
practical impact in eliminating federally protected voting rights, but they established
key narratives and arguments used a few years later in the campaign to pass
Proposition 187. This chapter examines the ways in which English Only advocates
viewed the ballot initiative process as a “laboratory” for their ideological claims,
shaping the terms on which immigrant rights and civil rights activists were forced to
respond.
The concluding chapter, “Blue State Racism” briefly examines several of
the ballot initiatives of the 1990s in light of the history explored through this study. It
discusses the lessons and insights which civil rights and racial justice groups have
learned as a result of the most recent round of racialized ballot conflicts, and
considers the future contours of debates on social justice and antiracism.

42
CHAPTER 1:
POLITICS, IDEOLOGY, AND IDENTIFICATION:
THEORIZING “RACIAL CHANGE”

In the introduction to Politics and Ideology, James Donald and Stuart Hall
observe that “it is possible to make an inventory of the broad contours of social
thought which prevail in any given society at a particular time.”
1
Suppose, following
Donald and Hall, we took such an inventory of the prevailing political discourse
about race and racism in California in 1945. By examining newspaper, television,
and radio content, political speeches, laws and legal discourse, policy debates, voting
patterns, and other expression of public judgment, we could offer a description of
which particular ideas came to “dominate the social thinking of a historic bloc” in
ways that “stabilize a particular form of power and domination.”
2

In this instance, we might set out to understand how different Californians
imagined, explained and justified a variety of established public policies which
endorsed formal segregation by race: separate schools for Anglo and Mexican-
American students, racially restrictive housing covenants, state legislation banning
interracial marriage, or swimming pools that admitted Black and Mexican American
patrons only on the days before the pools were drained and cleaned. We might
explore ideas about extralegal violence—for example the fires and vandalism that

1
James Donald and Stuart Hall, "Introduction," in Politics and Ideology, ed. James Donald and Stuart
Hall (Philadelphia, 1986), x.
2
Stuart Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees," in Stuart Hall: Critical
Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London, 1996), 27.

43
met some homeowners as they attempted to move into all-white neighborhoods, or
support for of “sundown towns” that were restricted to “whites only” after dark. We
certainly would want to understand perceptions towards the many changes unleashed
by the war itself—newly desegregated factories and plants, the service of Black,
Mexican American and Japanese American GIs overseas, the changing
demographics of many neighborhoods driven by a wave of new migrants to the
state.
3
Taken together, we could sketch out the basic elements of what Hall describes
as a pattern of ideology: “the mental frameworks-the languages, the concepts, the
categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation-which different
classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and
render intelligible the way society works.”
4

Suppose we then conducted a similar inventory in present-day California. We
would immediately notice both continuities and change from our earlier survey.
Ideas about formal segregation and extralegal violence would clearly be different.
For example, the “right” of an employer to use race as a criteria in hiring, or for a
landlord to do the same in screening potential renters, while widely embraced in
1945, would be surely accepted by many fewer Californians today. At the same time,
we could identify new frameworks in effect—explanations of racial “colorblindness”
and related ideas about meritocracy, individualism, and personal responsibility—that

3
Chapters 3, 4 and 5 include citations for literature on covenants, school segregation, and changes in
the terrain of racial politics wrought by World War II. On “Sundown Towns,” see James W. Loewen,
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York, 2005). Loewen reports that
the Los Angeles suburb of Hawthorne, for example, posted a sign at the town limits read: "Nigger,
Don't Let The Sun Set On YOU In Hawthorne."
4
Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees," 26.

44
might be offered to explain prevailing patterns of racial inequality and difference.
We would quickly be reminded of Antonio Gramsci’s observation that every
individual’s ideological repertoire “contains Stone Age elements and principles of a
more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history…and intuitions of
future philosophy.”
5
In the last half-century, this is particularly true for “racial
ideologies,” which have been dynamic, contradictory and fluid rather than static and
coherent.
The transformations and continuities observed between 1945 and 2007 would
require explanation. Why does “race” justify and explain certain types of authority
and power in one period and not another? Why are some ideas seemingly discarded
in the trash bin of history while others are renewed, refreshed and pressed into
contemporary service? How does “racial change” occur? For the purposes of this
study, how and why has a particular conceptual framework—what I describe in the
Introduction as the “colorblind consensus”—become hegemonic in the current
moment?
Donald and Hall suggest that in order to answer such questions, we must
account for the relationship between politics and ideology. They note that
traditionally, politics and ideology are treated as distinct and autonomous categories.
Politics concerns the “operation of power and government” while ideology relates to
the “systems of political and social ideas.”
6
Indeed, the leading explanations for

5
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintan Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-
Smith (London, 1971). 324.
6
Donald and Hall, "Introduction," xii.

45
“racial change” in the postwar United States deploy such a separation, locating the
engines of change in one sphere or the other. For example, the dominant “steady
march” account celebrates a process whereby the provincial chauvinisms of the past
gradually give way to an enlightened tolerance and liberalism—a teleological
expansion of the American Creed. While political actors may play a role in this
process by demanding recognition and inclusion, the ideals of the American Creed
itself are the real heroes. Conversely, scholars who have attempted to critique this
account and explain the endurance of racial inequality and hierarchy have often
essentially reversed the terms of the equation. They have suggested that the liberal
tradition of the American Creed co-exists with a competing illiberal tradition rooted
in ascriptive explanations of racial difference. From this perspective, these
competing ideological formations are relatively static—“racial liberalism” and
“racial conservatism” remain fairly consistent across time—and change takes place
because organized blocs of “racial liberals” or “racial conservatives” are politically
able to secure their goals.
7

Donald and Hall call for a more dynamic understanding of the relationship
between politics and ideology: “To become effective, ideas must be organized. This
relates to the question of how ideas circulate, how thought is produced and who has
the principal control over the dissemination and circulation of ideology.”
8
Gramsci

7
On the “steady march” tradition of American liberalism and the “multiple traditions” critique, see
Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. A similar analysis can also be
found in Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. For the broader
political stakes of this debate, see Nikhil Singh, Black is A Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle
for Democracy (Cambridge, 2004).
8
Donald and Hall, "Introduction," xiii.

46
similarly observes that because in “all periods there co-exist many systems and
currents of philosophical thought” we must explain how such currents “are born,
how they are diffused, and why in the process of diffusion they fracture along certain
lines and in certain directions.”
9

Following Donald, Hall and Gramsci, this chapter has two objectives. First, I
map out the conceptual framework I bring to bear on the case studies of California
ballot initiatives which comprise the body of this study. I abstract three categories of
analysis: “Ideology,” “Politics,” and “Identification.” Like all abstractions, these
categories are artificial; they are both revealing and obfuscatory. The boundaries
between them are not merely blurry; they exist only as abstractions to facilitate
analysis. I deploy them in order to foreground some of the relationships and
categories that shape the immediate study.

9
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 327.
Ideology Identification
Politics
Figure 1: Conceptual Framework

47

As I present this framework, I pursue my second objective of explaining why
and how particular California ballot initiatives represent a generative site to trace
these forces and relationships at work. The argument central to this chapter and to
the broader study is that to exercise political power requires more than controlling
the apparatus of the state. It also involves interventions into the way people
formulate, imagine, and identify within the political world. As mediators of
experience, political discourses establish the terrain on which people understand their
identities, experiences and interests, providing the logics and propositions they draw
upon in their negotiations and calculations of the political world. Political discourses
are central to the engagement and contestation of all power relations because they
provide coherent frameworks through which people view the world, understand their
identities in relation to others, and make meaning from their experience.
10

In the empirical chapters which follow, my analysis tacks back and forth
between the three categories of analysis depicted in Figure 1.1. In the remainder of
this chapter, I explain and define these categories, and describe how I bring them to
bear on my examination of particular ballot initiatives.

10
Trevor Purvis and Alan Hunt, "Discourse, ideology, discourse, ideology, discourse, ideology..."
British Journal of Sociology 44 (September, 1993). See also David Howarth, Discourse (Buckingham,
2000), David Howarth, Aletta Norval, and Yannis Stavrakakis, eds., Discourse theory and political
analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change (Manchester, 2000), Sara Mills, Discourse
(London, 1997).

48
Ideology
“Ideology” is a notoriously unwieldy term, which according to Terry
Eagleton is subject to no fewer than 16 distinct definitions.
11
Raymond Williams
suggests that the leading use of the term is “a system of belief characteristic of a
particular class or group.” Ideology, following this definition is often treated as
synonymous with “worldview:” a coherent and stable perspective on the political
world that is more or less systematic and doctrinal.
12

This conceptualization of ideology as stable, systemic, and systematic has
shaped many of the leading accounts of racial politics in the postwar U.S. Even the
most prescient and highly regarded studies—Thomas Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban
Crisis and Robert Self’s American Babylon—refer to “racial liberalism” and “racial
conservatism” as mostly static, coherent systems of thought.
13
From this perspective,
the outcomes of racialized ballot initiatives are a relatively transparent expression of
the ideological commitments voters bring to bear on particular issues or policies.
Thus a vote against fair employment practices or in favor of repealing bilingual
education is regarded as indexing a consistent and relatively unambiguous policy
position of the electorate.
14

11
Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London, 1991). 1-2. See also
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/ideo4.html
12
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977). 55.
13
Self defines racial liberalism as “racially equal opportunity in social and political life, as well as
some state intervention to achieve an “equal playing field’” (p. 14) though he deftly identifies the
contradictions inherent in this description. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for
Postwar Oakland, Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.
14
John Allswang, The Initiative and Referendum in California, 1898-1998 (Palo Alto, 2000). An
important exception to this tendency among historians is the discussion on Proposition 14 (1964) and
Proposition 13 (1978) in Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland.

49
This study works with an alternative definition of ideology. Social theorist John
Thompson defines ideology as “meaning in service of power,” a process involving
the production, transmission, interpretation and reception of symbols and forms
within historically specific sites and structures. Thompson’s account parallels Stuart
Hall’s conceptualization of ideology as the “practical as well as the theoretical
knowledges which enable people to ‘figure out’ society, and within whose categories
and discourses we ‘live out’ and ‘experience’ our objective positioning in social
relations.”
15
These accounts reject the notion that ideological formations are static,
coherent systems of thought that social agents use in a more or less consistent
manner to guide their political actions. Instead, they are ambiguous and fluid
frameworks always subject to a range of pressures, limitations and contradictions.
Central to this assertion lays the notion that mental elements, ideas, and concepts
do not have any inherent or essential class or political implications, or as Hall puts it
“the political character of our ideas cannot be guaranteed by our position.”
16
The
meaning of signifiers such as “fairness,” “justice,” “racism” and so forth are not
fixed, but are understood and interpreted through their deployment within particular
discourses. Competing political projects seek to organize and articulate the meaning
of such elements in ways that authorize their own particular visions of the world.
Here, hegemony operates as a naturalization of a specific vision of the social order,

15
Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees.", John B. Thompson, Ideology and
Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Palo Alto, 1991). 8, 10,
12.
16
Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the crisis of the Left.

50
rather than a form of overt domination or indoctrination.
17
Because no political
articulation or interest is guaranteed by its objective position or essential nature but is
constructed within and through a discursive field, every hegemonic discourse is
vulnerable to redeployment and reorganization, especially when it no longer seems
to be able to effectively explain and corroborate people’s daily experiences.
At the same time, we cannot regard ideological formation as a free-floating
play of language games; they are most effectively examined in historically rooted
structures of power and authority. As Thompson argues, political actors seek to
valorize specific ideological symbols and forms in order to exercise and secure
particular types of power. To take one example, in the 1970s opponents of
desegregation railed endlessly about defending the tradition of the “neighborhood
school” from district-wide busing plans that might assign students to new schools.
Yet most scholars agree that California (like much of the country) lacked any
“neighborhood school” tradition; in the postwar period in particular, local schools
were required by the state to consolidate into unified districts, reassigning students
accordingly, often requiring district-provided busing.
18
Attention to the ideological
dimensions of this school desegregation debate allows us to see how the symbol of
the “neighborhood school” became inflected with particular ideological meaning and
resonance, and linked within a chain of equivalence to other deeply racialized
notions of community, status and authority.

17
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 2nd Edition ed. (London,
1985). Anna Marie Smith, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality (Cambridge, 1994).
18
See Charles Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools,
1855-1975 (Berkeley, 1976).

51
The debates and campaigns that arose from some of California’s high profile
ballot initiatives provide an exemplary site to study this process—the ways in which
certain ideas come to grip the social imagination--in historically specific locations.
Political theorist Murray Edelman rejects the notion that we can “take for granted a
world of facts that have a determinable meaning and a world of people who react
rationally to the facts they know.”
19
Political conflicts are ambiguous rather than
self-evident phenomenon constructed in part through “the roles and self-
conceptions” fashioned by the observers themselves. Rather than starting with the
premise of the self-authored political subject, whose “interests” and affinities exist
independent of context and interpretation, political language and symbols help
constitute political subjectivity and make meaning from experience. A political
“spectacle” or conflict does not reveal the objective “facts” of a particular situation.
It acts instead as a “meaning-machine: a generator of points of view and therefore of
perceptions, anxieties, aspirations and strategies.”
20

Ballot initiatives represent a particularly compelling site to study this process in
action. Scholars of direct democracy have long-noted the ways in which ballot
initiative campaigns act as more than plebscites on transparent policy issues. As
early as 1939, political scientists V.O. Key and Winston Crouch noted how initiative
campaigns “appear at times to perform something of the function of minor parties in
serving as a vehicle for the dissemination of ideas which eventually, perhaps

19
Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago, 1988). 2.
20
Ibid. 10.

52
somewhat altered, take the form of legislation.”
21
Crouch extended this observation
11 years later in observing the effects such measures had beyond the purpose of
enacting particular public policies:
The initiative has functioned to an immeasurable degree as a medium for
discussion and for the expression of protest. This is certainly one of its
most significant functions. This becomes even more important in California
where political parties have played so small a role as media for discussion
of political issues and for organizing voters.
22

Ballot initiatives have also played an important, though by no means singular
role in the broader transformations in political discourse and racialization that
animate this study. As critical race scholars and others have pointed out, social
movements, legal constructions, actions by the state, and cultural productions also
play central roles in this process. In addition, the issues examined in this study—fair
employment policy, fair housing policy, school desegregation, and official language
debates, were not only deliberated through ballot initiatives; they were often
connected to various federal and local policy debates, and often litigation. But ballot
initiative debates remain a useful site of analysis. They often create public spectacles
where the political grammar and vocabulary of political projects becomes
decipherable and comprehensible in certain ways. Moreover, because electoral
campaigns are conducted in short expressions and “sound bites,” emphasizing
evocative and expressive imagery and symbols, they can reveal the way in which
meaning is produced referentially and through linkages, rather than through direct

21
V.O. Key Jr and Winston Crouch, "The Initiative and Referendum in California.," Publications of
the University of California at Los Angeles in Social Sciences IV (1939): 452-453.
22
Winston Crouch, The Initiative and Referendum in California (Los Angeles, 1950). 21-22..

53
pronouncements. In the complex economy of racialization, this process is
particularly significant.

Politics
If, as Hall suggests, a “theory of ideology” must seek to grasp “how a particular
set of ideas comes to dominate the social thinking of a historical bloc,” then tracing
the contours of a prevailing ideological formation must be coupled with an account
of the organized political actors and forces that seek to make such ideas effective.
Such a concern necessitates attention to the terrain of politics.
23

Donald and Hall explain that all conceptualization of politics are “culturally
specific” and that political relationships are never confined to “the institutional
terrain of political parties, elections and voting.”
24
Indeed, what we declare to be the
boundaries of politics—what we regard as public versus private or personal—is itself
ideologically mediated and defined. While I take this point seriously, and concur
with Foucault’s account of the diffuse and fragmented sites in which all relations of
power are embedded, in this study, I work with a particular definition of political
activity: the organized actors, forces, and resources mobilized to achieve particular
objectives through the capacities of the state.
25
My definition in part is limited
because my objects of analysis—California ballot initiatives—operate on such a
terrain. I would fully concede, moreover, that if we understand politics broadly as
social relations involving authority and power—then the sphere where I examine

23
Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees," 27. My emphasis.
24
Donald and Hall, "Introduction," xiv.
25
See Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1991).

54
power at work is merely one among an endless number of “political” sites.
In this study, I work with this particular definition of politics in order to
foreground the role organized actors and groups play in shaping and contesting the
contours of hegemonic ideological formations. Gramsci notes the importance of such
organized and instrumental activities and forces in his observation about the role of
political parties:
One should stress the importance and significance of which, in the modern
world, political parties have in the elaboration and diffusion of conceptions
of the world, because essentially what they do is to work out the ethics and
the politics corresponding to these conceptions and act as it were a their
historical ‘laboratory.’… For this reason one can say that the parties are the
elaborators of new integral and totalitarian intelligentsias and the crucibles
where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical
process, takes place.
26

Political parties, of course, have played a fundamentally different (and much
more limited) role in postwar California then in the milieu (post-World War I Italy)
in which Gramsci operated. What remains critical for my purposes is the attention
paid to organized political forces as “elaborators” of “conceptions of the world”
which provide “crucibles” for new modes of social thought. For ideologies to be
become effective and organic, they require political leadership and intervention.
Therefore, any account of the way a particular ideological formation changes and
evolves must locate and examine the origins of such leadership and intervention.
Lacking such explanations, we are left with an idealist account that suggests that
ideas simply take on “a life of their own.”
For several reasons, ballot initiative debates offer an exemplary site to study

26
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 335.

55
such processes at work. First, the political actors favoring or opposed to particular
ballot initiatives are relatively easy to identify, as are the resources they command.
While a certain mythology suggests that ballot initiatives arise spontaneously to
express the “will of the people” against “special interests,” such distinctions and
claims immediately collapse in the investigation of any particular ballot proposition.
As soon as California voters adopted provisions for the initiative, referendum and
recall in 1911, debate quickly grew about the way organized political actors could
influence the field of direct legislation for particular purposes. The movement to win
adoption of direct legislation was accompanied by a related effort to limit the power
and roles of political parties.
27
As a result, ballot propositions soon became an
attractive policy-making venue for organized interest groups which could no longer
rely on political parties to usher their agendas through the legislature.
28
In each of the
case studies which follow, I track the organized forces at work in supporting and
opposing individual ballot initiatives.
Implicitly, political actors launch initiative campaigns when they believe that
some prevailing explanation of a “problem” can be undermined and replaced by a
competing framework. For example, the California Real Estate Association assumed
(correctly) in 1964 that the ideological frameworks which narrated the passage of
“open” housing legislation during the previous four years could be subverted by a

27
Dean E. McHenry, "The Pattern of California Politics," The Western Political Quarterly 1 (Mar,
1948). Party power was primarily limited by the adoption of direct primaries and allowing for “cross-
filing,” in which a candidate could be listed on another party’s primary ballot.
28
Robert J. Pitchell, "The Influence of Professional Campaign Management Firms in Partisan
Elections in California," The Western Political Quarterly 11 (Jun, 1958).

56
formulation of “property rights” that built on long-standing notions of racial
entitlement to property.
At the same time, because the instruments of direct democracy by definition
are intended to advance the will of “the people,” these organized groups and interests
must always make their claims in populist, rather than partisan terms. Here, we are
reminded of Marx’s explanation in The Eighteenth Brumaire that “one must not take
the narrow view that the petty bourgeoisie explicitly sets out to assert its egoistic
class interests. It rather believes that the particular conditions of its liberation are the
only general conditions within which modern society can be saved…”
29
Ernesto
Laclau similarly sees this function as essential to the process of hegemony--a
political project becomes regarded as “popular” when its particular interests are
regarded as co-extensive with those of “the people.”
30
Again, while this process
occurs in every political struggle, it is brought into particularly stark relief within
ballot initiative campaigns. By definition, each side in a ballot initiative seeks to
represent the interests of “the people” while unmasking the opposition as narrow and
partisan. One of the major themes of inquiry of this study is how competing political
projects pursue this objective.
31

Certainly, any study of the “political” activities of ballot initiative campaigns
must account for the array of consultants and other resources which proponents and

29
Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1987(1963)). Also quoted in Donald
and Hall, "Introduction," xvi.
30
See Ernesto Laclau, "Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory " in Politics and Ideology, ed. James
Donald and Stuart Hall (Philadelphia, 1979).
31
On currents of populism in U.S. political history more broadly, see Kazin, The Populist Persuasion:
An American History.

57
opponents rely upon in order to communicate to voters and constitute an audience for
their claims. In many cities of the Midwest and Northeast, political actors could turn
to political parties and ward organizations in order to popularize and disseminate
particular ideas and policies among voters concentrated in local areas. In California,
political parties typically refrained from endorsing particular ballot measures, and
lacked the organizational capacity to influence a notoriously independent electorate.
California’s two major population centers lie 400 miles apart, thus making ballot
initiative campaigns particularly reliant on an array of specialized strategies to reach
voters: direct mail, television, radio and newspaper advertisements, and a variety of
“earned media.”
32
The massive “initiative industrial complex” which operates in
California today—including scores of firms specializing in advertising, public
relations, signature gathering, opinion polling, campaign strategy and other
functions—has a history dating back to the 1930s, when Campaign Inc., a
consultancy founded by the husband and wife team of Clem Whitaker and Leone
Baxter, first began managing ballot initiative campaigns. Whitaker and Baxter
demonstrated the effectiveness of building temporary, ad-hoc campaign
organizations run by consultants that could quickly develop, refine and communicate

32
“Earned media” refers to coverage in television, radio, newspaper or other media that is free rather
than purchased—for example, television coverage of a rally. On the prevalence and development of
consultants in California initiative politics, see Shaun Bowler, Todd Donovan, and Caroline Tolbert,
eds., Citizens as Legislators: Direct Democracy in the United States (Columbus, 1998), Bruce Larson,
Howard Ernst, and Larry Sabato, eds., Dangerous Democracy (Lanham, 2001), David Magelby,
Direct Legislation: Voting on Ballot Propositions in the United States (Baltimore, 1984), Daniel
Smith, Tax Crusaders and the Politics of Direct Democracy (New York, 1998). For an opposing
account that foregrounds “public opinion” as an autonomous and coherent force, see John G.
Matsusaka, For the Many or the Few: The Initiative, Public Policy, and American Democracy
(Chicago, 2004).

58
campaign messages directly to the public without the use of political parties. They
understood the vicissitudes of the electorate, had access to a network of consultants
necessary to take on the specialized tasks of a campaign, and maintained important
relationships with newspaper editors, politicians and the leaders of other influential
organizations.
33

This study pays particular attention to the strategies, tactics, and activities of
these consultants because they often played critical roles in determining whether
political actors and groups were able to constitute an audience and shape public
perceptions of their concerns through a ballot initiative. I especially focus on how
such campaigns were prosecuted. Decisions such as timing an initiative’s
qualification to coincide with a particular electoral turnout (which differs between a
primary and general election, and what other initiatives and contests are on the
ballot), targeting particular individuals and organizations for endorsements, devising
a signature gathering strategy, conducting voter contact, developing fundraising
strategies, and assembling coalitions for the campaign are all critical. Such decisions
are often more important than overall levels of financial expenditures. While big
budget initiative campaigns have long been a target of criticism in California, it is
interesting to note that several studies suggest that campaign spending alone has had
a relatively modest effect on voting patterns in ballot initiative contests. Wide-

33
Between 1933 and 1955 Whitaker and Baxter’s Campaigns, Inc. won 70 of the 76 campaigns it
managed, the majority of which were ballot initiatives. Pitchell, "The Influence of Professional
Campaign Management Firms in Partisan Elections in California," 279-285. See also Herbert M Baus,
" Oral History Interview, by Enid H. Douglass, Oral History Program, Claremont Graduate School,,"
(1990). Walter Rosenbaum, "Legislative Participation in California Direct Legislation, 1940-1960"
(Princeton University, 1964). 120-130.

59
ranging correlations between funds spent and vote received cannot be established,
the connections are always situational.
34

In addition, especially after the passage of Proposition 13, individual
consultants often played central roles in linking candidates and ballot issues together,
tying for example, a campaign for a state assembly seat to support for an anti-tax
ballot initiative. In general, as I will demonstrate, the civil rights opponents
developed much closer relationships with the political consultants who best
understood the terrain of initiative politics, and controlled the resources and
relationships to win elections than did their adversaries.
35

Finally, unlike other studies in the literature on direct democracy, my interest
does not address the normative question as to whether such specialists and the
resources they command unduly “corrupt” the initiative process or use it to
manipulate the will of the people.
36
Instead, my concern lies in the way these
consultants assist organized political actors in developing narratives and messages
for their campaigns, and constituting an audience for such narratives.

34
John Owens and Larry Wade, "Campaign Spending on California Ballot Initaitives, 1924-1988:
Trends and Voting Effects," The Western Political Quarterly 39 (December, 1986). See also Magelby,
Direct Legislation: Voting on Ballot Propositions in the United States.
35
One major reason for this dynamic is that particularly through the 1960s, the most experienced and
successful campaign management firms worked primarily for Republican candidates and conservative
causes, reflecting the political leanings of their principals. While Whitaker and Baxter occasionally
took on clients such as the California Teachers Association, for the most part, Democratic candidates
and causes lacked far behind in their access to such consultants. Pitchell, "The Influence of
Professional Campaign Management Firms in Partisan Elections in California." Carey McWilliams,
California: The Great Exception (1949). 205-206.
36
For a thorough review of such literature and debates, see the collection of essays in Larson, Ernst,
and Sabato, eds., Dangerous Democracy. See also Schrag, Paradise Lost: California's Experience,
America's Future. Magelby, Direct Legislation: Voting on Ballot Propositions in the United States,
Matsusaka, For the Many or the Few: The Initiative, Public Policy, and American Democracy

60
Identification
Gramsci poses an important question about the relationship between politics
and ideology: “Various philosophies or conceptions of the world exist, and one
always makes a choice between them. How is this choice made?”
37
This “choice,”
the way political subjects “acquire consciousness of their position, struggle” is the
process I refer to as political identification: the ways in which political agents are
“spontaneously” attracted to particular horizons of thought. Political identification is
produced at the intersection of politics and ideology. Particular ideological
formations become “effective” and organic through the process of identification.
Identification connects people to one another—helping them recognize others as
either friends or adversaries, “alike” or “different,” and aligned or opposed to certain
demands and interests.
38
Political identification also limits this same process.
Gramsci observes that new conceptions of the world do not simply rise up “from
scratch” but are drawn together from an amalgam of existing experiences and ideas,
what he describes as the task of “renovating and making ‘critical’ an already existing
activity.” The identifications that exist at any one moment set limits toward, but do
not guarantee, the basis of future identifications. A central objective of this study is
to highlight the role that particular racialized ballot initiatives play in this process of
political identification.
In several important theoretical accounts, the construction of political identity

37
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 326.
38
Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees," 43. The question of political
recognition as the basis of creative alliance building and action lies at the center of Gilmore, Golden
Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.

61
is constitutive of the process of ideological formation itself. Althusser, for example,
emphasizes ideological practices as not only images and representations but material
rituals and activities which reproduce a social formation by “‘constructing’ concrete
individuals as subjects:”
39

[I]deology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ among the
individuals (it recruits them all) by that very precise operation which I have
called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the
most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!
40

In this analogy, it is by turning towards the police officer’s call that the
individual is produced as a social subject, and thus constituted within a particular
position in the social formation. Laclau builds from Althusser’s central premise in
explaining that “what constitutes the unifying principle of an ideological discourse is
the ‘subject’ interpellated and thus constituted through the discourse.”
41

Ballot initiative debates offer concrete opportunities to analyze this process
of interpellation and identification at work. Take, for example, the series of ballot
initiatives aimed at reducing property taxes in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most
analysts describe these elections as the “taxpayers’” revolt, as if the political
identification “taxpayer” existed in a coherent form prior to the debate over taxes.
42

But when initiative proponent Howard Jarvis exhorted “taxpayers” to “reclaim their
rights,” who specifically was he addressing? After all nearly every member of

39
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays (New York, 1971), 171.
40
Ibid., 174.
41
Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (Philadelphia, 1977). Excerpted in James
Donald and Stuart Hall, eds., Politics and Ideology (Philadelphia, 1986). 28-29. Emphasis in original.
42
See for an excellent critique Smith, Tax Crusaders and the Politics of Direct Democracy.

62
society is a taxpayer of some form or another--paying sales tax, payroll taxes, and
taxes on phone and cable service; even renters contribute to the property taxes of
their landlords. Yet the taxpayers’ revolt “hailed” only some members of the
populace as taxpayers—primarily those who paid property taxes—and in a chain of
equivalence marked this group as society’s “producers.” This identification of course
had deep historical roots—the resonances and connotations between “property-
owner” and “producer” can be traced back at least to Jefferson’s Yeoman’s Republic,
and this linkage was always shaped by specific racialized and gendered inflections.
Yet even such historically powerful identifications always have to be renewed and
refreshed in response to contemporary conditions. Crusaders like Jarvis had been
trying for many years without success prior to the late 1970s to constitute an
audience of “taxpayers” that would back a massive overhaul to the property tax
system. Indeed, several tax reform initiatives on earlier ballots were defeated. In
these instances voters did not identify with the specific formation of “taxpayer” that
was articulated. Ballot initiatives such as these provide an exemplary site to examine
this process of identification in action, allowing us to evaluate the ways organized
political forces (Jarvis et al), historically resonant ideological narratives (racialized
producer/property owner), and an amalgam of lived experiences and contemporary
conditions (perhaps escalating tax bills but also widespread suburbanization) contour
and constitute specific political identities. Here, Hall’s observation that identity is as
much a process of “becoming” as of “being” is critical. Identities, he reminds us, are
not “eternally fixed in some essentialised past, [but]… are subject to the continuous

63
‘play’ of history, culture, and power.” Identity “belongs to the future as much as the
past.”
43
Ballot initiatives are thus one site (of many) in which specific political
identities are produced rather than merely reflected, and members of the populace
come to recognize themselves and others as “homeowner,” “taxpayer,” “parent,” and
even “Californian” or “American.”
All political identifications are rooted in some assumption of political
community—a delineation of the populace into “our side” and “their side.” Like
political identities, political communities always present themselves as a priori
formations united by a shared essence. But as political theorist Chantal Mouffe
argues:
Political community should be conceived as a discursive surface and not an
empirical referent. Politics is about the constitution of the political
community, not something that takes place inside the political community…a
surface of inscription of a multiplicity of demands where a ‘we’ is
constituted….
44

All political communities thus contain a “constitutive outside,” an exterior to
the community that is the very condition of its existence. It is crucial to recognize
that, since to construct a “we” it is necessary to distinguish it from a “they,” and
since all “forms of consensus are based on acts of exclusion, the condition of
possibility of the political community is at the same time the condition of
impossibility of its full realization.”
45

43
Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A
Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (1993).
44
Chantal Mouffe, "Citizenship and Political Identity," October 61 (Summer, 1992): 28.
45
Ibid.

64
Here is where race in particular serves a critical role in cohering specific
conceptualizations of political community, producing the distinctions that allegedly
constitute “racial difference.” That is, one of the most important impacts of many of
the ballot initiatives examined here is the diminished sense of political community
they produce. For example, in 1946, employers warned (white) workers that any
gains achieved through fair employment laws would come at their expense,
proposing that they shared no common ground or political community with workers
who faced racial discrimination. Similarly, in the 1980s, “English Only” advocates
declared that the use of multilingual ballots threatened to “fragment” the state,
averring that language itself formed the basis of political community and thus was
also an acceptable basis of political exclusion. Again, these and other propositions
resonated strongly with specific historical narratives and identifications. But we
should not treat those narratives and identifications as static or inevitable. Postwar
California was a particularly mobile society, dominated by new migrants to the state
and neighborhoods in constant change. A lack of an authoritative party structure or
tradition of ward organizations meant that voters’ identifications and commitments
were never pre-ordained or beyond the pale of struggle. For this reason, we cannot
take for granted that the political identifications of California voters would
automatically be struck on the basis of race. Thus, I am particularly interested in the
ways that ballot initiatives, amidst all of these changes, sustained and reproduced an
identification with “political whiteness”—the notion that one’s political interests and
concerns are established through a racial prism. Here, we can draw from Michael

65
Dawson’s generative argument about the ways African American voters tend to
assess political issues and controversies based on a conceptualization of “linked
fate.”
46
All of the ballot propositions examined here include some appeal to white
voters exhorting them to defend a similar racialized link fate. From this perspective,
all of the privileges white voters had come to enjoy--in the workplace, in their
neighborhood, and at their children’s school--were at their core racial privileges, and
any sustained anti-racist commitments by the government would destroy these same
benefits. I pay particular attention then to the ways such exhortations changed over
time, and how opponents often attempted to appeal to this same political identity.
Explaining the endurance and renewal of these identifications with “political
whiteness” in an era of colorblind race discourse is one of the primary goals of this
study.

Conclusion
By examining the interaction and relations between ideology, politics, and
identification I seek to make visible how political discourse about race has
transformed across the postwar period. Applying such a framework to case studies of
California initiative contests helps demonstrate how competing political projects
have attempted to organize and structure political discourse around race in service of
particular social visions. My project inquires into the “historically specific rules and
conventions that structure the production of meaning in a particular historic context”

46
Michael Dawson, Behind the Mule (Princeton, NJ, 1994).

66
and “how, in what forms, and for what reasons social agents come to identify
themselves with particular systems of meaning.”
47
For my purposes, it also means
reading these transformations and renovations over time through the particular
framework of racialization in order to understand the specific effects these ballot
contests had in producing racial meaning.
Raymond Williams argues that hegemonic formations always bear two
critical characteristics. First, he posits that “the hegemonic has to be seen as more
than the simple transmission of an (unchanging) dominance. On the contrary, any
hegemonic process must be especially alert and responsive to the alternatives and
opposition which question and threaten its dominance.”
48
He continues:
A lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a
system or a structure…it does not just passively exist as a form of
dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and
modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by
pressures not all its own.
49

In the chapters which follow, I place this observation at the fore. In
retrospect, it is tempting to begin and end our explanation of the voting patterns and
fate of these ballot initiatives during the last sixty years by citing a singular, almost
invincible racism. From this perspective, any alternative explanation might be
viewed as an apology for such racist commitments, what sociologists Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva and Gianpaolo Baiocchi lament as the “anything but racism”

47
Howarth, Discourse.
48
Williams, Marxism and Literature. 113.
49
Ibid. 112.

67
explanation.
50
By calling attention to the sophisticated ways in which white
supremacy has continued as a meaningful ideological formation, I do not mean to
excuse or exonerate its strength or influence. Instead, I am arguing for a framework
that remains sensitive to the complex challenges that face any hegemonic formation,
and the ways that specific political forces have acted to renew and regenerate
particular relations of power.
Williams’ second point about hegemonic formations concerns the question of
opposition. By definition, ballot initiatives are viewed as contests between opposing
political projects, which presumably do not share similar ideas, commitments or
values. But Williams reminds us that the very power of hegemonic formations
derives from their capacity to shape the terms on which they are opposed. Williams
suggests: “It can be persuasively argued that all or nearly all initiatives and
contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms,
are in practice tied to the hegemonic: that the dominant culture, so to say, at once
produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture.”
51
We are then faced with the
theoretical challenge of distinguishing between “alternative and oppositional
initiatives and contributions which are made within or against a specific hegemony
(which then sets certain limits to them or which can succeed in neutralizing,
changing or actually incorporating them) and other kinds of initiatives and
contributions which are irreducible to the terms of the original or the adaptive

50
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Gianpaolo Baiocchi, "Anything but Racism: how sociologists limit the
significance of racism," Race and Society 4 (2001).
51
Williams, Marxism and Literature. 114.

68
hegemony, and are in that sense independent.” A central assertion of this study is
that for a variety of reasons, the efforts of civil rights advocates and organizations
were almost always reducible “to the terms of the original or adaptive hegemony.”
They rarely attempted to challenge political whiteness as a fundamental
identification. Ultimately, the unwillingness and inability to confront this
identification over the postwar era set the grounds for the success of the racialized
ballot initiatives of the 1990s.

69
CHAPTER 2:
FAIR EMPLOYMENT AND THE VICISSITUDES
OF “RACIAL TOLERANCE,” 1945-1960

In October 1946, voters across Southern California received letters from a
recently formed group called the “Committee for Tolerance” alerting them to a threat
that would “arouse intolerance, disunity and hatred” across the state.
1
In the
immediate aftermath of the war, calls for “tolerance” often summoned nationalist
allegiances to defend a shared commitment to acceptance in the face of despotism
and fanaticism, a civic republicanism forged in the crucible of national crisis. The
letter’s recipients might have presumed any number of issues had propelled an
organization dedicated to “tolerance” to issue such an alert: Perhaps it was another
proclamation from Governor Earl Warren calling for the protection of returning
Japanese American internees? Perhaps it offered a reaction to the ongoing
revelations over the expanse of Nazi concentration camps? Maybe the letter was sent
by opponents of white nationalist Gerald L.K. Smith, warning that the “Minister of
Hate” might be returning to Southern California? California, as much as any state in
the nation, had been completely transformed by the war-- its explosive population
growth, rapidly industrializing economy, and its singular contributions to the
nation’s technological development. In this context, warnings about the specters of

1
“Proposition 11 Called Unfair.” Los Angeles Times. Oct 7, 1946, pg. A3.

70
“disunity” and “hatred” held a particularly strong resonance.
2

But the Committee for Tolerance made no mention of these issues. Its alarm
was instead focused on a ballot measure voters would face in the upcoming
November election. Frank Doherty, the Committee’s chairman, declared to his
readers that Proposition 11, which would create a state Fair Employment Practices
Commission (FEPC) and formally ban discrimination by race, gender, religion, color
or national origin by unions and employers, merely “pretends to promote tolerance
and good will.” In fact the former president of the Los Angeles County Chamber of
Commerce warned, “the unfair law” would “arouse intolerance, disunity, and
hatred.” Tolerance, Doherty insisted, was by its nature a matter of personal
conscience, and could not be legislated by the state. Forcing “different” people to
work together was a recipe for widespread turmoil and unrest.
3

Proposition 11 has received little attention in most accounts of civil rights
and anti-discrimination struggles in twentieth century California history. The
measure met an overwhelming defeat on election day—it received only 30 percent of
the vote—leading one historian of California ballot initiatives to the straightforward
conclusion that “the public was definitely not ready for fair employment.” From this
perspective, the measure lost primarily because the forces of “racial liberalism” had
yet to match the power of the prevailing “racial conservatism.”
4
In addition, in the

2
On the transformation of racial politics in Los Angeles and California during World War II, see
David Jason. Leonard, The Battle for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II (Albuquerque,
2006). 88.
3
“Proposition 11 Called Unfair.” Los Angeles Times. Oct 7, 1946, pg. A3.
4
Allswang, The Initiative and Referendum in California, 1898-1998. 73.

71
aftermath of Proposition 11’s defeat, the battle to win a state FEPC focused almost
entirely on the legislature, which finally adopted the measure in 1959. Thus, the
1946 ballot initiative seems like a minor footnote to this broader story.
In this chapter, however, I argue that Proposition 11 remains a critical site for
examining the ways political actors attempted to define the meaning and significant
of racism in a time of dramatic political transformation. The measure represented the
first and last time that a diverse grouping of civil rights, labor, religious and “civic
unity” organizations attempted to place an anti-discrimination measure before the
California electorate. The Proposition 11 conflict occurred at a time when the very
definition of terms such as “tolerance,” “discrimination,” and “unity” were deeply
contested; the period was marked by a series of debates over the way the state could
and should handle the legacy of racial hierarchies and inequalities it faced; no
particular outcome was guaranteed. In addition, the overwhelming defeat of
Proposition 11 shaped the strategies of civil rights advocates for many years to come,
conditioning their understanding of how anti-racist public policies could be most
effectively secured, and which constituencies were necessary to mobilize for such
efforts to succeed. The backers of the FEPC were not an undifferentiated grouping of
“racial liberals” but a heterogeneous set of activists and organizations espousing
distinct political commitments, analyses and strategies.
I begin this chapter with a discussion of the effort to bring the FEPC issue to
the ballot, exploring the social bases and political commitments of the groups
involved. I then discuss the ad hoc coalition of business leaders that emerged to

72
defeat the measure, paying particular attention to the way they harnessed the
putatively anti-racist discourse of “tolerance” in defense of the prevailing relations of
racial apartheid. That is, 50 years before Ward Connerly and the ascendance of
“colorblind” race politics in California political discourse, opponents of civil rights
proved remarkably sophisticated in commanding the rhetoric of racial pluralism to
serve their own ends. The last section of the chapter examines the impact of the
Proposition 11 debate on the ensuing political strategies of FEPC supporters and
opponents. These developments, I argue, remain critical to understanding the fate of
many subsequent racialized ballot initiatives in postwar California.

Proposition 11 and the Postwar Transformation of Racial Politics.
Los Angeles Assemblyman Augustus Hawkins surely felt an enormous sense
of accomplishment upon hearing California Secretary of State Frank Jordon’s
announcement in the early summer of 1946. For months, Hawkins, a committed New
Deal Democrat and only the second African American ever elected to the state
Legislature, traversed the state to build support for a petition to place an initiative on
the November ballot that would create a state FEPC.
5
The proposed state
commission would be empowered to receive, investigate and adjudicate complaints
of discrimination by race, gender, religion, color or national origin against unions

5
On Hawkins’ ascension to the Assembly in 1934, see Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los
Angeles in Jim Crow America. 314-317. Hawkins won office with the backing of a coalition of AFL
unions, New Deal supporters, and some Black voters, though as Flamming reveals, Black papers like
the Eagle and Sentinel ignored his campaign in favor of other Black candidates: “Hawkins set himself
completely apart from conventional black leadership.”

73
and employers. The national FEPC, created by President Roosevelt’s Executive
Order 8802 in June 1941 to ban racial discrimination in defense contracting, had
expired after the war. While a considerable effort was underway to make the national
FEPC permanent, many local organizations and activists focused their attention on
winning state level policies. In California, attempts at getting the state Legislature to
adopt FEP bills in 1944 and 1945 failed, and supporters concluded that “any hope of
passing an FEPC bill through this legislature is like believing in Santa Claus;” the
powerful agriculture and business lobby kept the legislation locked in committee.
6
In
addition, Governor Earl Warren remained publicly uncommitted to the legislation,
and Hawkins and other advocates believed there was little chance he would change
his position.
7

Anticipating that the celebrations of freedom and democracy sounded on VE
day and VJ day remained fresh on the minds of California voters, FEP supporters
spent months in the spring of 1946 collecting signatures to qualify the initiative for
the ballot. Weekly petition drives at places like the Soto-Michigan Community
Center in Boyle Heights, just east of Downtown Los Angeles, brought together
hundreds of NAACP members, trade unionists, Communist Party members,
volunteers of newly established “civic unity” groups, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant
activists, along with members of emerging Mexican American and Japanese

6
For background on the effort to win state level FEP policies in California and other state legislatures,
see Anthony S Chen, "From Fair Employment to Equal Employment Opportunity and Beyond:
Affirmative Action and the Politics of Civil Rights in the New Deal Order,1941-1972 (dissertation)"
(UC Berkeley, 2002).
7
“Oral history interview with Augustus F. Hawkins” conducted by Carlos Vasquez. University of
California, Los Angeles. Oral History Program State Government Oral History Program (Calif.)

74
American community organizations into the momentous effort, furnishing many of
the 275,000 signatures gathered statewide.
8
If successful, the FEP measure would
immediately confirm California’s status as one of the most “racially progressive”
states in the nation.
The very decision to bring the FEPC legislation to the ballot deserves careful
consideration. While there had been examples of civil rights and racial justice
activism in the prewar period—strikes among Mexican and Japanese American
farmworkers, “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Shop” campaigns, the NAACP’s legal
advocacy against racially restrictive housing covenants in the 1920s, efforts of
African American, Asian American and Mexican American parents challenging
segregated public schools—the statewide project for FEPC legislation was
unprecedented.
9
Indeed, before the war, explicit defenses of white supremacy could
be found at the center of California political discourse. The state was home to a
vibrant Eugenics movement, an ugly history of lynchings and vigilante violence,
widespread Klan activity, unapologetic advocacy for the Nazi regime, a constellation
of Jim Crow statues segregating schools, jobs and neighborhoods, and a state law
prohibiting interracial marriage. The state legislature continued to be dominated by
business oriented Republicans and was almost entirely white: Hawkins was the only

8
California Eagle February 14, 1946.David Jason Leonard, "'No Jews and No Coloreds are Welcome
in this Town': Constructing Coalitions in Post/War Los Angeles" (University of California, Berkeley,
2002). 311-320.
9
On the Mexican American and Japanese American strikes in Oxnard in 1903, see Tomas Almaguer,
Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, 1994). On
the struggle against restrictive covenants, see Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in
Jim Crow America. On organizing among parents, see Irving Hendrick, The Education of Non-Whites
in California, 1849-1970 (San Francisco, 1977), Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and
Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975.

75
African American in the State Assembly. Pioneering Mexican American lawmaker
Edward Roybal did not even win election to the Los Angeles City Council until
1949.
These dynamics reveal the state’s complex entanglements and history with
what historian Gary Gerstle describes as an American identity rooted in “racial
nationalism.” Within such a framework, political status and hierarchy are explicitly
defended by constructions of racial kinship and shared origin, cast in either cultural
or biological terms. Gerstle’s formulation is most generatively understood not as an
empirical assessment of the essential characteristics of national U.S. national identity
but as a discursive horizon on which competing claims for authority and power have
been collectively assessed and adjudicated.
10
That is, a variety of political actors and
projects deployed the discourse of racial nationalism to naturalize and legitimize
their own claims to power, justifying prevailing inequalities as a function of “racial
fitness” and embodied difference. The widespread grip which theories of Eugenics
had on many leading California figures well into the 1930s demonstrates the potency
of racial nationalist identifications during this time.
11

Why then at this juncture did Hawkins and other FEP supporters feel the
electorate, which in spite of wartime migrations of hundreds of thousands of
Mexicans and African Americans still remained overwhelmingly white and

10
Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. On Black consumer rights
and boycott campaigns, see Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America.
Chapter 9.
11
On Eugenics in California, see Alexandria Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of
Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley, 2005).

76
Protestant, would approve a fair employment ballot measure? Certainly, FEP backers
were emboldened by the growing numbers of Democratic voters in the state; given
FDR’s support of the wartime FEPC such voters might be more supportive of the
legislation. From 1930 to 1940, Democratic Party registration grew from 456,096 to
more than 2.4 million while Republican registration remained at roughly 1.6
million.
12
In addition, while the emerging political bloc of progressive civil rights
and labor organizations in the state was not as powerful as comparable formations in
the Northeast and Midwest, in cities such as Oakland, Richmond, San Francisco and
Los Angeles, the power of this alliance was clearly on the rise.
13
Finally, in New
York, a successful bipartisan coalition emerged to pass a similar state FEPC policy
over the objections of well organized groups of employers.
14

To replicate the success of the New York effort, the California FEPC
coalition would draw upon an ascendant conceptualization of American identity
rooted in “civic nationalism”—a liberal creed conferring rights and privileges
without regard to religion, gender, race, or national origin. The measure’s supporters
hoped that the ideological transformations wrought by a war against fascism and
predicated on a unified notion of national citizenship would disable the prevailing
discourse of racial nationalism in favor of a pluralist discourse in which economic,
social and political privileges derived from hard work and loyal citizenship rather

12
Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. 231.
13
See Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. 82-84.
14
Anthony S Chen, ""The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas:" Racial Conservatism and the Politics of Fair
Employment Legislation in New York State, 1941-1945," Journal of American History 92 (March,
2006).

77
than racial, ethnic or religious kinship. By transforming racial subjects into citizen
subjects empowered to fully participate in the state’s economic and political
marketplace, this creedal vision would provide framework and boundaries of
effective and intelligible political redress.
As we shall see, the abstract tenets of civic nationalism were polyvalent; their
political character was not guaranteed.
15
Indeed, the contours and trajectory of
California race politics after the war must be understood in relation to the political
struggle over the meaning of this emerging civic creed. It is to this process that I now
turn.

“There is No Rationality in Prejudice”: Race Relations Groups and the Rise Of
Racial Innocence

Much of the support for the FEPC struggle in California came from
organizations affiliated with an emerging number of “race relations” and “civic
unity” groups. Many of these groups traced their roots back to the late 1920s and
early 1930s, when a range of political organizations and cultural figures sought to
articulate a more inclusive American identity free of racial and religious
chauvinism, especially in response to the resurgence of white Protestant nativism
unleashed in the aftermath of World War I. In the early 1940s, the eruption of the
so-called “Zoot Suit” Riots and the internment of tens of thousands of Japanese
Americans in California spurned the formation of dozens of “civic unity” and “fair
play” organizations.

15
See Hall, "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees."

78
To take one leading example, in September 1944, the first meeting of the San
Francisco Civic Unity Council brought together some 340 representatives of groups
including the YMCA, the American Friends Service Committee, the CIO Minorities
Committee, the San Francisco Council of Churches, the National Conference of
Christians and Jews, the B’nai B’rith Community Committee and others. The group
formed a nominating committee, which included members of these organizations,
the Superintendent of Schools, the District Attorney, and City Comptroller.
“Racially, the group included two Chinese, five Negroes, one Filipino, and thirty-
three whites.” The meeting resulted in a series of recommendations which were
typical to such civic unity groups: Developing training courses in “interracial
leadership” and “interracial education;” eliminating segregation in housing through
both policy advocacy and educational campaigns designed to “‘Nail the Falsehood’
that minority races reduce the value of property” and advocating for a permanent
FEPC. San Francisco Mayor Roger Lapham formed an official Civic Unity
Committee which included members of the group in order to “study various trends
concerning prejudices for or against the components of our own San Francisco
society and to recommend insofar as possible ways and means by which
improvements may be made in the relationships among these various groups.”
16

At roughly the same time, the Chicago-based American Council on Race
Relations (ACCR) opened a Pacific Coast office in San Francisco to address “the

16 “Formation of the San Francisco Civic Unity Council” Clearing House Release, Number 1,
American Council on Race Relations, February 23, 1945 in Box 1, Folder 20, Charles Bratt Papers,
Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research (hereafter CB).

79
population dislocations during the war period, the housing situation and the
worsening condition of the colored minorities.” The ACCR was born out of a
Chicago meeting in 1944 by a group of foundations, academics, civil rights leaders
to “work for the full participation of all citizens in all aspects of American life,
regardless of race, creed or national origin,” with a particular focus on Northern and
West Coast cities. The ACCR combined a Myrdalian assertion that racial bias
represented a contradiction of a broad American creed of equal rights and tolerance
with the pragmatic commitments of scholars working in Robert Park’s Chicago
tradition, which examined how “group prejudice” operated in localized settings. The
ACCR hoped to assist the Fair Play and Civic Unity groups recently formed to
prevent the violence and “race riots” that unfolded in the immediate aftermath of
First World War.
In July 1945, ACCR helped bring together a Sacramento conference of
similar civic unity and fair organizations from across the state. Within a year, the
founding gathering of the umbrella California Council for Civic Unity brought
together nearly 50 newly formed race relations organizations from across the state.
17

Described by one participant as “an actual movement,” the new group declared its
purpose to bring together “all those forces which favor harmonious living—that
labor organizations, real estate associations, employers, religious interests,
professional groups, service groups, such agencies as the American Legion,

17 See “Report on Conference of California’s Councils of Civic Unity and similar community
organizations. July 6, 1945”Folder: “XI” Box 1, California Federation for Civic Unity Papers,
Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley (hereafter CFCU).

80
Veterans of Foreign Wars, Chambers of Commerce, newspaper publishers, and
various social agencies,” declaring “there is no rationality in prejudice.” Changing
its name to the California Federation for Civic Unity (CFCU), the group held
biannual statewide retreats in Asilomar on the Central Coast for the next ten years.
18

Nearly all of the leading civil rights activists of the period had some involvement
with the CFCU directly or with one of its affiliated organizations. Assemblyman
Byron Rumford, who would give his name to the Fair Housing Act of 1963, was
active in the Berkeley Inter-racial Committee. Edward Howden, who would become
the first director of the state FEPC in 1959, headed the San Francisco Unity Council
for many years. Loren Miller, the attorney who helped litigate many of the
important NAACP actions against racially restrictive covenants served as a vice
president of the CFCU in the late 1940s, as did the JACL’s Sburo Kido, labor
organizer Ernesto Galaraza, and Levi Strauss Corporation head Daniel Koshland, a
leading San Francisco philanthropist. Another important local affiliate, the Los
Angeles County Conference on Community Relations, counted future Lt. Governor
Glen Anderson, the Urban League’s Floyd Covington, John Dial of the Los Angeles
CIO, Supervisor John Anson Ford, and Edward Roybal as leading members.
19

The Contours of Liberal Anti-Racism
The various race relations organizations, labor unions and civil rights groups
brought together by the CFCU forged an analysis of racism influenced by a number

18
ibid
19
ibid

81
of sources. To be sure, the milieu of global politics loomed large—references to the
Good Neighbor Policy, “American brotherhood,” and the Four Freedoms saturated
their language. More particularly, the work of figures such as Ruth Benedict, Ashley
Montegue and above all Gunnar Myrdal deeply influenced their understanding of the
factors that nourished racism and the interventions necessary to bring about its end.
These writers emphasized the scientific fallacy of racial superiority and inferiority
(though rarely challenging the existence of “race”) and asserted that fact-based
public education and positive inter-group interactions would dispel prejudices held
by a fundamentally rational public. Myrdal’s “vicious cycle of cumulative causation”
asserted that economic discrimination, direct discrimination by white people, and
limited access to health, education and other resources had a cumulative effect that
had to be interrupted in all three arenas. The greatest resource in reversing this cycle
was the American Creed itself, “a belief in equality and in the rights to liberty” that
grew from the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. Appeals to the Creed
and its universality could overcome the local particularities, customs, and
chauvinisms that sustained bigotry and segregation.
20

In an address on “Discrimination and the American Creed” sociologist Robert
Merton distinguished between those who embraced the Creed in thought and those
who followed it in action, arguing that they constituted different types of
“discriminators.” The “unprejudiced discriminator,” the “unprejudiced non-
discriminator,” and the “prejudiced discriminator” required “diverse social therapies,

20
Richard H. King, Race, Culture and the Intellectuals (Washington, D.C., 2004). 29.

82
each directed at a given type in a given situation.” Merton thus explained that bigotry
had to be addressed in both thought and action, though primarily on an individual
basis.
21

This distinction between thought and behavior was central to the anti-racist
prescriptions pursued. Charles Johnson, a Chicago-trained sociologist, ACCR board
member and Director of the Institute of Race Relations at Fisk University in
Nashville emerged as a leading national authority on “race relations” issues. Johnson
explained to the audience at one of the Institute’s national convenings that:
Frequently, prejudice is merely the externalization of inner personal conflict;
and emotional insecurity, tracing back to childhood, may reveal itself in adult
racial behavior. Prejudice is also a symptom of social immaturity, the
evidences of which depend on uncritical attitudes, wishful thinking,
egocentrism, hypersensitivity, isolation and lack of social perspective.
Instead of attempting to change attitudes first and behavior next, it was
proposed to so change behavior that a change of attitudes is likely to
follow.
22

Thus, for Johnson, Merton and others, racism was, to borrow a term from
Paul Gilroy, “bad ideology.”
23
It rested primarily in the thoughts and the actions of
the individual who, because of personal experiences or a parochial upbringing
continued to subscribe to illogical and erroneous ideas about race. Yet with the
proper information and experiences, any individual could be cured of this condition,
embrace tolerance, and no longer be “guilty” of racism. When this occurred on a

21
Robert Merton, "Discrimination and the American Creed," in Discrimination and National Welfare,
ed. R.M. MacIver (New York, 1949), 11.
22
Race Relations: A Monthly Summary of Events and Trends, October-November, 1947. Volume V,
Numbers 1 & 2, p. 2. Johnson’s analysis was heavily influenced by Robert Park and his own theories
on the causes of racial prejudice. On Park and his research in California see Henry Yu, Thinking
Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford, 2002).
23
Gilroy, Ain't No Black in the Union Jack. 26.

83
widespread basis, resulting in changes in both beliefs and actions, segregation in
areas such as housing, employment, and education would also whither. These
remedies did not preclude legislative action to correct the legal underpinnings of
discrimination; Johnson and most race relations groups remained vigilante in their
efforts to end racially restrictive covenants, discriminatory housing practices, and
even biased immigration laws. But those legislative changes were necessary so that
people, no longer “artificially” segregated by force of law, could shed their own
prejudices and accept those from “other groups.”
The program and interventions pursued by race relations organizations in
California drew heavily from the analysis of Myrdal and his contemporaries.
Organizations set up specific “intercultural experience” programs as a “form of
intercultural education in which actual contact was established between members of
the different type of groups.”
24
They sought to coordinate and distribute various fact-
finding publications and surveys that reinforced their claims. The East and West
Association, which focused in particular on alleviating discrimination against
Japanese American returnees, organized a “Wardens of Understanding” program to
recruit volunteers that would “watch out for inflammatory utterances against any
minority group” in order to keep a “hostile member from poisoning the community”
while creating “public opinion” that would “reject race prejudice as a mark of
ignorance and social immaturity.” The Association, which counted Marshall
Stimson and John Anson Ford on its West Coast Committee, argued that the

24
Summary of Address by Fred Herzberg “Intercultural Experience” in Minutes of the California
Federation of Civic Unity, 2
nd
Meeting, October 18-19, 1947, p. 14, Box 18, Folder 7, CRC.

84
“conquest of prejudice is a labor which every individual must undertake within
himself according to the dictates of his own heart and mind and conscience.”
25

This notion of “racial innocence”—the self-possessed individual who decided
to free himself or herself from the narrow trappings of prejudice and bigotry and
fully accept American notions of equality and fair treatment—would dominate
debates over the meaning of race and racism for the rest of the twentieth century. As
we shall see, though it was primarily “liberal” organizations which developed and
refined these ideas in order to undermine support for racially discriminatory policies
and attitudes, notions of “racial innocence” had no inherent political valence.

Other Elements of the FEPC Coalition
While most members of the civic unity groups embraced a Myrdalian
framework which actively promoted the civic creed as the surest bulwark against the
forces of racial exclusion and bigotry, the coalition included political actors and
organizations with other analyses. For example, in 1944 the ACCR hired a young
Fred Ross to join the staff of its Pacific Coast Community Services office. Like most
of the other staff members, Ross had worked previously with the Farm Security
Administration and the War Relocation Authority, two agencies within the Roosevelt
administration that developed more activist approaches to citizen engagement. The
ACCR hired Ross in order to assist in “the organization of Mexican American unity
leagues in isolated, socially neglected areas” in places like San Bernadino and

25
“Wardens of Understanding,” Folder 8, Box 8, Clarence Gillett Papers, Young Research Library,
UCLA (hereafter CG).

85
Redlands, as well as building “inter-racial councils for civic unity on a city-wide
basis or regional basis.” Ross, who would become legendary in community
organizing circles as a contemporary of Saul Alinsky and a mentor to Cesar Chavez,
was particularly enthusiastic about the prospects of “working directly with the people
themselves in the establishment of minority or inter-minority organizations for civic
action on a neighborhood or community basis.” Ross thus championed another
important approach towards anti-racism. Rather than explaining racial inequality as
a function of “incorrect” or irrational ideas, this perspective emphasized disparities
in relations of power. While elite allies may be necessary to support efforts against
racist policies, they were not the most important constituency. To win legislation
such as the FEPC required the development of powerful grassroots organizations that
could make claims and demands on the political system. Organization, rather than
the dissemination of information, was the primary imperative.
Similar ideas drove unions that included large numbers of African American
and Mexican American workers struggling against racial discrimination during the
war. In the Bay Area, Black shipyard workers formed Shipyard Workers Against
Discrimination in 1943 and launched a successful boycott against their consignment
to segregated “auxiliary” locals within the powerful Boilermakers Union, which
controlled 70 percent of the labor hired in Bay Area shipyards. At one point,
thousands went on strike. Their subsequent FEPC complaint eventually led to the
state Supreme Court’s 1944 James v. Marinship decision declaring segregated

86
unions covered by closed shop agreements unconstitutional.
26

C.L. Dellums of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters became the
standard-bearer of a growing African American labor movement in Oakland,
Richmond and San Francisco in the aftermath of the war. As Dellums would later
explain, “Negroes will have to pay for their own organization, their own fights, by
their own funds as well as their own energy.” Dellums’ Brotherhood and other Black
railroad workers unions were built with “Negro leadership and Negro money” using
the solidarity forged within sites of segregation to wage direct confrontations against
racial discrimination.
27
Dellums played a leading role in launching the Oakland
Voters League (OVL) in the mid-1940s. This labor/civil rights coalition temporarily
wrestled control of the Oakland City Council from the conservative Republican bloc
which had dominated city politics for many years.
28
The OVL, like the activist labor
unions, drew its strength from building organization and a new notion of political
community among the cities multiracial working class.
Similarly, Mexican and Mexican American workers in the citrus groves and
packinghouses of Southern California engaged in spontaneous walkouts to demand
better wages or working conditions. For the large-scale employers which dominated
California’s vast agricultural sector, race, ethnicity and national origin had formed
the de rigueur basis of hiring and the organization of labor crews since the late

26
James v. Marinship Corp. (1944) 25 C2d 721. Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American
Community in Richmond, California, 1910-1963. 61. Charles Wollenberg, "James v. Marinship:
Trouble on the New Black Frontier " in Working People of California, ed. Daniel Conford (Berkeley,
1995).
27
Dellums quoted in Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. 86.
28
See Marilyn Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II
(Berkeley, 1993).

87
nineteenth century.
29
Employers believed such a racialized division of labor
discouraged strikes and unionization while making it easier to recruit, deploy and
dismiss large groups of workers. In addition, these employment patterns linked
directly with federal immigration policy, which supported the recruitment of
Mexican and Filipino workers to meet the labor needs of agricultural employers.
While the actions of farmworkers and packinghouse workers rarely resulted
in collective bargaining agreements or lasting unions, they did suggest a different
analysis of the causes and solutions to racial discrimination in employment. These
workers certainly appealed to notions of fairness and inclusion, but they understood
the problem as being rooted in unequal relations of power.
30
Like the labor unionists
led by Dellums, they attempted to bring the contradictions of a racially segmented
workforce directly to the fore.
A final component of the pro-FEPC coalition included an array of
Communist Party members, several CIO unions, and other left activists, which
viewed the struggle for the FEPC as an opportunity to unite a broader working class
formation. Like Ross, these activists held that employment discrimination was not a
function of individual “irrationality” but a deliberate effort by corporate interests to
divide and fracture solidarity among workers. While they also described workplace
segregation and discrimination as “un-American,” they linked the issue to a broader

29
On this period, see Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in
California, David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West,
1850-1920 (Berkeley, CA, 2001).
30
Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles,
1900-1970 (Chapel Hill, 2001). 158-160.

88
project of economic democracy and union power. During the war, the CIO
consistently urged the U.S. Employment Service to reject discriminatory job
specifications, arguing that such discrimination hindered the effort to achieve full
production. CIO unions such as the United Auto Workers took strong stands
nationally against discrimination, explaining that “to maintain our union’s position in
the shop we must have the support of all workers in the shop. Such support can only
be secured over a period of time by accepting all workers and guaranteeing equal
treatment for all workers.” A UAW booklet for its members on fair practices linked
racial discrimination to other forms of bias based on religion and national origin as
well, asserting: “Our union won’t stand for belittling talk: ‘Dago,’ ‘Wop,’ ‘Hunky,’
‘Nigger’—those are un-American words. They’re anti-union…A worker is a worker,
regardless of what country he or his parents come from.”
31

While it is important to remember that such positions were much more
widely embraced by union leadership rather than rank and file members, even these
“official” positions represented an important source of particular anti-racist politics.
Other FEPC supporters, including the Civil Rights Congress and the Communist
Party, offered a similar analysis, often expressed in even more strident anti-capitalist
tones.

31
“A Bill of Rights for All UAW Members” (n.d. probably 1945-46) Box 1, Folder 18, Box 1, CB.

89

Thus, the effort to win FEP legislation was not the product of a singular
“racial liberalism.” Instead, FEP represented an issue in which a fairly heterogeneous
group of political forces found temporary common ground. For labor activists and
other leftists, fair employment represented one among several issues (such as full
employment, public housing, and wage and price controls) where confrontations
with pro-business forces over the terms of the postwar economic consensus could be
waged. More centrist members of civic unity groups believed that discriminatory
employment policies validated and helped perpetuate the intolerant individual
mindset which they believed to be at the core of racial inequality. These were not
mutually exclusive or conflicting positions. But the campaign for Proposition 11
remains important to examine precisely because it represented an early site in the
Figure 2: The CIO and Civil Rights. From “A Bill of Rights for Union Members.”
Charles Bratt Collection, Young Research Library, UCLA.

90
postwar era for such groups to assert and define their understanding of the meaning
of race and racism.

Bringing FEPC to the Ballot
In California, a “Committee for a State FEPC” had been established in early
1945 to mobilize support for Assembly Bill No. 3, a measure drafted by Augustus
Hawkins patterned after legislation that had recently been adopted in New York.
32

After the war, national efforts to make the federal wartime FEPC permanent
continued to be stymied by Southern Democrats, and several states in the Northeast,
Midwest and West pursued state level FEPC policies to perform the same function.
33

To build public support for Hawkins’ A.B. 3, the “California Committee for a
State FEPC” established steering committees in northern and southern California,
raising funds to purchase a few advertisements in Los Angeles and Bay Area
newspapers. Their campaign to win public support for the measure rested almost
entirely on applying the pro-democratic aspirations of the war to the home front. A
Los Angeles ad featured a solemn-faced GI staring sternly from beneath his helmet:
“DON’T MESS IT UP NOW, BUDDY! Be Sure That Home-Front Jobs Are Open to
ALL Americans!” The long list of endorsing community leaders included Judge
Isaac Pacht, who chaired the Southern California Committee, John Anson Ford,

32
A state FEPC bill authored by Hawkins in 1944 died in committee with little public attention.
33
On the debate surrounding the New York Act, see Chen, ""The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas:" Racial
Conservatism and the Politics of Fair Employment Legislation in New York State, 1941-1945."

91
Carey McWilliams, and Loren Miller.
34

But the Republican controlled Legislature ensured that A.B. 3 would die in
committee. The powerful agricultural lobby, represented by the Associated Farmers
of California, lobbied relentlessly against the measure, as did groups of retailers and
other business associations. The Associated Farmers reported to its members at the
end of the legislative session that while “many sincere representatives of racial
groups who appeared at the hearings on the bill” made it “unpleasant” to oppose
A.B. 3, doing so was absolutely necessary because the legislation was “vicious
almost beyond description. We have no hesitancy in predicting that had this bill
become law it would have not only contributed to but would have created racial
strife rather than alleviate it. It was radical legislation, pure and simple…” Reciting a
key argument it would use in the debates to come, the article pointed to a recent
walkout of ILWU members in Stockton who had refused “to work with Nisei Japs”
as evidence of the folly of regulating the racial attitudes of workers.
35

34
Pro-FEPC flyer in Box 1, Folder 20, Box 1, CB.
35
Associated Farmer, Vol 5, No. 12 in Folder: “Legislature 1945,” Cartoon 15, Ellen Leary
Legislative Papers Collection (CR 49), Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley (hereafter EL).

92

Figure 3: “Don’t Mess It Up Now Buddy” Pro-FEPC flyer.
Charles Bratt Collection, Young Research Library, UCLA

93
The Council for Civic Unity of San Francisco would later report that the
effort at trying to get the FEPC passed by the state Legislature was “futile except for
incidental educational values, since it was a foregone conclusion that the State
Senate, dominated by big agriculture (which likes its racial labor gang kept intact
and apart), would never enact FEPC.”
36
The Senate was overwhelmingly dominated
by representatives from rural areas, the result of a Progressive era apportionment
plan that created legislative districts based on county boundaries, rather than on
population, and rural senators remained the staunchest opponents of fair employment
legislation over the next 12 years.
Lacking any meaningful support from Governor Warren, FEPC advocates
concluded that they stood little chance of getting the measure adopted through the
Legislature. Representatives from across the state gathered in Fresno to plan a
strategy to bring the FEPC issue directly to voters.
37
Leaders from African
American and Jewish civil rights organizations, together with representatives from
the statewide CIO Council, formed the core of the group. They drafted a ballot
initiative which closely mirrored A.B. 3, declaring the “opportunity to obtain and
hold employment without discrimination because of race, religion, color, national
origin or ancestry is hereby recognized and declared to be such a civil and
constitutional right.” The measure called for the creation of a five member

36 “Among These Rights…”Newsletter of the Council for Civic Unity of San Francisco, Vol. I, No 6,
Oct 26 1946, Box 18, Folder 6: “California Council for Civic Unity,” Box 18, CRC.
37
Anthony Chen, "From Fair Employment to Equal Employment Opportunity and Beyond:
Affirmative Action and the Poltics of Civil Rights in the New Deal Order, 1941-1972" (University of
California, Berkeley, 2002). 185.

94
commission appointed by the Governor that would be empowered to “receive,
investigate, act in and render decisions on alleged instances of discrimination in
employment because of race, religion, color, national origin or ancestry.” The
commission could issue formal subpoenas, conduct hearings and issue findings with
authority of a court order, and was also charged with a range of public education and
fact-finding activities. It not only outlawed discrimination by employers and labor
organizations, it prevented inquiries into the race, religion, color, national origin or
ancestry of a job or union applicant.
38
One study in 1946 found that 95 percent of job
openings advertised in the State Employment Service were subject to particular
“qualifications” of race, creed, gender or national origin; stipulations that the service
always attempted to honor.
39

The group quickly turned its attention towards raising the funds necessary to
print the petition and support an all-volunteer effort to gather signatures.
Acknowledging that it would be a “long hard fight” to win FEPC through direct
legislation, Attorney General Robert Kenny, the statewide committee’s Honorary
Chair, urged donors to contribute to the campaign so that the growing problem of
reconversion and unemployment would not be further exacerbated by “the poison of
discriminatory hiring and firing.”
40
By the early spring of 1946, the effort was in full

38
The legislation did include provisions for judicial review of the commission’s findings on appeal. It
also provided for an annual budget allocation of $250,000. Like most of the prevailing FEP legislation
of the day, it did not include prohibitions against gender discrimination.
39
“Among These Rights…” Newsletter of the Council for Civic Unity of San Francisco, Vol I, No 6,
Oct 26 1946, Box 18, Folder 6 “California Council for Civic Unity,” Civil Rights Congress, Southern
California Library for Social Studies and Research (hereafter CRC-SCL).
40
“Solicitation letter from Statewide Committee” July 25, 1945, Box 22, Folder 43: “State Fair
employment Practices Commission,” Jacob Zeitlan Papers, Young Research Library, University of

95
swing, led by the neighborhood organizations, faith groups, and the emerging
network of civil rights and race relations organizations which organized weekly
petition drives.
41

State campaign finance filings suggest the pro-FEPC effort raised
approximately $44,000 in Northern California—primarily from donors and
businesses based in San Francisco—and $31,000 in Southern California, including
funds spent on qualifying the initiative for the ballot. Among unions, only the left-
leaning California CIO and ILWU made direct donations to the campaign. The more
powerful AFL State Federation of Labor, and many individual AFL (and some CIO)
members, did not endorse the measure. With limited funds, the Hawkins-led
campaign in favor of Proposition 11 consisted primarily of distributing pamphlets
and leaflets to voters through volunteers and supportive organizations and through
appearances at a series of public debates and forums about the measure.
42

The Campaign for Proposition 11
The campaign to win public support for Proposition 11 reflected the
composition of the broader liberal-left coalition that backed fair employment
legislation. The campaign’s dominant narrative continued to deploy the American
Creed and the obligations of applying the anti-fascist commitments abroad to

California Los Angeles (hereafter JZ).
41
David Jason. Leonard, 'No Jews and No Coloreds are Welcome in this Town': Constructing
Coalitions in Post/War Los Angeles. (2002).
42
The campaign retained several consultants, including Dan Foutz of the firm Foutz and Craig to
manage the campaign; Foutz worked in the past for both the CIO and the conservative Merchants and
Manufacturers Association. Rosenbaum, "Legislative Participation in California Direct Legislation,
1940-1960". 116.

96
domestic concerns as well. The pro-11 ballot argument concluded with a statement
by four prominent religious leaders:
We must put upon our statute books the legal guarantee that this war shall
not have been fought in vain, and that the American concept of human
equality, to which men look for guidance in the principles and practices of
liberty, shall become at last more than a hope and a desired end.
43

Proponents also attempted to draw upon concerns over the economic dangers
brought about by reconversion and the need to maintain the purchasing power and
production capacity developed during the war to save the economy from depression.
A typical flyer read:
Most Americans are smart. They know if others are deprived of the chance
to work—or are forced to accept substandard wages—that this injures the
prosperity of all….PROPOSITION 11 leads the way toward more jobs—by
creating a rising purchasing power which will result in a more prosperous
state….[THE FEPC] helped us get national unity and full production to lick
the Axis, by encouraging the hiring of ALL qualified workers.
44

Thus, the main Proposition 11 campaign continually framed the initiative as a
reasonable, measured response that would prevent discrimination from taking root in
California. It stressed the FEPC’s emphasis on education and conciliation and that no
workers would be displaced if the measure were adopted. The enforcement
provisions were necessary because “education is ineffectual unless legislation can
compel a few recalcitrants to conform to democratic practices.” While the campaign
did not altogether conceal the ways in which African Americans and other racial
minorities were particularly invested in the FEP issue— the ballot arguments, for

43
ibid
44
Committee for a State FEPC Yes on Proposition #11 flyer, Folder: “1946 General Election,” CRIS
Campaign Literature Collection, Young Research Library, UCLA.

97
example, were also signed by Hawkins, Los Angels Sentinel editor Leon
Washington, Pittsburg Courier Pacific Coast editor Herman Hill, and attorney Loren
Miller--the campaign rarely suggested that discrimination was a broad problem in
California, underscoring that all workers and the economy at large would benefit
from prohibitions on discrimination.
45
In their attempts to win the support of white
voters for the measure, they framed the issue as a conflict between a few extremists
and bigots on the one hand, and the fair-minded, democratic populace on the other.
By contrast, the California CIO’s stand against Proposition 11 differed in
several important ways. A CIO pamphlet produced for the November 1946 election
tied the continuing racial violence in the South and the failure to pass federal anti-
lynching legislation or repeal the poll tax with the California effort to pass an FEPC.
“30,000 cases of job discrimination were laid before the FEPC in the 4 years of its
life. Thousands of inequalities were corrected. IN 1946 CONGRESS KILLED THE
FEPC.”
46
Also calling for full employment, it suggested that California’s
entanglements with racial discrimination were connected to rather than distinct from
the national crisis in race relations. The Civil Rights Congress, which pressed the
initiative vigorously in Los Angeles, similarly stressed the connection between the
FEP issue and broad social justice concerns. Here, white workers were urged to back
Proposition 11 not only because they embraced democratic principles, but because
segregation and discrimination harmed the interests and unity of all workers.

45
“Proposed Amendments to Constitution: Propositions and Proposed Laws, Together With
Arguments” General Election, November 5, 1946, California Secretary of State.
46
Election brochure for California’s Nov. 5, 1946 general election. San Francisco, CA: Congress of
Industrial Organizations, 1946 in California State Library, Sacramento, CA. Emphasis in original.

98
C.L. Dellums, while a vigorous supporter of fair employment legislation,
opposed the very idea of placing the question before voters. As he would later
recount:
…we should never set a precedent that we recognize that the people have a
right to vote on anything they want to vote on. The rights I have been
fighting for all my life, they are now called civil rights, I call human rights,
God given rights. White people have been using their majority and their
control of the law enforcing agencies and firearms to prevent us from
exercising our God given rights…. We were never really asking white people
to grant or give us any rights. Only to stop using their majority and power in
preventing us from exercising our God-given rights.
47

Dellums felt that putting the FEP question to voters, even if it passed, would
imply that the electorate possessed the authority to affirm or negate rights which
were “God-given”—a position distinct from the civic unity leaders in San Francisco
and the multiracial coalition of activists from Los Angeles that comprised the
leadership of the Proposition 11 campaign. Dellums would eventually play a leading
effort in the subsequent 14-year effort to win approval of the FEPC measure within
the State Legislature, and was eventually appointed by Governor Pat Brown to serve
on the state’s first FEP commission in 1960. Thus, the leadership of the Proposition
11 initiative fell to the. In spite of his objections to the initiative,

47 “International President of The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and civil rights leader : oral
history transcript / Cottrell Laurence Dellums.” Oral History Interview, Conducted 1973, by Joyce
Henderson for the Earl Warren Oral History Project, Berkeley, Calif.: Bancroft Library. Regional Oral
History Office. p. 116.

99
The Campaign to Defeat Proposition 11
As the November election approached, opposition to the measure began to
take shape only a few miles away from the bustling Boyle Heights street corners
where the Proposition 11 signature-collection effort in Los Angeles was centered.
Frank Doherty, the staunch conservative and former president of the Los Angeles
Chamber of Commerce, quickly began raising money amongst his colleagues to fund
a public campaign against Proposition 11. Doherty hired 32-year-old Herbert Baus, a
former public relations director for the Chamber, to manage the campaign.
48

Doherty, a one-time associate of Governor Hiram Johnson, knew the mechanics of
the initiative system well, and saw in Baus a major talent for conducting
conservative-oriented public relations. The pair focused on raising money and
securing endorsements, waiting until three weeks before the election to launch their
public campaign.
Had Proposition 11 been launched in the 1920s or 1930s, when the Ku Klux
Klan enjoyed widespread public backing and theories of Eugenics merited serious
attention among many California elites, Doherty and Baus could likely have
campaigned against Proposition 11 as a basic affront to white nationalism. Indeed,
the last time a ballot initiative with strong racial overtones appeared on the ballot—
the successful 1920 Alien Land Law measure—proponent V. S. McClatchy stated
openly in the ballot argument that “whites” must defend their interest against
“Orientals, largely Japanese” who would soon gain “political control through force

48
The Chamber played a leading role in the campaign against the 1938 Ham and Eggs retirement
funding initiative that lost in a controversial election.

100
of numbers induced by the heavy birth rate.” The potent grip that racial nationalist
ideology had on much of the California’s white populace was evident in the minimal
public outcry that met the forced repatriation of tens of thousands of Mexicans and
Mexican Americans in the 1930s and the wartime relocation of nearly 100,000
Japanese Americans.
Indeed, even at the end of the war, several political actors attempted to build
support for their projects on similar grounds. In May 1945, for example, Gerald L.K.
Smith, a one-time associate of Huey Long in Louisiana, came to Los Angeles to
establish a local chapter of his America First Party. Smith championed a doctrine of
“Christian Nationalism” to stem “mongrelization and all attempts being made to
force the intermixture of the black and white races.”
49
While Smith’s rallies drew
several thousand supporters, they were met by a much larger grassroots movement
which denounced Smith as anti-American extremist who represented the antithesis of
California’s postwar promise. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron and many other
elected officials roundly condemned Smith for “industriously blackening” the city’s
name “to serve his own special ends.”
50
Anti-Smith rallies led by a broad coalition of
Jewish organizations, civil rights groups, labor unions, and others drew 12,000
protesters to Smith’s appearance at the Shrine Auditorium in July 1945; 17,000
appeared the following month. The counter-demonstrations quickly gave rise to the
“Mobilization for Democracy” to coordinate future responses to Smith and other

49
Leonard, "'No Jews and No Coloreds are Welcome in this Town': Constructing Coalitions in
Post/War Los Angeles". 132.
50
“Broadcast by Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Radio Station KMPC, September 15, 1946” in Box 20,
Folder 1 (CB).

101
extremist figures. Meade McClanahan, the Los Angeles Councilman who welcomed
Smith to Los Angeles, was recalled from office because of his association with
Smith, over the objections of the Los Angeles Times.
51
In the wake of a global war
fought in the name of freedom against fascism, there was a dwindling audience for
Smith’s brand of patriotism.
Other groups which asserted overt defenses of racial domination met similar fates
during this time. In early 1946, in the face of a number of cross-burning incidents,
Attorney General Robert Kenny carried out several raids against the Ku Klux Klan.
Governor Earl Warren announced “I can think no worse calamity could befall our
state or nation than to have a revival of the Ku Klux Klan either in fact or in
spirit…I am calling upon every public employee as well as our citizenry at large to
give careful thought and attention to the eradication of the last vestige of bigotry in
our state.” The Superior Court soon revoked the Klan’s charter to operate.
52

Isolationist groups with fascist and anti-Semitic sympathies such as America First,
which sustained vigorous grassroots chapters in Southern California in particular
well into the early 1940s, soon became the object of public scorn; leaders of the
Klan and America First were even interrogated before the deeply conservative state
Committee on Un-American Activities.
53

51
See as one example of the media coverage Smith received the editorials in the Santa Ana
Independent , March 9, 1951 and March 16, 1951 in Folder 4, Box 32, American Civil Liberties
Union of Southern California Collection, Young Research Library, UCLA (hereafter ACLU).
52
Warren quoted in the (Los Angeles) Council for Civic Unity, UNI-FACTS: “The Ku Klux Klan in
California,” June, 1946, Box 1, Folder 20, CB. In late 1945 and early 1946, a rising number of cross
burnings sponsored Kenny to take legal action against the organization.
53
California State Legislature, "Report of Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in
California to California Legislature," (Sacramento, 1943), 273-281.

102
Doherty and Baus recognized the resonance of anti-fascist rhetoric among the
populace; Proposition 11 could not be defeated through overt appeals to white
supremacy. At the same time, in opposing the FEPC they were essentially defending
the right of white employers and unions to openly discriminate on the basis of race,
religion and national origin. The “Committee for Tolerance” was born to resolve this
contradiction—harnessing an ascendant, pluralist discourse of civic nationalism to
longstanding narratives of white supremacy.
The public campaign against Proposition 11, like opposition to A.B.3 the
year before, was driven almost entirely by employers, though a handful of stridently
conservative organizations and a few labor leaders also launched independent efforts
to lobby voters against the measure. Doherty and Baus raised approximately $60,000
for the Committee for Tolerance in only a few months, including $10,000 in the two
weeks before the election. These figures do not include independent expenditures by
many county-based associations of agricultural employers, as well as the Los
Angeles Chamber of Commerce itself, which printed and mailed anti-Proposition 11
materials to 60,000 voters before the election.
54

Doherty used the relationships he established as former Chamber president to
disseminate materials against the initiative. The campaign distributed literature
through business organizations and conservative groups and regularly fed press
releases to papers like the Los Angeles Times, which printed the materials verbatim.
Baus later confessed that the arguments used to defeat the measure were primarily

54
Campaign Filing Statements, 1946, Proposition 11, California State Archives, Sacramento.

103
designed to confuse and distract voters: “Like an octopus, we threw as much ink as
we could in the water.”
55
Yet the Committee for Tolerance did in fact emphasize a
core set of arguments, hewing to two main narratives.
First, as the campaign’s moniker suggested, Doherty and Baus asserted that
Proposition 11 would increase division and strife. The Chamber of Commerce
declared: “Racial and religious tolerance are highly desirable objectives. Tolerance,
however, by its very definition is something which cannot be forced by law. It is a
matter of individual conscience and private judgment.”
56
Doherty endlessly repeated
the refrain that Proposition 11 “would emphasize racial and religious cleavage and
differences. It does not allay them. For that reason it would inflame hatreds and work
to the disadvantage of every minority.”
57
Similarly, California Farm Bureau Vice
President C.O. Hoober asserted that “California’s farmers, as a group, never have
discriminated against workers because of race, color, or creed. In fact, agriculture
hires more workers from minority groups than does any other California industry.”
Hoober suggested that while the “Farm Bureau would support any genuine, honest,
effort to prevent discrimination… our investigations show that Proposition 11 is
neither honest nor genuine, and that such an act would prove unworkable and
impractical.”
58
The San Francisco Chronicle concurred with Hoober, explaining that

55
Herbert M Baus, Herbert M Baus. Oral History Interview by Enid H. Douglass (Oral History
Program, Claremont Graduate School, 1990). 178.
56
“Recommendations of Los Angles Chamber of Commerce on STATE BALLOT MEAURES
November 5 General election 1946.” Folder 6: “Election Materials,” Box 8, Clarence Gillett Papers,
Young Research Library, UCLA (hereafter CG).
57
“Don’t Be Misled” pamphlet. Box 8, Folder 6: “Election Materials,” Box 8 CG Emphasis in
original.
58
“Farm Bureaus in State Oppose Proposition 11.” Los Angeles Times October 29, 1946, p. 5.

104
“no one can quarrel with “the spirit of Fair Employment Practices without refuting
the principles underlying American democracy.” The paper explained that the
initiative simply was not the instrument to advance such principles. The Los Angeles
Times similarly editorialized: “Admirable as it might be if race and religious
prejudice ceased to exist, The Times does not believe that the disappearance of either
can be helped by compulsion… Prejudices by their very nature are matters of
emotion rather than logic or reason.”
59

Appeals to the principle of “tolerance,” a term celebrated by both proponents
and opponents of Proposition 11, are important to appraise. On the one hand, in this
context, tolerance might signify the acceptance and affirmation of some sort of
“difference” and the recognition of a shared and interdependent human condition. On
the other hand, as the political theorist Wendy Brown reminds us, “tolerance” does
other work: Tolerance can also be a deeply depoliticizing discourse, in the sense that
it “involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social
conflict, which all require political analysis and political solutions, as personal and
individual on the one hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the other.” This
move of personalizing and naturalizing involves “removing a political phenomenon
from comprehension of its historical emergence and from a recognition of the
powers that produce and contour it.” Inequality becomes naturalized, Brown argues,
because the subjects of tolerance are marked as “inferior, deviant, or marginal vis-à-
vis those practicing tolerance.” That is, the discourse of tolerance still reproduces a

59
“An Unsatisfactory Remedy” San Francisco Chronicle October 10, 1946, p. 12. “Promotion of
Race Prejudice,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 27, 1946; pg. A4.

105
political subjectivity which remains highly racialized; the plea to tolerate is
addressed to an audience—a political community—that must already identify as
white (for only if one embraces this identity would one recognize this appeal as
being addressed to oneself). Thus, by casting the question of employment
discrimination in the language of tolerance, certain members of the populace
continue to be marked as insiders, those who will do the tolerating, while others—
those who will be tolerated—are marked as outsiders. Furthermore, these divisions
and distinctions are explained as the result of some “natural” characteristics rather
than because of historically developed relations of power.
60
Here, even in the
putatively anti-racist language of civic nationalism and pluralism, what George
Lipsitz describes as the “possessive investment in whiteness”—the notion that one’s
status within the polity is derived from an exclusionary racial identity—becomes
affirmed and sustained rather than displaced or transformed.
61

Doherty and his allies could thus draw upon ideas about tolerance and even
anti-discrimination while still appealing to white nationalist identifications. Within
this discourse, the assumption continued that there existed meaningful, coherent
racial/ethnic/cultural differences among the populace—the differences that required
toleration--that might be relevant to employment decisions continued. The ballot
argument against Proposition 11 stated: “Certain minority racial groups are the most
efficient agricultural labor” and that if “compelled by law to put minorities with

60
Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton,
2006). 15.
61
Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics.

106
conflicting customs, creeds and prejudices into the close proximity required for
agricultural labor, inevitably friction, and in many cases, violence will result.”
62
An
anti-11 pamphlet expressed outrage that Proposition 11 would make it “against the
law to specify a Japanese gardener or a colored porter or a Filipino fruit-picker or an
English waiter or a Chinese cook or a French hairdresser or Swedish actress or an
Italian singer or a Mexican dancer.”
63
The L.A. County Chamber of Commerce
warned its members that the measure would “Deny employers the right to obtain full
information about a prospective employee—race, religion, color, national origin or
ancestry—for the purpose of intelligently appraising an applicant’s qualifications for
a particular job.”
64
Here again we have a particular proposition about the meaning of
race—a fixed, embodied notion of difference that was associated with one’s
“natural” role in the labor force—as well as the meaning of racism—a refusal to
tolerate such differences. The proposition offered by the anti-FEP groups articulated
and incorporated many of the ideas asserted by the civic unity organizations in
defense of prevailing relations of power.
Another important theme in the campaign against Proposition 11 was the risk
FEPC legislation posed to white workers. Doherty explained “You might lose your
job or be demoted at the whim of appointed commissioners forcing another person
into your place…This political commission could discriminate against you.”
65

62
“Proposed Amendments to Constitution: Propositions and Proposed Laws, Together With
Arguments” General Election, November 5, 1946, California Secretary of State.
63
“Don’t Be Misled” pamphlet. Box 8, Folder 6: “Election Materials,” CG. Emphasis in original.
64
“Chamber opposes FEPC Act” Southern California Business, Oct 16, 1946 Vol 8, no 44.
65
“Workers Told of Danger in Proposition 11.” Los Angeles Times. Oct 20, 1946. p. A3.

107
Acting as “investigator, prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner” the FEPC would
rob (white) workers of due process rights and leave them subject to the whims of a
heavy-handed bureaucracy that would be captive to the blackmailing schemes of
those intent on taking their jobs.
66
Proposition 11 would deny “the right of free
speech between one man and another freely negotiating about the right to work or
the right to join a union.” These threats were often gendered. Doherty asserted that
the FEPC could insist that “you, your wife, your daughter or your sister must work
with anyone the commission directs, regardless of color or race.” The campaign
against Proposition 11 also relentlessly red-baited its opponents on similar grounds.
Doherty referred to the measure as a “Communist-inspired scheme” of the CIO’s
Political Action Committee (PAC) that would threaten the freedom of workers and
employers.
67

Such charges resonated strongly with a tradition among California labor
unions that viewed efforts to exclude non-white workers from particular labor
markets as fundamental to the survival of the white working class. As Michael Kazin
has demonstrated, unions such as the Building and Trades Council in San Francisco
understood the exclusion of Chinese and Japanese workers during the first part of the
twentieth century in this light: “The labor movement was…not merely a device to
press the economic demands of its members but a bulwark against the incursions of a
hostile race.”
68
From this perspective, both anti-union employers AND workers of

66
“Proposition 11 Called Unfair.” Los Angeles Times. October 7, 1946.
67
The CIO-PAC was formed in 1944 to coordinate the union’s political activities nationally.
68
Michael Kazin, "Reform, Utopia, and Racism: The Politics of California Craftsmen," in Working

108
color threatened to undermine the autonomy and power of organized labor. Thus,
while the California CIO Council and several other unions endorsed Proposition 11,
other local union leaders organized a “Labor Committee against Proposition 11.”
Headed by representatives of the United Railroad Workers (CIO), the State Building
and Trades Council (AFL), and the International Association of Machinists (AFL),
the group declared that the initiative “threatens more harm to organized labor and its
members than to any other group of citizens.” It reasoned that the FEPC legislation
“empowers a political commission to subpoena union members, records, and private
papers” and “authorizes the political commission to jail and fine union members.”
69

The Proposition 11 debate thus indexed two important transformations. On
the one hand, political actors which had openly defended and profited from
discourses of racial nationalism, such as the Chamber of Commerce and the Farm
Bureau, began quickly—though obviously not completely—to disavow such claims
in favor of arguments which recognized and legitimated the civic creed. On the other
hand, these same forces demonstrated how this rapidly ascendant discourse
emphasizing pluralism and tolerance could be used to defend prevailing inequalities.
My argument here is not that Proposition 11 played a singularly influential role in
this process, but that it reveals how early in the postwar era, this civic creed, with its
references to abstract ideals of equality over embodied relations of power, had limits
which opponents of civil rights were quick to exploit.

People of California, ed. Daniel Conford (Berkeley, 1995), 314. See also Michael Kazin, Barons of
Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Champaign,
1987).
69
Quoted in Leonard, The Battle for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II. 288.

109
Proposition 11 was crushed on election day, capturing less than 30 percent
of the vote. The measure lost in 14 of 15 Los Angeles City Council Districts; only in
the multiracial Ninth District covering Boyle Heights, Little Tokyo and the Central
Avenue corridor did it prevail.
70
The initiative had a voter participation rate of 85
percent, one of the highest in the election, suggesting the public debate over the
initiative did not go unnoticed. Lacking polling data, voter surveys, or a clear sense
of how widely the campaign materials circulated, it is difficult to make conclusive
assertions about the influences that the competing campaigns had on the decisions of
voters.
Indeed, the outcome of another proposition on the same ballot demonstrates
the challenge of making clear pronouncements about the electorate’s judgments
about race and racism. This measure, Proposition 15, sought to enshrine the state’s
Alien Land Laws into the state Constitution for the purpose of “closing loopholes”
that allowed “Japanese aliens…to conceal true ownership of property.” Sponsored by
Republican State Senator Jack Tenney of Los Angeles and Democratic Senator Hugh
Burns of Fresno, the measure sought to tap into the anti-Japanese sentiments that
fueled support for internment during the war. A recent wave of escheat lawsuits
against farm properties owned by Japanese American had relied upon the Alien Land
Laws, and such suits would have been undoubtedly strengthened by the passage of
Proposition 15. While some organizations, including the LA County Chamber of
Commerce supported the initiative, only Burns and Tenney signed the ballot

70
Voting returns from Box 12, Folder “FEPC,” Box 12, Edward Roybal Papers, Young Research
Library, UCLA (hereafter ER).

110
arguments, and even they did not mount an organized campaign to publicize the
measure.
71

Groups including the JACL, local Fair Play organizations, religious
organizations, civic unity groups and their allies led the campaign against
Proposition 15. Like the campaign in favor of Proposition 11 (which included many
of the same groups) the effort against Proposition 15 declared “RACE HATE AND
DISCRIMINATION Hurt You” and urged voters to tell their friends to “Vote
American!” and reject the initiative. They cited the decorated and heroic effort of the
25,000 Japanese American GI’s who served in the war, and their right to “fair play
and decent treatment for themselves and their families.”
72

71
“Proposed Amendments to Constitution: Propositions and Proposed Laws, Together With
Arguments” General Election, November 5, 1946, California Secretary of State. “Recommendations
of Los Angles Chamber of Commerce on STATE BALLOT MEAURES November 5 General
election 1946.” Box 8, Folder 6: “Election Materials,” CG.
72
“Proposed Amendments…”
Figure 4: “Support FAIR PLAY Oppose PROP 15.”
Campaign Literature Collection (1946 Propositions),

111

Proposition 15 lost by nearly 20 points, revealing the unstable terrain on
which debates over race and racism would unfold. The same anti-discrimination and
fair play arguments which failed to persuade voters to pass the FEPC were effective
in defeating the discriminatory land ownership laws.
The opposing fates of Proposition 11 and Proposition 15 reveal an important
dynamic that characterized anti-racist political efforts across the postwar era. On the
one hand, raising charges of extremism, attacking the spurious logic of biologically
determined racial differences, and appealing to national traditions of fair play and
tolerance certainly had significant political resonance. Not only did such appeals
secure the defeat of Proposition 15, they also shaped and made possible the repeal of
a host of formally discriminatory policies. In 1946, (eight years before the Brown v.
Board of Education ruling) a federal district court struck down the segregation of
Mexican American students in the Mendez v. Westminster case. Within a year, the
legislature removed all remaining school segregation statues from the California
Education Code. The State Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation
legislation in 1948, citing the work of anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict in
arguing that “[t]he categorical statement that non-Caucasians are inherently
physically inferior is without scientific proof.” The Court held that the marriage
prohibitions “violated the very premise on which this country and its constitution
were built, the very ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the very

112
issues over which the revolutionary war, the civil war, and the Second World War
were fought.” Indeed, in nearly every court decision from this era, the traditions of
civic nationalism were recited to discredit explicit defenses of racial inequality.
73
In
1952, the State Supreme Court struck down California’s Alien Land Law as a
violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, prompting Attorney General Pat Brown to
note that all Californians should be proud that the state “will legally no longer persist
in an adherence to a philosophy of a ‘super race,’ nor insist upon being a vindictive
outpost of racial discrimination—that everyone of our residents here has an equal
opportunity to share in the building of a greater destiny for our State.”
74

Between 1945 and 1958, under Republican governors, the Legislature
prohibited segregation and discrimination in the state militia, auto insurance sales,
employment in public works, within the state civil service code, in employer or labor
run apprenticeship programs, in the provision of welfare benefits, and in teacher
hiring and assignment. State agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles were
banned from requiring driver’s license applicants to identify themselves by race, and
the State Employment Service was prohibited from accepting discriminatory job

73
“State Decision a Blow at Racial Prejudice” People’s World. October 9, 1948 and “County Appeals
Intermarriage Case to U.S. Supreme Court” Los Angeles Sentinel, November 11, 1946 both in Box
15, Folder 8, CRC. In attempting to defend the anti-miscegenation statues, the Los Angeles County
Deputy Counsel made explicit claims about racial inferiority. The County appealed the decision to the
state Supreme Court and even the state Legislature took another 10 years to remove the unenforceable
legislation from the books.
74
Brown quoted in The Open Forum (ACLU of Southern California Newsletter), Volume 29, No. 12,
June 7, 1952 in Folder 13, Box 5, California CIO Council Papers, Southern California Library for
Social Studies and Research (hereafter CIO-SCL). The Supreme Court had already essentially
eviscerated the Alien Land Laws in its decision in the 1948 Oyama case.

113
listings.
75
Few Californians seemed willing to openly reject the principles of non-
discrimination, equal opportunity and tolerance.
But appeals to tolerance proved to be extremely malleable. Doherty and Baus
crafted an effective campaign which asserted that acknowledging and acting upon
racial distinctions among workers did not compromise commitments to tolerance or
equal opportunity; such actions simply represented the a “natural” response to the
preferences and attitudes of “private” workers and employers. They effectively
deployed the rhetoric of (individual) tolerance and fair-mindedness to discredit
Proposition 11’s reliance on legislative action to address racial prejudice. Proposition
11’s sponsors were thus unable to make a compelling case for the need for the
proposed legislation. If racism was indeed a question of individual affect,
“compulsory” legislation was unnecessary. It was an early lesson in the mutability
of the creedal vision, and its claims of racial innocence.

The Aftermath of the 1946 Election
While Proposition 11 did not dominate the headlines the way subsequent
statewide ballot initiatives concerning race and racism would, the initiative had an
enormous impact on the strategies civil rights advocates pursued to advance FEPC
and other legislation over the next two decades. Three trends are particularly
important to note. First and perhaps most importantly, the defeat of Proposition 11
convinced FEP and civil rights advocates of the enormous disadvantages they faced

75
Summarized in “Civil Rights in California” in, Box 99, Folder: “1960 Civil Rights” Augustus
Hawkins Collection, Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles (hereafter AH).

114
in the arena of direct democracy. Even after a 1952 poll suggested a majority of
California voters now approved of state FEPC legislation, supporters feared the
impact that another initiative debate would have on broader public sentiments.
76
In
1957, the Jewish Labor Committee’s Max Mont, a leading representative of the
statewide coalition organized to win FEPC through the state Legislature explained to
Councilman Ed Roybal (who contemplated sponsoring an FEPC referendum in Los
Angeles) that support for a referendum would be “worse than outright opposition to
the FEPC bill.” Mont continued:
…as the referendum campaign developed, the public debate would become
more and more heated, bitter, and acrimonious. Vicious smears, and foul
rumors would be circulated…As a result, inter-group tensions would
develop that could set race relations back for a decade. The majority
achieved for the FEPC would be a hollow and costly victory.
77

The NAACP passed a formal statement the same year similarly condemning
a proposed statewide referendum on FEPC: “The serious question of extending equal
job opportunities to all Californians would become submerged, distorted, and
perverted in the slogans and propaganda directed at the general public in a
referendum campaign. FEP would become secondary and incidental to high pressure
campaign techniques.”
78
Thus, Proposition 11 provided an early lesson for civil
rights groups as to how initiative debates could be generative of public ideas about
race and racism in ways that would undermine their objectives. Not only did they

76
“Poll Discloses State Support for FEPC Law.” Los Angeles Times¸September 4, 1952. The
Caliornia Poll found that 61 percent of voters favored either federal or state FEPC legislation, with
only 32 percent opposed.
77
December 12, 1957 letter from Mont to Roybal in Box 12, Folder: “FEPC” Box 12, ER.
78
NAACP Policy Committee Statement May 13, 1957 in Box 12, Folder: “FEPC,” Box 12, ER.

115
focus subsequent efforts to win the FEPC entirely on the state legislature (and in
some cases, local city councils), they similarly eschewed ballot initiatives as a means
to secure any other civil rights legislation. The experience convinced these groups
that direct democracy was not an arena in which their anti-racist claims could be
productively made.
By contrast, the conservative employers who helped defeat Proposition 11
would grow increasingly comfortable in the realm of direct legislation and the
populist vernacular it required. Between the 1946 FEPC initiative and the 1964 anti-
fair housing measure discussed in Chapter 3, the corporate and conservative
opponents of these measures continued to build their capacity to run effective direct
legislative campaigns. For example, between 1945 and 1957, Herbrt Baus’ growing
campaign management firm ran thirty-six campaigns in Southern California (twenty-
four involving initiative or bond issues), losing only three.
79
The firm played a key
role in defeating a 1948 measure to create and fund a public housing authority in
order to deal with the state’s acute housing crisis. Two years later, Baus developed a
successful strategy for a coalition of realtors, builders and housing developers to pass
another initiative, Proposition 10, which required the state to receive local voter
approval for any proposed “low rent” public housing project. The outcome of both
measures virtually guaranteed that the development of future housing stock in the
state would be the exclusive province of private developers, who favored segregated
housing tracts. In these and other initiative campaigns, Baus ensured that hefty

79
Robert Pitchell, "The Influence of Professional Campaign Management Firms in Partisan Elections
in California," The Western Political Quarterly 11 (June, 1958): 282.

116
spending for campaign advertisements in newspapers would be noticed by the
paper’s editorial staff in making endorsement decisions, and developed particularly
close relationships with the staff of the Los Angeles Times.
80
Consultants like Baus
and Whitaker and Baxter (discussed in Chapter 1) were pioneers in the use of public
opinion polling and survey research, using these methods to test campaign messages.
While not always successful, they became skilled at building the fundraising
capacity and temporary campaign organizations most suited to direct legislation
campaigns. These lessons would prove invaluable in the decades to come.
81

The second major impact of the Proposition 11 campaign was to convince the
more centrist leaders of the FEPC coalition that communists and left unionists had to
be purged from the effort if it was to have any future success in the state legislature.
Left CIO unions were among the most enthusiastic and activist supporters of the
FEPC. The San Francisco ILWU, for example, maintained a standing FEPC
committee, declaring: “We feel that the Negro People through their churches and
organizations and the Labor movement are the combination that will lick jim-crow
(sic).”
82

Civil rights groups in general faced enormous pressures during this time to
demonstrate their anti-communist commitments. The California Legislature’s rabid
Committee on Un-American Activities named even the moderate Chicago

80
See Baus’ description of this process in Baus, Herbert M Baus. Oral History Interview by Enid H.
Douglass.
81
Rosenbaum, "Legislative Participation in California Direct Legislation, 1940-1960".
82
Feb 11, 53 letter from Richard Moore, Chairman FEPC Local 6 to John Adams. Folder 19
“Communism—Communist Infiltration,” Box 3, NAACP Papers, BL, UC Berkeley.

117
Conference on Race Relations among several “front organizations devoted to racial
agitation” and declared that half of the 63 sponsors of the FEPC in Southern
California, including Assemblyman Hawkins and writer Carey McWilliams, were
“prominent left-wingers” and “well known Party-liners.” “Submission to Moscow is
chronic with these individuals,” the Committee declared.
83

Though the mainline backers of the FEPC did not paint Communist support
of fair employment legislation with such a crude brush, they did want to give their
opponents the opportunity to rehearse the red-baiting attacks they unleashed against
Proposition 11. The Committee for Fair Practices explained that the 1946 initiative
had failed in part because “the Communists intervened and tried to identify
themselves with the issue, thereby sowing public confusion and accomplishing their
real aim—defeat of the measure and continuance of discrimination.”
84
In 1947, FEP
supporters in Los Angeles refused an invitation from the leftist California Legislative
Conference to work on a unified campaign for local fair employment legislation.
85

When the NAACP organized a Sacramento lobby day in 1953 in support of an FEPC
bill before the state Legislature, it specifically invited “all non-Communist, non-
Fascist organizations” to join the mobilization.
86
C.L. Dellums stressed that the
campaign was only for those “recognized organizations and individuals with no

83
Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, "Third Report of Un-American
Activities in California," (Sacramento, 1947), 45-47.
84
“Some questions and answers” flyer (n.d.) in Box 12, Folder: “FEPC,” Box 12, ER.
85
See “FINAL REPORT ON THE Campaign for a Los Angeles Equal Employment Opportunity
Ordinance” (1949) pg. 6. In Box 31/B III 6c(7), John Anson Ford papers, Huntington Library, San
Marino, CA (hereafter JAF).
86
NAACP press release for mobilization Feb 19, 1953 in Folder 5, Box 2206, Terea Pittman Papers,
California State Archives, Sacramento (hereafter TP).

118
political or ideological axe to grind.” Frank Williams, an attorney who served as
West Coast Regional Director of the NAACP from 1950 to 1959, explained that “the
left wing was completely excluded from the [FEPC] Mobilization” and recounted
with satisfaction that even unsympathetic legislators commended the group for this
action.
87
In response, the People’s World reported on the “often ludicrous efforts of
virulent anti-Communists among the leaders of the [FEPC] mobilization to keep it
‘pure’ by ‘screening’ from direct participation delegates from any groups considered
to be ‘left wing.’”
88
While applauding the pragmatic focus of the Sacramento
mobilization in 1953, the paper noted that leftist activists from local unions were
denied official credentials, and that “more white and union support” was needed.
89

As historian Shana Bernstein points out in a study of anti-communism within
the Los Angeles CSO, mainstream civil rights groups were quite pragmatic in
following the prevailing anti-communist currents of the day.
90
Such moves generally
strengthened their ability to make claims on American ideals of equal opportunity,
and undermined their opponents’ efforts at dismissing their proposals as subversive.
But the purges also came at a price. While these left organizations did not command
an extraordinary membership base or grouping of votes, they were deeply committed

87
Williams comments to in Folder 19: “Communism—Communist Infiltration,” Carton 3, NAACP
Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley (NAACP).
88
“For FEP in ’53!” People’s World (n.d. probably May 1953) in Box 15, Folder 11, Box 15.
89
In an irony all too familiar to the McCarthy era, Williams himself was eventually subpoenaed to
appear before the state’s Senate Committee on Un-American Activities, hardly able to control his
indignation that the NAACP was “being made to defend itself against the ridiculous charges and
innuendos that it is possibly subversive or that it is a tool of the Communists.” See flyers and
correspondence in Box 3, Folder 19 “Communism—Communist Infiltration,” NAACP.
90
Shana Beth Bernstein, "Building Bridges at Home in a time of global conflict: Interracial
cooperation and the fight for civil rights in Los Angeles, 1933-1954" (Stanford University, 2004).

119
to directly involving grassroots members in civil rights struggles. In addition, they
were often the only voices which linked specific policy proposals like the FEPC to
broader calls for working class empowerment within an anti-racist framework,
specifically calling on white workers to fight racial discrimination. Absent these
efforts, the more tepid calls to resolve bigotry at an individual level increasingly
became the singular rhetoric used to define fair employment politics.

Figure 5: “FOR FEP IN ‘53.” Pro-FEP Cartoon in
the People’s Weekly World, 1953.

120
The Emerging Labor-Civil Rights Coalition and the FEPC Victory
While groups like the NAACP drove leftists out of the FEPC coalition, at the
same time, they began challenging the political strategies and analysis of more
centrist members of the civic unity groups. Councilman Roybal told the CFCU in
1954 that “The greatest need in California today is organization.” Fred Ross, who
would leave the ACRR in the late 1940s to form the CSO explained that “Mexicans
in the area to date have lacked a medium for action” and called for a “Mexican
NAACP” to help direct this minority group.” He would return to a CFCU meeting in
1954 to run a workshop on “organizing the unorganized.”
91

Civil rights organizations also challenged some of the contradictions they
saw in the approaches pursued by civic unity groups, especially their decision to
work with the predominantly white professional staff members of member
organizations instead of the Californians who faced racism in their daily lives. Frank
Williams told a 1952 gathering of the LA County Conference on Human Relations
that such an approach had reached its limits:

In California alone there are almost one and one-half million members of the
most disadvantaged minority peoples;--one-tenth of the state’s population.
This is the base! Without roots deeply embedded in these people, any
struggle for the improvement of human relations is doomed to failure or at
least to a thankless partial victory…Our ranks could be legion, today they are
sparse…

This to me is the basic question: if our goal is the early realization of equality
of opportunity for all people, is it proper to expend time, energy and money
in the first instance to work for disadvantaged people? Isn’t the correct
approach to organize and work with minorities themselves?

'
91
ibid

121

Williams cited the work of the CSO, JACL and NAACP in building local
organizations across the state, and criticized groups like the CFCU for failing in
particular to assist the CSO in “extending its area of operation and unquestionable
effectiveness.”
92

Divided by such critiques and unable to commit to the strategy articulated by
Williams, Roybal, and Ross, the CFCU folded in 1956, though many of its
convening, networking, and coordinating functions were taken up by regional race
relations groups.
93

The struggle to win the FEPC through the state legislature was thus taken up
almost exclusively by the NAACP and its new allies within the labor movement. In
advance of the 1953 legislative session, the NAACP convened a California
Committee for Fair Practices (CCFP), chaired by C.L. Dellums with significant
leadership from the CSO, CIO and the NAACP. Staffed initially by the NAACP’s
Terea Pittman, the Committee organized a series of grassroots lobby days in
Sacramento each year the FEPC bill was introduced. By the mid-1950s, the CCFP
also included the AFL’s State Federation of Labor. The powerful group did not
support Proposition 11 in 1946, and throughout the late 1940s and in the early 1950s
failed to back the FEPC bills sponsored by Hawkins, endorsing its own more
moderate legislation instead. Influential AFL Secretary-Treasurer C.J. Haggerty
refused Pitman’s initial request to join the CCFP steering committee. But over the

92
Williams speech to LACCR, Oct 11, 1952, Folder 50, Box 3 NAACP Papers, UC Berkeley. P 5.
93
CFCU release on voter registration drive, March 20, 1950 in Carton 1, CFCU.

122
next two legislative sessions, the AFL became staunch supporters of the FEP fight
and one of the Committee’s leading organizational members. According to William
Becker, a one-time farmworker organizer who helped staff the Committee in the late
1950s, the AFL was impressed that Jewish, Mexican, and Black communities were
“so strongly pro-labor. [This] was something which solidified their concept of a kind
of natural coalition.”
94
Haggerty joined the steering committee, bringing both his
extensive knowledge of the state Legislature and the backing of union locals in areas
of the state where the civil rights groups had no presence. The AFL and its member
unions became the most important financial backers of the FEP effort, and also gave
funds directly to the CSO and NAACP to conduct voter registration drives.
To be sure, discrimination and segregation persisted within California labor
unions, as the structures of prevailing collective bargaining contracts and the racial
hierarchies within local unions continued. But in the 1950s, organized labor in
California forged significant relationships with civil rights groups like the NAACP,
and increasingly sought to address issues of discrimination on their own. The United
Steelworkers in Los Angeles urged its members directly to join the local NAACP
branch, citing the two organization’s “mutual beliefs and objectives.” The NAACP’s
Nathan Colley delivered a rousing address to the AFL’s 1955 convention in San
Diego, arguing that labor’s past history of discriminatory practices was giving way to
a powerful new alliance with civil rights organizations: He concluded “We can help

94
William Becker., "Oral History with William Becker. Interviewed by Gabrielle Morris.,"
(Sacramento, 1980), 24.

123
each other and all grow stronger in the process... Long live trade Unionism!”
95
Under
the leadership of Regional Field Director Frank Williams, the civil rights group
proposed a number of innovative partnerships with the AFL, including a joint drive
to organize farmworkers in rural areas of the state (there were still many thousands
of Black farmworkers in the cotton fields) and a massive voter registration drive in
collaboration with the CIO and CSO. While neither of these proposals reached
fruition (though significant voter registration did take place) they revealed the
enthusiasm with which labor and civil rights leaders thought about their emerging
alliance.
The Committee for Fair Practices continued to grow in strength and
sophistication throughout the 1950s. Criquing the public education campaign for
Proposition 11 in 1946 as “poorly planned, haphazardly and almost indifferently
executed, and hampered by the lack of funds” a rejuvenated FEP effort sought to
build powerful local and state coalitions to win passage of the policy.”
96
Local
affiliates won a series of city FEP ordinances in Richmond, Bakersfield, San
Francisco and San Mateo, mobilizing supporters to publicly challenge and confront
FEPC opponents. The Committee produced a number of detailed reports
documenting widespread discrimination within state and private employment
agencies, (where it found that 67 percent of job requests received in 1951 were

95
See letter to Steelworkers locals Jan. 30, 1956 and Colley speech in Box 3, Folder 13: “California
State Federation of Labor,” Box 3, NAACP Papers.
96
“Council for Equality in Employment Answers the Critics of the proposed ordinance for Los
Angeles creating a Commission for Equal Employment Opportunity” (n.d., probably 1956). in Box
31/B III 6c(7), JAF.

124
discriminatory) the building trades, the hospitality industry and other occupations,
drawing growing attention among the media and elected officials. Such tactics were
never employed in the 1946 effort on behalf of Proposition 11, when proponents
believed that simple appeals to American traditions of tolerance would carry the
measure. In their renewed effort to win FEP legislation, the coalition deliberately
focused on documenting and making visible the problem of racial discrimination,
discussing the issue in specific, rather than abstract terms.
97

These documentation efforts were also significant in the face of claims by
employers, who by then had shed any references to the suitability of particular
“racial groups” for certain types of work and focused almost entirely on the assertion
that discrimination either did not exist at all or could only be addressed through
voluntary action rather then “legislative coercion.” For example, Morris Pendelton,
president of the Proto Tool Company and frequent FEP critic wrote to Councilman
Roybal that he was opposed to local FEP legislation because “Los Angeles is as
liberal, moderate and reasonable in the hiring of members of minority groups as any
city in the United States. It seems wholly and totally unnecessary that…we should
have the harassments of an FEPC ordinance.”
98

The statewide FEPC bill progressed further in each legislative session
between 1953 and 1957, reaching a full Senate vote for the first time in 1957. The
Committee mobilized hundreds of people to lobby days in Sacramento during this

97
“The Case for Fair Employment Practices Legislation in California in 1953.” California Committee
for Fair Employment Practices, Box 12, Folder: “FEPC,” ER.
98
Letter to Roybal from Pendelton, December 31, 1957, Box 12, Folder: “FEPC,” ER.

125
time, keeping the issue alive within the public debate. In preparation for the 1958
election, the Committee conducted a detailed analysis of the FEPC position of every
candidate running for State Senate or Assembly as well as the candidates for
statewide office. Attorney General Pat Brown, the Democratic nominee for governor,
asserted his unqualified support for pending FEPC legislation, while his Republican
opponent, conservative Senator William Knowland, equivocated, declaring only that
discrimination should be eliminated and that “each man should be able to advance
according to his respective abilities.”
99
With the assistance of the AFL, the
Committee specifically focused on a handful of FEPC opponents in Senate races
outside the Bay Area and Los Angeles County, making the legislation a major issue
in the election, especially among union voters.
100

The combination of coalition-building and grassroots organizing yielded
enormous dividends in the 1958 election. Fueled by the emerging California
Democratic Coalition (CDC), an alliance of grassroots Democratic clubs built out of
the 1952 Stevenson presidential bid, Democrats swept every statewide office except
for the Secretary of State, and gained majorities in both the State Assembly and
Senate. Brown defeated Senator Knowland handily, bringing a Democrat to the
governor’s office for only the second time in the twentieth century. Labor unions and
their allies mobilized a massive and expensive campaign to defeat Proposition 18,
the anti-union “Right to Work” initiative supported by conservative business leaders,
mainly in Southern California. Union leaders estimated that their efforts increased

99
Brown and Knowland responses to FEPC questionnaire in Box 12, Folder: “FEPC” ER.
100
Becker., "Oral History with William Becker. Interviewed by Gabrielle Morris.."

126
turnout by one million votes. Civil rights groups like the NAACP worked hard to
defeat the initiative. One striking NAACP pamphlet proclaimed “Keep Mississippi
Out of California: Fight Sharecropper Wages, Expose the Fake ‘Right to Work’ Plot
of the Enemies of the FEPC.” Black voters overwhelmingly opposed Proposition 18,
in spite of a direct campaign which suggested that employment opportunities would
expand for Black workers if union power withered.
101
Labor power had grown so
strong that the Los Angeles County Chamber of Commerce, whose leadership
overwhelmingly backed the right-to-work measure, evinced apprehension at taking a
public stand against the measure for fear of drawing criticism of union leaders and
voters.
102
While several key tactical blunders helped pave the way for the
Republicans’ defeat, the Democratic coalition of civil rights, labor groups, and
grassroots activists successfully portrayed Knowland and the Right-to-Work
initiative he championed as extremist and out of step with the forward looking
electorate.
103
For the first time since the New Deal, it was Democrats who
articulated the civic creed in ways that most deeply resonated with voters. In
addition, their organizing and advocacy gestured towards the formation of a
multiracial political community forged through the development of grassroots
organization and coalitions.
The targeted organizing work of William Becker and the Committee for Fair

101
See Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. 88-91.
102
LA County Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors Stenographers Report, January 8, 1958,
August 7, 1958, Box 32, Papers of the LA County Chamber of Commerce, Department of Special
Collections, University of Southern California.
103
On Knowland’s 1958 campaign and the Republican debacle, see Gayle B. Montgomery and James
W. Johnson, One Step from the White House: The Rise and Fall of Senator William F. Knowland
(Berkeley, 1998).

127
Practices helped defeat the re-election bids of several key anti-FEPC Senators, and
during the 1959 session, the Committee worked closely with Governor Brown,
Hawkins, and Assemblyman Rumford to draft and pass a robust FEPC bill.
Emboldened by its recent electoral victories, Committee members remained resolute
in the face of threats to qualify a referendum to repeal the new legislation. As the
California Eagle would proclaim, “1959 isn’t 1946.” The paper called for a
“Showdown” with FEPC opponents and the repeal referendum never qualified for
the ballot.
104

Brown’s first term was marked by the massive infrastructure and human
investment projects that came to define his governorship—the passage of the Master
Plan for Higher Education, an unprecedented expansion of the state water system,
and dramatic increases in spending for schools, roads, parks and other public
goods.
105
At the same time, leaders of labor unions and civil rights groups continued
to cultivate their close ties. A leading representative at the 1958 State Federation of
Labor convention noted that the civil rights plank being adopted by the delegates was
“one of the most progressive documents that has ever come from any labor
federation in these United States.” Haggerty declared that “…no organization in this
state has done more to obtain FEPC laws in California” than the AFL and the
CIO.
106
In 1961, the State Federation called for the expansion of the FEPC to cover

104
“Let’s Have a Showdown.” California Eagle, March 3, 1959 On the proposed referendum, see
“Keep FEPC off the ballot—Nixon” Los Angeles Examiner. May 14, 1959.
105
On Brown’s administration see Ethan Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown
(Berkeley, 2005), Schrag, Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future.
106
Daily Proceedings Convention of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIP, Weds Dec 10, 1958
in Box 3, Folder 13: California State Federation of Labor, Box 3, NAACP.

128
all agricultural workers as well as non-profit employees and reaffirmed the union’s
stance towards addressing its own legacy of discrimination: “We know that if the fair
standards and fair practices which we seek are to prevail in the community at large,
we must not fail to practice what we preach within our own house of labor.”
107

Again, while these commitments did not represent the singular position of all
California labor unions, they represented the high-water mark for a multiracial
labor/liberal/civil political bloc within the postwar era.
But as we shall see in Chapter 3, the rapidly ascending Democratic/labor/civil
rights coalition had critical vulnerabilities. While prominent labor officials declared
support for a broad range of civil rights leaders, much less action was being taken to
organize union members to these ends. With the purge of Communists and leftists
from the FEPC coalition, civil rights and human relations groups silenced those
voices most likely to articulate a forceful vision of racial justice connected to
workers’ empowerment; only the limited language of racial innocence and equal
opportunity remained. At the same time, conservatives were developing a wide
reaching critique of the state’s role in combating racial discrimination and inequality
within their growing grassroots base. Together with the solid advantages held by
conservative business groups and the professional campaign consultants they
employed, civil rights opponents were well positioned in the battles which loomed
over race and housing. The logics of apartheid would continue.

107
“AFL-CIO Labor and Civil Rights.” 1962. California Labor Federation, San Francisco, CA.

129
CHAPTER 3:
RACE, HOUSING AND THE LOGICS OF APARTHEID, 1960-1972

Six weeks before the 1964 presidential election, Time magazine reported on a
California ballot initiative that was proving to be “the most bitterly fought issue in
the nation’s most populous state,” interest in which overshadowed “that of such
relatively piddling contests as the one between Johnson and Goldwater.”
1
Indeed, as
an onslaught of billboards, television and radio debates, media coverage, handbills,
neighborhood meetings and rallies ensured, few California voters that fall could
escape the spell of Proposition 14. Crafted by the California Real Estate Association
(CREA), the six sentence constitutional amendment sought to exempt the real estate
industry and individual homeowners from nearly all anti-discrimination legislation,
enshrining an unprecedented “right to discriminate” in housing sales and rentals
within the state’s highest law. The initiative took particular aim at the Rumford Fair
Housing Act, adopted by the state Legislature a year earlier to address patterns of
racial discrimination and segregation in housing as entrenched as any region in the
nation. Avoiding any explicit justification of racial inequality or difference, the
realtors’ public campaign deployed a defense of “property rights” against the
onslaught of “forced housing.”
On November 3, 1964, as California voters elected the pro-civil rights

1
Time. September 25, 1964, p. 23. Also cited in Mark Brilliant, Color Lines: Civil Rights Strugles on
America's "Racial Frontier," 1945-1975 (Oxford, forthcoming), Thomas Casstevens, Politics,
Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and Proposition 14 (Berkeley, CA, 1967).
Chapter Five.

130
Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, they also approved Proposition 14 by a two-to-one
margin. Though after a three-year legal battle the U.S. Supreme Court found the
measure in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and restored the Rumford Act
and the other anti-discrimination measures it nullified, its impact was profound:
Opponents identified the initiative as one of the deepest setbacks to civil rights in
California during the 1960s—“’a smashing blow to the teeth’ for racial minorities in
California”--and many linked the results directly to the Watts Uprising the following
summer.
2
Importantly, no civil rights legislation mobilized more intense attention
and deliberation in California during this period than Proposition 14.
Most scholars have explained Proposition 14 as an exemplary expression of
“white backlash” against the progress of civil rights in the postwar era.
3
In this
account, the beleaguered white voter—weary, angry or fearful of the looming
“threat” of racial justice, struck back to arrest the struggle for integration and equity.
Proposition 14 seems to exemplify a particularly powerful expression of this
political phenomenon because it suggested that even in the sunny and tolerant
climes of California, thousands of miles away from the “massive resistance” of

2
Quote by Edward Howden,, Executive Director of the state Fair Employment Practices Commission
to the McCone Commission. Fair Employment Practices Commission, Fair Practice News, No. 22,
November-December 1965.See also Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s
(1997).
3
The leading undergraduate California history textbook explicitly labels Proposition 14 as an
expression of “white backlash” as do otherwise excellent recent studies of the Los Angeles suburb
South Gate and of Orange County. See McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New
American Right. 133, Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven : Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of
Los Angeles, 1920-1965. 308, Richard Rice, William Bullough, and Richard Orsi, The Elusive Eden:
A New History of California, 3rd Edition (Boston, MA, 2002). 537. Robert Self specifically critiques
the label “backlash” because it “distracts attention from the central fact of that resistance: it took the
form of race based counter claims. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar
Oakland. 268.

131
Selma and Birmingham, collective white tolerance to the advance of “racial
liberalism” had limits that would prove inexorable. Just as the “silent majority”
joined George Wallace’s insurgent 1964 and 1968 presidential bids, stoned Martin
Luther King Jr. in desegregation marches through Chicago in 1966, and fought
school busing measures in South Boston in the early 1970s, so too did “racially
resentful” white voters register their opposition to further anti-discrimination
measures through Proposition14. The New Deal coalition itself, this narrative
contends, collapsed in large part because the pace and ambition of civil rights
activism (as represented through legislation like the Rumford Fair Housing Act)
drove Democratic white working class voters to the GOP.
4
As historian Mark
Brilliant suggests, housing proved to be the shoal where “racial liberalism” would
run aground. Brilliant captures this sentiment well in a letter written to Governor
Pat Brown in the aftermath of the election, which declared “Your Rights End Where
My Property Begins.”
5

But as this chapter argues, the Proposition 14 contest and outcome did not
simply index and reveal the preordained limits of collective white intolerance for
antiracist initiatives. Treating the initiative as a transparent expression of a fully-
formed, pre-existing and coherent political position (alternatively, the “silent
majority, “forgotten man,” or “angry white male”) misses critical transformations in

4
See Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s, Jonathon
Rieder, "The Rise of the Silent Majority," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980,
ed. Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser (Princeton, NJ, 1989). For an account of how Proposition 14
anticipated the rise of a conservative anti-statism, see Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom
(New York, 1998).
5
Brilliant, Color Lines: Civil Rights Strugles on America's "Racial Frontier," 1945-1975. Chapter 5.

132
political language, symbols, and modes of address that fueled the initiative, and the
role the contending campaigns played in organizing and defining, rather than merely
expressing, public understanding of this complex political controversy.
Proposition 14 emerged at a conjuncture in California history in which
discourses of “racial nationalism”—the explicit defense of political domination and
hierarchy by constructions of racial kinship and shared origin, cast in either
“biological” or “cultural” terms
6
—were in dramatic decline. Allegations of “racial
difference” themselves became an increasingly thin alibi within the dominant
political culture to explain relations of inequality, and racial meaning and authority
were in a growing state of crisis. Popular support for the measure could not have
been secured without a significant renovation in the political grammar used to
address and recruit white voters that ostensibly obeyed the basic imperatives of the
emerging civil rights imaginary while still drawing on a potent reserve of racial
meaning and identification. The exhortation to defend “property rights” deployed by
the realtors and their strategists was not simply a disingenuous defense of age-old
white racial animus; it transformed and articulated new modes of white racial
identity in order to naturalize prevailing relations of inequality. As we shall see, the
broad-based liberal coalition which emerged to defeat Proposition 14 failed to
adequately understand this transformation or respond to its implications. Indeed, the
realtors and their liberal opponents often shared the same foundational assumptions
about the meaning of racial identity, political community and the inevitability of

6
Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century.

133
inequality; affirming and reproducing the same fundamental articulation between
whiteness, property ownership and the right to exclude.
This chapter explores the forces which gave rise to the Proposition 14
controversy. I begin with a brief account of the intense and systematic discrimination
facing many home buyers and renters in the early 1960s. I then discuss the historic
emergence of patterns and logics of segregation and exclusion in California. These
patterns of segregation, while central to the state’s development and enforced by
powerful forces, were also constantly in danger of being undermined by
contradictory currents. I emphasize the particular leadership role played by organized
realtors and many homeowners’ associations, subsidized by the federal government,
in actively cultivating and bolstering a collective “political whiteness.” When the
struggle over the Rumford Act and Proposition 14 unfolded in the early 1960s, and
the state no longer openly endorsed the logics of racial exclusion, the realtors and
homeowners faced the uncertain challenge of sustaining this collective identity in the
face of formidable opposing forces. In the second half of the chapter, I chronicle
their efforts and the resistance they faced during the Proposition 14 campaign. I
conclude by suggesting that the shared framework for understanding and interpreting
racial identity and political community produced during Proposition 14 represents an
important and under-examined precursor to the rise of contemporary “colorblind”
race politics.

134
Who Erected the “Wall of Hate?”
The brochure promoting the Sun-Ray Estates development in the southern
Los Angeles suburb of Wilmington showed a tranquil ranch style home surrounded
by trees and a manicured lawn washed in gentle sunlight. It boasted of the many
conveniences to be found in the tract’s homes--spacious floor plans, wall-to-wall
carpeting, air conditioning and modern appliances. Veterans could pay only $130 per
month with no money down for the $20,000 homes. Conveniently located to the
newly raised Harbor Freeway, commuters had easy access to the stable
manufacturing, aerospace, and public sector jobs in the 25 mile corridor extending
from nearby Long Beach north to downtown Los Angeles. Tracts such as Sun-Ray
vied for the legions of newly arrived migrants to the area-- from 1950 to 1960, the
Los Angeles metropolitan area added almost two and a half million people.
7

Postal worker James McLennan and his wife Doris were among the many
home seekers surveying the dozens of such new developments near Los Angeles in
the spring of 1962. A handsome property at 1571 Baypoint Avenue in Sun-Ray
Estates caught their eye. But when the veteran attempted to make a deposit on the
property, the salesman informed him that the tract had no more vacancies. After
learning that half the homes in the development were in fact unsold, the couple
returned to the sales office to again initiate a purchase; the salesman once more
refused and called the police to have them removed. They returned a third time with

7
“Fact sheet on the McLennan case” in Deborah Louis Collection (hereafter DLC), UCLA, Box 12,
Folder 14: “Congress on Racial Equality-Housing 1962-1964.” Governor's Advisory Commission on
Housing Problems, "Report on Housing in California," (1963).

135
representatives from American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (ACLU)
and the nearby Centinela Bay Human Relations Council. The salesman finally
relented and accepted an increased deposit. Four months later, Banning Gardens, the
tract’s developer, informed the McLennan’s that their loan application to the VA had
not been accepted and that the house had been sold to another buyer. To test this
claim, an associate of the couple filled out an application to purchase the property.
They handed the salesman a $25 deposit and left with the key to 1571 Baypoint
Avenue. Only after a 35 day “dwell-in” by supporters of the couple, a series of
arrests, and an order to the developer by Judge Alfred Gitelson to sell the house to
the couple were they finally able to open escrow on the property, nearly a year and a
half after making their first bid.
8

Why would Banning Gardens, a prominent and successful Southern
California builder operating within an industry that never tired of promoting the
virtues of the unencumbered free market, go to such lengths to refuse the legitimate
sale of a property it was aggressively marketing? For what particular reasons did it
matter to Banning Gardens that James and Doris McLennan, unlike the other
residents who had purchased homes in Sun-Ray Estates, were Black? By what
reasoning and logic could so many Californians come to believe that it was not only
politically acceptable, but absolutely necessary to the future prosperity of the state,
that Banning Gardens maintain the right and authority to exclude the McLennan’s
from Sun-Ray Estates? Why would California, a state which imagined itself as the

8
“Film Union Rejects Negro Appeal” Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1963, p. 2; “’Dwell-in’ Continues
for Negro Homebuyer,” Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1962.

136
antithesis of the close-minded and anachronistic Jim Crow South, become the site of
perhaps the most politically sophisticated, widespread and effective campaign in the
civil rights era to defend race as an acceptable basis of exclusion?
According to most of the prevailing wisdom, the answer to these questions
can be summed up in the lyrics of a song by Phil Ochs, a contemporary of Bob
Dylan. In “Love Me I’m a Liberal” the folksinger chided northern white liberals
when their support of civil rights stopped at the integration of their own
neighborhood. “I go to civil rights rallies…I hope every colored boy becomes a
star…I love Puerto Ricans and Negroes/As long as they don’t move next door.” As
Stephen Grant Meyer argues in a book about race and segregation that takes Ochs’
lyric as it’s title: “Whites have accepted African American advancement toward
equal citizenship rights as long as they don’t move next door.”
9

Indeed, observers of the controversies over race and housing in California
during this period from across the political spectrum often shared Meyer’s
assessment. Kent Steffgen, the California field director of the segregationist “Citizen
Councils of America” explained that his opposition to “forcing integration” grew
from a concern to minimize the inevitable violence caused by “proximity between
Negroes and whites.” As Charles Shattuck, a former president of the national and
statewide associations of realtors told a subcommittee of the state Legislature in
1960, “it has been my observation that birds of a feather flock together, pretty much
as a matter of nature, and I don’t care how much you may try to pass laws, but the

9
Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don't Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in
American Neighborhoods (Lanham, MD, 2000). vii.

137
amount of human ills that kings and parliaments can cure is very small indeed.”
10

Similarly, Democratic Governor Pat Brown, who championed the Rumford
legislation and fought determinedly against Proposition 14, explained to his daughter
Kathleen after the election, “the white is just afraid of the Negro. The Negroes have a
long way to go before there is any acceptance by the white majority in our state.”
11
It
was these prejudices, asserted the activists from the Congress for Racial Equality
(CORE) who championed the McLennan’s case, which had built a “wall of hate”
around Los Angeles.
12

But as historian Barbara Jeanne Fields argues, to posit that “race” or “racial
prejudice” functions as a motive force of history does little “more than repeat the
question by way of answer.” “Since race is not genetically programmed, racial
prejudice cannot be genetically programmed either but, like race itself, must arise
historically.” Fields suggests we must examine the organization of social relations
which seem to so self-evidently offer race as the answer if we are to arrive at a
genuinely historical explanation. Focusing on the expression of individual attitudes
and personal animus alone obscures the important relationship between race,
political identity, land and housing in California, a contradictory history that
involves a complicated interplay of investments and structures, and authority as well
as resistance. While the patterns witnessed in California during this period were not

10
Shattuck quoted in Council on Discrimination newsletter, June 27, 1960 in DLC, UCLA, Box 12,
Folder 10 “Congress on Racial Equality---Newsletters, 1960-1966)
11
Cited in Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown. 290-291. Rarick described the
Proposition 14 outcome as perhaps the deepest and most personally felt losses in Brown’s long
political career.
12
“Press release October 12, 1962,” DLC, UCLA, Box 12, Folder 14: “Congress on Racial Equality-
Housing 1962-1964;” “

138
entirely distinct from other regions of the country, there were some important
characteristics particular to the state’s history. It is to this story that I now turn.

Jim Crow in the Land of Sunshine: The Origins of the Race and Property
Nexus
California’s history of land development and patterns of property ownership
largely affirms Patricia Nelson Limerick’s observation that “the intersection of
ethnic diversity with property allocation unifies Western history.”
13
But several
historical developments unique to California also help explain the particular ways in
which race became a central factor in determining access to and authority over land
and real property in the twentieth century. This history is most generatively
understood as a century long investment on the part of the majority of homeowners,
boosters, financiers, developers, realtors, and the state itself in preserving whiteness
as a marker of value: naturalizing “race” as meaningful category of identity and a
source of social power. As George Lipsitz argues, this investment is “possessed”
both literally and figuratively—in the form of both material rewards and resources as
well as through the psychological wages of whiteness described by Dubois.
14

Following Lipsitz, we can think of this investment as a type of an “endowment,”
drawing from two meanings of the word. Whiteness is analogous to a financial

13
Patricia N. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987).
27.
14
W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which
Black Folk Played in an Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935). 700. See
also David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class (1999).

139
endowment, in that its ability to provide benefits or dividends is based on a long-
term process of valorization and accumulation. For such an endowment to continue
generating dividends, its corpus must be continually invested and renewed, or it will
relinquish the value it has accumulated. But an endowment also refers to a capacity
that is by definition innate, derived from “nature” or “God,” and vested in an
individual or group. The argument I develop below is that the investments in
whiteness witnessed in the racial geography of California reflect the patterns and
logics of the first type of endowment—value that has been accumulated over time—
but are experienced and understood by their benefactors as the second type of
endowment—capacities derived from natural gifts or abilities. Moreover, because
this investment was forged collectively, it required collective action in order to be
sustained. Critical attention then must be paid to those political actors and forces
which helped sustain this collective action—and those which undermined it.
Beginning with the Southern California land boom of the 1880s, boosters and
developers played a singular role in both promoting large scale migration to the state
(beginning in earnest with the Southern California boom of the late 1880s) and
allocating land and property to settlers.
15
As William Deverell and Douglas

15
On boosters and promotion in 19
th
century California see David M. Wrobel, Promised Lands:
Promotion, Memory and the Creation of the American West (Lawrence, KS, 2002). The precedents to
these patterns were established even earlier. As Carey McWilliams explains, the large land holdings
established under the Californio period in the early nineteenth century and later claimed by Anglo
settlers during and after statehood meant that “California began with land monopoly, and, in this
respect,… is an exception to the rule of frontier settlement….When the tide of western migration
began to pour into California, the settlers discovered, with anger and amazement, that a large area of
the best land had already passed into private ownership.” This process only accelerated during the
second half of the nineteenth century, as “industrial cowboys” such as Miller & Lux, and behemoths
such as the Southern Pacific Railroad acquired and consolidated vast expanses of land, forcing a large

140
Flamming note: “Western boosters spoke in terms of race as much as real estate…
‘Booster speak’ often meant ‘race speak,’ albeit in encoded or symbolic language.”
16

These boosters projected California’s fantastic promise specifically as a product of
Anglo-Saxon vigor and exceptionalism—fashioning its identity as a place of
opportunity using explicit racial significations. The symbols and images found in
myriad postcards, railroad brochures, and other promotional materials drew from this
reservoir of meaning. Deverell argues that the boosters’ exultant visions of Los
Angeles as the pinnacle of Anglo-Saxon triumph asserted “an explicit and
intertwined relationship between race and time.” California symbolized the
culmination of centuries of European expansion to the West.
17

The migrants who settled Los Angeles during this formative period differed
in important ways from the working class European immigrants who populated the
large cities of the Midwest and Northeast. As Carey McWilliams explains, the
Southern California boosters targeted a relatively homogenous population: “Every
consideration was subordinated to the paramount concern of attracting church going

share of the population either to settle into urbanizing areas or accept a landless, peripatetic existence.
Land speculation, distribution, and control was perhaps the most significant issue in late nineteenth
century California politics, and an important factor in the anti-Chinese exclusions which found fertile
ground during this period. This precedent was critical because it established the private market as a
singular domain of land allocation and residential development, undermining future efforts to
democratize access to land and housing. It also established an early pattern of anxiety over land
scarcity, especially among wage laboring migrants who had control over few other resources. Igler,
Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920, McWilliams,
California: The Great Exception.
16
William Deverell and Douglas Flamming, "Race, Rhetoric, and Regional Identity: Boosting Los
Angeles, 1890-1930," in Power and Place in the American West, ed. Richard White and John Findlay
(Seattle, 1999), 117.
17
See Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin, William Deverell, Whitewashed
Los Angeles: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past (Berkeley, 2004). 4.
Emphasis in original.

141
Middle Westerners to Southern California.”
18
Lizbeth Haas observes that real estate
ads which targeted “wage earning” white workers during this period played “on the
general assumption that social stratification was an acknowledged difference
bridgeable by consumption.”
19
Because buying and owning a home was cast as an
exercise in social mobility, it was implicitly also an act of social distancing; part of
the value of becoming a home owner was not only the real property and land
acquired, but the dynamic of racial exclusion it signified.
20

For the migrants and settlers themselves, the quality and status of their new
lives in California became understood in explicitly racial terms almost from the
outset. Early migrants to Southern California, largely American born and middle
class, viewed the single-family detached houses, with their large lots and landscaped
yards, as ideal because of their symbolic and physical distance from the congested
streets and tenements associated with the ills of turn-of-the-century urbanization.
21

Distance from “socially subordinated groups” as Laura Pulido suggests, played a
prominent factor in the calculus of establishing the relative desirability and value of
residential areas. Richmond homebuyers, for example, were enticed by a 1909
developer’s appeal to “white men, civilized men, twentieth century Americans” who

18
Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (1946). 157.
19
Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley, 1995). 276,
Lizbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1969 (Berkeley, 1995). 276.
20
While Southern California remained the primary engine of the state’s population growth during this
period, similar dynamics could be found in San Francisco’s growing suburbs. See Moore, To Place
Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910-1963, Self, American
Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland.
21
Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (1993). Laura Pulido,
"Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privlidge and Urban Development in Southern
California," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90 (2000).

142
could appreciate the “beauty of owning property—real property—a HOME.”
22
Thus,
“Homeowner” became a social and political identity animated by particular
normative race, class and gendered assumptions: a white nuclear family headed by a
breadwinning father, a homemaking mother, and their immediate children--the home
serving as both the foundation and index of this condition.
The extraordinary influence of realtors and boosters, and the cultural
meanings associated with homeownership and racial exclusivity formed the
groundwork for the extensive modes of racial segregation that shaped the geography
of twentieth century California. But the struggle to sustain these exclusions was
always a contingent process rather than a finally determined outcome. The continued
migration to the state of African American, Mexican American, and Asian American
settlers, along with a growing number of Jews and immigrants from Eastern Europe,
meant that realtors and developers could never organize the entirety of the available
housing stock along racial lines. George Sanchez, Mark Wild and Allison Varzaly
have demonstrated that Los Angeles, like Oakland and Fresno, were home to
important and vital multiracial communities in the first half of the twentieth century.
Especially in the early twentieth century, before the proliferation of restrictive
covenants, Black migrants found many white homeowners willing to sell or rent
properties to them;
23
California’s Black home ownership rate in 1910 was 38

22
Quoted in Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond,
California, 1910-1963. 23.
23
Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. 66.

143
percent, compared to 17 percent in New England and 22 percent in the South.
24
At
the same time, certain farm labor unions, Popular Front organizations, left labor
unions, and some socialist and communist groups actively built interracial
organizations in the workplace and political sphere.
25
Early multiracial civil rights
organizations like the NAACP, which had a strong presence in Los Angeles in
particular, continued to challenge the legal basis of segregated housing.

Twentieth Century Investments in Whiteness: Realtors, Homeowners and the
State
As diverse groups either ignored prevailing race restrictions or pursued legal
challenges to overturn them, the boosters, developers, realtors, and property owners
who remained invested in racial exclusion as a source of value, status and identity
were forced to take new action. Racial covenants, for example, did enter into
widespread usage until the 1920s. Developers, realtors and owners propagated the
use of covenants, occupancy clauses, and similar agreements (often going door-to-
door to persuade homeowners to sign them) precisely because there were white
homeowners willing and interested in selling and renting their homes to non-whites.
Indeed, if an unchanging and all-encompassing white racial animus existed
independent of such concerted action, racial covenants would be unnecessary; the

24
Deverell and Flamming, "Race, Rhetoric, and Regional Identity: Boosting Los Angeles, 1890-
1930," 140.
25
See Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California,
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century
(London, 1999).

144
agreements would be self-enforced.
The California Real Estate Association (CREA) emerged as the most
steadfast and influential leader in the effort to sustain the articulation between
property ownership, political community and racial exclusivity. Formed in 1903 in
order to professionalize the public image of real estate salesmen and allay public
concern over the risk of land speculation and fraud, the CREA developed a strict
“Code of Ethics” to be followed by its member “realtors” (a copyrighted name which
only members of affiliated local realty boards were authorized to use). Until 1951,
this Code included the principle that a “realtor should never be instrumental in
introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of
any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental
to property values in the neighborhood.” As one respondent told the CREA in a
survey of the use of racially restrictive practices: “Any broker who will place or
encourage the placing of any objectionable races in a section, where they do not fit,
is not of quality or has no integrity [sic] of purpose, or principle.”
26

Local realty boards assumed the role of disciplining any members who
violated this principle, and determined which neighborhoods and tracts would be
designated for “whites only,” refusing to share listings with agents who openly
served non-white clients.
27

Bodies like the Southwest Realty Board in Los Angeles
formed “race restrictions committees” to organize homeowners to maintain racial

26
Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. 220.
27
Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. 261

145
restrictions, publicizing their success in the CREA magazine.
28
As late as 1949,
Glendale realtors proudly declared their city a “100% Caucasian Race Community”
in the CREA’s annual directory.
29

When a wave of foreclosures during the 1930s provoked the federal
government to become the principal guarantor of home loans, existing patterns of
segregation intensified. The standardized risk assessment scale used by the new
federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) made racial distinctions a central
determinant in appraising a neighborhood’s suitability for federally backed loans.
Multiracial neighborhoods in Los Angeles such as Boyle Heights and the Central
Avenue District received the lowest grades on these “Security Maps,” directing the
vast majority of investment in housing stock towards exclusively white
neighborhoods.
30
Building on patterns established by settlement, strengthened by
covenants, and valorized by federal mortgage assistance initiatives, California’s
exploding working and middle class suburbs remained almost exclusively white. The
1930 and 1940 census of South Gate found only two Black residents in the city out
of a population of nearly 27,000.
31
As the South Gate Property Owners’ Protective
Association proudly declared in its handbook, its planners had recognized “the

28
See California Real Estate Magazine, December, 1940 for the Southwest Realty Board’s “Race
Restrictions” Committee update. The CREA’s activities in the early 1950s are described in a
September 29 press release of CAP 14 in Box 29, Folder 1 “No one 14 [Fair Housing Revocation]”
California Democratic Council (CDC) Records, Southern California Library for Social Studies and
Research, Los Angeles, California. Hereafter SCL-CDC.
29
California Real Estate Magazine, June, 1949, p. 68.
30
George Sanchez explains that racially mixed Boyle Heights received even lower FHA ratings then
segregated Black communities in Los Angeles. George Sanchez, "Reading Reginald Denny: The
Politics of Whiteness in the Late Twentieth Century," American Quarterly 47 (1995).
31
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven : Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-
1965. 42.

146
danger of allowing race restrictions to lapse too soon” so that nearly “all of the city’s
residential tracts have perpetual restrictions against occupancy by non-
Caucasians.”
32
The Federal Housing Authority (FHA), which succeeded the HOLC
in 1934, used the HOLC’s rating system in its provision of mortgage guarantees to
lenders and developers, thus rewarding communities that made use of covenants.
FHA assistance poured into working class South Gate as it shunned integrated
neighborhoods in South and East Los Angeles.
33
The 1938 FHA Underwriting
Manual tacitly affirmed the desirability of racially restrictive covenants in new
housing developments, cueing white residents to leave integrated urban areas such as
Boyle Heights and central Oakland in favor of the expanding suburbs, strengthening,
rather than mitigating, the race and property nexus.
34
Moreover, as historian David
Freund demonstrates, the FHA’s programs included a widespread marketing
campaign which insisted that the massive new federal housing programs were in fact
initiatives to unleash private capital into the free market, rather than direct state
subsidies. Freund argues that these campaigns helped reinforce the idea among white
suburbanites that their burgeoning and prosperous communities were an achievement
of the free market and their own volition, free of any government support or
assistance.
35

As a result, of the 350,000 new homes constructed in northern California

32
Ibid. 19
33
Ibid. 180.
34
Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Chapter 4.
35
David Freund, "Marketing the Free Market: State Intervention and the Politics of Prosperity in
Metropolitan America," ed. Thomas Sugrue and Kevin Kruse (Chicago, 2006).

147
between 1946 and 1960 with FHA support, analysts estimate that less than 100 went
to Black homebuyers.
36
In addition, federally sponsored public housing, which
housed approximately 60 percent of Richmond’s mushrooming population during
World War II, strictly segregated residents, typically placing Black tenants in the
lowest grade structures.
37
In 1950, a successful statewide ballot initiative
(Proposition 10) promoted by builders, developers, realtors and allied industries
required any proposed public housing project to receive local voter approval. As a
result, smaller, newly incorporated cities on the suburban fringe could keep public
housing complexes and working class communities of color out of their areas all
together.
38
After the War, billions of dollars in federal housing assistance provided
by the Veterans Administration (VA) and the GI Bill also flowed overwhelmingly to
white suburban enclaves.
39

But even as the legal architecture of segregated housing was being
dismantled, realtors and many white home owners organized to sustain the prevailing
regimes of segregation. To take one revealing example, as legal challenges to
covenants were making their way through the California Supreme Court in late 1947,
realtors and residents operating as the “Southwestern Wilshire Protective
Association” prepared their response. Anticipating a favorable ruling from the

36
Duster cited in Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.
37
Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, California, 1910-
1963. 84.
38
Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. 354 , Don Parson,
Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles
(Minneapolis, MN, 2005).
39
By 1962, half of all the nation’s suburban housing stock had received FHA or VA financing.
Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. 204.

148
Supreme Court on the basis of a lower court decision, the group distributed a flyer
announcing a meeting to strategize next steps.

Eveyln Rife Mathews, a neighborhood resident alarmed by the flyer, attended
the meeting at the Diana Ballroom at the suggestion of the ACLU. According to
Mathews, Charles Shattuck, the local realtor (and a neighborhood homeowner) who
would eventually head the state and national realtor associations, explained to the
group that when the first Black families moved into the area, realtors and other
homeowners acted quickly to have every homeowner sign “use and occupancy”
Figure 6: Southwest Property Owners Association 1947 announcement of meeting to protect
racially restrictive covenants.
American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California Collection, Young Research Library,
UCLA.

149
clauses to their titles to prevent the “plague of Negro encroachment.” Shattuck then
appealed to each of the 600 homeowners present to contribute $25 each to fund the
planned lawsuits the group would file against any homeowners who violated the
covenants. Mathews concluded her account of the meeting: “[Shattuck] said that as
far as he was concerned, he would accord to the Negroes the privilege of signing
restrictive covenants against white occupancy in their neighborhoods. Each race
should stay where it belongs.”
40

Realtors remained defiant even in the face of the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer
decision, which ruled that court enforcement of restrictive covenants was akin to
state action and in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Shattuck’s Los Angeles
Realty Board urged “…a nationwide campaign to amend the United States
Constitution to guarantee enforcement of property restrictions.” The realtors argued
that such restrictions provided “a traditional element of value in home ownership
throughout this nation.” Because “recent decisions of the Supreme Court…have
destroyed the values thus secured,” a constitutional amendment was necessary. The
Board revealed its vision of permanently segregated communities in a curious
concession: “In the interest of fairness [restrictions] should be so drawn as to assure
Negroes of the enjoyment of areas restricted to the occupancy of their race, as well
as to insure Caucasians of the enjoyment of areas restricted to the occupancy of
Caucasians”
41

40
The Mathews letter and flyer is in Box 32, Folder 4, American Civil Liberties Collection of
Southern California, Young Research Library, UCLA hereafter ACLU-UCLA.
41
California Real Estate Magazine, September, 1948. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).

150
Realtors and others proliferated the use of “corporate contract agreements”
and “neighborhood protective associations” through which homeowners could
regulate the sale of properties in their neighborhoods.
42
Local organizations with
names like “Neighborly Endeavor, Inc” raised funds from local homeowners to
attempt to enter suits of damages against sellers of property to non-white
homebuyers as well as the realtors that executed the sales. Neighborhoods on the
verge of desegregation were visited with anonymous fliers suggesting that
transactions which violated previous covenants could result in loss of the property.
43

In Southern Alameda County, M.C. Friel, a private corporation, solicited
homeowners to form similar organizations that would assume the power to enforce
such agreements. Homeowners paid M.C. Friel to join the corporation and agreed to
insert a clause in their home titles specifying that the property could not be
transferred without approval of all other members (neighboring homeowners) of the
corporation, thus forbidding “occupancy by Non-conforming Elements. Usually non-
caucasians” (sic). The agreements would remain in force for 25 years and substantial
fines and assessments were threatened against those who broke the agreements. An
article in the CREA’s monthly magazine advised that such associations would not

42
Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. 105, 261.
43
See one example of such a flier in the California Eagle, December 21, 1950 and letters in Folder
12, Box 23, Civil Rights Congress of Los Angeles Papers, Southern California Library for Social
Studies and Research (hereafter CRC-SCL). According to a report by the Los Angeles County Human
Relations Committee, “Neighborly Endeavors, Inc.” on behalf of several dozen homeowners, filed
several unsuccessful lawsuits in the early 1950s against homeowners who sold their properties to
Black homebuyers, seeking damages of several hundred thousand dollars, in the Leimert Park
neighborhood of Los Angeles. See “June 30, 1950 memo to Supervisor Raymond Darby by County
Committee on Human Relations” Box 72/B IV 5 a cc(5), Folder: 1950, John Anson Ford Papers,
Huntington Library.

151
technically be issued with “reference to race or color, but based entirely upon
personal qualifications as a good neighbor, or in other words, cultural status.” It
continued, “The advantage of [a home association] is that it will permit exclusion of
undesirable whites.”
44
The article concluded with suggestions regarding how to list
properties for sale that would maintain the spirit of restrictive covenants without
violating the law.
A “Dear Neighbor” letter circulated to organize such an association in San
Leandro read:
You may readily realize how easily you could lose two thousand dollars in
value on your home over night, should you suddenly find that some
member of the colored races had taken up residence in your
neighborhood…

“San Leandro was planned, and has been maintained as a strictly white
residential City. Your investment in your district was predicated on that
attribute and all other amenities which made the City a desirable home
location...”

It is not a one-man job and your cooperation is necessary. You owe it to
yourself and to the neighborhood which makes your home a desirable place
in which to live.
45

Though in 1951 the CREA removed the specific section of its Code of Ethics
prohibiting realtors from introducing “members of any race or nationality” whose
presence would lower “property values in the neighborhood,” realty boards

44
“Racial Restrictions—Brokers’ Rights Under Supreme Court Decisions.” California Real Estate,
August 1948,p. 10
45 See letter from “Restrictions Committee of San Leandro Improvement Association,” (n.d.), and
statement “Private Ownership or Political CONTROL?” from Estudillo Tracts Estates in San Leandro,
n.d., both in Carton 1 California Federation for Civic Unity Papers, Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley (hereafter CFCU). The court’s Barrows decision in 1954 deemed such
agreements unenforceable. Barrows v. Jackson, 346 US 249 (1953)

152
continued to expel members who violated agreed racial boundaries. A Downey
broker, for example, was dismissed from the Southwest Realty Board in 1956, eight
years after the Shelley decision, after selling a home to a Mexican American family
in Lynwood and refusing to pay the resulting fine imposed on him by the Board.
46

Because these local boards controlled the Multiple Listing Services (MLS) which
provided access to homes available for sale, realtors who choose to breach these
mandates faced dire consequences. Few broke ranks. A fair housing group in the San
Francisco peninsula reported that only three of the six hundred realtors serving the
region agreed to provide “equal and undiscriminating treatment in the purchase of
homes” as late as 1960.
47
In the same year, the Los Angeles Realty Board did not
have a single Black realtor among its more than two thousand members. At a
hearing that year before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Los Angeles, a
representative of this Realty Board declared racial discrimination in housing to be
entirely non-existent: “The inability of one to fulfill a desire is not discrimination: it
is frustration which only the individual can overcome by personal improvement in
his financial and social position.” Quoting the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, the
representative insisted that a natural “heterogeneity” in society was a product of the
“march of progress and of civilization.”
48

But thinly veiled references to white supremacy do not explain the realtors’

46 “Suit Against Realty Unit Charges Discrimination,” South Gate Press, March 4, 1956 in Box 30,
Folder 3 “Housing and land ownership” ACLU-UCLA.
47
United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearings Before the United States Commission on Civil
Rights (Washington, DC, 1960). 640.
48
Ibid. 275.

153
actions in their entirety. Several generations of investments in racially segmented
housing markets had left an enduring legacy. As Robert Self argues, under the
HOLC, FHA, and VA guidelines, “the most profitable real estate strategy was to
treat Black and white housing markets as entirely distinct entities.”
49
Open housing
policies and practices risked triggering wide fluctuations in property values instead
of the steady increases that the industry most prized. Covenants and corporate
contract agreements were built upon and helped fuel white racial identity and
prejudice to this end. Self concludes that “the real estate industry came to see the
promotion, preservation and manipulation of racial segregation as central—rather
than incidental or residual—components of their profit-generating strategies.”
50

Realtors, of course, were not the sole authors of such patterns of segregation. But
because their own relationships, frameworks and practices relied so heavily on such
patterns, they organized more quickly than any other group to preserve them.
In addition, the realtors’ investments in whiteness as an arbiter of value and
as a basis of political community resonated broadly within an influential mid-century
discourse in which race, blight and deviance assumed critical spatial dimensions.
Eric Avila demonstrates how the racialized, menacing urbanity depicted in film noir
contrasted to the buoyant optimism represented by Disneyland, suburban malls, and
other spaces of white consumption.
51
The postwar “culture of consumption,” as
Lizabeth Cohen has explored, was predicated upon the invocation of racial

49
Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. 265.
50
Ibid.
51
Eric Avila, "Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight," Journal of Urban History 31 (November,
2004): 11. See also Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger.

154
distinctions and exclusions.
52
Thus, in promoting racially exclusive neighborhoods,
realtors could draw upon a popular understanding of the racialized underpinnings of
California’s prosperity. Like California’s late nineteenth and early twentieth century
boosters, the tens of thousands of realtors who promoted and facilitated the state’s
development at mid-century understood the California Dream as reliant upon, rather
than anathema too, racial inequality and difference. In all of these actions, we can see
the extensive organizational action and ideological leadership committed to building
political communities around white racial identity.
For their part, most white homeowners took full advantage of the privileges
afforded to them by the federal government and the real estate industry,
understanding the value and sanctity of their property and neighborhoods to be
dependent on racial distinctions and exclusion. As George Sanchez explains, racially
polyglot communities such as Boyle Heights grew more segregated during this
period.
53
Hundreds of thousands of white residents abandoned previously integrated
communities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley for the promise
of racially exclusive suburbs, and then conspired to keep their new neighborhoods
segregated. After the war, as more people of color acquired the personal savings and
income to purchase homes in these communities, they often faced well-organized
and sometimes violent resistance. In 1947, the San Leandro News-Observer reported
that the “sudden increase in the East Bay Negro population” meant “local

52
Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.
53
George Sanchez, ""What's Good for Boyle Heights Is Good for the Jews": Creating
Multiculturalism on the Eastside during the 1950s.," American Quarterly 56 (2004).

155
neighborhoods are spontaneously moving to protect their property values and calling
upon [a local realtor] to assist them.”
54
In southern Los Angeles County, white
workers who accepted integrated workplaces fought vigorously to protect the
homogeneity of their working class suburbs.
55
It was, as Robert Self explains
“segregation’s consequence: racism rationalized as economic calculation.”
56

Collectively, these investments in the endowment of whiteness forged a racial
geography in California as segregated and asymmetrical as almost any region in the
country. In 1960, 82 percent of the nearly 35,000 Black residents of San Diego lived
in only 10 of the city’s 123 Census tracts. The San Francisco East Bay suburb of
Orinda Village reported only four nonwhite households out of a total of 1,600.
According to a report by the Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations, between
1950 and 1960 of the 637,399 units constructed in the County, “at best only 2.2
percent were available to minority groups.” The report continued, “It is indeed a
startling fact that in the ten-year period ending in April 1960, only 1,437 additional
Negro citizens or .87 percent have found residences outside of the Central District of
Los Angeles, and in San Pedro, Venice and Pacoima.”
57

54
Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. 104.
55
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven : Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-
1965.
56
Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. 160.
57
“Population and Housing in Los Angeles County: A Study in the Growth of Residential
Segregation” published by the Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations, March, 1963 in Box 2,
Folder 1 “California: Housing 1959-1964,” DLC.

156
Mid-Century Challenges to Race Restrictions
Though racial segregation in California remained stark through the 1960s,
defending and preserving these patterns proved increasingly difficult. The national
office of the NAACP challenged the FHA’s use of “public tax money to restrict,
instead of extend opportunities [or] to enforce patterns of racial segregation”
eventually ending the federal government’s subsidies for segregated housing.
58

Richmond tenants launched a rent strike in 1945 to contest the segregation schemes
of the Richmond Housing Authority, and a San Francisco lawsuit resulted in a court
order to build public housing units in white neighborhoods that had excluded them.
59

In 1946, the Los Angeles chapter of the Civil Rights Congress formed an
anti-covenant coalition asking property owners to sign “anti-restrictive covenants”
which would invalidate any standing race restrictions. West Coast NAACP attorneys
including Frank Williams and Loren Miller played central roles in several cases
which led to the Supreme Court rulings finally outlawing covenants. Throughout the
1950s, local chapters of the organization litigated or demonstrated against racial
segregation in both public housing and on military installations.
60
After the passage
of two civil rights laws by the state legislature in 1959, realtors faced a host of newly
affirmed restrictions which further undermined the legal right to overtly

58
Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. 353.
59
Lawrence B. De Graaf and Quintard Taylor, "African Americans in California, California in
African American History," in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, ed. Lawrence B.
De Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Seattle, WA, 2001), 34.
60
See as examples folder 38: “Program Files, Herlong, CA” NAACP West Coast Region Papers,
Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley (hereafter NAACP-UCB).

157
discriminate.
61

By the early 1960s this activism grew more forceful. NAACP member E.J.
Franklin told a gathering of more than 1,100 civil rights supporters at Beverly Hills
High School auditorium in 1963: “Everybody is upset about conditions in
Mississippi and Birmingham; but they should be upset about conditions in Los
Angeles.” Another NAACP leader explained: “There is more racial residential
segregation in Los Angeles than in any major Southern city in the United States. Los
Angeles is more racially segregated in housing than all of the large Northern cities
with the exception of Chicago and Cleveland.”
62
CORE chapters in San Francisco,
Berkeley, Oakland and Los Angeles increasingly used direct action tactics such as
sit-ins at segregated subdivisions and “window shopping days” to test whether
realtors showed properties for sale on a non-discriminatory basis. Organizations like
the ACLU provided legal support to protesters and took on individual cases of
discrimination.
63

In addition, while sporadic violence continued to visit Black, Asian
Americana and Mexican American homeowners who brought property in all white
neighborhoods, such vigilantism was increasingly met with a visible counter
response, and by the late 1950s, sheriff’s deputies dispatched to these conflicts were

61
For example, Attorney General Stanley Mosk issued a ruling in late 1962 that local realty boards
could not exclude applicants solely on the basis of race. Mosk also found that the 1959 Unruh Act,
which banned discrimination in places of business, also applied to real estate brokers. See copies of
Mosk’s opinions in ACLU UCLA Box 30, Folder 3: “Housing and land ownership.”
62
“Negroes Raise Civil Rights War Chant in Westside Mass Meeting.” Westwood Hills Citizen, July
11, 1963 in Box 111, Folder 7: “Racial Discrimination—housing, real estate, schools,” ACLU-UCLA.
63
For examples of the ACLU’s role, see in Box 111, Folder 7: “Racial Discrimination—housing, real
estate, schools,” ACLU-UCLA.

158
more likely to disperse protesters then abet their efforts.
64
Several accounts suggest
that these new homeowners almost always found white allies willing to ease their
transition, and that the initial opposition they met often faded. The sustained protests
and vigilantism which met desegregation efforts in Northern cities such as Detroit
and Chicago during this period occurred far less frequently in California after the
war.
65

Historian Charlotte Brooks describes the uproar and denunciations heard
across the state in 1952 when residents of an all-white South San Francisco
subdivision voted in an unofficial referendum to reject the attempt of a Chinese
immigrant to purchase a house there.
66
Brooks suggests that growing geopolitical
concerns over Communist influence in Asia in the 1950s made such overt acts of
discrimination against Asian Americans in particular increasingly unpopular. A 1955
report on “Racial Attitudes in Neighborhoods in-filtrated by non-whites” based on
interviews with 549 white residents in 35 Bay Area neighborhoods concluded that it
“would appear to indicate that for the large majority of white residents, the presence
of Negro or Oriental neighbors was not prominent in their respective thinking about

64
See for example various news articles about vigilante violence in Box 15, Folder 5, CRC-SCL.
65
On Chicago and Detroit see Hirsch, "Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumball Park,
Chicago, 1953-1966.", Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis. Outbreaks of violence did occur
sporadically; vigilantes set fire to a Fontana home in 1945, killing Los Angles civil rights activist
O’Day Short and his family. But such episodes occurred less and less frequently in the aftermath of
the war. See Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York, 1990).
399-400.
66
The potential homebuyer, Sing Shen had proposed the referendum to neighborhood residents,
believing that “racism could not be the majority sentiment in a democracy.” Charlotte Brooks, "Sing
Sheng vs. Southwood: Residential Integration in Cold War California," Pacific Historical Review 73
(2004): 463.

159
the advantages and disadvantages of their respective neighborhoods.”
67
Groups such
as the Palo Alto Fair Play Council emerged to work with individual homeowners and
sympathetic realtors to find housing for middle-class Black, Asian American and
Mexican American home seekers and allay opposition among existing residents. The
stark segregation that still existed in 1960 reminds us that these efforts were
piecemeal at best, but they challenge the claim that these neighborhoods unvaryingly
resisted desegregation.
Perhaps the most important force for desegregation was the growing numbers
of Mexican Americans, Asian Americans and African Americans who had adequate
income and savings to purchase more valuable homes in white communities, some
with the assistance of VA loans. From this perspective, housing desegregation was a
practical imperative, not just a moral one: The housing stock to which most non-
white Californians were confined, much of it old and dilapidated, could not meet the
enormous demand.
68
Even lower wage workers fueled these transformations.
Thousands of Mexican American families across Los Angeles County refused to
remain in segregated colonias and company housing set up by citrus growers and
other industries and permanently settled across East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel

67 Bay Area Real Estate Report “A Study of Racial Attitudes in Neighborhoods in-filtrated by non-
whites” Second Quarter 1955, p. 127. In Folder “Proposition 14,” Institute for Governmental Studies,
University of California, Berkeley (hereafter IGS).
68
A 1963 study suggested that 6.7% of whites lived in dilapidated housing, 26.1% of African
Americans and Asian Americans, and 31.5% of the Spanish surname population lived in dilapidated
housing. “Population and Housing in Los Angeles County: A Study in the Growth of Residential
Segregation” published by the Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations, March, 1963 inBox 2,
Folder 1 “California: Housing 1959-1964.” DLC.

160
Valley.
69

In sum, by the late 1950s, many of the forces which had secured the
maintenance of a racially segregated landscape—federal and state policies and legal
rulings endorsing segregation, a tacit acceptance of racial violence and intimidation,
and economic constraints facing people of color—were in dramatic decline. As a
result, the tenets of “racial nationalism”—the admissible belief that the bounties and
benefits of citizenship could defensibly be allocated by racial kinship—became
increasingly marginalized within California political discourse. In California, it
would be a competing tradition of “civic nationalism”—a liberal creed conferring
rights and privileges without regard to religion, gender, race, or national origin—that
would increasingly assess and adjudicate competing claims for authority and
power.
70

The Emergence of “Fair Housing” Legislation
As Chapter 2 explains, it was against this backdrop in 1958 that the coalition
anchored by civil rights organizations, labor unions, and the recently formed
California Democratic Council (CDC) brought a Democratic majority in the state
legislature and helped Edmund “Pat” Brown upset conservative Republican Senator
Joseph Knowland for governor. Within three years, with the support of Brown,
Inglewood Assemblyman Jesse Unruh, and under the leadership of African

69
Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-
1970. 69, Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los
Angeles, 1900-1945. 80-82.
70
Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century.

161
American legislators Augustus Hawkins and William Byron Rumford, the state
passed a series of important civil rights bills. A 1959 measure outlawed
discrimination in employment and labor union membership by race, religion,
national origin, color or ancestry, and created a state Fair Employment Practices
Commission (FEPC) to administer the law. In the same legislative session,
lawmakers passed the Hawkins Act to prohibit discrimination in public housing
(including housing financed or insured by a government loan) and urban renewal
projects, and the Unruh Act, which banned discrimination in all business
establishments. Court rulings subsequently held that real estate agents, tract
developers, and most apartment owners were also included under the Unruh Act.
71

While this legislation brought a large proportion of the housing market under
the coverage of anti-discrimination law, they did not provide an enforcement
mechanism. An aggrieved buyer or renter was still required to file a legal claim
(either a civil suit or a complaint to the district attorney) in order to obtain relief--a
lengthy and costly process. (The McClellan case cited in the beginning of this
chapter was eventually resolved through such a lawsuit, which took nearly a year to
adjudicate). The standard “open housing” legislation adopted in other states called
for an administrative process to resolve complaints of discrimination.
72
In 1963,
Assemblyman Rumford introduced A.B. 1240, the “Fair Housing Bill.” This
legislation, which covered private housing financed by public sources (such as VA

71
Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and Proposition 14.
10.
72
Legislation to that end sponsored by Assemblyman Hawkins died in a Senate committee during the
1961 legislative session. See Ibid.

162
and FHA loans) and non-publicly assisted housing comprised of five or more units.
The legislation empowered the four-year-old FEPC to receive, investigate and
adjudicate complaints of discrimination.
Rumford’s bill faced an uncertain fate as the legislature prepared to adjourn
in June 1963. But Rumford, Governor Brown, and Assembly Speaker Unruh lobbied
undecided legislators vigorously while CORE began a sit-in in the Capital Rotunda.
Minutes before the legislature was to adjourn for the summer and over the vociferous
objections of several apartment owners and the CREA (which argued that no housing
discrimination existed in California), lawmakers adopted A.B. 1240 and Governor
Brown signed the Rumford Act into law.
73
No swell of individual home owners
traveled to Sacramento to lobby against the bill, and newspaper coverage of the
debate suggested little “public outcry” towards the legislation at this time.
74

With the passage of the Rumford Act, California joined Massachusetts,
Washington, Colorado and New Jersey among the 14 states in the postwar period to
pass some version of “open housing” legislation enforced by an administrative
body.
75
Like other states, California’s open housing protections offered modest
remedies to the crisis facing the hundreds of thousands of people excluded from the

73
The defeat of a similar ordinance in Berkeley in early 1963 made some legislators, especially
Unruh, cautious about pursuing the Rumford Bill. But Rumford and others argued that backing down
in reaction to the narrow Berkeley defeat would only encourage the political intervention of the
CREA, which lobbied against the Berkeley measure. But Rumford also opposed the C.O.R.E. sit-in,
fearing it would alienate moderate legislators. Lawrence Crouchett, William Byron Rumford: The Life
and Public Services of a California Legislator (El Cerrito, CA, 1984). 64-71.
74
It is important to note that of 31 anti-discrimination bills introduced in the legislature that year, only
one (which provided for a pilot program for “culturally disadvantaged pupils”) other than Rumford
was signed into law. That is, it would be inaccurate to say that Rumford represented a vast upsurge in
civil rights legislation during this period. See California Real Estate Magazine, August, 1963, 8.
75
Twelve cities nationally also had local open housing ordinances on the books Los Angeles Times,
September 20 1964

163
vast majority of the state’s housing market. Most of the housing included in the Act
was already covered by the Hawkins and Unruh legislation or by a November, 1962
Executive Order issued by President Kennedy.
76
The primary change brought about
by the Rumford Act was to vest adjudication and enforcement powers with the
FEPC. Complainants seeking redress under Rumford had to file their grievance with
the FEPC, wait for an investigation to occur, and then participate in a voluntary
conciliation process. If the case was still unresolved, the FEPC could convene a
formal hearing and, if it sustained the complaint, order the homeowner or manager to
rent or sell the property in question or a comparable accommodation to the
complainant. If such a remedy was not available, a $500 fine could be imposed, but
no criminal charges could be filed.
It is also important to note that the Rumford Act exempted properties
consisting of four or fewer units, and only covered single family houses that were
“owner-occupied” and financed by a government loan. In other words, a vacant or
rented single family home (e.g. an investment property) was exempted from the
Rumford Act’s coverage even if it was publicly financed; duplexes, triplexes, and
fourplexes were exempted all together. One estimate suggested that the Rumford Act
covered only about twenty-five percent of the nearly 3.8 million single family homes
in the state, and less than five percent of the 857,000 duplexes, triplexes, and
fourplexes. Other than vesting authority with the FEPC, its primary impact was to

76
The Kennedy Order of November 20, 1962 covered all FHA and VA financed mortgages made
after that date, as well as all public housing and urban renewal projects. See John Denton, Apartheid
American Style (Berkeley, CA, 1967). 9.

164
extend coverage to 99 percent of the 738,000 apartment buildings of five units or
more. In other words, most individual home owners remained entirely unaffected by
the provisions of the Rumford Act; none of their “rights” were abridged by its
provisions. These limitations are important to keep in mind in evaluating the realtors’
(and some scholars’) subsequent claims that support for Proposition 14 represented a
grassroots response by a beleaguered electorate frustrated with the steady erosion of
their rights.
77
At least as a policy measure (rather than as a political symbol) there is
scant evidence to regard the Rumford Act as “an overreaching law” which
demonstrated that “liberalism had lost its sense of moderation.”
78

In addition, the Rumford Act dealt with discrimination in renting and sales
only; it did not provide any assistance or relief for the many Californians who could
not afford housing outside of segregated neighborhoods. Thus, the Act would
primarily benefit middle-income renters and buyers who could afford such housing.
To be sure, open housing legislation such as Rumford was critical because it further
signaled the state would no longer sanction or enforce racial discrimination in
housing and because it increased housing options for many middle income earners.
79

But as its proponents would later never tire of repeating, the Act was not intended to
bring about widespread integration or solve the endemic housing crisis facing so
many Californians.

77
Howard Lewis, "Analysis of Proposition 14: The CREA Amendment," (Palo Alto, CA, 1964), 22.
Lewis was a CREA member opposed to Proposition 14, and self-published a lucid analysis of the
ballot measure’s contradictions.
78
Hayward, "Ronald Reagan and the Transformation of Modern California," 240.
79
Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and Proposition 14.
Rumford’s original bill would have applied to all individual homeowners and included modest
criminal penalties for violators, but those provisions were removed during negotiations.

165

Bringing the “Forced Housing” Question to the Ballot
Because of the success of open housing legislation at the state level, the
CREA, as well as the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) had
largely abandoned their efforts to defend the legality of racially restrictive covenants,
and focused their attention instead on reversing the tide of these laws. Since the 1948
Shelley decision overturning restrictive covenants, every other strategy pursued by
realty groups--including the proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution, corporate
contract agreements and neighborhood protective associations, and disciplining
realtors who broke informal restrictions--failed to win significant public support or
pass legal muster. The NAREB concluded that defeating fair housing laws in
California--the nation’s most populous state, and one which often regarded itself as
the antithesis of the Jim Crow South-- could reverse the national proliferation of
open housing laws.
80

But while the NAREB, the CREA and the California Apartment Owners’
Association were resolutely committed to taking the Rumford Act off the books, they
faced a vexing tactical dilemma. In the Democratic takeover of 1958, which included
Brown’s election and the defeat of an anti-union “right-to-work” initiative,
conservatives were portrayed as atavistic extremists who were out of touch with the

80
The NAREB’s position is discussed in a post-election analysis of Proposition 14 written by Edward
Rutledge in Box 115, Folder “CAP 14: Housing Initiative” ACLU-UCLA. Local referendums or
initiatives opposing anti-discrimination measures were also being supported by the NAREB in
Berkeley in 1963 and in Detroit and Seattle in 1964, but all observers agreed that California would be
a singularly important arena for this debate.

166
state’s liberal and forward looking electorate. When Brown won re-election in 1962
against Richard Nixon, he candidly expressed his support for additional civil rights
legislation, including open housing measures, with little apparent “backlash” from
voters. Indeed, a California Poll taken in 1964 found “civil rights and the race
problem” to be the most important issue in the presidential election.
81

Nationally, the conflict over civil rights in the South became increasingly
depicted as a moral struggle between the forces of progressive tolerance and those of
anachronistic bigotry, the last frontier in the conflict between civic and racial
nationalism. Media accounts continued to paint right-wing formations like the Birch
Society with a fanatical brush, and while conservatives were building sophisticated
local organizations in communities such as Pasadena and Orange County, they had
limited influence over statewide politics. Even among these California conservatives,
few credible voices publicly embraced a racially exclusionary vision. California’s
version of “civic nationalism,” in which economic, social and political privileges
derived from hard work and loyal citizenship rather than racial, ethnic or religious
kinship was increasingly becoming the authoritative framework within which all
legitimate and admissible political claims could be made.
82

81
Cited in Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and
Proposition 14. 58. Wolfinger and Greenstein cite a California Poll in which only 13 percent of the
respondents replied that they would move if “colored people came to live next door” to suggest that
racial prejudice was not particularly acute among Californians, a questionable proposition. See
Raymond Wolfinger and Fred Greenstein, "The Repeal of Fair Housing in California: An Analysis of
Referendum Voting," The American Political Science Review 62 (September, 1968): 754.. On the
limitations of survey questions such as these to assess opinions and attitudes around race, see Donald
R. Kinder and Lynn Sanders, Divided By Color (1996).
82
On Brown’s ascension, see both Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown,
Schuparra, Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the California Conservative Movement, 1945-1966.

167
To roll-back the Rumford Act would require the realtors to steer clear of any
language, symbols or inferences which associated their opposition to open housing
with the pro-segregationist images of the Birch Society and figures like George
Wallace. At the same time, it was a policy and practice of racial exclusion that they
specifically sought to protect; the CREA’s campaign would be built on complex and
unstable political terrain.
The CREA decided to withhold its support from a smaller group which had
begun collecting signatures for a referendum initiative that would repeal the
Rumford Act. The referendum effort, led by a group based in Berkeley, fell 60,000
signatures short of qualifying for the ballot, suggesting grassroots opposition to the
open housing legislation was not immediately guaranteed.
83
As the CREA would
later explain, it did not support this effort because a referendum would not prevent
the legislature from enacting similar laws in the future, nor would it preclude county
and local governments from adopting their own open housing measures.
84
Instead,
as the referendum effort floundered, the CREA and the California Apartment
Owners Association, with the support of the NAREB, met to draft a more sweeping
and permanent initiative to amend the state constitution.
85
As early as March 1963,
three months before the Rumford Act was adopted, CREA president L.H. Wilson
had proposed that a ballot initiative be placed before voters which incorporated the

83
“Brown Calls on Aides to Save Housing Act,” Los Angeles Times, Oct 29, 1963.
84
Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and Proposition 14.
41.
85
The organizing committee was originally to be called “Americans Against Forced Housing” before
adopting the moniker CHP, again revealing how cautious the realtors were of associating their effort
too explicitly with rhetoric that could be identified as openly racist. See California Real Estate
Magazine, November 1963.

168
Association’s newly adapted “Property Owners Bill of Rights;” soon after, at least 20
realty boards took out full page ads of this Bill of Rights in their local newspapers.
86

Calling itself the “Committee for Home Protection,” the CREA ultimately drafted an
initiative which adopted much of the language in this document. Concise and
cleverly crafted, it made no mention of race. Its operative first paragraph instead
focused on the seemingly transparent and fundamental notion of property rights:

Neither the State nor any subdivision or agency thereof shall deny, limit or
abridge, directly or indirectly, the right of any person, who is willing or
desires to sell, lease or rent any part or all of his real property, to decline to
sell, lease or rent such property to such person or persons as he, in his
absolute discretion, chooses.
87

While the initiative would come to be identified as a straightforward “repeal”
of the Rumford Act, the constitutional amendment actually eviscerated most (but not
all) of Rumford’s provisions, and also invalidated components of the Unruh and
Hawkins Acts banning discrimination in public housing, apartment rentals, and
housing construction. As an analysis authored by the deans of UCLA, USC and UC
Berkeley’s law schools would soon conclude, the measure “would establish

86
California Real Estate Magazine, May, 1963, p. 19. Wilson publicly introduced the “Property
Owners Bill of Rights” at a March, 1963 speech to the CREA Board of Directors entitled The New
“Forgotten Man” which warned “Militant minorities have organized and vocalized equal rights until
“equal rights” has almost become “special privileges” and this forgotten man lies neglected…The
pendulum has swung too far! His Defenders have been silent too long.” It is important to note that this
language, which rehearses the types of appeals made by George Wallace in his presidential bids as the
epitome of a “backlash” sensibility, was rarely emphasized in the subsequent Proposition 14
campaign. Appeals to defend the “forgotten man” were quickly replaced by defenses of “property
rights.” See California Real Estate Magazine, April 1963, p. 5, 24. A 1965 assessment of the
Proposition 14 debate written by the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing
suggested that CREA had been planning the strategy for an initiative amendment for several years.
87
Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and Proposition 14.
97.

169
constitutional immunity for those who discriminate in the sale or rental of their
property and would exempt them from present and future fair housing laws.”
88

The Realtors’ Campaign
The CREA quickly retained a campaign management and public relations
consultants (funded in part by a $10 assessment paid by member realtors), but
decided to forgo the customary practice of retaining paid signature gatherers. The
group instead mobilized its membership of nearly 45,000 members, organized into
171 local realty boards, to the immense task of gathering at least a half-million
signatures within 150 days.
89
A February 20, 1964 advertisement in the Oakland
Tribune seeking volunteers to circulate petitions revealed the careful construction of
the issue the realtors intended to bring before voters:

88
The legal analysis is cited from “A Legal Opinion on Prop 14 and a Description of Its Effects on the
Constitution and the Laws of the State of California” n.d. in Box 29, Folder 1, California Democratic
Council Papers, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research (hereafter CDC-SCL).
Interestingly, Proposition 14 did not exempt the realtors themselves from any anti-discrimination
measures (except if they were selling or renting their own houses). It did however, exempt both
apartment owners and developers of tracts from the Unruh Act of 1959 and the Rumford Act of 1963,
exempt those who owned and occupied government housing from the Rumford Act, and prevented the
passage of any other city, county, or state laws that might prohibit racial discrimination by sellers and
renters. See Lewis, "Analysis of Proposition 14: The CREA Amendment," 5.
89 The CREA contracted with Steven Wells to manage the campaign. Wells handled the most
conservative ballot initiatives and candidates in California during this time, including the 1958
“Right-to-Work” initiative. California Real Estate Magazine, January 1964. Rosenbaum, "Legislative
Participation in California Direct Legislation, 1940-1960". One of the main campaign spokespersons
for the CHP, William Shearers, was a regular contributor to the White Citizens Council of America.
See NAACP flyer in Folder 61, Box 105, NAACP-UCB. The reference to the assessment of realtors is
from Memo from Bill Becker to Gov Brown Nov 6 1963, in Carton 1, CFCU.

170
“RUMFORD ACT FORCED HOUSING”
COMMITTEE FOR HOME PROTECTION

In September 1963, the Rumford Act became state Law. Heretofore, a man’s
home was his castle. The Rumford Act makes a man’s home subject to the
whims of a politically appointed State Board…The politically appointed
Commission can FORCE you to sell or rent your home to an individual NOT
OF YOUR CHOICE. Most people believe that a man has the right to sell,
rent or lease his property to whomever he wishes; consequently they
OPPOSE the Rumford Act…VOLUNTEERS NEEDED TO CIRCULATE
PETITIONS…
90

Neighborhood realtors, joined by committed political and religious
conservative activists, mobilized an enormous grassroots operation, delivering and
collecting petitions from thousands of volunteers through designated “area
captains.”
91
Realty offices served as local headquarters for canvassing efforts in both
residential neighborhoods and retail districts, particularly during the holiday
shopping season.
92
By late March, the Committee for Home Protection, now headed
by former CREA president L.H. Wilson, submitted 633,206 valid signatures to
Secretary of State Frank Jordon, reportedly the largest number ever certified for an
initiative measure.
93

The narratives in clear sight in the Tribune advertisement would be rehearsed
throughout an intensely fought campaign during the next ten months. The

90
Cited in Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and
Proposition 14. 49.
91
The reference to “area captains” who helped organize petition collections comes from an article in
the “Realtor’s News” n.d. “Rumford” folder, Box 17 in Marie Koenig Papers, The Huntington
Library, (hereafter MKP).
92
See one such description of signature gathering efforts in “4,000 sign realtors’ petitions” Riverside
Enterprise, December 14, 1963 in Box 111, Folder 7: “Racial Discrimination—housing, real estate,
schools,” ACLU-UCLA.
93
The CREA estimated that it collected nearly one million signatures in total, including those
gathered for a supplemental filing. See California Real Estate Magazine March, 1964, p. 5.

171
“Committee for Home Protection” identity (first developed by political consultants
in the 1948 campaign against public housing) continued to draw upon a powerful
Cold War narrative of home and civilian defense against a menacing outsider—“the
home as a man’s castle” evoking threats to a collective domestic security. The
campaign materials, news accounts and other public discourse developed by the CHP
assiduously avoided most direct mentions of race, civil rights, or segregation. In their
published communications, no direct claims were ever made that the Rumford Act
would drive down property values, lead to racial strife, or would sacrifice any natural
orders of segregation—arguments which circulated widely in open housing conflicts
in other parts of the country at the same time.
94
Few supporters of Proposition 14
would defend the tenets of racial nationalism explicitly.
Instead, Proposition 14 was defended largely within the creedal language of
civic nationalism and in defense of the inalienable privileges that were fundamental
to this vision. In their campaign materials, public talking points, organized letters to
newspaper editors, and fundraising appeals, Proposition 14 supporters steeped their
arguments in the rhetoric of egalitarianism and even anti-racism. Incorporating
dimensions of emergent liberal civil rights discourse, they portrayed racial
discrimination as a regretful but individually rooted problem of morality and
tolerance, one the state could or should do little to address.

94
At one point, Dr Nolan Frizzle, president of the California Republican Assembly was quoted as
saying that “the essence of freedom is the right to discriminate.” Such candid expressions, however,
rarely appeared in official campaign literature of statements of the CHP and Frizzle was quickly
condemned by other Prop 14 supporters. See Schuparra, Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the
California Conservative Movement, 1945-1966. 105.

172
The CREA had begun to deploy the language of tolerance and anti-
discrimination in early 1963. As it was lobbying vigorously to defeat the Rumford
Act and other civil rights legislation, the CREA Board of Directors formed an “Equal
Rights Committee” to “inform and assist members of the Association in their
understanding and responsibility in giving equal service to all clients.” The CREA
also voted to amend it’s constitution to include language prohibiting member boards
from imposing “any limitation upon membership because of race, color, creed or
national origin” and adopted new guidelines prohibiting realtors from promoting
panic-selling or “blockbusting.”
95
Thus, a year before the public battle over
Proposition 14 had begun, the realtors had already incorporated some of the rights
based rhetoric of the early civil rights movement. While the realtors actively
publicized the creation of their new Equal Rights Committee in various public
forums, there is little evidence to suggest the Committee affected the actual practices
of any local realty board.
96
But it did allow the realtors to claim the high ground of
racial innocence in their own campaign rhetoric. CHP chair and former CREA
president LH Wilson declared in a February campaign debate:

95
“Director’s Minutes” California Real Estate Magazine, August 1963, p. 16, 18.
96
For example, the head of the Equal Rights Committee, Clare Short, gave several speeches at
housing conferences announcing the CREA’s new equal rights initiatives. See a copy of a speech by
Short in Box 127, Folder: “CAP 14” ACLU-UCLA. Short was a member of an all white realty board
in the San Fernando Valley that had succeeded in confining nearly all Black and Mexican American
residents to a handful of neighborhoods in the entire Valley. See
Valley Times series “Valley Housing: Integration Blueprint?” February 28-March 6, 1963 in Box 12,
Folder 7: “CORE (3 of 4)” DLC.

173
Our association, the CREA is open to all races and all religions. Our
constitution requires that no member board shall impose any limitation
upon membership because of race, color, creed or national origin. We are
not a bunch of ogres despite what the Governor says. Our real estate board
throughout California has many Negro members. We have just taken 16
colored brokers in the LA region in 1963. Does that sound like
discrimination? We are not anti anybody. We will sell any property
anywhere to anybody.
97

The Campaign for Proposition 14
A pro-14 editorial in the Los Angeles Times, which had supported earlier
desegregation measures in employment and education, articulated the logics
espoused by the CREA clearly:
Artificial laws designed to hasten the process of social, as distinct from
civil, justice can only exacerbate the situation—and, in the opinion of The
Times, defeat their very purpose. Discrimination will disappear only when
human prejudice succumbs to human decency…The philosophical fallacy
of the Rumford Act, unhappily, lies in seeking to correct such a social evil
while simultaneously destroying what we deem a basic right in a free
society…The initiative, by removing such force and restoring a basic right
equally to all citizens, should relieve tensions between ethnic groups,
leaving human decency and good will as powerful allies in overcoming
prejudice.
98

A letter to the editor endorsing the Times’ position evinced a similar distinction
between “public” and “private” discrimination, while endorsing the ideals of social
equality:

97
Speech by LH Wilson at the “Changing Peninsula Forum, Part III” February 20, 1964. In
“Proposition 14 Campaign Materials” IGS.. The realtors to whom Wilson was referring were actually
admitted to an auxiliary board that did not have access to the MLS listings. In addition, this offer was
only made after the proposal of forming a separate segregated realty board was rejected by the Black
realtors.
98
“Decision on Housing Initiative” Reprinted in Los Angeles Times Feb. 2, 1964. The majority of
major daily newspapers in Northern California came out against then initiative. See Casstevens,
Politics, Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and Proposition 14.

174
Pray God that all our different ethnic groups will exercise patience and
tolerance as work is continued towards curing our social problems. This
can be done without laws or government interference. Your
recommendation of equality in education and employment will guarantee
the closing of existing social gaps as it has in the past. Let all people of
good will work towards this goal.
99

Situating Proposition 14 in the spirit of an inclusionary Americanism built
upon freedom and opportunity over exclusion and hierarchy, the CREA asserted in
its introduction to the “Property Owners Bill of Rights” that:
Forty million immigrants gave up much to come to this land, seeking
something promised here---and only here…They came for the promise of
security—the promise of freedom—for the precious right to live as free
men with equal opportunity for all….In July of 1868, a new guarantee of
freedom was ratified; Its purpose was to guard against human slavery. Its
guarantees were for equal protection of all…
100

References to the Fourteenth Amendment and its promises of equal
protection under the law were common in CHP campaign materials. The argument
updated the logic of the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v Ferguson decision, which
held “separate but equal” segregation policies to be legal because the state itself
remained putatively “colorblind” while individuals retained their private “freedoms
of association.”
101
But the CHP deployed this narrative as commensurate with, rather
then in opposition to, a broader affirmation of state protected “civil rights” and the
moral legitimacy of racial integration.
Another central element of this discourse emphasized that Proposition 14

99
Los Angeles Times Feb. 2, 1964
100
“Property Owners Bill of Rights” Pamphlet published by CREA in Box 17, Folder: “Rumford”
MKP.
101
See Kimberlee Williams Crenshaw, "Color Blindness, History, and the Law," in The House that
Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York, NY, 1997), Gotanda, "A Critique of "Our
Constitution is Color-Blind"."

175
would restore a divine, eternal, preternatural “property right”--held to be the bedrock
of American freedom—which the Rumford Act had abridged. The headline of a
typical CHP pamphlet announced “OWNERS! TENANTS! NEIGHBORS! GET
BACK YOUR RIGHTS! VOTE “YES” ON PROPOSITION 14.”
102
At times, this
rhetoric drew from a long-standing “free labor ideology.” Long Beach realtor Reg
Dupuy explained in a Realtor News article that the “Founding Fathers realized in
creating our Constitution what some politicians today seem to have forgotten—
which is that a man without property rights—without the right of the product of his
own labor---is not a free man.”
103

At other times, property rights were framed as a “freedom of choice” that the
heavy hand of the state was determined to seize. Mobilizing Cold War anxieties over
a “creeping socialism,” another “Yes on 14” pamphlet titled “That Long, Long Arm
of the Law” warned that: “The Rumford Forced Housing Act’s police arm is long
and strong. It can reach almost any Californian—almost anyone who owns or rents a
place to live. Owner. Tenant. Yes, and neighbor, too!”
104
The pro-14 ballot
argument stated bluntly:
The Rumford Act establishes a new principle in our law -- that
State appointed bureaucrats may force you, over your objections,
to deal concerning your own property with the person they
choose. This amounts to seizure of private property.
105

102
Pamphlet in Folder: “Rumford,” Box 17, MKP
103
Realtor News, Folder: “Rumford,” Box 17, MKP.
104
‘Yes on 14’ Pamphlet, Folder: “Rumford,” Box 17, MKP.
105
Ballot argument cited from Hastings Law Library, California Ballot Initiatives Database.
Downloaded April 1,2005 from http://traynor.uchastings.edu/cgi-bin/starfinder/10375/calprop.txt

176
Importantly, the enemy was not represented as agitating civil rights
organizations and almost never as people of color per se, but as a government
controlled by an unaccountable cadre of elite white liberals determined to dispossess
a silent majority. A broadside by a CHP affiliate based in San Gabriel explained that
“the use of the term ‘fair housing’ and the claim that it is a ‘civil rights’ issue, is an
attempt to sugar-coat a bitter pill by angle-playing, vote seeking politicians. Remove
the sweetness and slogans and you have another government encroachment on your
freedom as an individual.”
106

Similarly, a letter to the editor written by a Northridge home owner explained
that “transactions without racial prejudice were taking place long before” the
Rumford Act passed. The writer declared that Black and white homeowners alike
were “all being discriminated against” by the governor:
What an insult to our intelligence that [Pat Brown] should now think we
have become too stupid to know what is best concerning our property! Is
there an ulterior motive?... Let’s not be intimidated further by such
professional politicians!
107

Reacting to Governor Brown’s public appeals for voters not to sign the
initiative petition, another realtor explained that the “opposition has begun to
express itself…And I am not referring to the Civil Rights organizations as the
opposition but rather the political organizations and other groups that are opposing
this action. The insidious ‘Machine Politics’ methods that are planned and are
already being set into motion to prevent the people of this state from deciding the

106
Pamphlet produced by “CHP, San Gabriel, CA” in Folder: “Rumford,” Box 17, MKP
107
Letter written by “Trudy Schmidt, Northridge” titled “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, OPEN
FORUM,” ibid.

177
issue is something out of a story book.”
108

While the CHP carefully avoided explicit references to race during the
campaign, as another article in the Los Angeles Times put it: “Anyone who thinks
that [Proposition 14] doesn’t have anything to do with the racial issue just hasn’t
been paying attention.”
109
An NAACP lawsuit seeking to prevent the initiative from
qualifying for the ballot because it violated the Fourteenth Amendment captured the
issue clearly. In response to the argument advanced in the Proposition 14 statement
of purpose that the initiative would restore a constitutionally guaranteed right, an
NAACP attorney argued:
If the asserted right is already ‘constitutionally guaranteed’ the Legislature
could not take it away… The [initiative’s] statement of purpose is but a
disguised appeal to racial prejudice, because the only part of the right to
decline to sell or rent real property abridged by ‘recently enacted laws’ is
that based on race, color, creed or religion.
110

In other words, Proposition 14’s backers were in fact referring to a historically
specific racial right: The right of white people to discriminate against and exclude
people of color in general and Black people in particular. The rights and freedoms
voters were being exhorted to defend were not generic or abstract—they referenced
specific historic constructions and narratives recognizable to white voters even when
asserted in the language of individual rights and opportunities. In fact, restrictive
covenants, corporate agreements and homeowner associations in general abridged
the rights of individual property owners to sell, rent or make use of their dwellings

108
Realtor News, n.d., Folder: “Rumford,” Box 17, MKP
109
“Proposition 14: The Cases for and Against.” Los Angeles Times, Sep. 20, 1964.
110
Ibid

178
much more significantly than the Rumford Act. Moreover, covenants and corporate
agreements, which restrict and restrain free competition between buyers and sellers,
were hardly the pillars of an open and free market.
Critical race theorist Cheryl Harris explains how whiteness in this discourse
becomes understood as a form of property--“an aspect of identity” converted, or
reified “into an external object of property” itself dependent on an “absolute right to
exclude.”
111
The CHP sought to frame the Rumford Act as an assault on the very
foundations of this privilege, asserting that the right to discriminate by race was not
only rooted in “natural law” and guaranteed by the Constitution, but that it was a
cornerstone of American prosperity writ large. This assertion essentially restated the
argument Los Angeles realtors made in their 1948 bid to enshrine racial covenants in
the U.S. Constitution: that a central dimension of what made property valuable was
the prerogative of (white) property owners to exclude by race. Thus we see how the
logics of apartheid could be sustained even as the tenants of racial nationalism were
disavowed.
In addition, if proponents declared that Proposition 14 had nothing to do with
race or civil rights, they also clearly signaled that the Rumford Act would implicitly
and necessarily disposes white home owners. A CREA pamphlet explained: “The
Rumford Act, by granting one group of citizens’ rights for reason of race, color,
religion, national origin or ancestry, necessarily takes equivalent rights away from

111
Gotanda, "A Critique of "Our Constitution is Color-Blind".", Cheryl I. Harris, "Whiteness as
Property," Harvard Law Review 106 (June, 1993).

179
the rest of the citizenry. This is denying equal protection under the law.”
112
Another
realtor argued that “the issue is not one of property rights versus human rights, but of
the human rights of one person in the community versus the rights of another.”
113

References to the Rumford “Forced Housing” Act, racialized (that is, gave racial
meaning to) a prevailing anti-statist discourse: Innocent white families would be
compelled to cede their neighborhoods and homes, and the status and value they
embodied, to a menacing racial other. These references to the dispossession of “one
group” reveal that it was a specific “racial right” that was being asserted.
114
The
discourse again naturalized the assertion that such a racial right was foundational and
beyond any state action. As CHP spokesperson L.H. Wilson argued:
Forced housing is like forced religion. An apartment owner may be honestly
afraid of members of some particular race. Such a person should have the
right to be a conscientious objector to people who he fears. What right does
government have to force a man to fill his house with people that he fears?
115

The rhetoric of anti-elitism and anti-statism mobilized by the CHP was
similarly rooted in the idea that these racial rights were fundamental and to be
protected by the state. The attacks on the white leaders who publicly opposed
Proposition 14—including politicians like Pat Brown and Jesse Unruh but also
groups like the California Council of Churches and the ACLU—were especially
instructive. Part of these charges included the subtle implication that Brown and

112
CREA pamphlet in “Rumford” folder, Box 17, MKP
113
Realtor News, ibid
114
Initiative proponents did not claim, for example, that the Rumford Act could compel an elderly
couple to rent their adjoining in-law unit to a group of loud musicians. Proposition 14 only sought to
restore the right to discriminate by race, color, creed or national origin.
115
Speech by LH Wilson at the “Changing Peninsula Forum, Part III” February 20, 1964. In
“Proposition 14 Campaign Materials” IGS.

180
others were “race traitors” to working and middle class white communities because
of their insistence that combating racial subordination was an appropriate matter for
state intervention.
116
Their assertions had the effect of defining the expansion of state
welfare and redistribution functions during this period—in areas such as housing,
education and employment—as being antithetical to the interests of the white
property rights previously described. This “creeping socialism” discourse sought to
align white workers and voters with organized conservative interests resolutely
opposed to such attacks on corporate and elite authority.
In sum, while direct references to race by the CHP were minimal, the
exhortations to defend whiteness as property—which required a shared recognition
of this concept such that the call to “restore our rights” could register so
powerfully—were in plain sight. The CHP brought together a set of resonant,
historically specific narratives about race and property, the causes of racial
discrimination, domesticity, and the role of the state in service of the realtors’
instrumental goal of continuing to use racial segregation to structure and control
housing markets. It was a racializing process in that it drew upon a rich reservoir of
racial meaning in order to offer an explanatory framework through which to
apprehend the issue and to determine one’s interests and identity on specifically
racial terms.
117
Perhaps most importantly, the CHP forged an argument to naturalize
or rationalize broad forms of racialized inequality using the terms and ideas of the

116
On anti-statist conservative discourse in Orange County, see McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The
Origins of the New American Right.
117
On the concept of racialization, see Gotanda, "Comparative Racialization: Racial Profiling and the
Case of Wen Ho Lee.", Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States.

181
civic creed itself, suggesting that this vaulted social vision was perhaps not as “race-
neutral” as its champions claimed.

Challenges Facing the Proposition 14 Campaign
Even this renovated use of the civic creed by the CHP to defend the right to
discriminate initially won few adherents, even among recognized conservative
groups and opinion leaders, again attesting to the contradictory and indeterminate
character of public opinion towards this issue. Other than the realty boards, only a
handful of organizations and individuals formally supported Proposition 14. The
Republican State Central Committee refused its endorsement, as did George
Murphy, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. Caspar Weinberger, a former
GOP chairman of California and future Reagan cabinet member declared the issues
at stake were “settled 100 years ago by a civil war.”
118
Republican presidential
candidate and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller declared the Rumford Act to
be a “start in the right direction for civil rights and a step ahead for us all.”
119

Save for a few small churches and conservative political groups concentrated
in Southern California, the large majority of political, civic, and religious
organizations opposed the initiative.
120
The debate which unfolded within the Los
Angeles County Chamber of Commerce reveals the apprehension evinced by many

118 Cited in No on Prop 14 Alameda County Oct 12, 1964 press release in “Proposition 14 Campaign
Materials,” IGS, UC Berkeley.
119
“Rockefeller Backs Housing Law” Bay Area Independent February 1, 1964. Folder 1, Box 104,
NAACP Papers, UC Berkeley.
120
The California Republican Assembly and the Young Republicans, two volunteer organizations not
affiliated with the state Party, did endorse Proposition 14. Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race
Relations: California's Rumford Act and Proposition 14. 57.

182
traditionally conservative groups. Staunch and reliable foes of almost every piece of
civil rights legislation in the postwar period, the Chamber’s 12 member Board of
Directors took months to study and deliberate Proposition 14 during the summer of
1964. Some board members concurred with a subcommittee report which cited the
threat the Rumford Act posed to property values and property rights, the potential
negative impact it could have on the business climate, and the fallacy of government
intervention into the realm of personal sentiments.
But an equally strident opposition expressed serious concern that the Chamber
risked assuming a morally dubious position. As one board member explained, “The
right we are giving up is the right to discriminate on the basis of race. Is that a right
we want to bat for? I don’t think this is a thing we should do a lot of breast-beating
about. It is not a laudable right in the first place.” Another inquired, “I wonder if we
are not in favor of this type of legislation because we are men of property and men
who have not ever been discriminated against?” Other members cited opposition to
the initiative within their church, and worried that the Chamber would be going
against “the so-called official moral leaders in the community.” The group remained
deadlocked as the election approached, and Proposition 14 was the only measure
among the 17 statewide initiatives that appeared on the November ballot that the
Chamber did not endorse or oppose.
121

121 The Chamber supported the Los Angeles School Board’s efforts to resist school desegregation in
the early 1960s, and opposed many federal urban renewal, public housing, and anti-poverty programs.
When Proposition 14 qualified for the ballot, the Chamber, which routinely took well publicized
positions on all state and local initiatives, assigned its 60 member State and Local Government
Committee to investigate the measure and return to the Board of Directors with a recommendation.
After several months of inquiry, the Committee voted 50 to 5 to support Proposition 14, and

183
Even some CREA members sounded similar sentiments. At least ten local
realty boards, including those in San Francisco and Ventura, voted to oppose the
measure. Floyd Lowe, the president of the CREA in 1955 thanked the anti-14
campaign for “saving the Realtor’s profession from it’s leadership.” In Oakland, a
“League for Decency in Real Estate” was formed to persuade realtors to publish non-
discriminatory listings and oppose Proposition 14.
122
Howard Lewis, a member of
the CREA Board of Directors wrote that some Californians approved of Proposition
14 “because some of us want its false ideal to be established in our
Constitution…Some of us want to be told that what we have been doing to the
minorities in our community is right—is accepted—is morally good.” But the real
purpose of the measure, he insisted, was “to rewrite our moral ideals so we won’t
have to change our social practice!”
123
Earle Vaughan asked his fellow apartment
owners in an article in the trade magazine The Apartment Journal: “If all other types
of business can prosper under integration, why can’t we?”
124

Lacking elite endorsements, the Committee for Home Protection continued to
organize through its vast network of local realtors and neighborhood activists around
a framework of property owners’ rights and home protection. This grassroots
approach urged supporters to hold “coffee klatches” in their home, talk to their

submitted a lengthy report to the Board, which still could not reach an agreement. Chamber quotes
from “Stenographers Reports” May 7, 1964, and May 28, 1964. Box 16, Chamber of Commerce of
Los Angeles County Papers, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Also see minutes from
Board meetings 1/19/64-12/17/64, Box 35.
122
“News from CAP 14.” Newsletter #10, October 2, 1964. “Proposition 14 Campaign Materials.”
IGS.
123
Lewis, "Analysis of Proposition 14: The CREA Amendment," 16. Emphasis in original.
124 Earle Vaughan “Facing the Inevitable Changes” The Apartment Journal, October 1963. In Carton
1, CFCU.

184
friends and neighbors about the dangers the Rumford Act posed, and to monitor
news, radio and television coverage of the initiative and write letters to the editor
when appropriate. Apartment owners distributed pro-14 literature to their tenants
signed “Your Landlady.”
125
The importance of this outreach strategy cannot be
overstated. While the realtors were far outmatched in terms of political endorsements
and support from public figures, and while they did not significantly outspend their
opponents, they made use of a vast statewide network of realtors and neighborhood
organizations which remained in constant contact with voters.
The message the realtors brought to voters built on the same ethos and
discourse of “neighborhood defense” which they had used in the 1940s and 1950s to
organize restrictive community associations and oppose public housing, without
direct references to exclusion and property values. They framed the Rumford Act as
an unjustified, heavy-handed, and self-aggrandizing attempt on the part of white
elites to promote an idealistic and unnecessary scheme at the expense of innocent
homeowners. This discourse fashioned an identity position that would prove
enormously appealing to white voters: It retained the historic privileges of racial
exclusion and the benefits it yielded while disavowing any complicity in or
responsibility for prevailing inequalities, an unapologetic racial innocence.

125 Cited in Rutledge memo, p.8, Box 198, Folder: “Housing: Prop 14,” ACLU-UCLA.

185
Organizing the Campaign to Defeat Proposition 14

At the end of the legislative session in June, supporters of the Rumford Act
were well aware of the CREA’s intentions to launch an initiative campaign to roll
back open housing legislation and began to plot their own organizing strategy. That
fall, the influential California Democratic Council (CDC) declared defeat of the
“segregation initiative” to be the top civil rights priority for 1964.
126
The CDC
joined with the ACLU, the California Committee for Fair Practices (the statewide
civil rights formation headed by labor leader C.L. Dellums to pass the FEPC) and
various Democratic elected officials to prevent the measure from qualifying for the
ballot. The ACLU organized a group of realtors under the auspices of “California
Realtors for Fair Housing” in late 1963 to lobby the CREA leadership to abandon the
initiative.
127
Once the signature-collecting phase began in February 1964, Governor
Brown asked voters not to sign the CHP’s petitions, and activists circulated form
letters within their membership for people who had already signed the initiative to
withdraw their signature.
128
After the petitions were submitted and certified, the
NAACP appealed to the California Supreme Court to keep the measure off the
ballot, claiming it violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
The Court expressed reservations over the constitutionality of the initiative but
rejected the NAACP’s request.
129

126
Minutes from CDC statewide convention in Long Beach, CA, December, 1963 in Box 29, Folder
1, SCL-CDC.
127
From a memo by ‘California Realtors for Fair Housing’ in Folder: “CAP 14: Housing Initiative,”
Box 15, ACLU.
128
Sample letter, ibid.
129
Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and Proposition 14.

186
The groundswell of support the CHP engendered during the signature
gathering phase clearly alarmed Proposition 14’s opponents. After the Secretary of
State assigned the measure a ballot number in June, civil rights, labor, religious and
Democratic activists and elected officials formed Californians Against Proposition
14 (CAP 14) as an umbrella group to defeat the initiative. Richard Kline, the Deputy
Director of the Department of Motor Vehicles, resigned from the Brown
administration to run CAP 14, and Brown appointed a “blue ribbon” commission to
nominally lead the campaign.
130

Borrowing a strategy used successfully in the 1958 and 1962 statewide
elections, CAP 14 sought to portray Proposition 14 as a bigoted and extremist
measure designed to serve the narrow concerns of realtors over the best interest of all
Californians, essentially charging the CHP with resurrecting the ugly tenets of racial
nationalism. CAP 14 pamphlets framed the initiative as a contest between realtors,
Birch Society members and other racial extremists on the one hand and a broad
range of labor, civic, businesses, religious, civil rights, groups and elected officials—
the authentic protectors and representatives of the Californian populace--on the
other. By late August, CAP 14 had secured dozens of high profile commitments to
oppose the initiative, and its endorsement list read as a who’s who of California
public life. The list included every significant Democratic official in the state
(including Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty), the California Council of Churches and

52. Proposition 14 opponents feared that if a special June election were held (because of a proposed
school bond measure) they would not have adequate time to do public education against the measure.
Brown avoided calling the election in June for that reason.
130
Ibid. 62.

187
the liberal Protestant denominations it represented,
131
the American Jewish
Congress, the California Teachers Association, the California Labor Federation, the
State Bar of California, and every major African American, Asian American, and
Mexican American civil rights organization.
132
A “Performing Arts Division” of
CAP14 won the support of stars including Richard Burton, Lucille Ball, Dinah
Shore, Carl Reiner, Joan Baez, Nat King Cole, Burt Lancaster, Gregory Peck, James
Garner, and Elizabeth Taylor, among others. Taylor and Burton headlined a “Night
of Stars” fundraiser for CAP 14 in early October at the Hollywood Bowl; Baez and
Pete Seeger led a fundraising concert in the same venue a week earlier.
133

Finally, CAP 14 began proliferating dozens of identity and geographically-
based affinity groups to demonstrate the breath of opposition to the measure on
endless grounds: “Lawyers Against Proposition 14” challenged the constitutionality
of the measure; “Clergy Against Proposition 14” cited the moral contradictions;
“Orange County Realtors Against Proposition 14” suggested the measure would
destabilize housing markets; “Oriental-Americans Against Proposition 14” tied the
measure to the state’s history of Asian exclusion; “Doctors Against 14” warned of
the serious public health consequences of confining people to slums and ghettos;

131
The largest of these denominations were the United Church of Christ, the Methodist Church, and
the Presbyterian Church. For a description of the Council of Churches’ role in the national civil rights
movement, see James Findlay Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches
and the Black Freedom Struggle (Oxford, UK, 1993).
132
The Mexican American Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles endorsed Proposition 14, though
dissenting members charged procedural irregularities in the vote. Los Angeles Times, August 13,
1964.
133
Various materials related to Hollywood involvement in CAP 14 are in Box 29, Folder 1, CDC-
SCL. They described the effort as “perhaps the largest group of artists and craftsmen who have ever
met together for a single, political purpose.” In September 10 ‘Statement of Executive Committee of
the Arts Division of CAP14” CDC-SCL.

188
“Librarians Against 14” challenged engaged citizens to take a stand within an
important public debate. Dozens of neighborhood and locally based groups formed
to represent and initiate local opposition to the measure.
134

The strategy to bring together like-minded volunteers who could mobilize a
wide range of arguments had a defensible rationale. CAP-14 hoped to disarm the
realtors’ accusations that Proposition 14 was a reasonable response to the extremism
of the Rumford Act and reclaim the fair-minded center. But the strategy also had
profound limitations. In early 1964, William Becker, the former farmworker
organizer who played a key role in the FEPC struggle in the 1950s asked Robert
Coate, a CDC member and former president of the Fair Play Council of Southern
Alameda County, for advice on how to defeat Proposition 14. Coate wrote a
prescient reply to Becker, who was by then a human relations liaison in the Brown
administration. He explained that while raising and spending money for
advertisements could be accomplished, the most important obstacle lay in organizing
the volunteers of the campaign, whom he described as a “mixture of church groups,
civil rights groups, and random collections of citizens with good intentions.” He
warned Becker: “The interested people enjoy talking to themselves more than
tackling jobs which can have any real effect on an election.” Coate recommended
that volunteers be given a shared task to do accomplish, such as circulating and
collecting pledge cards against the measure, which would force them to talk to

134
There were also affinity groups including “Long Beach Youth Against 14,” a group of bike riders
who came together under an anti-14 banner, and dozens of neighborhood based groups,
predominantly in Los Angels County and the Bay Area. See Box 29, Folder 1, CDC-SCL.

189
potential voters.
In addition, Coate urged Becker to find a small number of core themes to
focus the anti-14 public campaign, and to avoid reciting a long list of objections to
the measure.
I found that when a person argues in favor of Fair Housing because it s a
Christian idea, and another person argues because he is a member of a
minority group, and a third person argues just because he thinks it is fair,
and a fourth argues because he feels the international image of the United
States is at stake—you develop interminable arguments and the arguers pass
many pleasant hours among themselves…A single thesis for your argument
is far stronger than presenting all of the points of view in a cumulative
argument.
135

Ultimately, the campaign to defeat Proposition 14 realized Coate’s worst
fears. The anti-Proposition 14 campaign raised almost $600,000 statewide, nearly
matching the amount raised by the realtors. But while the realtors emphasized a
small number of core themes—protecting property rights and opposing “forced
housing”—CAP-14’s materials included a wide array of charges, from potential loss
of federal construction funds, to warnings about “ghetto violence,” to accusations of
fascism. In addition, the CAP 14 campaign sponsored an array of social activities in
the name of fighting the initiative. Volunteers organized bike rides, swim-a-thons,
two Hollywood Bowl events, a large art auction, folk-song hootenannies, fundraising
and award dinners and many similar events. (The realtors, by contrast, devoted
almost all of their campaign expenditures and energies to direct voter contact,
especially advertising and campaign literature). CAP 14 held the vast majority of

135
Letter from Robert Coate to William Becker, March 2, 1964, in William Becker, "Oral History
with William Becker, interviewed by Gabrielle Morris.," (Sacramento, 1980), 63.

190
their frequent rallies and meetings in the Los Angeles and Bay Area communities
where their volunteer base was already concentrated. While small groups of anti-14
volunteers could be found in other regions of the state, many replicated these same
activities on a smaller scale. This strategy had the deceptive effect of suggesting to
volunteers that the opposition to the initiative was enthusiastic and broad-based, a
result of Coate’s warning over “interested people talking to themselves.”
136

“Why do they want to move into my neighborhood in the first place?” The
Logics of the Fair Housing Discourse
While the CHP offered a coherent, unified framework through which its
supporters could apprehend the measure and establish their self-interest, CAP 14
mobilized a wider range of sometimes contradictory arguments, placing the focus on
the flaws of Proposition 14 over the value and necessity of the Rumford Act. Two
important narratives stand out in this discourse. First, anti-14 forces sought to portray
Proposition 14 as a direct attack on the civic creed, asserting that its only purpose
was to foment division and prejudice. The CDC, for example, launched a statewide
“Bucks for Billboards” campaign to secure grassroots contributions that would pay
for a series of hand painted billboards in prominent locations. The red, white and

136
Campaign fundraising estimates compiled from Proposition 14 Campaign Filing Statements,
California State Archives. The filing statements themselves reveal the contrasts between the two
campaigns clearly. The realtors’ Committee for Home Protection centrally managed all of the
fundraising and campaign activities, including contracting with consultants and conducting opinion
polling—only one other campaign organization, a small groups of Republicans based in Southern
California, even filed a campaign statement. By contrast, more than fifty campaign organizations
dedicated to defeating Proposition 14 filed campaign statements, each independently raising and
spending small amounts of money.

191
blue image which eventually appeared on 51 billboards across the state featured
sketches of Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy next to an American flag. The
tagline read: “Don’t Legalize Hate: Vote No on 14.” As a CDC memo explained,
“the symbolism of the flag was chosen by the artist to reflect the basic nature of a
vote against Proposition 14 as being in the American tradition of equal rights for all
citizens.”
137

137
The quote and Bucks for Billboard campaign, which raised nearly $10,000 in grassroots
contributions from local neighborhood groups is described in CDC memos in Box 29, Folder 1, CDC-
SCL.
Figure 7: “Don’t Legalize Hate”
Californians Against
Proposition 14 campaign
brochure, 1964.
Campaign Literature Collection
(1964 Propositions), Young
Research Library, UCLA.

192

Governor Brown repeatedly emphasized this theme in a series of speeches he
delivered before the election. Addressing a Jewish women’s group in August, he
explained that the initiative represented the voices of “a minority of the angry, the
frustrated, the fearful. They do not represent California or its people.” He predicted
that as “Americans we will heed our great Judeo-Christian heritage…we will choose
love over hate and concern over indifference.” At another Los Angeles rally in
October, he announced that the “issue here is not legislating morality; it is the
controlling of anti-social behavior. And discrimination and segregation are just as
anti-social as breaking a contract with a real estate salesman, running a red light, or
robbing a bank.”
138

Anti-14 forces often used the perceived baseness and bigotry of the South as
a foil to contrast the high minded ideals which Proposition 14 threatened to
undermine. Lt. Governor Glenn Anderson addressed “Mar Vista-Westside Citizens
Against Proposition 14” before the election and explained that if the amendment was
adopted:

138
Brown speech to the women’s group on August 20, 1964, ibid. Brown spent much of the fall
pillaring Goldwater as an extremist as well, declaring that there was “the stench of fascism in the air.”
Cited in Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown. 288.

193
We will be accepting the leadership of states like Mississippi, the poorest,
most badly educated and in my opinion, amongst the most badly governed
states in the nation…If we now ally ourselves with the south in the civil
rights struggle, the future of this state will be in serious jeopardy. California
did not achieve her present wealth and importance by becoming a symbol of
fear and hate.
139

These appeals followed the prevailing understanding of the nature of “racial
conservatism” to liberal politicians such as Anderson and Brown. As Lisa McGirr
demonstrates, in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars such as Daniel Bell and Richard
Hofstadter argued that conservatives who stood outside the national liberal
consensus were expressing “status anxiety” over their tenuous standing in a modern,
secular liberal culture. Influential social scientists such as Robert Park and Ruth
Benedict held that discrimination would wither as people who were implicitly
different came into closer proximity to one another.
140
Moreover, highly visible
national civil rights leaders like King often described racism in highly personal,
individualistic terms. Indeed, when King arrived in Los Angeles at an anti-14 rally in
late October, he declared, “Men hate each other because they fear, they fear because
they do not know one another, and they do not know one another because they are
separated.”
141

A second critical feature of anti-14 discourse was the repeated emphasis
placed on assuaging the fears of white voters that the Rumford Act would not upset
the character of their neighborhoods or violate their “property rights” in any

139
Anderson’s speech excerpted in an October 9 press release by CAP14. Box 29, Folder 1, CDC-
SCL.
140
On this tradition, see McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, Yu,
Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America.
141
King’s speech cited in October 27 CAP 14 press release. Some 75,00 people came to hear King in
the Los Angeles Convention Center. Box 29, Folder 1, CDC-SCL.

194
significant way. A memo to Episcopal lay leaders in Los Angeles sought to
downplay the impact the Rumford Act would have:
The Rumford law is not a “special privilege” law for the minorities. It does
not give minorities any special claim on housing in any way, shape, or form.
It merely attempts to give them an equal chance for housing if they are fully
qualified. The law was not passed for the benefit of the minorities, but for
the benefit of the health, welfare, prosperity and peace of the whole
community. Delinquency, slums, social welfare programs, reduced
community business and income, bitterness and strife—all of which are
destructive to total community life—are at stake.
142

A Council of Churches brochure offered similar reassurances:

Economic inequalities over our long history of discrimination make it
impossible for most minority citizens to buy homes of their choice. For
example: Negroes make up only 6% of the population of California.
Probably not more than 1% or 2% of the Negro population can afford to buy
houses in all-white areas. Of those who can afford to do so, experience
shows only a small percentage choose to do so, even though they should
have this right. The same situation exists for persons of other racial, national
and religious groups.
143

The Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, appointed by the
County Board of Supervisors, held a series of hearings in the early 1960s on the
problem of racial discrimination in housing and issued a series of public education
materials to address the anxieties of white residents weary of integration in their
neighborhood. One paper, titled “An Open Letter to An American Community,”
argued that integration did not have to mean a decline in property values if current

142
Excerpted from a release to the “Clergy and Christian Social Relations Chairman of the Episcopal
Diocese of Los Angeles: Fact Sheet on Proposed Initiative to Cancel the Rumford Fair Housing Act.”
In Box 16, Folder: “Housing” MKP.
143
“The Church Says No on Proposition 14” by the Council of Churches in Northern and Southern
California. .” In Box 16, Folder: “Housing” MKP..

195
homeowners did not sell their homes in panic. It posed and responded to a series of
questions about what would happen to neighborhoods as they began to desegregate.
The questions included:
• “Why do they want to move into my neighborhood in the first place?”
• “Won’t the neighborhood deteriorate?”
• “Isn’t it true that once a Negro family has bought into a community,
only Negroes will move after that?”
• “What about the schools—won’t the standards of teaching and
discipline decline?”

In each case, the emphasis fell exclusively on how little change would occur and
how the values and character of their neighborhood would not be altered. Again, the
Rumford Act was never defended on its own terms as a solution to the problems
facing Black homebuyers or renters. Indeed, the notion that white Californians had
any communal obligations other than to themselves and their neighbors was
anathema to this entire discourse.
144

When a defense of the Rumford Act was mounted, it was often done in the name
of containing the “problems of the ghetto” from erupting in violence. Brown warned
that “the ancient problems of segregation and discrimination” would be “settled in
the streets, with blood and violence” if Proposition 14 passed.
145
A fundraising letter
to support anti-14 work from the ACLU asked, if Proposition 14 were to become

144
Commission letter and other materials. .” In Box 16, Folder: “Housing” MKP. These arguments
extend from a broader effort at public education, which included short movies, discussions, and
empirical research produced to make the case that racial integration did not have to result in the loss
of property values. While these efforts are understandable, especially in the context of the panics often
incited by realtors, they sustained, rather than transformed, the political identities of white
homeowners.
145
Brown’s comments, widely quoted in the press, were seized upon by the CHP, who charged the
Governor was resorting to desperate scare tactics. See CHP pamphlets in Folder: “Rumford,” Box 17,
MKP.

196
law:
How much will California’s spreading slums and their accompanying evils
cost us and our children in the interim? What will the minority ghettos do to
the newly-planted hopes and the age-old angers of their chief residents?
146

In slightly less ominous tones, opponents also offered a host of other negative
consequences that would result if the initiative were adopted. They cited the
suspension of federal urban redevelopment grants and the loss of tens of thousands
of construction jobs, the sacrifice of basic “property rights” to the whims of profit-
hungry realtors, a loss of “home rule” because Proposition 14 would prohibit
localities from passing their own open housing legislation, a growth of social welfare
costs stemming from ghetto poverty, public health problems caused by festering
slums, and the arrival of out-of-state racial extremists eager to exploit the initiative’s
message of bigotry. Finally, they frequently sought to downplay the impact of the
Rumford Act itself, pointing out that during its first year of implementation, no fines
had been issued by the FEPC, and that only one of the complaints filed had led to an
administrative hearing. Thus, when the Rumford Act was referenced, it was either to
emphasize its limitations and feebleness or to argue that its repeal risked inciting
explosions in the ghetto.
147

In focusing almost entirely on the contradictions and dangers of Proposition
14, CAP 14 declined to endorse or defend the original purpose of the Rumford Act in
any meaningful way. Liberal activists rarely mentioned the housing crisis which

146
From an ACLU fundraising letter to supporters dated February 1, 1964. “Rumford,” Box 17,
MKP..
147
See the daily news releases from CAP14 in October, 1964 in Box 29, Folder 1, CDC-SCL.

197
drove Black communities and civil rights organizations to demand the passage of the
legislation in the first place, or referenced the overwhelming levels of discrimination
many home buyers and renters still faced. Rather then contesting or challenging the
deeply racialized notion of property rights emphasized by CHP, they only argued
that the Rumford legislation represented little threat to those same privileges. Only
when the housing crisis might erupt beyond the “walls of the ghetto” was the
necessity of the Rumford Act invoked. Like the CHP, CAP 14 affirmed the basic
privileges white home owners had come to expect as natural and unassailable—they
simply argued that Proposition 14 itself represented a greater attack on those
interests than the Rumford Act.
In addition to sustaining the marginal status afforded to people of color in the
broader public discourse, these arguments actually contradicted the moral appeals to
which they were often joined. If the status quo and the privileges it secured were
legitimate, and no violation of justice in California existed, then pleas to oppose
bigotry and intolerance were irrelevant. Proposition 14 opponents championed an
ideal—California as a beacon of interracial accord—but said little to defend the
rights of actual Californians to live where they pleased. With both the CHP and CAP
14 defending the legitimacy of prevailing relations, it is unsurprising that
homeowners who supported Proposition 14 were unmoved by moral appeals to their
conscience.
Civil rights groups like C.O.R.E. and the NAACP ultimately played a
relatively minor role in the official CAP 14 campaign. The United Civil Rights

198
Committee mobilized 2,000 volunteers to register some 40,000 voters in heavily
African American and Mexican American precincts in Los Angeles, certainly
outpacing the impact of similar coordinated efforts by CAP 14.
148
CAP 14 provided
some funding for these voter outreach efforts, but civil rights groups kept a low
profile within the overall debate. The anti-14 ballot argument was signed by
Democratic Attorney General Stanley Mosk, the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of
Stockton, and the President of the Council of Churches in Southern California, and it
made no mention of the need to expand or enforce civil rights or address the housing
crisis.
By contrast, literature produced by the NAACP, the Committee for Fair
Practices, and United Civil Rights Committee addressed the problem of fair housing
much more explicitly. An NAACP flyer circulated during a protest outside a CREA
meeting in September 1963 declared: “We will no longer tolerate segregated housing
as a way of life, and demand that housing in California be made available
immediately without discrimination because of race, color or religion.”
149
The
strategy which led to actions like the CORE sit-ins and protests at segregated sub-
divisions sought to dramatize the prevailing racial hierarchy in the state, exposing

148
See “Press Release: United Civil Rights Committee” (nd) in Folder “1964 United Civil Rights
Committee,” Box 116, ACLU-UCLA.
149
Flyer: “Eliminating Housing Discrimination in California.” Box 27, Folder 14, CDC-SCL. Civil
rights groups also made the connection between Proposition 14 and Jim Crow segregation, but more
often spoke to the conditions facing Black people in California then the abstract ideals of integration.
C.O.R.E. continued small demonstrations against some realtors “Outside the Law.” The Daily Review
Hayward June 8, 1964 But Casstevens suggests most civil rights groups in California respected a
national call for a moratorium on mass demonstrations following uprisings in New York earlier in the
year. Rumford and Hawkins convened a “Negro Political Action Association of California” in July,
1964 that drew 350 leaders across the state to plan voter education and mobilizations strategies in
Black communities. Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford Act and
Proposition 14. 61.

199
California’s deep historical entanglements with Jim Crow. CAP 14, however,
asserted a different position, largely suggesting that no such tradition of
discrimination had existed in the state until the arrival of Proposition 14.

Voters Respond
CAP 14 mobilized at a furious pace in the two months leading up to the
election, organizing endless press conferences and fundraising events, participating
in televised debates and community forums, and running a series of television and
radio advertisements. Campaign materials from both sides inundated voters, and the
measure received extensive media coverage. At the same time, many property owner
associations took up the issue aggressively, continuing their door-to-door organizing
on behalf of Proposition 14 in suburban subdivisions across the state.
Polls conducted throughout the campaign identified two trends. First,
contrary to the claims of CAP 14 that the ballot language was deceptive and
misleading, voters seemed to increasingly understand that a vote for Proposition 14
meant the evisceration of the Rumford Act. Second, as the campaign wore on and
both sides had an opportunity to present their case, support for Proposition 14
grew.
150

150
Gathered from data cited in Ibid. 56, 68.

200
Comparison of Trends in California Poll for
Proposition 14
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
January
March
May
September
Early October
Late October
Election Day
Poll release Date (not to scale)
Percentage
Approve
Disapprove
Undecided

Voters ultimately approved Proposition 14 by a 65 to 35 margin. Nearly 85
percent of registered voters in the state cast their ballots on the measure, the highest
number for any proposition on the ballot and just below the number cast in the
presidential contest. While President Johnson secured almost 4.2 million California
votes in his landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater, only 2.4 million votes were cast
against Proposition 14. The measure carried in 57 of 58 counties (it was defeated by
19 votes in sparsely populated Modoc County), and in 361 of 393 cities. The margin
of victory was nearly nine points higher in Southern California (from Santa Barbara
Figure 8: Comparison of Trends in California Poll for Proposition 14.
Source: Thomas Casstevens. Politics, Housing and Race Relations: California's Rumford
Act and Proposition 14. Berkeley, CA: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of
California, Berkeley, 1967.

201
County to San Diego County) than Northern California, but it won even in San
Francisco and Alameda counties. The California Poll conducted a week before the
election suggested that white voters supported the measure by a three to one margin--
Black voters rejected it nine to one--and that union voters and Protestant voters
favored Proposition 14 by more than 60 percent.
151

In Los Angeles County, where registered Democrats outnumbered
Republicans by three-to-two and cast ballots for Johnson by the same margin,
Proposition 14 won by 35 points and nearly a million votes. Locally the measure
passed by the highest margins in cities built on traditions (and identities) of racial
exclusion: Long Beach, Lakewood, Glendale, and most of all South Gate, where 87
percent of voters favored the measure.
152

Assessing the Outcome and Impact of Proposition 14
It would be difficult to overstate the profound sense of defeat and
anguish which gripped the anti-14 forces after the election. In retrospective
assessments, many of the CAP 14 leaders candidly acknowledged that they
had been out organized. Richard Kline, the Pat Brown aide assigned to head
CAP 14 campaign confessed “… I made a huge strategic misjudgment
which was, in my naiveté, [I thought] that if you could only explain this
issue to people, raise enough money, have enough good media campaigns,

151
Ibid. 68-74.
152
LA County election returns taken from a California Democratic Council report in Folder 1: “No on
14,” Box 29, CDC-SCL.

202
organization and everything, if you’d explain the issue to people, people in
the goodness of their hearts would vote no on 14.” He stated a common
refrain from other assessments of the campaign: “It was obvious we were
going to lose but we didn’t expect it to be as much as we did, two to one.
That’s everybody—we didn’t pick up one vote at all.”
153

Brown aide and campaign spokesman William Becker described the inability
of the CAP-14 campaign to confront the realtors’ claims:
I think our problem was that the opposition was able to formulate the issue in
terms of ‘Every man’s home is his castle’ and ‘What the hell is government
doing in telling me I can’t sell my home to whomever I want, I cant rent my
apartments to whomever I want?’ All of our arguments on this didn’t pierce
that with a large number of people.
154

An internal memo written by Edward Rutledge, head of the National
Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NCADH), based on interviews with
people involved in both sides of the campaign, offered the most candid and self
critical assessment of the campaign. He conveyed the deep sense of despair
experienced by many activists at the results of the election in observing that “even
the most cautious and pessimistic had not anticipated such a major defeat.”
155

On the positive side, Rutledge described the anti-14 campaign as a broad-
based, path breaking and heroic defense of civil rights:

153
Richard Kline., "Richard Kline: Governor Brown's Faithful Advisory. Oral History Interview,
Conducted by Eleanor Glaser,," (Sacramento, 1977), 18-19.
154
Becker, "Oral History with William Becker, interviewed by Gabrielle Morris.," 47.
155
See Rutledge memo, p 12, in Box 168, Folder: “Housing: Prop 14” ACLU-UCLA.

203
No state had ever before marshaled so many diverse forces in local
communities and on a statewide basis to do battle in support of a civil rights
issue; nor had any other state developed such intensive activity among
citizens of good will in local communities as well as big cities and the
suburbs; nor had received such dedicated support and leadership from the
Governor and other state officials; nor had managed to secure active support
of practically all major civic organizations and religious groups…
156

But Rutledge also noted a series of tensions that might have limited the
campaign’s impact. Some in the campaign complained of “foot-dragging by many
local union officials and the lack of discussion and active communication” with their
members. Though the State Federation of Labor contributed funding, the hard work
devoted to defeating the “right-to-work” initiative in 1958 was not in effect for
Proposition 14. Others noted that religious leaders did “a great deal of ‘preaching’”
but that there was very little communication or discussion with members of their
congregations. A post-election meeting of the CDC also noted the “lack of contact
between the CDC and the Civil Rights Movement, especially the absence of active
participation in the…UCRC.”
157

Ultimately, Rutledge concluded that even if the campaign had addressed
these shortcomings, the margin might have been narrowed, but the outcome would
have been the same. He concluded “the overriding reason for the impressive YES
vote for Proposition 14 can be attributed to latent and overt anti-Negro racial
prejudice (especially as related to integration in housing) of most of the white
California voters.”

156
Ibid
157
Ibid, 14.

204
Rutledge’s assessment, echoed by Governor Brown and many of his
colleagues, represented a version of the same sentiment expressed by the CREA
itself. It was the populace, the realtors claimed, who insisted on living among “their
own kind;” realtors were responding to this preference, and protecting the right of
homeowners to make such decisions. While this posture disavowed the indisputable
role of realtors and developers historically in sustaining racially segregated housing,
it did point to an important convergence witnessed among both the supporters and
opponents of Proposition 14.
Ultimately, both sides affirmed the pronouncement of CREA’s Charles
Shattuck when he argued that the “present racial tensions will diminish in direct ratio
to…the determined effort on the part of all to increase the flow of understanding.”
158

Here, no large gulf existed between so-called “racial liberalism” and “racial
conservatism.” Both understood white racial power as an individual, rather than
structural and historical phenomenon, which would only dissipate in the face of
mutual understanding and “tolerance” of difference between free-thinking
individuals. In both accounts, the possessive investment in whiteness not only went
unchallenged, it became further naturalized. This discourse renovated forms of white
racial identity, renewing and recasting the idea that the social authority and status of
white homeowners was rooted in their ability to exclude.
159

But as this chapter has argued, though the territory on which the Proposition
14 debate unfolded certainly favored the CREA, the outcome of the election was not

158
California Real Estate Magazine, May, 1964, p. 11.
159
See Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.

205
guaranteed. Proposition 14 unfolded at a moment when an emerging interracial
progressive bloc might have displaced long-standing hierarchies of power that
generated and relied centrally upon racial distinctions and exclusions. The CREA
could never frame the issue as a straightforward and uncomplicated attack on the
rights of people of color—it required a renovation in the language, symbols, and
framework that would simultaneously acknowledge and even incorporate some
emergent civil rights discourse.
But this alignment faltered in the face of unchallenged exhortations to defend
and recommit to a white racial identity centered on the power to exclude. CAP 14
was reticent to acknowledge or refer to the crisis in housing and discrimination that
compelled Black communities and civil rights organizations to press for the Rumford
Act in the first place. They offered a tepid defense of the anti-discrimination
legislation, more often invoking the necessity to contain ghetto violence than the
principle of making life better for hundreds of thousands of Californians. As a result,
their claim that Proposition 14 represented an assault on the ideals of California
progressivism and interracial cooperation had little traction. CAP 14 accepted CHP’s
proposition that white homeowners shared minimal political interest or ground with
those Californians who faced racial discrimination. While the coalition brought
together an impressive set of organizations and activists that worked tirelessly to
defeat the measure, the discourse they mobilized was built upon contradictory logics.
They sought to paint neighborhood realtors and their organizations as racial
extremists, a strategy which hardly resonated with the sensibilities and experiences

206
of most white homeowners. These homeowners might not trust Barry Goldwater’s
finger on the atomic button, but that did mean they were ready to believe that their
local realtor was shilling for the Ku Klux Klan. Following the dominant logics of the
postwar liberal civil rights imaginary, they attacked Proposition 14 on the grounds
that it used race to justify inequality, a violation of the civic creed. This strategy
presumed that by discrediting racial nationalism, historic patterns of racial inequality
would indeed succumb to the forces of an inclusionary creedal vision. The realtors
demonstrated, however, that the civic creed could easily be racialized, and that no
bright line existed between racial nationalism and American civic nationalism.
Moreover, inequality itself was defended as a natural and inevitable condition under
both social visions; racial hierarchy buttressed by racial innocence.
CAP 14 never offered a forceful defense of the Rumford Act or attempted to
tie the legislation to the broader vision that animated the Brown administration’s
other policy commitments during the period--such as the expansion of the state
infrastructure and higher education system-- which drew on shared aspirations for a
society with greater possibilities and opportunities for all Californians. By refusing
to acknowledge the legacy of discrimination and exclusion that compromised this
vision, CAP 14 endorsed, rather than displaced, the possessive investment in
whiteness that the CHP so effectively exploited.
Thus the CREA campaign exposed two enormous liabilities within the civil
rights/labor/Democratic party coalition that took power in 1958. First, as Chapter 2
explains, while the coalition had spent more than a decade building relationships

207
between organizations around civil rights issues, focusing primarily on research,
lobbying, and fact-finding, it had spent far less time engaging and educating its base
of supporters and membership around these same concerns. That is, while small
groups of religious leaders, CDC activists, and other veterans of “fair play” and
“human relations” organizations crafted an analysis of the importance of anti-racist
policies, they never meaningfully constituted an audience of other California voters
who believed in the same. The only mass-based organizing and public education
that took place around racial justice and civil rights issues in the decade proceeding
Proposition 14 were the voter registration drives conducted by the NAACP and
Community Service Organization (funded by the state federation of labor) in the
late 1950s, and the building of Democratic clubs by the CDC, which generally took
strong stands on civil rights issues, even if they were overwhelmingly dominated by
white leaders. While these organizations spent many years building organization
and developing leadership among African Americans and other people of color
around the vision and demands of the Second Reconstruction—a democratic
reconstitution of U.S. society—civic, labor and political organizations within
working class white communities did far less grassroots work among their own
constituencies towards the same end. As a result, large segments of working class
white communities in particular could be realigned to oppose redistributory politics
and participate in attacks on parts of the public sphere.

208
The realtors by comparison, had a deep “organic” base within the electorate,
especially the neighborhood associations which they played a critical role in helping
to develop over several decades. These neighborhood groups, together with the
grassroots conservative organizations that were aggressively organizing in the
emerging suburbs of Southern California in particular, proved to be powerful and
effective at reaching voters.
The second liability in the Democratic coalition exposed by the Proposition
14 campaign was its inability to develop a political discourse about race beyond the
terms of racial guilt and innocence. This discourse, largely unchanged since the
1940s when it first came into popular usage, drew simple contrasts between
tolerance and bigotry, and asserted that racism was a matter of individual belief and
mindset. The campaign against Proposition 14 failed to develop any compelling
narrative which called attention to the history of racism in California, or to the
contemporary effects that history had on millions in the state. It offered no response
to the vision of “property rights” that was built upon the logic of apartheid—that
racial exclusion was part of what made property valuable. To be sure, crafting such
counter-narratives in the heat of a battle for votes was no easy task. Yet having
spent almost no time developing such arguments in the decade before the election,
and with little proclivity to begin doing so during the campaign, the anti-14 forces
were left to rely upon outmoded and ineffective appeals. The realtors, by contrast,
effectively built on the besieged homeowner identity they had carefully cultivated
across an array of struggles over public housing, taxes, and restrictive covenants.

209
But they took enormous care to update these narratives in the face of changing
historical circumstances, effectively embracing and mobilizing the rhetoric of equal
rights and racial innocence to their own ends.

The Aftermath of Proposition 14
CAP 14 let the CHP’s contention that the Rumford Act was a special interest
attack on the (white) collective body politic go largely unchallenged. By refusing to
contest this narrative and explanatory framework at a fundamental level, CAP 14
not only lost the election, it ceded key ground in future statewide deliberations on
racial justice issues in California. Perhaps the most enduring impact of the
Proposition 14 contest was not the policy it enacted during the three years between
the election and the Supreme Court’s ruling against the initiative, but the way it
disorganized the emerging progressive consensus and historic bloc that swept
Brown into office six years earlier. In the wake of Proposition 14, a more
conservative, cross-class alignment rooted in the defense of white privilege
emerged. Ronald Reagan incorporated many of the themes and narratives of the
CHP discourse in his rise to the governor’s office two years later. Like the CHP,
Reagan depicted a political environment in which hard-working and independent
white Californians had to remain vigilant against the ominous and conceited
attempts of the liberal state and its racialized clients to undermine their way of life.
Reagan also tirelessly defended his own “racial innocence.” In his
gubernatorial campaign, Reagan identified civil rights as “one of the three or four

210
most important issues,” labeled “bigots” as “sick people” and vociferously objected
whenever he was accused of supporting or tolerating bigotry (he stormed out of one
campaign event during his first gubernatorial bid when such an insinuation was
made). Yet Reagan was a steadfast supporter of the CREA and perennially one of
the most popular speakers at its annual convention. He drew a standing ovation
from the group during his gubernatorial bid when he denounced the Supreme
Court’s ruling against Proposition 14 and insisted “the right to the ownership and
disposition of property is inseparable from the right of freedom itself.”
160
After
winning office, Reagan continued to sustain and address this political identity even
as he quietly ended his support for future legislative action to repeal the Rumford
Act. To Reagan, articulating a political subjectivity that captured the spirit of
Proposition 14 and its logics of apartheid was ultimately more important than
defending the policy itself.
161

Proposition 14 also shaped the ways in which grassroots groups organized to
defend or challenge patterns of housing segregation, value and exclusion in the
aftermath of the election. While the CREA would continue to maintain a powerful
lobbying presence in Sacramento, it would never again match the concerted
mobilization effort witnessed during the 1964 election; the Association could not

160
Reagan’s quote from a 1966 essay by Carey McWilliams “How to Succeed With the Backlash”
reprinted in Carey McWilliams, Fool's Paradise: A Carey McWilliam's Reader (Berkeley, 2001),
Carey McWilliams, Fool's Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader (Santa Clara, CA, 2001).
161
Reagan’s biographer, Lou Cannon, suggests the governor’s decision to back away from a bill to
repeal the Rumford Act during the 1967 legislative session was a pragmatic move he felt necessary to
build relationships with Sacramento lawmakers. See Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to
Power (New York, 2003).Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (New York, 2003). 201-
204.

211
longer maintain such rigid political unity within its professional ranks. After the
state Supreme Court overturned Proposition 14, it was unable to mobilize the
necessary support among lawmakers to repeal the Rumford Act through subsequent
legislation.
162
In a 1972 address to fellow realtors, incoming CREA president
Joseph Carnahan acknowledged the group’s ambivalent legacy towards civil rights
issues. Acknowledging that “much more needed to be done” to end discrimination
in housing, he asserted: “Whatever the reasons and causes for the [CREA’s]
mistakes and failures of the past, it does no good to dwell on them, that only
perpetuates them.” He declared the full support of the Association in addressing the
problems “caused by bias and fear.”
163

But an important dimension of the principles advanced by the CREA during
Proposition 14 was carried on by the neighborhood associations that proved so
critical in defining the measure as a natural, populist response to an unlawful
government incursion on property rights. Neighborhood and homeowner
organizations continued to grow in influence and power, nourished by the
experience of “defending their homes” during the Proposition 14 campaign. These
associations would play a large role in the 1970s struggles over school busing and
property taxes detailed in Chapter 5, employing much of the same political grammar
in these campaigns. Twenty-six years after Proposition 14, Mike Davis would argue

162
Mark Brilliant describes the considerable outcry among many voters about the Court’s decision to
overturn Prop 14. See Brilliant, Color Lines: Civil Rights Strugles on America's "Racial Frontier,"
1945-1975.A legislative repeal of the Rumford Act would have been lawful before a 1968 Supreme
Court ruling which outlawed all forms of discrimination in housing. See also Brilliant, "Color Lines:
Civil Rights Struggles on America's Racial Frontier, 1945-75 (PhD diss)".
163
“The Necessity of Change” by Joseph Carnahan. California Real Estate Magazine, February 1972,
page 7.

212
that the “most powerful ‘social movement’ in contemporary Southern California is
that of affluent homeowners, organized by notional community designations or tract
names, engaged in the defense of home values and neighborhood exclusivity.”
164

On the other hand, while fair housing activity continued to grow, their work
assumed a far less oppositional stance. Groups such as CORE largely stopped
organizing direct action confrontations with discriminatory developers and realtors,
silenced in part by the verdict pronounced by the Proposition 14 outcome. Instead,
dozens of locally based fair housing groups, largely led by sympathetic white
activists, took on the task of attempting to open up segregated communities. In
Long Beach, one of the most segregated cites in Los Angeles County, groups such
as the Fair Housing Foundation used a combination of legal advocacy, community
education, and direct support to individual home seekers, such as providing listings
of available “open” housing to challenge prevailing restrictions. Offering slogans
such as “good neighbors come in all colors” and “brotherhood in the neighborhood”
these organizations had modest success on an individual level; a group in West Los
Angeles for example used its listings to find housing for UCLA basketball stars
Lew Alcindor and Henry Bibby in the early 1970s.
165
A few of the groups were able
to expand their work through the support of federal and local anti-poverty programs.
But these groups also ultimately accepted the assertion that housing
segregation and inequality was a product of individual bigotry and volition, and

164
Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. 153.
165
For a description of fair housing activities in Los Angeles County, including West Los Angeles,
see Series 1, Box 1, Folder 22 Catholic Human Relations Series, Loyola Marymount University
(hereafter CHRS).

213
focused their efforts on “enlightening” realtors and apartment managers about the
irrationality of intolerance. Erased from this discourse was any engagement with the
decades of systematic investments—both material and symbolic—in the racial
exclusivity of the state’s most desirable housing. Some fair housing groups were
accused by critics within their own organizations of “inadvertently reinforcing
racism” for only welcoming middle-class and professional home seekers into their
communities.
166
Ultimately, while many communities across the state experienced
modest integration in the decade after Proposition 14, the naturalized notions of
inequality and restrictive notions of collective responsibility embraced by so many
white Californians, only grew in power. Proposition 14 valorized a sensibility that
would prove enormously influential in state politics for decades to come.

166
A 1971 report, “An Outsider’s View” by a UCLA graduate student working for the umbrella
Housing Opportunities Center leveled this charge at some local fair housing groups. See Series 1, Box
1, Folder 15 CHRS.

214
CHAPTER 4:
SCHOOL DESEGREGATION, BUSING AND THE TRIUMPH OF RACIAL
INNOCENCE, 1972-1982

On first blush, the two ballot initiatives adopted by large majorities of
California voters in the 1970s to halt mandatory school desegregation seem to be
products of the same political imagination. Both the 1972 Wakefield Amendment
(Proposition 21) and the 1979 Robbins Amendment (Proposition 1) were sponsored
by controversial, sometimes combative Southern California lawmakers determined to
stop the progress of court-ordered school desegregation that relied upon student
reassignment and busing. Both measures were implicitly grounded in assertions of
“racial innocence”--the claim that because white parents and students did not create
the second class schools to which most racial minorities were consigned, nor
explicitly supported segregated schools, they could not be compelled to participate in
their improvement. And finally, both initiatives raised the hackles of traditional civil
rights advocates including the NAACP and the ACLU, which along with a handful
of elected officials attempted to convince voters that the measures endorsed Jim
Crow schooling by another name—a direct assault on the modest progress that had
been made during the 1960s and 1970s in challenging the prevailing system of
apartheid in California public schools.
Yet as this chapter argues, we learn more about the critical renovations and
renewals in political debates over the meaning of race and racism during this period

215
by attending to the significant differences that marked the two initiatives than by
dwelling on their similarities. The 1972 Wakefield Amendment, championed by a
fiery conservative Republican from the Los Angeles suburb of South Gate, bore
strong resemblance to the realtors’ campaign to pass Proposition 14, the anti-fair
housing initiative, eight years earlier. A legislative sledgehammer, it prohibited all
race-based assignments in public school, effectively outlawing any systematic
desegregation efforts. Like the realtors, Assemblyman Floyd Wakefield railed
against the yoke of “forced integration” and sounded a thinly veiled call to defend
white rights and “freedoms of association.” And also like the 1964 anti-fair housing
measure, most of the Wakefield Amendment was invalidated by the courts as a
violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
By contrast, the 1979 Robbins Amendment was brought to the ballot by a
Democratic lawmaker who supported fair housing laws and declared himself a
faithful champion of civil rights and racial integration. He carefully recruited several
prominent Black and Chicano figures to promote his ballot measure—deftly
incorporating their emerging nationalist critiques of desegregation--even as he
incited white voters in his San Fernando Valley district to defend their segregated
neighborhood schools. And unlike Wakefield, Robbins meticulously drafted his
measure to withstand Fourteenth Amendment challenges. Proposition 1 did not
prohibit school desegregation entirely; instead it carefully specified the limited
conditions under which such orders could be given. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court
upheld Proposition 1 as a race neutral act which complied with the Equal Protection

216
Clause. The Robbins Amendment effectively ended the 20-year Crawford v Los
Angeles School Board case, which sought to desegregate the largest school district in
the state.
1
The Reagan administration subsequently utilized the court rulings
Proposition 1 secured to justify the rollback of school desegregation orders nation
wide.
Why did Alan Robbins succeed where Floyd Wakefield did not? Or perhaps
more accurately, what did Robbins understand about the terrain of racial politics in
the 1970s that Wakefield did not? To be sure, by the late 1970s, much of the public
stood fundamentally opposed to mandatory desegregation and busing. The images of
white anti-busing mobs in Pontiac, Michigan, Boston and other cities indexed the
rapid decline in white support over the pace and trajectory of racial justice efforts in
the North after the mid-1960s. While civil rights advocates frequently pointed out
that 95 percent of student busing nationally (and within California) took place for
reasons other than desegregation and argued that the school bus had for at least a
generation been regarded as a positive symbol, “busing” soon became synonymous
with many of the ills of the 1970s in general: physically dangerous to students, a
drain to taxpayers, a contributor to traffic and smog, educationally irrelevant, and
responsible for removing children from the protection and security of their parents.
2

1
Crawford V. Los Angeles Board of Education, 458 U.S. 527 (1982)
2
In addition, the vast majority of the hundreds of desegregation plans approved by the Department of
Health, Education and Welfare for Southern school districts actually decreased total busing. Under
segregated (dual) systems, students were often transported beyond their nearest school. See “School
Busing a U.S. Tradition” New York Times, May 24, 1970. The California busing figure is from
Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. 159.
On the Boston busing debate see Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class and Ethnicity in the
1960s and 1970s, Theoharis, "'We Saved the City': Black Struggles for Educational Equality in

217
Former Governor Pat Brown asserted the logic of this emerging consensus when
he observed after the passage of the Wakefield initiative in 1972 that white
opposition to busing was a “gut issue…The mere thought of busing over to a black
school is bad. And you’re not going to change that. These are things people have
fixed judgments on. Nothing will change them.”
3
Indeed, even some early
proponents of school desegregation argued that mandatory busing programs did
more harm than good by arousing these political impulses in white parents, which
inevitably led to “white flight” from the public school system.
4
More damning still,
desegregation opponents pointed to growing opposition towards large-scale busing
programs among African American and Latino parents and elected officials.
Whereas fair housing and fair employment policies ultimately enjoyed widespread
consensus—and almost uniform support among racial minorities—school
desegregation programs were considered inherently less popular.
We must certainly take seriously the critical transformations underway in the
broader terrain of race politics within California and the nation during the 1970s.
These transformations include the rise of what economist William Fischel terms
“homevoters”—homeowners whose political behavior is shaped largely by their
concern over property values—the ongoing abandonment of the urban core, and the

Boston, 1960-1976."}; for an overview of national debates over busing during the 1970s, see Joseph
Durham, "Sense and Nonsense About Busing," The Journal of Negro Education 42 (1973), Nicolaus
Mills, ed., Busing U.S.A. (New York, 1979).
3
“Views Divided on Analysis of Voting in State.” Los Angeles Times, Nov 13, 1972; pg A3.
4
Purveyors of this “white flight” thesis typically argued that because mandatory desegregation
programs compelled white parents to withdraw their children from urban public school districts, only
voluntary programs should be pursued. See generally the essays in Mills, ed., Busing U.S.A.

218
emergence of the suburb as a center of political power in local and national politics.
5

These regional dynamics, together with the fracture and defeat of many of the most
visible elements of the civil rights coalition which rose to power during the 1960s
unquestionably shaped and obstructed the prospects for systematic school
desegregation.
Yet these dynamics alone do not explain how widespread public opposition to
mandatory school desegregation was politically secured. We must still investigate
why and how particular frameworks of racial meaning operated and what relations of
power they enabled and naturalized. How did the opponents of mandatory
desegregation and busing effectively stigmatize these programs as unworkable and
intolerable? How did their claims resonate with other political narratives and
currents, such as the growing anti-tax movement that was sweeping California at the
same time? Why did prevailing desegregation proposals fail to sustain any
meaningful popular support?
This chapter engages these questions in order to develop a more nuanced
explanation for the outcomes of California’s anti-busing propositions, and the claims
of racial innocence on which they were predicated. Like the broader study, this
chapter is concerned with the relationship between ideological formation and
political initiative. I begin by examining the 1972 Wakefield initiative, exploring the

5
William Fischel, The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government
Taxation, School Finance, and Land-Use Policies (Cambridge, MA, 2001). Fischel argues that
because for the majority of homeowners, the equity in their home comprises a large proportion of
their overall wealth, they will consistently act to protect their property values from perceived threats.
What requires explanation, of course, is the political and ideological process by which such “threats”
are defined, and the forms of racial identification this process secures.

219
political forces that brought it to the ballot and explaining why it fell short of its
goals as both a policy measure and a discursive horizon. Next, I track the rise of
Alan Robbins and the anti-busing politics of the late 1970s in Southern California,
which culminated in 1979 with Proposition 1. I pay particular attention to Robbins’
shrewd embrace of a small but highly visible number of African American, Asian
American and Mexican American political figures, a move which represented a
decisive moment in the debates over civil rights in the postwar era. I conclude the
chapter with a discussion of the legacy of the Robbins Amendment within both
California and national politics.

Floyd Wakefield, Proposition 21, and the struggle against “Forced Integration”
Proposition 21 banned school districts from explicitly using race to assign
students to schools, and passed with 61 percent of the vote in the November 1972
elections. Twenty months later, the state Supreme Court ruled that the initiative’s
operating language violated the Equal Protection Clauses of the state and federal
constitutions.
6
To understand the rise and fall of Proposition 21, we have to travel
back at least a decade earlier to the political debates which nourished its creation,
and the figure responsible for bringing it to the statewide ballot.
As portrayed in historian Becky Nicolaides’ My Blue Heaven: Life and
Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965, Floyd Wakefield
was the standard bearer of postwar white backlash politics, “the unequivocal voice of

6
Santa Barbara School District v. Superior Court, 13 Cal. 3d 315, 324, 530 P.2d 605, 613 (1975).

220
South Gate’s ‘silent majority.’”
7
Born in Oklahoma in 1919, Wakefield moved at a
young age to the suburbs south of Los Angeles. After serving in the Second World
War, Wakefield and his family settled in South Gate, a working class city of 57,000
residents which through the use of racial covenants and other restrictive practices
remained deeply segregated well into the 1960s. Its border with neighboring Watts
along Alameda Street was famously described as “The Wall;” an unmistakable
Mason-Dixon Line marking distinctly separate and unequal territories.
Wakefield’s family relied on public assistance early in his life and Wakefield
himself took out a GI bill loan to start his first small business. But like many
members of the “greatest generation” he imagined himself an entirely self-made
man, the product of a vigilant work ethic: “I always did things myself, and I didn’t
have to worry about somebody else.”
8

In the early 1960s, South Gate became a flashpoint for initial efforts to
desegregate the Los Angeles school district, which included schools in South Gate
and 21 other cities adjacent to Los Angeles. Groups such as the NAACP, CORE and
the umbrella United Civil Rights Committee seized on South Gate High School as a
particularly egregious example of the school board’s racial gerrymandering of
attendance boundaries: The attendance areas for South Gate High and nearby Jordan
High School in Watts were regularly adjusted as Black families in Watts moved
closer to the South Gate border. South Gate High remained nearly 100 percent white

7
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven : Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-
1965. 273.
8
Ibid.

221
and was kept in far better condition, while Jordan High was almost entirely Black
and badly in need of repair.
9

The school board maintained that such patterns of racial imbalance were
unintentional and that the District operated in a “colorblind” fashion. Indeed, the
formal segregation of African American students was effectively outlawed by the
California Supreme Court in 1890.
10
The segregation of Mexican American
students—which was widespread in most parts of Southern California well into
World War II—succumbed to a legal challenge by a group of parents in Orange
County. The year after the Mendez v. Westminster (1947) verdict was delivered,
Governor Earl Warren repealed all legislative provisions allowing for the segregation
of racial minorities in public schools.
11
Thus, when first confronted with evidence of
racial imbalance and segregation in South Gate, the majority of the Los Angeles
school board simply recited the official prevailing position: colorblind innocence. In
response to NAACP charges that racially gerrymandered attendance areas sustained
segregated schools, school board member Georgina Hardy insisted that the school
staff “counts noses, not color.” Superintendent Jack Crowther maintained that the
school district was “concerned with only one thing—providing the best education

9
Ibid. 288.
10
Wysinger v. Crookshank, 82 Cal 588, 720 (1890).
11
Mendez v. Westminster School Dist. of Orange County, 64 F.Supp. 544 (D.C.CAL. 1946). On this
case see Gilbert Gonzalez, "Segregation of Mexican Children in a Southern California City: The
Legacy of Expansionism and the American Southwest.," Western Historical Quarterly 16 (January,
1985), Vicki Ruiz, "South by Southwest: Mexican Americans and segregated schooling, 1900-1950,"
OAH Magazine of History 15 (Winter, 2001). On an earlier anti-segregation case near San Diego see
Roberto Alvarez, "The Lemon Grove Incident: The Nation’s First Successful Desegregation Court
Case," The Journal of San Diego History 32 (Spring, 1986).

222
possible for each child regardless of race, creed or color.”
12

To civil rights activists, these responses were not convincing. When the school
board voted to rebuild and expand Jordon High as a segregated campus rather than
integrate students with nearby South Gate High, it provoked this wry retort from
NAACP leader Marnesba Tackett:
You are accidentally spending over a million dollars to accidentally rebuild
Jordon in its same location. Hence it will accidentally remain a segregated
school. You have accidentally bought two new school sites in areas that are
rapidly becoming solidly Negro. In accidental anticipation of this ethnic
change you have accidentally named one of these proposed schools after a
noted Negro author.
13

Tackett’s testimony demonstrates how the distinction between de facto versus de
jure segregation provided so little purchase towards understanding the causes of
segregation in Los Angeles and elsewhere in California. As desegregation lawsuits
made their way through California courts in the 1960s and early 1970s, case after
case revealed that decisions to set attendance zones, locate new school sites, and
arrange feeder patterns between elementary, middle and high schools were often
based on maintaining and enforcing patterns of racial segregation. In Los Angeles,
funding formulas for campus maintenance were based on the square footage of
school facilities, systematically favoring the sprawling, newly constructed campuses
in the San Fernando Valley over the aging, more compact buildings in older parts of
the city. School boards did not make these decisions unilaterally; parents often

12
“Who Is Becoming Color Blind?” Los Angeles Times, Sep 13, 1962; pg. A4.
13
“‘Gerrymandering in the Los Angeles City School Districts’ presented by NAACP and UCRC June
27, 1963 by Marnesba Tackett.” Box 5, Folder 3, Dorothy Doyle Collection , Southern California
Library for Social Studies and Research (hereafter DD).

223
lobbied them to ensure they adopted policies that would use race to assign students
and allocate resources. Thus, the highly segregated school systems which developed
across the state in the postwar era were driven in large part by a self-reinforcing
dynamic that treated racially determined attendance and assignment patterns as
“natural” and funneled disproportionate amounts of resources and opportunities to
schools serving white students.
14

Among their other demands for political representation and additional
resources, Tackett and the civil rights groups insisted that attendance boundaries be
redrawn to desegregate both South Gate and Jordon High Schools, a policy that
would have required minimal district-provided busing, since the schools were less
than a mile apart.
15
The ACLU also filed a lawsuit to compel this change. Crawford
v. Los Angeles School Board (1963) was eventually expanded to include the entire
Los Angeles school district and all Black and Mexican American students; it would
be nearly two decades before the case was resolved.
Wakefield arose to the forefront of the grassroots effort within South Gate to
repel the proposed changes. To Floyd Wakefield, the parents and students of Watts
were the authors of their own failures; they had no right to make claims on the

14
On the history of African American segregation in California schools see Hendrick, The Education
of Non-Whites in California, 1849-1970, Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and
Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. John Caughey and LaRee Caughey, School Segregation
on Our Doorstep: The Los Angeles Story (Los Angeles, 1966). 4. Other accounts of the Crawford case
include Fred Okrand, Oral History Interview, Conducted 1982 by Michael Balter, UCLA Oral History
Program. http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft258003n2&brand= calisphere. Accessed Oct 29,
2006.Jess Carrillo, "The Process of School Desegregation: The Case of the Los Angeles Unified
School District (PhD Diss)" (UCLA, 1978), Carlos Manuel Haro, Mexicano/Chicano Concerns and
School Desegregation in Los Angeles (Los Angeles, 1977), Jeanne Thiel Landis, "The Crawford
Desegregation Suit in Los Angeles 1977-1981 (Phd Dis)" (UCLA, 1984).
15
On the early protests before the LAUSD, see Caughey and Caughey, School Segregation on Our
Doorstep: The Los Angeles Story.

224
innocent bystanders of South Gate. In crafting his opposition to “forced integration”
and “social experiments” threatening South Gate schools, Wakefield drew from the
same thinly veiled discourse of “white rights” animating the realtors’ Proposition 14,
an initiative Wakefield also enthusiastically championed. As fervently as civil rights
groups organized marches, sit-ins, press conferences and hunger strikes at the school
board during late 1963 and early 1964, Wakefield and his supporters counter-
mobilized with their own rallies, petitions and other collective actions.
16
While they
disavowed any racist intentions, they nonetheless posed their interests and concerns
in direct opposition to the “integrationists.” To Wakefield, the struggle was between
those who “believed in integration and swapping kids [and those who] didn’t.”
17

Moreover, while Wakefield asserted at different times that Black students would not
benefit from learning in a desegregated setting, the white activists of South Gate
never sought any common ground with African American or Chicano political
leaders who might also oppose prevailing desegregation proposals. Their political
vocabulary was defined by straightforward calls for local control and (white)
parents’ rights, and they made little effort to conceal their contempt for civil rights
proponents.
As Chapter 3 suggested, this discourse had contradictory effects. On the one
hand, it effectively aroused the passions and anxieties of large numbers of white
parents and voters who felt that preserving segregated schools and communities was

16
Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven : Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-
1965. 294.
17
Ibid. 295.

225
essential to protecting their own standing. Hundreds of South Gates residents joined
Wakefield at school board meetings, denouncing the proponents of desegregation
and pressuring the school board to preserve the existing school attendance
boundaries. South Gate voters passed Proposition 14 in 1964 by a ratio of nearly 9 to
1, among the highest rates in the entire state.
18
Floyd Wakefield rode the same
political currents to a victory in the State Assembly race in 1966, even though he ran
as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic district.
But Wakefield’s unapologetic white rights’ discourse also had significant
political and legal liabilities. The California Real Estate Association learned these
limits when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Proposition 14 violated the federal
Equal Protection Clause, holding that its blanket prohibition on anti-discrimination
remedies demonstrated discriminatory intent.
19
In addition, as a political discourse,
demands for white rights failed to offer any solution or response to the growing crisis
facing highly segregated Black and Mexican American schools beyond the token
support it offered for the principle of “equal education.” Finally, by marking itself as
opposed to “forced integration,” white rights claims ran against a growing public
consensus, shaped largely by the work of the Southern civil rights movement but
reflected in opinion polls nationally, that segregated schools were anathema to a
pluralist democracy.
20

18
California Secretary of State. 1964 General Election Statement of Vote.
19
Reitman v Mulkey 387 U. S. 369 [1967]
20
A 1970 UCLA poll found that 75 percent of Los Angeles County residents favored desegregation,
yet 69 percent opposed busing to achieve this goal. Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation
and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975. 159.

226

The Emerging Challenge to Segregated Schools
Indeed, by the late 1960s, Wakefield and his South Gate constituents
increasingly found they could no longer claim to represent an unassailable public
consensus against the desegregation of public schools. While many of these
transformations took place within local school districts, two developments at the
state level served as important catalysts. First, in 1963 the state Supreme Court ruled
in Jackson v. Pasadena School District that where residential segregation existed, it
was “not enough for a school board to refrain from affirmative discriminatory
conduct. The harmful influence on the children will be reflected and intensified in
the classroom if school attendance is determined on a geographic basis without
corrective measures.” The court offered an expansive interpretation of the state
Equal Protection Clause in determining that “right to an equal opportunity for
education and the harmful consequences of segregation require that school boards
take steps, insofar as reasonably feasible, to alleviate racial imbalance in schools
regardless of its cause.”
21
The decision essentially made the distinction between de
jure and de facto discrimination irrelevant, foregrounding the principle of equal
educational opportunity and giving local desegregation advocates a potent tool in
their negotiations with school boards. The ruling, together with the 1965 passage of
the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act, placed a clear mandate on
local school districts to address both racial imbalance and educational inadequacy.

21
Jackson v. Pasadena City School Dist. (1963) 59 C2d 876

227
The second development was inaugurated by the state Board of Education,
which through most of the 1960s was comprised of Pat Brown appointees who
favored immediate desegregation. With pressure from the NAACP, the Board first
adopted a series of administrative directives beginning in 1962 urging school
districts to “exert all effort to avoid and eliminate segregation of children on account
of race or color.”
22
In 1966, the Board instituted a statewide racial and ethnic census
which for the first time allowed a standardized and quantifiable measurement of
levels of racial imbalance. Two years later, even with Reagan appointees comprising
a majority, the Board adopted an advisory policy declaring that any school whose
enrollment of minority students differed by more than 15 percent from the
percentage of students in the district as a whole would be considered “racially
imbalanced” and require the school district to take corrective action.
To Wakefield’s dismay, many local school boards began responding to these
mandates. In May 1968, Los Angeles School Board President Georgina Hardy, who
five years earlier equivocated when faced with demands to desegregate South Gate
High School, now chastised San Fernando Valley residents for turning their backs on
the problem of overcrowded and deteriorated schools in the central city. She told an
audience at the Van Nuys Chamber of Commerce that when the Valley needed
money for schools during its period of expansion in the 1950s, voters eagerly
supported bond issues. But “once you had it made” she told the group, “you didn’t
give a damn what was happening in other parts of the city.” Hardy called opposition

22
Hendrick, The Education of Non-Whites in California, 1849-1970. 110.

228
among “white, middle class parents” to a modest, voluntary program designed to
bring students from overcrowded schools elsewhere in the city to empty classrooms
in the Valley “ridiculous.”
23

The same year, Duarte Superintendent Palmer Campen referred to a virtual
“Mason-Dixon line” marking attendance boundaries and enrollment disparities in his
school district 20 miles east of Los Angeles. The Duarte school board vowed to
undertake an effort to maintain “an integrated school system in which each child
shall be provided equal educational opportunities.” In Orange County, both within
larger districts such as Santa Ana and Anaheim and within smaller districts such as
Garden Grove, Placentia, and Orange, school boards made at least modest efforts to
alleviate patterns of racial imbalance by redrawing attendance boundaries or locating
new schools to ensure existing imbalances were not perpetuated. As many of these
districts were relatively small and already relied on some use of busing, the remedies
seemed palatable to most parents.
24

To be sure, other than the Berkeley district’s unprecedented mandatory
desegregation plan (which was adopted in the late 1960s without a court order), most
of these efforts were uneven and partial rather than comprehensive or resolute. In
cities such as Richmond and Pasadena, the opposition of some parents and district
officials plagued desegregation efforts from the start; in other cases, the reticence of
local leadership to act decisively only contributed to the perception that

23
“Ms. Hardy Delivers Blast at Suburbia.” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1968; pg SF1.
24
‘Mason-Dixon Line’ Must Go, Duarte Vows.” Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1968, Pg SG_B1;
Ethnic, Racial Housing Patterns Affect Schools.” Los Angeles Times, Oct 20, 1968; pg OC1.

229
desegregation was unworkable and excessively burdensome. But the transformations
afoot during the 1960s should not be underestimated. California schools had become
segregated over the course of many decades through a complex set of forces and
relationships, and it was logical that the remedies would have to be locally tailored
and implemented.
25

In addition, contrary to Wakefield’s contentions, white parents and students did
not uniformly oppose or flee mandatory desegregation. Their actions and
assessments were often contradictory, and we must balance the tension between
examining the pro-segregationist expressions of many white parents seriously
without treating them as historically inevitable. On the one hand, because local
school districts often funneled the most resources—the newest buildings, the most
experienced teachers, and the most comprehensive curricular offerings—to the
schools serving white students, it is unsurprising that many parents would infer that
maintaining a white dominant student body and teaching staff was critical to
“protecting” the quality of their schools. In many cases, they eagerly pursued and
embraced the relative opportunities and privileges afforded to them by segregated
school systems.
On the other hand, the doomsday admonitions that white parents would never
tolerate desegregated schools also proved spurious. Following the 1946 Mendez

25
Case studies of desegregation and busing struggles in these cities include Doris Fine, When
Leadership Fails: Desegregation and Demoralization in the San Francisco Schools (New York,
1986), Lillian Rubin, Busing and Backlash: White against White in a California School District
(Berkeley, 1972). On Pasadena see Rosina A. Lozano, "Brown’s Legacy in the West: Pasadena
Unified School District’s Federally Mandated Desegregation," Southwestern Law Review
(forthcoming).

230
decision, most schools in Orange County desegregated without incident. When the
Berkeley and Riverside school districts voluntarily inaugurated a district-wide busing
program in the late 1960s, and when districts such as San Francisco, Pasadena, Santa
Barbara and other cities instituted court ordered programs in the 1970s, the highly
vocal opposition they faced typically gave way to rapid adjustment and acceptance
among the majority of parents and students. Attempts to organize anti-busing
boycotts failed consistently. Even in Los Angeles, where busing programs faced
more than a decade of relentless stigmatization and political and legal delay, the
awkwardly crafted busing program that was eventually implemented for a few years
in the late 1970s unfolded peacefully. Nor were desegregation opponents ever able to
conclusively establish that mandatory desegregation programs singularly drove
patterns of “white flight” into private or parochial schools and other school districts.
While the debate over the causes of declines in white enrollment was complicated,
most of the evidence suggested that an objection to busing and desegregation was
only one among several factors contributing to the exodus of white students from
urban public school systems, a trend that had been underway for many years prior to
busing proposals.
26

If the desegregation plans had a significant liability, it was that by focusing

26
University of Chicago sociologist James Coleman became the leading advocate for the theory that
mandatory desegregation programs resulted in increased (re)segregation, because such plans drove
white students out of large districts. Coleman’s 1975 report was answered by critics such as Gary
Orfield and Thomas Pettigrew, who challenged several methodological issues in his study. They
generally contended that at most, mandatory desegregation only accelerated “white flight” in the first
year or two of the programs, and generally not by large proportions. For a summary of this debate, see
Dianne Ravitch, "The "White Flight" Controversy," in Busing U.S.A., ed. Nicolaus Mills (New York,
1979). The relevant question for my purposes is why and for what reason parents understood
desegregation and busing as harmful or beneficial to their children’s education.

231
almost exclusively on rectifying rigidly determined racial imbalances, they often left
other questions of equity involving teacher and personnel hiring, “ability tracking,”
inadequate resources, parental involvement, curriculum, and language policy
unaddressed. Many of these issues animated the largest student-led protest in the
history of California public education—the Chicano student “blowouts” involving
22,000 students centered in East Los Angeles in the spring of 1968. The students’
complaints—a curriculum which ignored Mexican American history and steered
students away from college and towards vocational training, the paucity of Mexican
American teachers, the continued use of corporal punishment, overcrowded
campuses—reflected many of the same desires for justice and opportunity pursued
by desegregation advocates. But the Chicano students made little mention of
desegregation as a political imperative; their priority was the immediate
improvement of conditions in East Los Angeles schools.
27
The desegregation
remedies proposed in Los Angeles and elsewhere made little commitment to address
these issues or the forms of cultural domination that fueled the walkouts. The
inability of desegregation advocates and the student protestors to find common
ground would eventually be exploited by opponents of both groups.

Bringing Proposition 21 to the Ballot

Floyd Wakefield’s antagonism towards all state-sponsored desegregation
actions did not parse such distinctions in the political strategies of civil rights groups

27
For an excellent account of the student walkouts see Lopez, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for
Justice.

232
and student activists; the thunder of his exhortations to defend white rights left him
tone deaf to other criticisms of desegregation. The policies he pursued as a state
legislator reflected this position.
28
In 1970, the San Francisco Unified School District
became the largest city in the country to desegregate its elementary school system.
The same year, in the Crawford v Los Angles case, Superior Court Judge Alfred
Gitelson found the state’s largest school district to be deliberately segregated and
ordered the board to devise a far-reaching district-wide desegregation plan.
29

In response, in 1970 Wakefield introduced a blunt and far reaching bill which
banned the busing of school children “for any purpose” without written parental
consent, arguing “the child belongs to the parent not the school board, and it is the
parents’ prerogative to decide the issue.” Echoing an argument offered by foes of fair
employment in 1946 and fair housing in 1964, Wakefield claimed it was his
opponents who “created hatred and animosity among the races. Integration will
never be successful unless it is on an individual basis.”
30

The legislature adopted Wakefield’s measure, but the state Supreme Court
ruled early the following year in San Francisco Unified School District v. Johnson
(1971) that the statute could not be used to ban busing for the purposes of lessening

28
Wakefield also continued to remain deeply involved in South Gate politics. In 1971 he championed
an unsuccessful effort (first inaugurated a decade earlier) to allow South Gate and five other
neighboring cities to secede from the LAUSD in the name of “neighborhood control.” “Wakefield
Backs Cities’ Move to Form Own District” Los Angeles Times, Aug, 19, 1971, pg M1.
29
After a two-year trial, Gitelson found that the Los Angeles school board “knowingly, affirmatively
and in bad faith…segregated, de jure, its students” through its attendance boundary and school
location decisions. Gitelson ordered the District to develop a desegregation plan immediately, an
order the school board promptly appealed. Gitelson lost his reelection bid in 1970, largely on the
desegregation issue 1972. Wollenberg, All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California
Schools, 1855-1975.
30
“Author of Bussing Bill Defends Handiwork Against Times Attack.” Los Angeles Times., Jul 14,
1970, pg. A6.

233
racial imbalance. The court described busing as “a method that in many
circumstances is the sole and exclusive means of eliminating racial segregation in the
schools." To prohibit busing for this purpose would clearly violate federal and state
equal protection guarantees. The court determined Wakefield’s bill could only
prevent school boards from requiring students to ride district-provided buses, as
opposed to finding their own transportation.
31

Wakefield candidly admitted that his legislation never sought to address the
issue of busing in general but rather to end “busing children for the purposes of
integration.” Indeed, the vast majority of busing which occurred in California had
nothing to do with desegregation, and most parents who relied on such busing would
be outraged if district-provided transportation were to end. So in the spring of 1971,
Wakefield shifted his focus from regulating the use of busing to restricting school
assignment. He sponsored legislation which prevented school districts from making
race-based school assignments for any purpose, a measure described by the Los
Angeles Times as “Discrimination in a Transparent Mask.” It was unsurprising that
the measure failed to win passage in the legislature; the Johnson ruling specifically
endorsed the right and obligation of school boards to use student assignment as a tool
to alleviate racial imbalance.
32

At the same time, the legislature adopted a bill sponsored by Marin County
Republican Assemblyman William Bagley which formally established school
desegregation as a policy goal of the state. Bagley’s legislation was modest by any

31
San Francisco Unified School District v. Johnson, 3 Cal. 3d 937, 479 P.2d 669 (1971).
32
“Discrimination in a Transparent Mask.” Los Angeles Times. April 16, 1971. pg. C10.

234
measure. It required the collection of race and ethnicity data to determine patterns of
imbalance, but gave broad discretion to local boards to alleviate these patterns
without any specific mandates or penalties for non-compliance. Indeed, the bill was
backed by Republicans such as Governor Reagan in large part because of the
perception that providing local districts with an administrative framework to address
racial imbalance was preferable to becoming subject to a more far reaching court
order.
33

From Wakefield’s perspective, however, such considerations were irrelevant;
the Bagley Act was an invitation to “massive busing.” All efforts at “forced
integration” were equally untenable, a position he felt would be vindicated at the
ballot. If the courts and lawmakers would not agree, he would take his case directly
to voters.
Wakefield used the “Friends of Wakefield” organization he established for
his campaigns for the Assembly to draft and circulate a ballot initiative. Wakefield’s
proposed statute added a provision to the state Education Code declaring “No public
school student shall, because of his race, creed, or color, be assigned to or be
required to attend a particular school.” The “Wakefield Amendment,” as it came to
be known, also repealed the Bagley Act’s mandate for school districts to correct
racial and ethnic imbalances within student enrollment.

33
“Wakefield Requests Veto on Racial Bill.” Los Angeles Times. December 12, 1971. pg SE2.

235
The Campaign for Proposition 21
A fundraising appeal that Wakefield sent to his supporters two weeks before
the election revealed the ways the Assemblyman sought to construct Proposition 21
as an unambiguous defense of white rights. Asserting that the busing agenda pursued
by “liberals” was being masked by “press suppression” and the “pro-busing news-
media,” Wakefield solicited donations in order to buy television time for a campaign
ad. Declaring that the “California Forced Busing Law” would “totally destroy the
neighborhood school concept,” his appeal included a photo storyboard for a
commercial he hoped to begin airing immediately (see Figure 5.1). The storyboard
showed a terrified young girl being taken from her mother’s protection by “that old
government.” The ad exemplified Wakefield’s longstanding racialized anti-statism
and his forceful defense of white racial innocence.
34

Wakefield continually emphasized the racialized dimensions of his critique
before the public. He referred to the Bagley Act as the “forced integration law,”
announcing that the “Courts have said we are not going to tolerate segregated (by
law) schools. Now we’re turning around and saying we’re not going to tolerate
integrating them by law either.”
35
Wakefield’s references to “freedom of choice”
recited a familiar defense of Jim Crow policies in the South that portrayed
desegregation as a fundamental abrogation of (white) freedom of association.
36

34
“Dear Fellow Californian” letter, October 26, 1972 and storyboard in folder “Proposition 21
(1972)” Campaign Literature Collection, Young Research Library, UCLA. Campaign filing reports
suggest the campaign never purchased any television advertising time.
35
“2 Groups Promise Court Challenge to Busing Proposition.” Los Angeles Times Nov 9, 1972; pg.
A20.
36
For an example of how the freedom of association defense was deployed in Atlanta school

236
In early September, Wakefield showed up at a press conference called by his
adversaries and engaged in a heated exchange with Los Angeles school board
member Georgina Hardy, a Proposition 21 opponent. When Hardy accused
Wakefield of attempting for years to “keep an enclave of middle class whites
separate” through his opposition to desegregating South Gate High School,
Wakefield did not challenge her characterization, instead telling Hardy that he did so
“because of [her] sloppy ways of educating children.”
37

Undoubtedly, Wakefield hoped to tap the “anti-busing” currents that seemed
to be rapidly accelerating in other parts of the country. In March 1972, 74 percent of
Florida voters supported a straw-ballot resolution in support of a constitutional
amendment prohibiting “forced busing.” Soon after, President Nixon called for a
national moratorium on busing for desegregation and Congress adopted legislation
declaring that such busing must be a remedy of last resort.

desegregation debates, see Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern
Conservatism (Princeton, 2005).
37
“Prop. 21 Author, Foes Trade Barbs.” Los Angeles Times, Sep 22, 1972; pg OC_A1.

237
Figure 9: “Stop Forced Busing.” Photographic storyboard for television advertisement
in support of 1972 Wakefield Amendment (Proposition 21).
Campaign Literature Archive (1972 Propositions), Young Research Library, UCLA

238
The busing controversy loomed as a major issue in the 1972 presidential contest, and
dominated local politics in cities such as Detroit, Boston, and Charlotte.
38

But Wakefield’s measure failed to catalyze the same response in California,
and fell far short of triggering the outpouring of grassroots support witnessed in the
Proposition 14 campaign. His campaign collected only 329,675 signatures, barely
enough to qualify the measure for the ballot, and attracted only minor attention from
the news media. The campaign was essentially run through the organization
Wakefield had built in his Assembly bids; Wakefield received relatively few official
endorsements. His few public supporters included L.A. school board president JC
Chambers, a steadfast opponent of the pending desegregation order in Los Angeles,
who assisted Wakefield with the signature gathering effort, and a handful of local
school boards, including the conservative Orange County Board of Education.
39

Wakefield raised a modest $45,000 for the entire effort, including money he
donated from his own campaign fund, as compared to more than $3 million secured
by the California Real Estate Association in support of Proposition 14. Most of the
donations came in small amounts from a handful of supporters scattered across
Southern California, in addition to a few organizational contributions from local
Republican Clubs. Wakefield—who conceded to the Los Angeles Times during the
campaign that he was “sort of a tightwad really”—purchased only a few radio spots

38
Florida voters also adopted by a greater percentage—79% a resolution to guarantee “quality
education” and “equal opportunity” for all children and prohibit a return to dual-school systems.
“Retreat from Integration” Time magazine, March 27, 1972. The Nixon and Congressional measures
were largely symbolic as they did not delay the implementation of any local desegregation actions.
39
“Proposition 21: Is it Anti-Busing or Anti-Integration?” Los Angeles Times, Sep 26, 1972. OC1.
“County Board Supports Bible Version for Texts.” Los Angeles Times. Oct 26, 1972. pg. OC A11.

239
on behalf of Proposition 21 in Los Angeles, Corona, Sacramento and San Diego, but
employed little other media advertising or direct mail.
40

In sum, Wakefield shaped Proposition 21 around the same political claims
that propelled him to local stardom in South Gate a decade earlier. Repeating
arguments made by opponents of both fair employment and fair housing since the
mid-1940s, Wakefield portrayed racial segregation and apartheid as a “natural”
expression of individual preference and choice. Desegregation, on the other hand,
was a “social experiment” unlawfully imposed by the government on innocent white
families. Wakefield rarely masked his indifference to the crisis facing segregated
Black and Chicano schools. As I will argue, this account of the meaning of race and
racism, so dominant in the early postwar years, was quickly losing its grip on the
public debate in California. Yet as we shall see, like the opponents of Proposition 14,
Wakefield’s adversaries proved unable to offer any meaningful opposition or
alternative to this framework.

The Campaign to Defeat Proposition 21
As the campaign season for the November elections kicked off in early
September, Floyd Wakefield’s opponents hastily mobilized to defeat the measure.
The ACLU of Southern California, which had taken the lead in the Crawford v Los
Angeles case, formed Californians Against Unequal Schools and Education
(CAUSE) to coordinate the anti-21 effort, appointing ACLU board member Joyce

40
“Proposition 21: Is it Anti-Busing or Anti-Integration?” Los Angeles Times, Sep 26, 1972. OC1.
Campaign filing statement from California State Archives, Sacramento. Folder: 1972, Proposition 21.

240
Fiske director. Fiske promised a determined campaign that would reflect lessons
learned in the failed effort to defeat Proposition 14 eight years earlier.
Many volunteers with the campaign against Proposition 14 had been shocked at the
overwhelming passage of the anti-fair housing measure, as “No on 14” bumper
stickers seemed to be ubiquitous in many parts of Los Angles and the San Francisco
Bay Area before the election. Fiske declared they would not be similarly lured into a
false sense of confidence, insisting that because “people who will vote yes on a
discriminatory proposition just won’t advertise it,” they would pursue new
strategies.
41

Yet CAUSE’s effort against Proposition 21 largely followed the approach
used against Proposition 14, and it realized an identical outcome, albeit on a far
smaller stage. Three parallels between the campaigns to defeat Proposition 21 and
Proposition 14 are worth noting, as they register the difficulty which civil rights
advocates in California faced during this period in fashioning and constituting an
audience for their anti-racist claims.
First, after the initial burst of grassroots mobilization in 1963 and 1964
around the South Gate controversy, desegregation advocates had focused their efforts
almost entirely on litigation and lobbying. This emphasis made some tactical sense.
The state courts in particular had become increasingly supportive of local
desegregation mandates. As long as the Legislature did not obstruct these
interpretations, the courts seemed to be the most promising avenue of redress. The

41
“Proposition 21: Is it Anti-Busing or Anti-Integration?” Los Angeles Times, Sep 26, 1972; pg. OC1

241
grassroots organizing that did occur—such as the 1968 student walkouts and some
parent activism at local school sites—had little formal connection with the
desegregation advocacy led by the NAACP and ACLU. At the same time, the
grassroots Democratic clubs that had become so active in the fair housing effort had
been wracked for several years in internal debates over the party’s policy in Vietnam
and devoted little attention to the desegregation controversy. Thus when the ACLU
established CAUSE in order to defeat Proposition 21, it had no meaningful
grassroots base to mobilize or address.
Instead, CAUSE turned to a handful of likeminded organizations for support.
CAUSE secured the endorsement of many of the groups that opposed Proposition
14: the NAACP, the California Teachers Association, the State Federation of Labor,
the League of Women Voters, and several faith-based groups which CAUSE briefly
organized into an Interfaith Committee. The Los Angeles school board recorded its
opposition to Proposition 21, even as it continued to appeal its own desegregation
order.
42
Yet because the 1972 general election ballot was crowded with other
controversial initiatives, these endorsements came with little concrete support. Much
of the attention of the ACLU—especially its Northern California chapter—was
focused on defeating a measure sponsored by the correction officers’ association
(and backed strongly by Wakefield) to restore the death penalty in California. Faith
groups focused on an anti-farmworker measure, a proposal to legalize the possession

42
“Most Voters Undecided on Prop. 19, Poll Finds” Los Angeles Times; Oct 25, 1972; pg. A24.
According to LA school board member Hardy, the board determined that the desegregation order
issued by Judge Gitelson was too far-reaching, whereas the Bagley Act’s guidelines were more
suitable.

242
of marijuana, and a harsh anti-obscenity initiative. Unions trained much of their
attention on a contentious tax reform initiative championed by realtors and
developers. These competing efforts siphoned off most of the contributions CAUSE
might have been otherwise able to secure. Working out of a rented office on West
Pico Avenue in Los Angeles, the campaign raised only $17,000, more than half of
which came from the ACLU. While Wakefield also had difficulty arousing a critical
mass of interest in his initiative, his opponents’ organized constituency was even
smaller.
43

Second, CAUSE mobilized a tepid, almost apologetic defense of the anti-
discrimination measures it sought to defend, and failed to offer any affirmative
vision of the benefits of desegregated or integrated schools. CAUSE attempted to
cast opposition to Proposition 21 as a bipartisan effort, emphasizing the moderate
terms of the Bagley Act and the minimal obligations it imposed. At the same time,
CAUSE also challenged the moral underpinnings of the Wakefield measure, thus
crafting a deeply contradictory argument. On the one hand, Proposition 21 opponents
accused Wakefield of “raising scare words and horror stories” such as “‘forced
integration’, ‘forced busing’, [and] ‘destruction of public schools,’” hoping to
prevent Wakefield from using the menace of “busing” to frighten voters. On the
other hand, CAUSE itself attempted to mobilize these same fears towards their own
ends. They repeatedly warned that without the “calm and deliberative progress”
provided for by the Bagley Act’s modest requirements, the courts would be forced to

43
Proposition 21: Is it Anti-Busing or Anti-Integration?” Los Angeles Times, Sep 26, 1972. OC1.
Campaign filing statement from California State Archives, Sacramento. Folder: 1972, Proposition 21.

243
intervene with a far worse prescription. The first line of the ballot argument against
Proposition 21 read: “Passage of this proposition will encourage Court-ordered
‘busing’ in California! Please vote ‘no.’” In other words, if voters wanted to
minimize the reach and pace of desegregation, the limited remedies of the Bagley
Act were their surest bet. This was the essence of both Reagan and Bagley’s position
on the issue, and they pointed to the Governor’s endorsement of the Bagley Act
routinely. Just as Proposition 14 opponents argued that the protection of fair housing
was necessary to avoid unleashing the “anger of the ghetto,” CAUSE hoped to
arouse white racialized anxieties against “busing” in defense of a moderate civil
rights measure. And while they repeatedly contended that Proposition 21 would be
overturned by the courts, they made few moral claims about the imperative to
desegregate, or the advantages an integrated education might present beyond the
tepid suggestion that “multiracial education offered better preparation for life.” In
addition, in the public debate, school desegregation seemed completely divorced
from most other concerns for the state of public education—the overcrowding facing
many schools, buildings in need of repair, and growing concerns about learning and
achievement. Floyd Wakefield effectively stigmatized school desegregation as an
impediment towards improving “educational standards for all students.”
44

Finally, the anti-21 campaign refused to call attention to the conditions and
inequities that initially gave rise to desegregation efforts. That is, for the students and
parents who inaugurated the Mendez v. Westminster suit in 1946, the five lawsuits

44
California Secretary of Statement. Ballot arguments for Proposition 21, 1972 General Election.
Emphasis in original.

244
consolidated into the Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954, and the Pasadena
and Los Angeles cases of the early 1960s, desegregation was never an effort to
achieve “racial balance” as an end in itself, but a principled claim to secure an equal,
first-rate education. This goal, they asserted, could never be realized under “separate
but equal” conditions. But a decade’s worth of litigation in California had removed
much of the moral import of this vision; the lawsuits and the court orders they
secured shifted attention towards the numerical measures of racial balance on their
own.
45

Black and Chicano leaders and organizations played a minimal role in the
anti-21 campaign, indexing both their marginal role within these advocacy coalitions
and their own ambivalence towards the meek solutions implied by legislation like the
Bagley Act.
46
In short term tactical calculations seeking to win blocs of voters, the
failure to include Black and Chicano leaders perhaps seemed unimportant; white
voters easily constituted 90 percent of the California electorate. Yet as we shall see,
it was precisely the schism between desegregation advocates and the grassroots
communities they claimed to represent that opponents would eventually exploit in
order to naturalize and defend the status quo.

45
By 1972, the racial and ethnic census of the LAUSD’s 544 regular schools revealed 272 segregated
minority schools and 125 segregated white schools. Ninety-five percent of Black students attended
segregated schools and eighty percent of white students attended schools which averaged less than
one Black student per class. These rates of segregation consider an individual school to be segregated
if it has a greater than 50 percent total minority enrollment. In half of these schools, the enrollment
was at least 98 percent minority. Collectively, Black, Mexican (Spanish Surname), Asian, and Indian
students comprised approximately 50 percent of the district’s enrollment. John Caughey and LaRee
Caughey, To Kill a Child's Spirit: The Tragedy of School Segregation in Los Angeles (Itsca, Illinois,
1973).
46
African American Assemblywoman Yvonne Braithwaite Burke from Los Angeles served as a
spokesperson for CAUSE, and several AME bishops spoke out against the measure, but CAUSE
made few other attempts to address or organize nonwhite voters.

245

The Proposition 21 Vote and its Aftermath
Given the limited reach and effectiveness of both campaigns, it is
unsurprising that a week before the election, a Field Poll found that more than one in
three voters remained undecided about Proposition 21; 36 percent said they intended
to vote in favor of the initiative, while 27 percent intended to vote against it.
47

Ultimately, the measure passed by more than two million votes and a
statewide margin of 63 percent. Ninety-one percent of those who showed up to the
poll cast a ballot on the measure, slightly lower than the rate for the death penalty,
farm labor, obscenity, or marijuana initiatives.
48
The strongest resistance the measure
faced was in several Bay Area cities, including Oakland and San Francisco, which
had voted in favor of Proposition 14 eight years earlier, but voted against Proposition
21. The San Francisco vote was particularly revealing because the city was in the
midst of a mandatory desegregation program, and only a year earlier, a local
referendum on a policy urging that no busing would be “compelled” without parental
permission passed by more than three to one.
49

As promised, immediately after the election both the NAACP and the ACLU
filed suit to overturn Proposition 21. The cases became attached to desegregation

47
“Death Penalty Initiative Favored 2 to 1 in Poll.” Los Angeles Times. Nov. 3, 1972, pg. A21.
48
The death penalty initiative passed, but the anti-farmworker legislation, the anti-obscenity measure,
and the marijuana legalization measure all failed. Nixon won California by a landslide, even as
Democrats increased their majority in the State Assembly to historic highs. California Secretary of
State. Statement of Vote, 1972 General Election.
49
“S.F. School Busing: No Miracles, No Disasters.” Los Angeles Times, Nov 27, 1972; pg A3.

246
litigation already pending in San Bernadino, Sacramento and Santa Barbara.
50
The
Superior Court initially issued conflicting rulings on the cases, which were then
heard on appeal by the state Supreme Court. In January 1975, more than two years
after the election, the state Supreme Court found the operative portion of Proposition
21, which prohibited student assignment based on race, color or creed, to be in
violation of the state and federal constitution. Associate Justice Raymond Sullivan
argued that like Proposition 14, Proposition 21 involved the “state in racial
discrimination” and that the measure could not abrogate “the school district’s
constitutional duty not to segregate.” Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent
decision in Charlotte v. Mecklenburg (1971) Sullivan further asserted that “to forbid
all assignments made on the basis of race would deprive school authorities of the one
tool absolutely essential to fulfillment of their constitutional obligation to eliminate
dual school systems.” Wakefield’s claim that white parents and students bore no
responsibility to address prevailing conditions of inequality failed to pass the court’s
muster.
51

Though it was only in effect for two years, Proposition 21 had a significant
chilling effect on many local school desegregation efforts. The Inglewood and
Pasadena school boards immediately attempted to appeal their own desegregation

50
These were local cases brought about by the NAACP to seek desegregation orders. The courts used
the cases to determine the constitutionality of Proposition 21. See National Assn. for Advancement of
Colored People v. San Bernardino City Unified Sch. Dist. (1976) 17 C3d 311.
51
Santa Barbara School District v. Superior Court, 13 Cal. 3d 315, 324, 530 P.2d 605, 613 (1975).
“State High Court Rules Ban on School Busing Unconstitutional.” Los Angeles Times. Jan 16, 1975.
pg. A3. In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971) the U.S. Supreme
Court upheld a district-wide busing plan that was enacted primarily in response to racially segregated
housing patterns rather than explicit race-based assignments, in order to achieve compliance with the
Brown I mandate. See Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.

247
orders, and in cities such as Whittier and Santa Ana, planned desegregation measures
were never put into effect. At the same time, the State Auditor began monitoring
whether school districts were complying with Proposition 21’s mandates. One state
education official observed that “[t]hings have come to a dead halt in the area of
desegregation since Proposition 21 passed…we have lost ground.” Indeed in early
1974, the state census revealed that 192,000 more students attended segregated
schools in comparison to five years earlier.
52

The Decline of Floyd Wakefield
By the time the state Supreme Court overturned the operative portion of
Proposition 21, Floyd Wakefield had left public office and returned to South Gate,
working as a house painter with minor real estate investments. His South Gate
assembly district was eliminated in a redistricting plan, and he moved in early 1974
to Anaheim to run in a newly created district. Wakefield lost the Republican primary
there, and promptly moved back to South Gate and resumed life as a private citizen,
“just picking up odd jobs from other people.”
53

The decline of Wakefield’s eight-year career in the Assembly paralleled
important transformations in the political landscape of Southern California during
the 1970s. Wakefield never tempered his ardent conservative postures. In the last
months of his final term in the Assembly, he sought to qualify a ballot measure to
rescind the California Legislature’s 1972 ratification of the Equal Rights Act, and sat

52
“School Integration: Light and Shadow.” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 27, 1974.
53
Los Angeles Times, July 13, 1975.

248
at the head table of a John Birch Society political banquet where founder Robert
Welch called for President Nixon’s impeachment.
54
But Wakefield could no longer
count on a constituency in South Gate to reliably support such appeals. The white
working class residents that a decade earlier had rallied behind Wakefield’s defense
of Proposition 14 and segregated South Gate High School were rapidly abandoning
the inner suburbs south of Los Angeles for new residential developments in the San
Fernando Valley and Orange County. Wakefield was no innocent bystander in this
retreat. By insisting that cities such as South Gate could never prosper if they became
racially integrated, he implicitly endorsed the exodus of white residents that
ultimately led to his own political demise. Wakefield would find it increasingly
difficult to find an audience for his unapologetic stands against racial integration.
But as this study argues, political forces seeking to define the meaning of
race and racism in public life have undergone regular renovation and renewal during
the postwar era. Wakefield’s staunch defense of white rights anchored in the white
working class suburbs of South Los Angeles would give way to a more subtle and
sophisticated defense of racial inequality centered in the burgeoning San Fernando
Valley.

Alan Robbins and Proposition 1

Alan Robbins was an unlikely candidate to succeed Floyd Wakefield as
California’s leading crusader against mandatory school desegregation. Twenty-four
years Wakefield’s junior, Robbins grew up in an integrated area in North

54
Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1974; March 11, 1974.

249
Hollywood, earning his undergraduate and law degrees at UCLA. He became hooked
on politics at a young age, volunteering frequently at a Democratic Party office to
register the legions of new arrivals to the San Fernando Valley. Like many other
young Jewish political activists, Robbins supported the early Southern civil rights
movement and campaigned locally against Proposition 14. His energy and quick
mind caught the eye of Burbank Democratic Assemblyman Tom Bane, an early force
in the California Democratic Council and a contemporary of Pat Brown and Jesse
Unruh. Bane’s savvy campaign and organization skills sustained him during a 24-
year career in the State Assembly, and he took Robbins under his wing in the early
1960s. As a Bane staff member, Robbins worked on a non-partisan effort to
streamline the state’s unwieldy state Constitution and make recommendations to
professionalize the Legislature. The project required Robbins to go paragraph by
paragraph through the 75,000 word Constitution and to assess public reaction to each
of the proposed changes. As we shall see, Robbins’ familiarity with this document
would prove critical in the political and legal battles he waged against desegregation
and busing.
55

Bane advised Robbins to build a career in the private sector before running
for office himself. Robbins profited handsomely from investments in real estate, and
by his late twenties had grown wealthy enough to return to politics and finance much
of his own campaign. His election in 1973, secured with the support of the CDC,
helped the Democrats to regain the majority in the State Senate they lost in 1966,

55
Tom Bane, Oral History Interview, Conducted 1994 and 1995 by Steven Isoardi, UCLA Oral
History Program for the California State Archives State Government Oral History Program, p. 96.

250
when Wakefield and Reagan first won office. Where Wakefield often appeared
combative and curmudgeonly, Robbins fashioned himself as young, energetic and
optimistic, a favorite son of the San Fernando Valley and a booster of leading
Democratic causes: he spoke alongside Jane Fonda in support of the ERA and
championed the United Farmworkers.
56

Yet few observers—even his critics—ever doubted Wakefield’s commitment
to his ideals; he rarely equivocated on his positions. Robbins was a different political
animal. He had an astute understanding of the symbolic dimension of politics, even
as his lofty political ambitions on occasion outmatched his own ethical
commitments. A letter Robbins used in his 1973 Senatorial campaign which he
claimed was written to him by his father was revealed by an opponent to be identical
in form and content to a letter written from Joseph Kennedy to his son John during a
1946 campaign for Congress. Robbins blamed the gaffe on a staff member, a tactic
he would make use of again.
57
Less than three years into office, the Los Angles
Times noted that Robbins had already “proved himself a master of the artificially
contrived press conference.”
58

Robbins became quickly ingratiated with the local politics of the Valley,
carefully anticipating issues that could help him prepare a challenge to Los Angeles
Mayor Tom Bradley in the April 1977 primary. He became an early legislative
advocate of “rape laws”—increased criminal penalties for sexual assault crimes--and

56
Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1976
57
Kennedy reference from http://takebackthetimes.blogspot.com/2006/09/angelides-campaign-gaffe-
appropriately.html
58
Los Angeles Times, Nov 17 1975.

251
other “victims’ rights” legislation. Robbins also courted support from boosters for a
plan to see the San Fernando Valley secede from the City of Los Angles, a political
project which constantly drew contrasts between a corrupt, free spending, racially
polyglot city and its exploited, innocent, white suburbs. Robbins demonstrated how
these themes could be brought together when he announced his mayoral candidacy at
a dinner in the Valley in December 1976; he passed out rape whistles printed with
his name to symbolize his defense against the rape of the city.
59

Robbins intended to make crime and taxes the major issues in his 1977
challenge to Bradley. Early in the campaign, he met with a group of parent activists
from BUSTOP, a fledgling organization with roots in the Valley community of
Encino that began organizing in anticipation of a district-wide desegregation plan
stemming from the Crawford case that could include their schools. Robbins told
them that while he was sympathetic with their cause—he had authored a bill earlier
in the year which sought to block a hastily proposed lottery system to desegregate
teaching staffs—he would not make busing or mandatory desegregation a major
issue in the race. Mayor Bradley had consistently said he was opposed to any
“massive cross-town busing,” so the issue seemed to hold little promise. Robbins
indeed publicly scolded Bradley at one point for “injecting the busing issue into the
mayor’s race” after the Mayor suggested most Black parents were also opposed to a
large-scale busing program.
60

But as the April 5 election drew closer, Robbins began to rethink his strategy.

59
Los Angeles Times Dec 11, 1976.
60
“Robbins seeks to place busing issue on ballot.” Los Angeles Times. June 2, 1977. pg. B3

252
Robbins was polling miserably—one poll had the Mayor leading the challenger by
67 percent to 12 percent--and he faced the embarrassing possibility that he would not
even force the mayor into a runoff. At the same time, Bobbi Fiedler, an Encino
housewife and one of the early leaders of BUSTOP was attracting enormous
attention for her insurgent school board candidacy and her uncompromising stand
against busing. Like Robbins, Fiedler was Jewish, grew up in an integrated Santa
Monica neighborhood, and emphasized her opposition to the “deliberate
segregation” which characterized the South. But Fiedler asserted that Los Angeles
schools were free of such intentional actions, and that desegregation plans must be
limited to voluntary programs that preserved the rights of parents to keep their
children in their current schools, however racially imbalanced they might be. As the
Los Angeles school board appeared close to exhausting its legal challenges in the
now 13-year-old Crawford desegregation suit, Fiedler recited apocalyptic scenarios
of a mammoth busing order that would destroy neighborhood schools, arousing
enormous support from anxious Valley parents. By attacking desegregation
remedies, rather than the principle of “forced integration” (as Wakefield had done),
Fiedler effectively recast the defense of white innocence on new terms.
61

It did not take Robbins long to switch the focus of his own campaign. A week
before the election, Robbins announced his candidacy would turn almost completely
to the issue of busing. He released a television commercial with an image of a school
bus and a voice warning: “Now they’re telling us our kids have to go to school 20 or

61
This shift in strategies used to discredit school segregation was occurring in other cities as well.
See, for example, Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.

253
30 miles away. Who’s involved with a school 20 or 30 miles away? Are you? Are
your kids? Are their friends?... No one ever got an education sitting on a bus.”
62

Robbins’ eleventh hour shift failed to salvage his campaign against the
immensely popular Bradley, who gained the plurality of votes necessary to avoid a
runoff. But Fiedler cruised to an easy victory, as did anti-busing incumbent Richard
Ferraro, and as the debate over mandatory desegregation began to dominate Valley
politics, Robbins had found the issue that would keep him in the public spotlight for
the next five years.
63

The Legal and Political Innovations of the Robbins’ Amendment

As Robbins contemplated a ballot initiative to halt the desegregation orders
facing Los Angeles and other California districts, he confronted two challenges—one
legal, the other political--that both turned on questions of intentionality and racial
innocence. From a legal standpoint, Wakefield’s Proposition 21 was entirely
unimaginative. Its central mandate--that the state could not use race in making
student assignment decisions--already been ruled unconstitutional by both the state
court in Johnson v. San Francisco (1971) and by the U.S. Supreme Court in
Charlotte v Mecklenburg (1971). For Robbins’ amendment to avoid the same fate, it
would first have to contend with the state Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
Since the 1963 Jackson v. Pasadena City School District decision, the state Supreme

62
“Busing to Dominate Robbins’ Campaign.” Los Angeles Times. March 31,1977. pg. OC14
63
On Bradley’s defeat of Robbins in the 1977 mayoral contest, see Raphael Sonenshein, Politics in
Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles (Princeton, 1993).

254
Court had interpreted this 23 word passage—“A person may not be deprived of life,
liberty, or property without due process of law or denied equal protection of the
laws”—as requiring school boards to take steps “insofar as reasonably feasible, to
alleviate racial imbalance in schools regardless of its cause." The state court thus
disregarded the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation developed by
the U.S. Supreme Court in determining whether to issue desegregation orders. To the
state courts, the arguments of school boards and desegregation opponents that racial
imbalance occurred because of housing patterns or other “de facto” causes were
immaterial.
In addition to reckoning with the court’s interpretation of the state Equal
Protection Clause, any ballot initiative to limit desegregation orders also had to
adhere to the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In lawsuits
challenging the anti-fair housing Proposition 14 (1964) and Wakefield’s Proposition
21 (1972), plaintiffs successfully argued that the blanket prohibitions on civil rights
protections included in these initiatives demonstrated discriminatory intent on the
part of the electorate. Any challenge to the desegregation order facing the LAUSD
or other California school district would have to withstand similar scrutiny.
64

On June 1, 1977, less than two months after his defeat to Mayor Bradley,
Robbins unveiled a proposed constitutional amendment that cleverly addressed this

64
It is important to note that the initial Superior Court rulings in both the Pasadena and Los Angeles
cases had determined that the school districts did practice intentional segregation; rulings the U.S.
Supreme Court ultimately chose to ignore. In addition, even though the state courts issued favorable
initial rulings, some desegregation strategists felt that the cases should have been filed in federal
court, as the findings would have had more authority with recalcitrant school districts and because
federal judges, appointed to life terms, would be less vulnerable to swings in voter opinion. See
Landis, "The Crawford Desegregation Suit in Los Angeles 1977-1981 (Phd Dis)".

255
vexing dilemma. Robbins proposed to amend the nearly 100 year old state Equal
Protection Clause with a lengthy (176 word) exemption. It held that “with respect to
the use of pupil school assignment or pupil transportation” the state Constitution
could not be interpreted to impose “obligations or responsibilities which exceed
those imposed by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United
States Constitution.” In other words, as long as the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted
the federal Equal Protection Clause as only prohibiting de jure school segregation,
California courts would have to do the same. A lesser provision of the amendment
affirmed the right of school districts to pursue voluntary desegregation programs at
their discretion, an exception that Wakefield never proffered.
The Robbins amendment thus addressed a legal bind that had stymied
opponents of desegregation in California for 15 years. His legislation prevented state
courts from vigorously applying the state’s equal protection guarantees. At the same
time, by affirming the Fourteenth Amendment standard, the initiative also seemed
immune from challenges on these grounds. Undoubtedly, Robbins legal training and
experience on the Constitutional Review Commission under Tom Bane served him
well in striking such a delicate balance: drafting an initiative that could eviscerate
state equal protection guarantees while at the same time meeting the court’s
requirement of putative race neutrality. While Robbins knew that court challenges
would await the measure, he had broken new legal ground in the fight against
mandatory school desegregation. His opponents understood the gravity of this
strategic innovation. NAACP West Coast Secretary Virna Canson, one of Robbins’

256
most astute and uncompromising adversaries, later accused the Senator of mandating
“a course of action which places the State Court off limits to NAACP and other
petitioners on behalf of school desegregation...This State Court has moved beyond
the crippling requirement of proving intent and you seek to void that. Your effort to
constitutionally restrict our access to certain courts and your determination to take
away what we have gained through legal methods is insidious.”
65

In addition to this legal innovation, Robbins embraced a political strategy
markedly different from Wakefield. When the South Gate lawmaker qualified
Proposition 21, he primarily sought support from his existing base of white
conservatives: Republican clubs, a handful of school board members, and individual
voters in his own district. Robbins, by comparison, was alert to the growing criticism
of prevailing desegregation plans within many minority communities, and actively
courted African American, Chicano, and Asian American figures to take visible,
active roles in his initiative campaign. Robbins recruited State Senator Alex Garcia,
a prominent East Los Angeles Democrat who had opposed Proposition 21 five years
earlier, to be the principal co-sponsor of his legislation. Garcia contended that
mandatory busing and student reassignment would undermine the tenuous status of
newly established bilingual education programs. At Robbins’ request, Garcia
circulated a letter to colleagues urging support of the bill:

65
Letter from Virna Canson to Robbins Feb 18, 1979, Box 36, Folder 34, NAACP Collection,
Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley (hereafter NAACP).

257
Compulsory busing in most California cities would mean the virtual
end of bilingual education as we know it today. Where will you find
sufficient bilingual instructors if you spread the Chicano students all
over the school district?... Please don’t force us to try it ‘for our own
good’: Thank you, but no thanks.
66

Similar arguments for community self-determination were sounded by another
leading Chicano figure recruited by Robbins, East Los Angeles social worker and
parent activist John Serrano. Serrano served as the lead plaintiff in a groundbreaking
lawsuit to equalize school funding equalization lawsuit supported by the ACLU and
the Western Center on Law and Poverty. In decisions issued in 1971 and 1976, the
state Supreme Court ruled in Serrano v Priest that a property-tax-based school
finance system violated California’s equal protection mandates and was
unconstitutional, and ordered the Legislature to make local spending more equitable
between high and low property value districts. Serrano became one of the leading
backers of the Robbins’ Amendment over the next two years, writing in the ballot
argument that as the plaintiff in the funding lawsuit, he “worked to insure equal
educational opportunity for all California children. The excessive use of court-
ordered forced busing will not guarantee this result.”
67

While Serrano and Garcia claimed to be representing a uniform position
among Chicanos towards busing and desegregation, their comments pointed more to
subjects of contentious debate than a fully formed consensus. To be sure, Chicano

66
Nov 30, 1977 Alex Garcia letter, Folder “Busing,” Series 1, Box 2, Alan Robbins Collection,
California State University Northridge (hereafter AR)
67
Serrano v. Priest, 5 Cal.3d 584 (1971) (Serrano I); Serrano v. Priest, 18 Cal.3d 728 (1976)
(Serrano II); Serrano v. Priest, 20 Cal.3d 25 (1977) (Serrano III). California Secretary of State; Ballot
Arguments for 1977 Special Election.

258
education activists in Los Angeles and elsewhere were weary of desegregation
proposals that threatened the future of emerging bilingual education programs. Asian
American and Mexican American advocates had only recently won the funding and
legal mandate for bilingual education in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a lack of
qualified bilingual teachers raised issues about how such programs could be staffed
if the students who needed them were reassigned across a large school district. No
one wanted a return to the days when Mexican American students were punished for
speaking Spanish on school grounds, even during recess.
68

In addition, the 1968 Chicano “blowouts” heightened attention towards
issues of cultural domination within public education. Indeed, many proponents of
the Los Angeles desegregation plan, such as ACLU leader and UCLA professor
John Caughey, spoke openly of identifying and distinguishing “unassimilated”
Mexican Americans who would be prioritized in reassignment plans. Such
comments resonated uneasily with a long history of “Americanization” programs in
the state rooted in assumptions of Mexican “cultural” pathology. Chicano members
of a community advisory committee set up to advise the Los Angeles school board
on its desegregation plan sounded its trepidation towards “an integration policy that
is totally assimilationist in nature—one that does not respect the rights and needs of
the culturally different.” They argued repeatedly that student reassignment and

68
For a discussion of the “conflicting avenues of redress” pursued by advocates of desegregation and
bilingual education see Brilliant, "Color Lines: Civil Rights Struggles on America's Racial Frontier,
1945-75 (PhD diss)". Ch 9. The court ruling affirming the right to bilingual education was Lau v.
Nichols, 414 U.S. 563 (1974). The federal Bilingual Education Act, which established a legislative
mandate and funding for these programs, was passed in 1968 and amended in 1974. See Crawford, At
War With Diversity: US Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety.

259
desegregation were necessary but not sufficient: they demanded parity in resources,
culturally relevant instruction and curriculum, and attention to racial discrimination
in teacher staffing and hiring.
69

On the other hand, many established Mexican American civil rights
organizations felt that support for bilingual education did not require opposition to
desegregation. In testifying against the Robbins bill at a Sacramento hearing in
January 1978, Peter Roos, speaking on behalf of League of United Latin American
Citizens (LULAC), the Mexican American Political Association (MAPA), the
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), National La
Raza Lawyers and the Association of Mexican American Educators asserted: “[T]he
concept that bilingual education and desegregation are incompatible precedes from
the false premise that desegregation cannot be sensitive to the unique educational
needs of those children integrated.”
70
Vahac Mardirosian, director of the Hispanic
Urban Education Center, argued that Mexican and Mexican American parents had to
be made aware of the underlying reasons for school desegregation. He noted that “if
parents are convinced that sending their children twenty-five to thirty miles will
result in exactly the same education that child had when he was in the school next
door, logically there really isn’t a good reason for that parent to want to cooperate
with a desegregation program.” But, he added, “if parents understand that this
process of desegregation ultimately will result in a better future for their

69
Haro, Mexicano/Chicano Concerns and School Desegregation in Los Angeles.
70
Statement by Peter Roos in opposition to SCA 48, Jan 19 1978, FOLDER: “Committee
Testimony,” Box 5, Series 1, AR. “A Summary of the Position and Policy statement of the Chicano
Subcommittee of the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Student Integration” in Folder 10, Box 5, DD.

260
children…most… would be willing to live with the additional anxiety.”
71

Robbins had less success in securing support among the state’s recognized
African American leadership. While Mayor Bradley was never a strong supporter of
a citywide desegregation program, leading figures in the state legislature such as
Diane Watson (a former Los Angeles school board member), Maxine Waters, and
Yvonne Braithwaite Burke were strong advocates of mandatory desegregation. But
Robbins found enough backing to boost his claim that opposition to busing was not a
“white rights” issue but represented a multiracial consensus. Soon after introducing
his initiative, he secured the endorsement of Rev. William Jackson of the Beth-Ezel
Baptist Church in Watts. Jackson did not necessarily represent or influence a large
bloc of African American voters, but when he campaigned on behalf of the Robbins
initiative he spoke as a Black community representative, claiming widespread
support. At an early 1978 press conference he explained: “I am here representing all
those Black people who are terribly distraught about busing…We know what is best
for our people.”
72

In making these claims, Jackson placed himself squarely within the civil
rights tradition. He asked an Assembly committee holding a hearing on the bill:
“How brutal can we be to impose this action (compulsory busing) on little children?
We’d rather have $100 million spent on books and teaching aids than $100 million
spent on busing.” Similarly, another Black parent recruited by Robbins to testify
before the Assembly committee described the “humiliation and psychological

71
Haro, Mexicano/Chicano Concerns and School Desegregation in Los Angeles. 38.
72
Press release dated January 4, 1978 in folder “Busing Press Releases,” Box 2, Series 1, AR.

261
damage done to the child” by busing, reciting the central themes of Dr. Kenneth
Clarke’s famous testimony in the Brown case about the deleterious effects of
segregation on Black children.
73

As this chapter has emphasized, the anti-busing stance of Rev. Jackson,
Senator Garcia and others on behalf of “their” communities had complex origins.
While it did not represent a unanimous position within African American, Latino and
Asian American communities, it did reflect a deep ambivalence towards nominal
desegregation efforts that seemed unable to deliver significant changes in
opportunity or equity.
74
The comments of leaders such as Rev. Jackson and Senator
Garcia also reflected the growing demands for “community control” on the part of
Black and Chicano students and parents, who had grown weary of a desegregation
debate that rarely seemed to include their participation or perspective. These issues
were first thrust into the national spotlight during a standoff and strike in the Ocean
Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn in the late 1960s, as African American parents
called for decentralizing authority over schools and strengthening their
accountability to local communities. Again, most of the desegregation plans ordered
by the courts gave little attention to such issues.
75

73
“Assembly Unit Kills Robbins’ Antibusing Bill.” Los Angeles Times, Jan, 20, 1978; pg. B3.
74
Other than at a few committee hearings, Robbins placed less emphasis on demonstrating Asian
American opposition to mandatory busing, though when it did happen, similar themes were
emphasized. Tony Trias, a former president of an Asian education advisory group in Los Angeles,
testified before the Assembly on behalf of the Robbins bill that Asian-Americans are “concerned
about the idea of dividing the family. We came here for freedom of choice and equality of
opportunity. We want to keep our children close. We’re not concerned about integration. We are
concerned about being bused out of our neighborhoods.” Press Release Jan 4, 1978, Folder: “Busing
Press Releases,” Box 2, Series 1, AR.
75
See Maurice R. Berube and Marilyn Gittel, eds., Confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville (New

262
But Robbins own anti-racist claims should be viewed with more suspicion.
While he carefully developed his ties to visible Black and Chicano leaders, he was
unafraid of addressing and cultivating the reactionary populist sensibilities of white
voters. Robbins modified and adapted, rather then abandoned Floyd Wakefield’s
appeals to “white rights.” These actions are brought into sharp relief in a strategy
memo for a direct mail effort to raise money for the anti-busing campaign in the
summer of 1978 developed by consultants hired by Robbins. The memo suggested
targeting particular middle class white communities across the state by referencing
the nearby “undesirable areas” to which their children might be bused.
BUSING—UNDESIRABLE AREAS

San Mateo Co.—E. Palo Alto
Santa Clara Co—E. San Jose
San Francisco Co—Hunters Point District or Fillmore District
Marin Co.—City of Marin 95% Black but has no schools—kids walk to Sausalito—
also very small section of E San Rafael
Contra Costa Co—City of Richmond—in total better than 50% black—W Richmond
probably the worst
Alameda Co—West Oakland
Santa Barbara—Lower East Side of Santa Barbara
Ventura Co.—S. Oxnard, Montalvo District, El Rio District
Sacramento—North Sacramento outskirts
Del Paso Heights (K-6 grade—80% black) out of city of Sacramento
Oak Park District—So Central Sacramento high school.
76

Evidence such as this suggests the tenuous basis on which anti-busing
campaigns sought to include Black, Chicano and Asian American spokespersons.
While their participation was made possible by a deep-seated apprehension towards

York, 1970).
76
“Anti-Busing List Order,” Folder: “Suppor SCA 46, 1975,” Box 3, Series 1, AR.

263
prevailing desegregation proposals, their inclusion was mainly sought to legitimate
assertions of white racial innocence. Fiedler later said that in preparing BUSTOP’s
legal challenge to the desegregation order the group “focus[ed] heavily on minority
children, because we knew that the charge of racism would be made in the minute
that we started trying to go to court.”
77

The intent of this approach was not lost upon Robbins’ opponents. The
NAACP’s Canson testified at a State Assembly hearing on the Robbins Amendment
that: “One of the strategies of our opposition is to seek to project individual black
spokesmen, exploit their individual points of view, and trade it off as a massive
departure of NAACP from our historic goal of full integration.” Canson directly
attacked the anti-racist claims made by Robbins and his allies:
The proponents of segregation have taken great comfort in a simplistic
campaign phrase ‘A black child does not need to sit beside a white child
to learn.’ Education in isolation is not an effective way to end this dismal
record…Children may learn some things isolated from each other, but the
larger goals of education cannot be achieved in isolation. Not only does a
black child need to sit beside a white child, or a white teacher needs to
work in a class room with non-whites to learn, but a white child
desperately needs to sit beside a black child to learn and be prepared to
be a citizen of this colored world.
78

But Robbins putative incorporation of anti-racist themes and tactics was
effective. Calls among busing opponents for the protection of “majority rights”
quickly waned in favor of arguments that represented the interests of “all children.”

77
Interview with Bobbi Fiedler. Interviewed by Richard McMillian, transcribed by Farah Ortega
17 November 1988. California State University Northridge, Department of History and Urban
Archives Library
78
Testimony before the assembly judiciary committee in opposition to anti-integration measures,
March 14, 1979. Folder 49, Box 37, NAACP.

264
The Los Angeles Herald Examiner explained that the anti-busing movement “is not
(and should not) be racist in either intent or effect. The goal of the movement is not
to deny minority students a quality education, but to deny the state the power to
wreck neighborhoods and lives.”
79
Robbins affirmatively embraced “integration
carried out in an orderly fashion” as a desirable goal, but asserted that “[c]ompulsory
busing, where it has been mandated by the courts against the will of local residents,
has caused not only racial tension, but actual racial strife, an unfortunate ingredient
that we ought not to weave into the social fabric of our society.”
80
Robbins’ claim
that the remedy—school desegregation—was the cause, rather than the solution to
“racial strife” recited a theme that was familiar in postwar debates about anti-racism.
Yet when sounded with populist, pluralist accents, it seemed more like a pragmatic
assessment rather than a racist disavowal.

The Professionalization and Privatization of the Anti-Desegregation Movement

In California political lore, the grassroots opposition to mandatory
desegregation has often been described as a powerful “anti-busing political machine”
forged over kitchen table meetings across the San Fernando Valley. To be sure,
“busing” as a campaign issue launched the careers of numerous local politicians;
BUSTOP leader Fielder parlayed her opposition to busing first to a spot on the
school board and eventually to a seat in Congress; other BUSTOP leaders including
Tom Bartman and Roberta Weintraub also won spots on the LA school board. And at

79
“Quarrels with the courts” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Jan 12, 1979
80
Robbins “Guest Editorial. Los Angeles Times, Oct 28, 1977; pg. I4.

265
various points in the late 1970s, anti-busing meetings and rallies in the Valley drew
hundreds and sometimes thousands of participants. The controversy was not simply
“manufactured” by opportunistic leaders.
But these accounts overstate the levels of organization and stability which
typified anti-busing groups, while eliding the role of professional campaign
consultants in constructing and popularizing their message. For example, when
Robbins failed to win the endorsement of the State Assembly to place his
constitutional amendment on the June 1978 ballot—liberal Democratic lawmakers
controlling the body voted it down—he was forced to qualify the measure by
petition. Robbins’ proclaimed he was “100 percent” certain that his newly formed
organization, Californians Helping to Obtain Individual Choices in Education
(CHOICE), could gather the roughly 500,000 valid signatures necessary. He
recruited BUSTOP leader Roberta Weintraub to become the group’s executive
director and coordinate the signature gathering effort. As the Los Angeles school
board was finally moving ahead with the implementation of a mandatory
reassignment and busing program involving up to 60,000 students in grades four to
eight, Robbins and Weintraub confidently declared their goal would be met; the
public’s anti-busing fervor and opposition to the pending Los Angeles plan could not
be suppressed. CHOICE set up petition collection stations at elementary schools
across the Valley, hoping to replicate the all volunteer effort that qualified
Proposition 13 with more than a million signatures a few months earlier.
81

81
“Antibusing Initiative Misses 1
st
Deadline.” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1978; pg. A25.

266
Yet when the filing deadline arrived, CHOICE conceded it was roughly
300,000 signatures short of its goal. Robbins accused a campaign staff member of
stealing more than two hundred thousand signatures on behalf of “someone outside
the campaign.” An investigation by the Sherriff’s Department later revealed that the
signatures never actually existed, and that the staff person had filled boxes with tens
of thousands of forged petitions produced by a printer. CHOICE apparently had few
records of the number of signatures it was collecting, and even if the forged petitions
had been legitimate, Robbins would have fallen short of his goal. The organization
soon disbanded.
82

CHOICE’s embarrassing and amateurish gaffe was hardly exceptional among
anti-busing organizations, even at the height of the Los Angeles desegregation
controversy. Several attempts to build umbrella grassroots anti-busing organizations
in the Valley throughout 1978 and 1979 similarly failed, marked by in-fighting,
funding competition, and inflated claims of membership. A 1978 school boycott on
the first day of the LAUSD’s mandatory busing program endorsed by Northridge
Republican Assemblyman Robert Cline proved a complete failure; most parents who
announced they were participating in the boycott returned their children to school
within a few weeks.
A similar dynamic unfolded in Orange County, where three anti-busing

82
“Antibusing Initiative Can’t Meet Deadline.” Los Angeles Times. June 6, 1978; pg C1. “Sentencing
Set in Petition Bilking.” Los Angeles Times, Nov 8, 1978, pg. E1. The following year, Weintraub was
also accused of participating in an effort to forge signatures in the campaign to recall Los Angeles
school board member Howard Miller. She invoked the protections of the Fifth Amendment in the
investigation, which some say soured her prospects for running for higher office. “Activists of Busing
Era: Where They Are Now.” Los Angeles Times. Oct 14, 1984; pg. V12.

267
organizations formed in late 1978 amidst rumors that the LAUSD might adopt a
“metropolitan” desegregation plan that would involve neighboring school districts. A
USC doctoral student sympathetic to the anti-busing effort conducted a participant
observation study of the three groups, and concluded that all were soon plagued by
“1) financial problems; 2) resignations by leaders and local chairpersons; 3) inability
to organize metropolitan chapters; and 4) apathy among the members as shown by
falling attendance and participation in other activities.” One of the groups, Bus-Bloc,
founded by Huntington Beach school board member Doris Allen, attempted to
qualify two other ballot initiatives blocking desegregation; neither attracted any
meaningful attention.
83

These challenges even brought the mighty BUSTOP to the brink of collapse.
BUSTOP had been founded in 1976 by Weintraub, Fiedler, and other parent activists
involved in Valley Parent Teacher Associations, quickly claiming a membership of
60,000 parents. A year and a half later, hobbled by a financial crisis and internal
discord, it abandoned its model of grassroots parent activism and turned over its
management and leadership to professional fundraisers and administrators, including
Paul Clarke and Arnold Steinberg, an emerging Republican campaign consultant.
Steinberg and Clarke turned BUSTOP’s attention almost entirely to raising
funds through direct mail solicitations, primarily to support its legal efforts as a
newly recognized intervenor in the Crawford v. Los Angeles suit. Over the next three

83
Billy E. Frye, "Quarrels with the courts: A Comparative Study on Three Anti-Busing Community
Groups Formed in Response to Mandatory Busing (MA Thesis)" (University of Southern California,
1981). 66. “3 Antibusing Groups Launch Fund Drives.” Los Angeles Times. June 16, 1979; pg. OC
A1

268
years, BUSTOP’s continuous stream of appeals to carefully targeted voters across
Southern California yielded more than $550,000 in tax-free contributions. These
appeals were usually signed by school board members Fiedler or Weintraub (who
was elected in 1979) and often tied the anti-busing campaign to the anti-tax fervor
sweeping the state in the wake of Proposition 13’s passage. A typical letter began:
“Are you willing to pay higher property taxes to finance the forced busing of over
100,000 Los Angeles schoolchildren?” They included “Official Reply Ballots” and
other “surveys” that allowed voters to register their anti-busing sentiments.
Following Robbins, the BUSTOP mailers counseled the use of “constructive
proposals for voluntary, not, mandatory, integration.”
84

After the failure of CHOICE, Robbins also turned over much of his
“grassroots organizing” to professional campaign consultants. Butcher-Forde, the
self-proclaimed “Darth Vader of direct mail,” was an Orange County-based
consultancy that managed much of the Proposition 13 direct mail campaign on
behalf of Howard Jarvis and took on the Robbins initiative as a client. The coveted
lists of voters and campaign donors Butcher-Forde developed through the anti-tax
campaign provided an ideal audience for the Robbins’ anti-busing effort. While the
return from these fundraising appeals was never lucrative--the campaign raised
approximately $250,000 between mid-1978 and late 1979, a reported 50 percent of
which was kept by Butcher-Forde—it allowed Robbins to send out well over a

84
Bobbi Fiedler fundraising letter, 1977, Folder 17, Box 1, DD.

269
million pieces of campaign literature across the state during this period.
85

While political campaigns had relied on direct mail for decades in California,
it was through the busing and tax controversies that these efforts reached
unprecedented levels of sophistication, scale and impact.
86
The anti-busing and anti-
tax movements were not “grassroots” political projects in the mold of the labor, civic
and electoral formations that dominated California politics through the mid-1960s.
Howard Jarvis, Paul Gann and Alan Robbins reached their constituency
predominantly through direct mail and media coverage; when they did organize
“rallies” and public meetings, it was more for the benefit of radio, television and
newspaper journalists than to sustain ongoing grassroots organizations. This shift,
what might be called the privatization of political activism, because it was built on
individualized rather than collective actions, was embraced far more quickly by anti-
tax and anti-busing leaders than by their opponents.
The professionalization and privatization of the anti-busing effort had one
other important effect. Consultants like Steinberg also advised or directed dozens of
campaigns for individual candidates in Southern California, including Fiedler and
Weintraub’s school board bids, the Congressional campaigns of Bob Dornan, and
Attorney General Evelle Younger’s challenge to Governor Jerry Brown in 1978. By
encouraging their clients to run in these campaigns as “anti-busing” candidates, they

85
On Butcher-Forde and the rise of the initiative industry in the late 1970s see Schrag, Paradise Lost:
California's Experience, America's Future. Magelby, Direct Legislation: Voting on Ballot
Propositions in the United States.
86
Butcher Forde collected at least $100,000 in fees from Californians Against Forced Busing, and
was permitted to keep the names of and addresses of all donors well as all of the materials they
created. “Agreement between Bucher Forde Consulting and Californians Against Forced Busing”
Folder: “Californians Against Forced Busing”, Box 6, Series 1, AR.

270
accelerated the use of busing as a publicity-grabbing campaign issue. This
development not only forced other candidates to claim ever more extreme anti-
busing positions, it ensured that an anti-busing message would be continually carried
to millions of voters in the months leading to the vote on Robbins’ measure.
87

Thus, even though Robbins and BUSTOP failed to sustain ongoing grassroots
organizations, their strategic and continuous use of targeted mail appeals and their
ability to make busing a central issue within many electoral races paid enormous
benefits. They persistently primed the electorate with a singular characterization of
“busing” as an expensive, half-baked bureaucratic scheme that failed all children and
accelerated the decline of public education. On one side within this discourse stood a
handful of deep-pocket ACLU and NAACP attorneys, insular politicians, self-
aggrandizing judges, and their academic advisors who found great pleasure in raising
taxes to advance their own “social experiments.” On the other side stood the vast
majority of “innocent” taxpayers, parents and children of all racial and ethnic
backgrounds who would be forced to shoulder the burden of this preposterous
scheme. They were a silent majority perhaps, but not in the revanchist mode of
George Wallace, for they professed to value the education of all children. For civil
rights advocates, what began as an effort to challenge racial hierarchy and expand
educational resources and opportunity had become effectively tarnished by their
opponents as a disastrous folly of bureaucratic elites emptied of any anti-racist
ethics.

87
“Making Do In An Overcrowded School.” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 16, 1978; pg. A3, A16.

271

Proposition 1 Reaches the Ballot
Ultimately, it was the attention the professional campaign consultants
brought to the electoral arena, more than the impact of a grassroots upsurge, which
finally secured the Robbins Amendment a spot on the ballot. Indeed, anti-busing
rallies organized by Robbins and others in December 1978, when he reintroduced his
legislation to the State Senate, were poorly attended, even after the first phase of the
LAUSD’s desegregation program had been implemented.
88
But in the November
1978 election incumbent Democratic Assemblyman Jim Keysor lost his Valley seat
to a dark horse Republican challenger (managed by Steinberg) who attacked Keysor
relentlessly over the issue of busing. Anti-busing candidates also took several local
school board elections. Even some desegregation advocates worried that preventing a
public vote on the Robbins’ Amendment would abet a small but growing call for a

88
“Simi-Conejo Busing Rally Attracts Few.” Los Angeles Times. Dec 1, 1978; pg. SF1.
Figure 10. “We Love All Kids.” Bumper sticker for Proposition 1 (1979).
Alan Robbins Collection, California State University Northridge

272
voucher system which would divert public funds towards tuition payments at private
schools. Democratic Assembly members who earlier voted against the Robbins
Amendment took notice. The Keysor election in particular demonstrated that a
majority of voters felt little moral quandary in opposing the prevailing desegregation
plans, or the elected officials that might endorse them.
By March 1979, both the Assembly and the State Senate voted
overwhelmingly to place the Robbins Amendment on the next ballot, scheduled for
June 1980. According to the Sacramento Bee, Assemblyman Leo McCarthy, the
liberal Speaker of the House who earlier had managed to prevent his Democratic
colleagues from supporting Robbins, now “sat glumly at his desk like a stone figure”
as the Robbins measure was approved, frustrated that the political winds had
seemingly left the Legislature with no other choice.
89
Robbins pressed this advantage
fully. He quickly sponsored another bill calling for a special election in November.
Such an action was almost unprecedented in the history of California elections;
special elections were always reserved either to fill vacancies or recall incumbents
from office. But in addition to Robbins’ legislation, anti-tax leader Paul Gann had
already qualified his own “Spirit of 13” initiative to restrict the growth of state and
local spending. An ad hoc coalition of desegregation advocates mobilized to prevent
approval of the special election proposal, but few legislators would risk being tagged
as obstructionists by anti-tax and anti-busing leaders. Governor Jerry Brown agreed
to call the special election, placing both the Robbins Amendment (Proposition 1) and

89
“The Reluctant ‘Yes’ Vote.” Sacramento Bee, March 29, 1979

273
the Gann initiative (Proposition 4) on a special November 1979 ballot.
As the election approached, the aura of an “anti-busing machine” based in the
San Fernando Valley continued to grow. Steinberg and Clarke helped engineer the
ouster of several Los Angeles school board members who refused to take
unequivocal positions against mandatory desegregation, and an “anti-busing slate”
led by Weintraub and Fiedler now dominated the board. While the relationships
between Robbins, Fiedler, and others involved in the anti-desegregation project were
always strained and subject to the pressures of their personal ambitions, there was
little doubt that they had succeeded in making any public defense or endorsement of
“busing” an act of political suicide. A poll conducted in August found that while less
than one in three respondents were aware of Proposition 1, nearly 80 percent
registered their opposition towards “busing designed to achieve racial balance.”
90

At the same time, Robbins and other Proposition 1 leaders increasingly
moved to identify their campaign more closely with the anti-tax currents that
propelled Proposition 13. Fiedler had worked with Gann as early as 1976 in
attempting to build support for a prior version of Proposition 13. Weintraub
coordinated her successful school board bid out of the Valley headquarters of the
Proposition 13 campaign. These relationships became even more formalized as the
November election approached. Fiedler was appointed to co-chair a “Los Angeles
Nonpartisan Committee for Yes on 4.” Gann announced that he was “against busing

90
The poll was conducted August 20-27 with a sample size of 1,104 adults and was “a representative
cross-section of the California adult public.” The poll also found that fewer than one-third of
respondents were aware that Proposition 1 was going to be on the ballot. California Poll Study 7903,
conducted Aug 20- Aug 27, 1979, 1,104 cases, representative cross-section of California voters.

274
for anything but educational purposes” and Jarvis declared “[t]hrowing money at the
problem is not the answer…Forced busing does not work.” Indeed much of Jarvis
and Gann’s attack on excessive property taxes drew from the same claims of
suburban innocence that drove the anti-busing movement: Just as liberal politicians
were wasting tax dollars on overly generous welfare payments to Black and Brown
families in the central city, so to were irresponsible politicians and judges sacrificing
the education of students in the Valley in pursuit of their own self-aggrandizing
visions. Fiedler claimed that “[b]etween the antibusing and Proposition 13
movements we have one of the strongest grass-roots movements that has ever come
together.”
91

Robbins continued to strike a balance between emphasizing the common
fiscal concerns which drove his Proposition 1 and Gann’s Proposition 4—he told
supporters that busing would cost every household an additional $352 per year in
taxes--while ensuring the campaign did not become too publicly identified with
white San Fernando Valley homeowners. Serrano and Jackson joined Robbins in
signing the official Proposition 1 ballot argument, which repeatedly emphasized the
negative impact of busing on all children. But in personal fundraising appeals to his
Valley supporters he continued to associate busing with the dangers which lurked
beyond their suburban enclaves; busing outside one’s own neighborhood would
inevitably lead to tragedy:

91
“Prop 1, 4 Backers May Form Alliance.” Los Angeles Times, Oct 14, 1979; pg A3. On Proposition
13 and the anti-tax movement in California in general, see Schrag, Paradise Lost: California's
Experience, America's Future, Smith, Tax Crusaders and the Politics of Direct Democracy.

275
Children in strange, unfamiliar neighborhoods are much more prone to
violence than they would be in their own neighborhood, close to the safety
of their own home, family and friends. And there’s always the danger of a
child missing the bus, becoming terrified and getting lost—which again
multiples the opportunity for some sick person to make your child a victim
of violence.
92

The Campaign Against Proposition 1

After the Legislature agreed to place the Robbins Amendment on the ballot,
the familiar coalition of civil rights groups, faith-based organizations, and labor
unions scrambled again to offer some nominal resistance to their adversaries. The
Southern California ACLU, which had been taking the leadership in the Crawford
litigation for more than a decade, helped launch Californians Against Proposition 1
(CAP 1), and lent the group temporary office space in its Los Angeles headquarters.
State Senator Diane Watson and television producer Norman Lear served as
honorary co-chairs of the effort, which raised a miniscule $15,000; CAP 1 lacked the
fundraising and voter contact capacities that its opponents had spent the last few
years cultivating. While CAP 1 secured a predictable set of endorsements—the
California Labor Federation, League of Women Voters, California Teachers
Association, California Democratic Council—even these groups offered little
concrete support to the campaign.
93

The NAACP’s Virna Canson, who was in the midst of attempting to
reinvigorate the grassroots base of that organization, sent a memo to local NAACP
branch leaders in July warning that if “we NAACP-ers allow [the Robbins

92
Robbins “Dear Opponent of Forced Busing” letter, n.d. Box 38, Folder 9, NAACP.
93
See endorsement list and related documents in Folder 17, Box 5, DD.

276
amendment] to happen without a fight, we might as well close up shop.”
94
In August
she reported to Watson an inventory of how the campaign against Proposition 1 was
shaping up. While she tried to remain optimistic, the activities she identified revealed
how limited their capacity was: Organizers anticipated some outreach to college
campuses and a few volunteer groups, and a one hour spot on a local radio show. No
references were made to any of the capacities needed to seriously compete in a
statewide political campaign: Organized precinct work, paid media, or the active
involvement of organizations with large constituencies.
95

Canson publicly promised that the campaign against Proposition 1 would
“open voter schools in communities throughout California… in store fronts,
basements of churches, homes and other places where people can come to learn
about the issues, the records of candidates and the importance of voting.” But such
activities never came to fruition; it was far too late in the desegregation struggle to
begin constituting a large enough audience to seriously challenge Robbins. A late
October rally in an African American church in South Los Angeles church against
Propositions 1 and 4 drew only 100 participants, a turnout Watson described as
“really sad.”
96
But lacking any recent history of sustained grassroots organizing or
contact with parents and voters about the importance of desegregation or the stakes
of the current busing debate, this turnout was hardly surprising. They made few
adjustments in their strategy to the increasing privatization and professionalization of

94
Canson memo to all NAACP branches, July 25, 1979. Canson memo to all NAACP branches, July
25, 1979. Box 37, Folder 50, NAACP.
95
August 19, 1979 memo from Canson to Diane Watson. Box 37, Folder 50, NAACP
96
“Anti-Prop 1, 4 rally attracts only 100 blacks.” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1979. pg B3.

277
California electoral politics. CAP 1 failed to realize that the day had long passed
when civil rights organizers could simply post and circulate a few flyers and expect
an audience to materialize, or that they were the only ones who could lay claim to the
civil rights tradition.
Equally as damaging, the campaign against Proposition 1 made few inroads
in winning endorsements among Asian American and Latino political leaders or
organizations. Canson made the case for a multiracial, interdependent defense of
education rights:

Chinese, Japanese, Chicanos, Filipinos have all been discriminated against in
their pursuit of public education in California… Our history is filled with the
struggles of these groups to throw off the yoke of segregated schools. All of
these groups know that history. This time the educational opportunities of
Blacks is the target, the next time the target will be employment
opportunities, the next attack will be on bi-lingulism, the next attack on rights
of women, the next on abortion and so on down the line.
97

But her pleas fell on deaf ears. Most of the desegregation proposals under
consideration by the court offered only vague support for bilingual education and
other compensatory programs. Robbins, by contrast, promised that once mandatory
busing was ended, money would be freed up to directly fund such programs. It is not
surprising then that other than the Los Angeles-based Hispanic Urban Center, which
had taken an active role in the Crawford case, the anti-Proposition 1 effort secured
little formal support from Latino organizations or elected officials, and none from
Asian American organizations. Worse, three of the most powerful Mexican
American elected officials—Senators Alex Garcia, Ruben Ayala, and Joseph

97
CAP 1 Press release August 3, 1978. Box 38, Folder 9, NAACP.

278
Montoya—endorsed the Robbins’ measure, reasoning that bilingual education and
other compensatory programs would not weather a large scale desegregation plan.
98

As the election approached and Robbins’ momentum showed no signs of
abating, the campaign against Proposition 1 opened a final, desperate attempt to
derail the support for the measure. Rather than fundamentally contesting the attacks
Robbins launched against “forced busing” and mandatory desegregation, they argued
that his initiative would be unable to stop such programs, either because it would be
ruled unconstitutional or because the federal standards stipulated by the initiative
would still require busing. CAP 1 also speculated that Proposition 1 could trigger
additional mandatory busing if the federal courts determined that a district’s
segregation resulted from intentional actions.
The ballot argument against Proposition 1 insisted that “neither desegregation
in Los Angeles, nor the busing used as a tool to achieve it, would come to a halt with
the passage of this measure.” It further explained that recent Supreme Court
decisions meant that “federal standards may impose broader rather than narrower
duties to desegregate” hoping to press the same anti-busing anxieties fanned by Alan
Robbins in service against the initiative.
99

A “true/false” mailer produced by CAP 1 recited these same arguments,
attempting to discredit Proposition 1 on the grounds that it would not be able to
achieve its professed goals:

98
Legislative history, AR.
99
Proposition 1 ballot arguments, California Secretary of State, November 1979.

279
PROPOSITION 1 WILL HALT THE LOS ANGELES
INTEGRATION PLAN.
TRUE___ FALSE__X__
PROPOSITION 1 WILL HALT ANY POTENTIAL
METROPOLITAN PLANS IN CALIFORNIA.
TRUE____ FALSE__X__
PROPOSITION 1 WILL ELIMINATE FORCED BUSING,
WHICH IS ALREADY BARRED BY THE U.S. SUPREME
COURT.
TRUE____ FALSE__X__
100

That desegregation advocates had to essentially concede to their opponents
that mandatory desegregation and busing were unpopular and undesirable spoke to
their broader inability to advance any affirmative argument for the benefits of a
desegregated or integrated education. While the ACLU and the NAACP made
reference to the need to improve funding, repair dilapidated buildings, or reduce
class size, they largely failed to link their desegregation proposals to such broader
imperatives and needs.
101
And because the overwhelming attention of the courts,
desegregation opponents, and the media was placed on issues of busing and student

100
Californians Against Proposition 1 News Release, September 19, 1979; “Support the Truth!”
campaign mailer, Folder 17, Box 5, DD.
101
A group of progressive, predominantly white educators in Los Angeles called the Integration
Project set out to build the case among white voters in particular that a fully integrated school district,
bolstered by reductions in class size, building improvements, and adequate training could provide
quality education for all students. A similar proposal was offered by the integration community
advisory body established by the LA school board. Another provocative proposal was offered by an
Orange County assistant principal and graduate student who proposed the development of “education
parks” in cities such as Santa Ana where aging, seismically unfit “neighborhood” school buildings
would be replaced by state of the art campuses or clusters drawing students from a broader
geographical area. “An Integration Plan” Box 5, Folder 3, DD. “Racial Imbalance: School District
Policy Making under Pressure.” Joan Barbara Reiner Wilson. UCLA Dissertation Education, 1972, p.
294.

280
reassignment, they were effectively painted as being obsessed with busing at the
expense of any other concerns. Thus while Robbins, Jackson and Serrano suggested
that the end of “forced busing” would bring new resources to teachers, classrooms
and buildings, their opponents could only counter that while busing may be
undesirable, it was inevitable. In addition, CAP 1’s accusations that Proposition 1
represented a “‘blatant attempt’ to maintain the long legacy of racial segregation in
California’s schools” were severely undercut by Jackson and Serrano’s insistence
that the measure sought “equal, quality education” for all students.
102

The Election and its Aftermath
In the days before the election, as Robbins continued to campaign
aggressively across Southern California, even Watson conceded that the best
opponents could hope for was to limit Proposition 1’s margin of victory. Even that
modest goal proved unattainable. Proposition 1 passed statewide by 38 points, 12
points higher than the margin of victory for Proposition 21, and received majorities
in all 58 counties. Los Angeles County passed the measure by 74 percent. In the City
of Los Angeles, the West San Fernando Valley communities that formed the nucleus
of the anti-busing movement voted nine to one in favor of Proposition 1, with a
forty-three percent turnout rate. In the three South Los Angeles city council districts
represented by African Americans, the measure was defeated by a two to one
margin, but turnout lagged at twenty-five percent. It passed by almost 70 percent in

102
California Secretary of State. Ballot Arguments for Proposition 1, November 1979.

281
the generally liberal Westside, and was approved by smaller majorities in the heavily
Latino Eastside district.
103

As Table 5.1 suggests, the vote between Proposition 21 in 1972 and
Proposition 1 in 1979 differed in two important ways. First, statewide, about twice as
many votes were cast in the Proposition 21 contest; in some cities the difference was
much greater, and it was Proposition 1 supporters who turned out the most. Second,
even areas with larger concentrations of Democratic and African American voters
like Oakland and San Francisco which opposed Proposition 21 voted in favor of
Proposition 1. Only in the heavily African American city of Compton was the
margin against the Robbins initiative higher than the Wakefield measure. In
Southern California cities such as South Gate, Pico Rivera, and Santa Ana which had
growing numbers of Latino residents (but fewer voters), support for Proposition 1
was still very large.

103
“Most of L.A. Voted Heavily for Prop. 1” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 9, 1979. “Prop 1 May Face
Early Court Test.” Los Angeles Times, Nov 8, 1979; pg. B3.

282

Proposition 21 (1971) Proposition 1 (1979)
YES NO Total
Votes
YES NO Total
Votes
Statewide 63% 37% 7,870,196 69% 31% 3,546,295
Oakland 43% 57% 133,857 57% 43% 36,578
San Francisco 49% 51% 250,761 56% 44% 173,691
Los Angeles
City 58% 42%
998,699
73% 27%
390,743
Compton 43% 57% 18,005 36% 64% 5,475
South Gate 75% 25% 20,013 82% 18% 5,908
Pico Rivera 59% 41% 16,531 63% 37% 5,573
Santa Ana 70% 30% 50,944 74% 26% 16,872

The passage of Proposition 1 stopped neither Robbins nor his opponents from
continuing their legal and political battles over the desegregation. Soon after the
election, Robbins sponsored another bill to require plaintiffs to carry the burden of
proof in desegregation lawsuits, a measure he said was necessary because two recent
U.S. Supreme Court rulings had placed the burden of proof on school districts. The
bill won approval in the Legislature, but was vetoed by Governor Brown on the basis
that it directly violated Proposition 1’s requirement that state courts follow federal
rulings in school desegregation cases. Robbins, the Governor implied, could not pick
and choose which of those federal rulings the state would choose to follow.
Undeterred by this contradiction, Robbins turned to Butcher-Forde and
launched another direct mail campaign to win an override of the Governor’s veto. In
envelopes declaring “Your anti-busing vote stolen!” he called for voters to contact
Table 2: Proposition 21 and Proposition 1 vote in select cities
California Secretary of State, Statement of Vote, General Election November 1972;
Special Election November 1979.

283
targeted senators to demand they support a veto override, while requesting donations
for his “Save Proposition 1 Legal Defense Fund.”
104
The envelopes also included
petitions for a ballot measure that Robbins said he would qualify if the veto override
failed. Most of Robbins’ colleagues dismissed the campaign as a base effort to keep
the senator’s name in the press in anticipation of another mayoral run. Robbins’
failed to win support for the override, and fell well short of his signature gathering
goal, prompting Butcher-Forde to abandon the campaign before the deadline.
While Robbins did little in the aftermath of Proposition 1 to alter his
reputation as an occasional political huckster, his legal strategy to stop mandatory
desegregation was completely vindicated. In its December 1980 decision upholding
the constitutionality of the measure, the Court of Appeals ruled “we do not believe a
state constitutional amendment can be said to violate the Fourteenth Amendment by
specifically embracing it.” The court also determined that the electorate had not
acted with discriminatory intent in adopting the measure, calling the charge “pure
speculation.” At one hearing Associate Justice Lynn Compton told ACLU attorney
Fred Okrand “I just think you’re being very unfair in imputing sinister motives to the
people who adopted Proposition 1.”
105
The three judge panel also rejected the
ACLU’s assertion that the markedly inferior conditions in predominantly Black and
Latino schools demonstrated a pattern of intentional discrimination. The court held
that “the two problems (unequal facilities and discrimination) frequently parallel one

104
Envelope and release in Series 1, Box 2. Folder: Busing Press Releases, AR. “Brown Vetoes Bill
to Strengthen Prop 1.” Los Angeles Times Feb 5, 1980; pg B3; “Anti-Busing ‘Burden of Proof’ Bill
Dies.” Los Angeles Times. Mar 14, 1980; pg B18.
105
“Prop 1 Called Biased Against Minorities.” Los Angeles Times, Dec 9 1980; pg B24.

284
another but they are distinct and different problems.”
106

When the state Supreme Court refused to review the appellate decision in March
1981, it opened the door for the anti-busing faction controlling the LA school board
to immediately end its mandatory desegregation program. The court’s decision not to
review the case surprised both sides, and led Superior Court Judge Paul Egly to
remove himself from the Crawford case after four years, charging the school board
had “failed to even meet the [separate but equal] standard of Plessy v. Ferguson.” In
the three years it had been in effect, the LAUSD desegregation program had grown
to include 153 schools and about 58,000 students in grades one through nine. Critics
noted it was the first time in U.S. history that a court ruling resulted in the
reassignment of minority students from desegregated schools to segregated ones.
107

The ACLU and NAACP were granted one last opportunity to present their
arguments when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in 1982. The
Reagan Administration soon backed the LA school district’s position, arguing in a
friend of the court briefing that Proposition 1 demonstrated a “race neutral belief in
the advantages for all races” of neighborhood schools.
108
(William French Smith,
Reagan’s Attorney General, had represented the realtors before the Supreme Court in
defending Proposition 14 in 1966).
Not surprisingly, many of the L.A. school board’s arguments in support of

106
. Crawford v. Los Angeles Board of Education 113 Cal. App. 3d 633, 170 Cal. Rptr. 495 (1981).
“Prop 1, Upheld: Bars L.A. Busing.” Los Angeles Times, Dec 20, 1980; pg. A1. “Foes of Busing Hail
Los Angeles Victory.” NYT, March 13, 1981; “The Quest to Desegregate Los Angeles Schools.”
David Ettinger. Los Angeles Lawyer, March 2003. pg 55-67.
107
“Prop 1 Upheld.” Los Angeles Times. Dec 20, 1980; pg. A1.
108
“Administration Asks Court to Back Prop. 1” Los Angeles Times; Feb. 2, 1982; pg. OC_A10.

285
Proposition 1 cited its intentions of racial neutrality or innocence. Attorneys for the
board noted that Proposition 1 passed by 75 percent in Los Angeles County, where
racial minorities constituted half of the population, but only got 53 to 55 percent of
the vote in nearly all-white Humboldt and Marin counties, the lowest margin of
victory in the state. The school district’s attorney recounted the recent string of
minority politicians elected by California voters—“as Asian U.S. senator, a black
lieutenant governor, an Asian secretary of state, a black superintendent of public
instruction and many other Hispanic, black and Asian public officials”—to assert
that Proposition 1 could not have been approved by a discriminatory electorate.
109

In June 1982, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s decision by an 8
to 1 vote; Justice Thurgood Marshall offered the lone dissent. Writing for the
majority Justice Powell asserted that “It would be paradoxical to conclude that by
adopting the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the voters of the
State thereby had violated it.” The measure “neither says nor implies that persons are
to be treated differently on account of their race.” Moreover, because school boards
could be ordered to relieve segregation in other ways that did not require mandatory
busing, the initiative could not be construed as favoring segregation. In his dissent,
Marshall noted that “Proposition I has placed an enormous barrier between minority
children and the effective enjoyment of their constitutional rights, a barrier that is not
placed in the path of those who seek to vindicate other rights granted by state law…
The fact that California attempts to cloak its discrimination in the mantle of the

109
ibid

286
Fourteenth Amendment does not alter this result.
110

The Supreme Court’s ruling was a death knell for mandatory desegregation
programs across the state.
111
Local school boards were still free to craft their own
programs. But without the threat of a court order, these programs were largely
feeble. Pasadena ended its mandatory programs in late 1981; San Francisco reached
an agreement to do the same in early 1983. Participation in San Diego’s voluntary
program grew much more anemic after the Proposition 1 ruling. In San Mateo, a
local school district successfully used Proposition 1 to reject an intradistrict
desegregation plan that would have required minimal busing. While these changes
reflected a number of forces, especially the declining enrollment of white students in
nearly all urban school districts, it was Proposition 1 that provided a populist, even
anti-racist imprimatur to the movement to halt systematic desegregation of California
schools.
In Los Angeles, after their court victory, Robbins and other anti-busing activists
vowed to make full use of “voluntary measures” to achieve desegregation, including
magnet schools and voluntary busing programs that provided students transportation
to attend schools outside of their neighborhood. In reality most of these voluntary
efforts were “one-way” programs, requiring students of color from Central, East, and
South Los Angeles to be bused from their neighborhood schools to attend better
resourced schools in West Los Angeles and in the Valley. By 1985, the district was

110
Crawford v. Los Angeles Board of Education, 458 U.S. 527 (1982).
111
Add cites: April 6 1989 NAACP finally drops busing case. April 11 84 School Board votes to pay
legal costs since 1977 for busing litigation $1.35 million to NAACP and ACLU

287
busing 57,000 students each day—more than at the height of the mandatory
desegregation program—for voluntary programs and to relieve overcrowding.
112

Ironically, some students in South Gate High School, which by the early 1980s was
predominantly Latino, were forced to ride a bus 35 miles each way to the Valley
community of Tujunga in order to relieve overcrowding.
113
The end of mandatory
desegregation meant that the burden of busing had fallen almost exclusively on
students of color. One East Los Angeles high school teacher demanded: “Where is
Bustop now? Where are all the anti-busing activists who assured us that the issue
was not racism or integration but busing itself? If busing was wrong for children
from the San Fernando Valley, then if follows that busing should be wrong for
children from the inner city.”
114

But the fallout from the struggles over school desegregation did not exempt all
white, middle class communities. Robbins and others claimed that once mandatory
busing was abolished, white parents would return in droves to public schools. He
was wrong. Years of pillorying the public school system and undermining its funding
base through property tax cuts had taken a toll even on these schools. The problem
snowballed because as more parents abandoned the public schools, state funding for
those schools (which was determined by attendance) also declined. One Reseda
couple who left the public school system explained what they discovered after
visiting their neighborhood school in hopes of reenrolling their children:

112
“For L.A. Schools, Double Jeopardy: Segregation, Overcrowding.” Los Angeles Times; Oct 27,
1985; pg OC_A7
113
“School Busing Furor Erupts in South Gate.” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1981; pg. SE1.
114
“School Busing Takes a U-Turn.” Los Angeles Times. Dec. 13, 1981; pg. H5

288
[At the visit] [w]e learned the following: (1) The school library is no longer
operated due to a lack of funds (2) The music teacher is assigned to the
campus every other year (if that often) (3) There are no cultural enrichment
programs due to a lack of funds (4) Maintenance on the campus have been
curtailed due to a lack of funds.
115

The couple decided they had little choice but to keep their children in private
school, though the cost and long travel time to the school was burdensome. Indeed,
Robbins and Weintraub could offer little comfort to parents when the District was
forced in 1982 to close ten Valley schools with low enrollment in order to save
money.
116

Nor could Robbins offer much support to those politicians and activists he had
recruited to join the Proposition 1 campaign in the name of preserving bilingual
education programs. As Chapter 5 reveals, the attacks on bilingual education and
language rights began almost immediately after the busing debate subsided. By the
mid-1990s, when ballot initiatives were launched seeking to bar undocumented
immigrants from public schools and to ban bilingual education entirely, Robbins was
already out of politics. In November 1991, he pled guilty to federal racketeering
charges after accepting bribes from insurance companies while serving as chair of
the Senate Insurance Committee. He served two years in prison.

115
Letter from Gary and Jody Washburn to Senator Ed Davis, n.d. probably 1981. Box 6, Series
1,Folder: “Constituent Correspondence.” AR.
116
“More Schools Shut but 3 Will Stay Open.” Los Angeles Times. May 30, 1982; pg WS4.

289
Conclusion

In a 1982 speech, President Reagan’s Solicitor General Rex E. Lee explained
that his office’s opposition to mandatory desegregation and its support of Proposition
1 could not automatically construed as a stance against civil rights: “What is it that
qualifies a legal position as ‘pro-civil rights’ or ‘anti-civil rights?’ Certainly not the
fact that position is advanced, or opposed by any certain group” Twenty years
earlier, Lee’s comments would not have been credible. At the height of the Southern
desegregation struggle, a political actor could be easily identified as either “pro-civil
rights” or “anti-civil rights” and there was little disagreement about the policy
positions that determined such descriptions.
117

How did this redefinition of the meaning of civil rights and anti-racism take
place, such that a conservative administration could attack desegregation policies in
the name of protecting civil rights? As this chapter has suggested, this transformation
was not simply the product of a conservative judiciary or media savvy conservative
think tanks. Floyd Wakefield attempted to preserve California’s deeply segregated
system of public education through a thinly veiled discourse of white rights and
freedom of choice. To Wakefield, racial segregation was a natural, defensible
phenomenon that was beyond the pale of state interference. While the electorate
adopted his 1972 ballot measure prohibiting any race-based student assignments, the
initiative failed to pass judicial review, or earn the support of a broad based
constituency. Alan Robbins, by contrast, challenged school desegregation on much

117
“Justice Official Defends Reagan on Rights” Los Angeles Times Oct 3, 1982; pg A5

290
different grounds. He declared himself a faithful champion of integration, but argued
that mandatory busing programs did more harm to this cause than good. He carefully
recruited several leading African American and Mexican American public figures to
support his initiative, exploiting their ambivalence towards prevailing desegregation
measures. At the same time, he used a sophisticated direct mail operation to
constantly remind white voters of the racialized dangers which lurked outside of
their neighborhood. In valorizing “voluntary” as opposed to “forced” integration, he
too figured segregation as natural and treated the right of white students to remain in
segregated settings (if they choose to do so) as inalienable.
In studies of race and politics in the postwar U.S., Floyd Wakefield is a
familiar figure. We could easily imagine Wakefield at home in the white working
class communities of Thomas Sugrue’s Detroit, Arnold Hirsch’s Chicago, Jonathon
Rieder’s Boston, Kenneth Durr’s Baltimore, or Ronald Formisano’s Canarsie.
Singularly motivated by his inexorable racial antipathies and strident individualism,
Wakefield typifies the “racial conservatism” which many scholars argue led the
assault on the post war civil rights imaginary.
118

Alan Robbins, by contrast, is a more difficult political figure to narrate. He
supported many Democratic causes, grew up in an integrated neighborhood, fought
for fair housing, and counted many people of color as political allies. Yet as I have
argued, Robbins also sought to defend relations of apartheid, and his initiative

118
Durr, Behind the Backlash: White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980, Hirsch,
"Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumball Park, Chicago, 1953-1966.", Rieder, Canarsie: The
Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.

291
effectively ended any possibility that California could serve as a national model for
an integrated, high quality system of public schools.
When the Reagan administration moved to rollback court-ordered school
desegregation programs nationally in the 1980s, it was Alan Robbins, rather than
Floyd Wakefield, who helped provide the blueprint. The administration relied on the
Supreme Court’s Proposition 1 ruling to argue that school districts should be relieved
from desegregation orders even if racial imbalance still existed, provided it could be
demonstrated that the school board or electorate did not intentionally discriminate.
119

Indeed the assaults on affirmative action and other anti-discrimination policies in the
1990s were fueled by similar claims of racial innocence. The scholarship on postwar
racial politics needs to be further expanded to account for figures like Robbins and
the ways anti-racism arguments have been mobilized to undermine civil rights.
I have suggested in this chapter that the defeat of mandatory desegregation
was not inevitable. The consensus against busing and mandatory reassignment
programs that seemed to be so widespread by the early 1980s had complex origins; it
did not arise solely from an aversion to long bus rides or from a reflexive antipathy
towards integrated schools. Alan Robbins’ success was hardly guaranteed. During
the 1960s, the movement to desegregate California schools was gaining political
momentum and moral authority. But desegregation advocates made a number of
critical missteps that played into the hands of their adversaries. They placed their
attention almost entirely on the courts and policymakers, and failed to constitute a

119
“End Busing, Justice Dept. Asks Court.” Los Angeles Times. Dec 7, 1984; pg. B1.

292
meaningful grassroots audience for their vision of desegregated schools. Their
proposals became so overly identified with achieving a numerically determined
racial balance, they failed to mobilize a robust vision of a public education system
that was both integrated and effective. And when their policies came under attack
from figures such as Wakefield and Robbins, they proved to be deeply ambivalent
about challenging and destabilizing a political culture that placed white homeowners
at the moral center of every policy debate.

293
CHAPTER 5:
ENGLISH ONLY AND THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION, 1982-1990

The leaders of the organization U.S. English could barely contain their
excitement following their meeting in the spring of 1983 with Paul Gann. Gann’s
reputation as the state’s foremost ballot initiative strategist rose quickly after his role
in passing Proposition 13, the 1978 property-tax slashing measure. The following
year, he qualified and passed a measure to limit government spending growth, and in
1982 won approval for a “Victim’s Bill of Rights” initiative to toughen criminal
sentencing guidelines. To U.S. English’s delight, the 71-year old Gann offered to
counsel the group in qualifying an “English Only” initiative for an upcoming
California ballot. Upon returning to her office in Washington, D.C., U.S. English
executive director Gerda Bikales wrote to Gann: “I am absolutely elated to know that
you’ll be working with us on the English Language Initiative next year. With the
Master himself guiding the course, we are sure of victory!” John Tanton, the group’s
founder, told Gann: “[I want to] apprentice myself to you for this campaign … I’m
interested in spreading the practice to other states and in the development of a model
initiative and referendum statue.” Tanton passed along to Gann a well-known quote
from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis about the important role states played as
“laboratories of democracy” for the nation, providing opportunities to “try novel
social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Above the
passage Tanton scribbled: “Paul—Thought you’d like this. I’ve long thought of the

294
initiative process as playing this important laboratory role.”
1

Though U.S. English had only been in formation since mid-1982, it enjoyed
several important advantages. S.I. Hayakawa, recently retired from his single term as
California Senator, had agreed to be the organization’s main spokesperson.
Hayakawa had introduced his own constitutional amendment to declare English the
nation’s official language in 1981, arguing that the legislation would prevent the
country from replicating the linguistic conflict and separatism fracturing his native
Canada. But the amendment attracted little public attention or legislative traction.
For his part, Tanton had significant non-profit and policy advocacy experience. He
worked with local chapters of the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood before serving
as national president of Zero Population Growth (ZPG) in the mid-1970s; he then
went on to establish the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a
group that would soon play a leading role in the national effort to restrict
immigration. Funding was not a problem; Tanton could count on several deep-
pocketed (though unidentified) donors to help bankroll his initiative. What U.S.
English needed was an audience.
2

Gann’s invitation to learn the ropes of the California ballot initiative process
provided the opportunity Tanton and his colleagues had been seeking. Within three

1
Correspondence between U.S. English and Gann in Box 140, Folder “US English Correspondence”
Paul Gann Papers, California State Library, Sacramento (hereafter PG). Brandeis full quote, made in
1890, was “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if
its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk
to the rest of the country.” See G. Allen Tarr, "Labratories of Democracy? Brandeis, Federalism, and
Scientific Management," Publius 31 (Winter, 2001).
2
On the rise of U.S. English, see James Crawford, "What's Behind Official English?," in Language
Loyalties: A Source Book on the Official English Controversy, ed. James Crawford (Chicago, 1992).

295
years of meeting with Gann, U.S. English bankrolled two state ballot initiatives that
passed by wide margins, launching the upstart organization into national
prominence. Proposition 38, approved in November 1984, required Governor George
Deukmejian to write a letter to the President and Congress requesting that “federal
law be amended so that ballots, voters' pamphlets, and all other official voting
materials shall be printed in English only.” Proposition 63, passed in 1986, declared
“English is the official language of the State of California” though it provided only
vague provisions for enforcement. The fact that both ballot measures did not result in
any substantive policy changes seemed to matter little to Tanton. As Tanton wrote in
a 1986 memo to other FAIR leaders: “Ideas will win out in the end, or so I believe.”
3

The initiatives were more a platform to circulate and raise such ideas—“to make
immigration a subject of conversation among thinking people”—than an arena to
enact particular legislation.
4

But what type of “conversation” was Tanton seeking to have, and with which
particular groups of “thinking people?” Given the deep history in California of
movements for immigrant exclusion, we might expect the English Only project to
operate in a similar register: Casting the growing numbers of immigrants from Asia
and Latin America as threats to the nation and demanding their exclusion.
5
Indeed,

3
Tanton memo titled “Quo Vadis” (July 11, 1986) was a survey of FAIR’s growth over the last eight
years since its founding, and offered ideas for future directions. Series 5, Box 176, Folder 7, National
Council of La Raza Collection, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University (hereafter
NCLR). A copy of the memo is also available online in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s
Intelligence Reporter at http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=124. Accessed
2/1/07.
4
“U.S. English’s Links to Anti-Immigration Groups. ”Asian Week Aug 15 86.
5
Among many works about the role of nativism in California political history and culture are

296
scholars who have examined the English Only initiatives in California and other
states have understood support for the measure as a relatively transparent expression
of “nativism,” and sought to distinguish the specific factors—negative perceptions
about the economy, large increases in migration levels, proximity to new immigrant
communities, attitudes about American identity—that explain or motivate such a
position.
6
Such explanations rehearse the basic assumptions about the sources of
American nativism described most famously by historian John Higham more than 50
years ago. Higham, examining nativist political projects in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, similarly argued that when large influxes of newcomers
arrive during a period of economic, political or social crisis, prevailing national
chauvinisms engender a wave of xenophobic reaction. Contemporary critics, such as
political theorist Rogers Smith and historian Gary Gerstle, join Higham in figuring
nativism as an aberration from the commitments of liberal democracy, in which
ascriptive political attachments trump liberalism’s promise of formal equality.
7

In this chapter, however, I suggest that the debates inaugurated by the

Deverell, Whitewashed Los Angeles: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past,
Brian Gaines and Wendy Tam Cho, "On California's 1920 Alien Land Law: The Psychology and
Economics of Racial Discrimination," State Politics and Policy Quarterly 4 (Fall, 2004), Mae M.
Ngai, Impossible Subjects : Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ, 2003),
Eduardo Obregon Pagan, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A.
(2003), Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California.
6
See for example Jack Citrin et al., "The "Official English" Movement and the Symbolic Politics of
Language in the United States," The Western Political Quarterly 43 (Sept, 1990), Deborah J.
Schildkraut, Press One for English: Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American Identity
(Princeton, NJ, 2005), Raymond Tatalovich, Nativism Reborn? The Official English Language
Movement and the American States (Lexington, 1995).
7
David H Bennett, The Party of Fear; From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American
History (New York, 1990), Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century,
John Higham, Strangers in the land : patterns of American nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, NJ,
2002(1955)), Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History.

297
English Only ballot measures might reveal a more complicated relationship between
the forces of nativism, race and liberal democracy. Theorist Bonnie Honig discusses
the deeply ambivalent and contradictory role played by the figure of the “foreigner”
within liberal democracy.
8
Honig suggests that we must examine nativist political
projects in connection to (rather than as an aberration from) the familiar and
celebrated claims that the U.S. is a nation founded by immigrants, a narrative of
xenophilia continually rehearsed in representations of immigrants as redemptive and
idealized economic, civic, and familial subjects. She explains:
American political culture is marked by a play of xenophobia and xenophilia
that is not simply caused by periodic power changes from nativists to
inclusionists… Nor is it merely a sign of changing economic ‘realities,’
from expanding to shrinking labor needs. These may be parts of the story,
but there is a deeper logic at work here.
9

Honig continues:

Mere facts—the mere fact of heightened migration—cannot be counted
upon to do the world-building of politics. People cross borders all the
time…it is not the fact but the significance of those crossings, the meanings
and causes on behalf of which those crossings can be pressed into service,
that is the stuff of politics… American immigrants are…variously available
for capture on behalf of diverse causes, and this is what the symbolic
politics of immigration is about: the struggle and counter struggle to define
the terms of foreignness in relation to the always shifting terrain and values
of national and democratic politics.
10

In this chapter, I bring Honig’s call to explore the “symbolic politics of

8
I turn to Honig following political scientist Ron Schmidt. Schmidt makes productive use of Honig to
understand the ideological commitments of the national English Only movement. See Ronald
Schmidt, "Defending English in an English-Dominant World: the Ideology of the ‘Official English’
Movement in the United States," in Discourses of Endangerment: Interest and Ideology in the
Defense of Languages, ed. Monica Heller and Alexandre Duchene (London, 2007).
9
Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ, 2001). 76.
10
Ibid. 80.

298
immigration” to bear on the two statewide English Only ballot measures of the
1980s, as well as a San Francisco referendum to ban multilingual ballots in 1983. I
examine the way these initiatives operated as processes of both exclusion and
inclusion, not only limiting access to rights, resources, and opportunities (the more
familiar story) but also conditioning the terms on which acceptable claims to these
goods could be made. These initiatives established a critical distinction between
different ideal types of “foreigners.” Honig describes a xenophilia directed towards
the figure of the “good” immigrant: the “supercitizen” who is committed to national
ideals of citizenship and democracy, who contributes to the national economy, and
who obeys conservative, often patriarchic social norms. Through these practices, the
good immigrant thus affirms foundational narratives of exceptionalism and
choiceworthiness in a moment when such ideals and practices seem increasingly out
of reach for much of the populace. This redemptive figure is contrasted to the “bad”
immigrant, the menacing newcomer who takes jobs, welfare, other goods from the
nation, disregards prevailing social norms, and remains ambivalent or even hostile
towards national ideals of patriotism and citizenship. I argue that within a political
culture increasingly attentive to determinations of “innocence” and “guilt,” these
distinctions proved critical. English Only ballot initiatives became a generative
location to establish and make visible those members of the populace whose
innocence, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, had been “extinguished,” and thus
forfeited their right to make claims on the polity.
11

11
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Profiling Alienated Labor: Racialization, Externalities, and Re-partitioned

299
I first trace the rise of U.S. English, and its turn to the California ballot
initiative process following Hayakawa’s failed attempt at winning a federal English
Only constitutional amendment. In the wake of the enormous national impact of
Jarvis and Gann’s anti-tax efforts, groups like U.S. English increasingly became
convinced that a successful California ballot initiative was a sure path to placing an
issue on the national political agenda. I detail the campaigns and debate over the two
English Only propositions, examining how proponents and opponents deployed
similar arguments about racialized immigrants as both threatening and redemptive
figures. Ultimately, I argue that these initiatives did more than simply re-arouse a
static, a priori nativism; the debates engendered by these measures participated in
naturalizing and condensing new modes of racial identification and racialized
political communities.

The Symbolic Character of English Only Legislation

Samuel I Hayakawa was nearing the end of a single term in the U.S. Senate
in 1981 when he first introduced a Constitutional amendment declaring English to be
the nation’s official language. Compared to the accolades he earned for staring down
student protestors as president of San Francisco State University in the late 1960s,
Hayakawa’s tenure in the Senate was largely undistinguished; a lapse of drowsiness
at a Harvard conference on the eve of his arrival to Washington had earned him the
name “Sleepy Sam.”
12
A semanticist by training, Hayakawa was a reliable

Geographies," ed. Unpublished paper in author's possession (2004).
12
“Hayakawa puts sour Senate experience behind, pursues new interests.” Los Angeles Times, Feb 1

300
conservative on most issues, but his legislative projects rarely attracted great public
attention. Such was the case when Hayakawa first brought his English Only
Amendment to the Senate floor in April 1981. He secured a handful of sympathetic
opinion-editorial columns but found few colleagues or advocacy organizations
interested in the effort. Indeed, not since the 1920s, in a time of significant anti-
German sentiment and growing calls to restrict immigration, had there been a
national debate of any note on official language legislation. There is no evidence that
Hayakawa introduced the amendment as a result of demands from his constituency
or organized interest groups; his interest in the issue stemmed primarily from his
preoccupation with language as an obligation of citizenship, and his frequent
accusations that demands for minority language rights were the work of radical
political projects. He blamed the upsurge in separatist sentiments in Quebec, for
example, on the destructive influences of the “American Civil Rights movement”
and an “aggrieved black minority.” He insisted that “pressure from ambitious
politicians” promised to do the same for the “influx of Hispanics” entering the
United States.
13

To broaden awareness of his amendment, Hayakawa turned to the Orange
County political consultancy Butcher-Forde, which as described in Chapter 4 had
been instrumental in building a grassroots funding and voter base for Howard Jarvis
and Proposition 13, as well as for Alan Robbins’ crusade against school
desegregation and busing. Butcher-Forde consultants prepared for Hayakawa a

1984; pg. C1.
13
Congressional Record of the 97
th
Congress, Second Session, June 17, 1982, Vol 128, No. 77.

301
detailed “Communication Assessment and Action Plan” in order to “build a
constituency for the issue and proposed legislation.” The consultants described the
numerous challenges his proposal would face including “Suspicion of anti-minority
intentions,” “Suspicion of extreme Right activity,” “Lack of funding,” and “Possible
infringement upon due process of law.” Yet one challenge stood above all the others.
Noting the central importance of identifying and mobilizing a political base to fight
for the measure, Butcher-Forde pointed out to Hayakawa: “AT THIS POINT THE
NATURAL CONSTITUENCY for the Amendment is not clear.”
14

What Butcher-Forde laid bare to Hayakawa was a challenge that would
follow English Only advocates for the next two decades: they seemed to have a
solution in search of a problem. In the ballot initiatives examined in earlier chapters,
the “problem” or threat which civil rights opponents brought to the electorate was
never difficult to locate. Employers who opposed anti-discrimination legislation
warned of the threat to “individual rights” posed by a state Fair Employment
Practices Commission. Realtors contesting fair housing legislation announced they
were defending inviolable “property rights.” Anti-busing activists sought to protect
the “neighborhood school” from bureaucratic assault. While, as I have argued, each
of these initiatives also operated at important symbolic registers— invoking and
naturalizing particular ideas about race, political community, and power—they also
emphasized particular privileges—“your job,” “your home,” “your school”--that

14
English Only. “Communication Assessment and Action Plan (February 19, 1982), English
Language Amendment 1982.” (Emphasis in original.) Box 25, Folder: SJ Res 72, Samuel Hayakawa
Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University (hereafter SH). Butcher-Forde’s role in the
subsequent 1982 campaign is unclear.

302
(white) voters stood to lose.
By contrast, the English Only project had much greater difficulty articulating
a specific set of rights and privileges which their legislation sought to protect. To be
sure, proponents attempted to express the “material” stakes of their proposals,
pointing to the fiscal burdens imposed by printing multi-lingual ballots and election
materials. Yet those costs, even when exaggerated, never attracted great attention, as
they comprised only a small fraction of overall election expenditures.
15
Other
arguments about a loss of entitlements—to jobs or public services--were made but
never circulated widely.
Indeed, as one analysis has observed, “symbolic attitudes rather than material
concerns are the predominant influence on mass preferences” for English Only
policies.
16
My argument here is not that these debates were without substance or
import—they had an enormous impact on everyday life in California and beyond.
Instead, we should be cautious about assuming a particular instrumentality or
coherence within the English Only effort and remain alert to the contradictions and
ambivalence articulated by the diverse range of people who came to embrace English
Only policies. Claims made on behalf of English Only legislation often reveal more
about the hopes and anxieties of the claims-makers then they do the need or rationale
for any particular policy.

15
In 1984, Los Angeles County spent $120,000 out of an election budget of $7 million to print and
distribute 39,000 ballots. San Diego County spent $14,000 out of a budget of $1 million the same
year. “Bilingual Ballots Gone for Many.” Los Angeles Times, Oct 7, 1984.
16
Citrin et al., "The "Official English" Movement and the Symbolic Politics of Language in the
United States," 536. The California Poll figures are in Citrin et al., "The "Official English" Movement
and the Symbolic Politics of Language in the United States," 550-551.

303

Multilingual Ballots and the Rise of U.S. English

The first project U.S. English backed after its 1983 meeting with Paul Gann
was an advisory ballot measure in San Francisco. Proposition “O” which appeared
on the November 1983 ballot, required city officials to urge the federal government
to repeal legislation mandating local jurisdictions publish election materials in
languages other than English. In the mid-1970s Texas Congresswoman Barbara
Jordon, and civil rights groups including the Mexican American Legal Defense and
Education Fund (MALDEF), led a successful effort to extend the protections of the
Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 to “language minority groups.” In adopting the
legislation, Congress clearly acknowledged the historic dimensions of language
discrimination as a tool of disenfranchisement:
[T]hrough the use of various practices and procedures, citizens of language
minorities have been effectively excluded from participation in the electoral
process. Among other factors, the denial of the right to vote of such minority
group citizens is ordinarily directly related to the unequal educational
opportunities afforded them resulting in high illiteracy and low voting
participation. The Congress declares that, in order to enforce the guarantees
of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the United States
Constitution, it is necessary to eliminate such discrimination by prohibiting
these practices, and by prescribing other remedial devices.
17

Thus, as originally articulated, the VRA was a direct outgrowth of the
postwar civil rights imaginary, implicitly affirming particular claims by right-bearing

17
The language minority provisions of the Voting Rights Act were first adopted in 1975 for a period
of ten years, then extended them in 1982 for ten year and in 1992 for fifteen years. See
http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/sec_203/activ_203.htm. Accessed February 7, 2007. For a recent set
of essays on the VRA, see Richard M. Valelly, ed., The Voting Rights Act: Securing the Ballot
(Washington, D.C., 2006).

304
citizens on the electoral process. The legislation specifically identified particular
groups—“American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Spanish-
heritage citizens”—that had been systematically excluded from the electoral process,
and specified the conditions under which political subdivisions had to make election
materials available in particular languages. While it was also true that many
proponents viewed multilingual ballots as a form of remedial assistance for voters
unable to understand election materials in English—one study noted that the average
readability of California ballot measures in the 1970s was the eighteenth grade level
(the bachelor’s degree plus two additional years)—this was not the main rationale for
the VRA’s language minority protections.
18
They were enacted as a response to
historic patterns and practices of discrimination and disenfranchisement, akin to the
literacy tests imposed on African American voters in the South.
In the late 1970s, census figures identified San Francisco as one of 39
California counties that was required to furnish election materials, including
registration forms, ballots and Voter Information Pamphlets, in languages other than
English. (In San Francisco they were required in Spanish and Chinese; in most other
jurisdictions they were only required in Spanish).
19

Why would English Only forces test their initiative on what was arguably the

18 Magelby, Direct Legislation: Voting on Ballot Propositions in the United States.
19 Census figures released in 1976 required San Francisco to provide election materials,
including registration forms, ballots and Voter Information Pamphlets, in both Chinese and
Spanish. The San Francisco Registrar of Voters did not comply immediately with the
mandate; a federal lawsuit and consent decree eventually brought the County into compliance
by 1981.

305
most liberal electorate in the state, and where civil rights groups had a long history of
activism? The decision was partly pragmatic. Quentin Kopp, a conservative member
of the Board of Supervisors who had been active around earlier debates over
bilingual education, was an outspoken opponent of the multilingual ballot
requirements, and was eager to take the lead on a local referendum. In addition,
Stanley Diamond, a one-time Hayakawa staff member who was among the founding
members of U.S. English, was also based in San Francisco.
20

But in many ways, San Francisco was a logical place for U.S. English to
launch their nascent effort. Their strategy to popularize English Only measures
centered on turning the claims that multilingual voting materials empowered
language minorities against the civil rights groups which made them. In these
representations, it was not English language ballots that restricted the political
participation of language minorities, as civil rights groups alleged. Instead it was the
multilingual ballots that marginalized language minorities by inhibiting them from
learning English. From this perspective, only self-styled “ethnic bosses” and “self-
appointed leaders” would want to keep immigrants in such subservient positions; the
“real” interests of language minorities could only be secured if multilingual ballots
were abolished. That is, U.S. English sought to represent their legislation as an
attempt to free language minorities from the “illusion” that they could become fully

20 Kopp had seized on the issue as early as 1980 when he charged that bilingual ballots represented a
“mandate from Big Brother” that would lead to “segregation of people.” “A Ballot Box Albatross.”
San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 27, 1981. In addition, San Francisco had a long tradition of using local
referenda to debate a wide-range of issues, and the threshold to qualify a measure for the ballot was
not high; Kopp needed only to submit 9,679 valid signatures to the Registrar of Voters.

306
empowered citizens without learning English, rather than as an attack on minority
rights.
Hayakawa continually employed such claims when he first introduced his
Constitutional Amendment to the Senate in 1981, often with reference to his own
experiences as an immigrant. He told his Senate colleagues for example:

I believe we are being dishonest with linguistic minority groups if we tell
them they can take full part in American life without learning the English
language... As the son of an immigrant to an English-speaking country, I
know this from personal experience. If I spoke no English, my world would
be limited to the Japanese-speaking community, and no matter how talented
I was, I could never do business, seek employment, or take part in public
affairs outside the community…The purpose of this proposal is to insure
that American democracy always strives to include in its mainstream
everyone who aspires to citizenship, to insure that no one gets locked out by
permanent language barriers.
21

San Francisco thus represented a logical place to launch a political effort
seeking to “empower” immigrant and language minority communities by abolishing
multilingual ballots. My point here is not that English Only advocates were “less
nativist” because they invoked narratives of minority empowerment or that their
arguments against multilingual ballots were innocuous. Instead, I suggest that the
effort to back the San Francisco referendum reveals the early intention of U.S.
English and its allies to deploy arguments about empowerment and inclusion
championed by civil rights advocates to their own ends.
The campaign for Proposition “O” in San Francisco recited many of these
themes. In an insightful analysis of the discourse generated by the measure,

21
Congressional Record, Vol. 127, No. 61, April 27, 1981.

307
Sociologist Kathryn Woolard explains that proponents “recast…the bilingual ballot
as a means of robbing minority voters of their voice.” This argument, she explains
“gave the referendum a meaning that was not only acceptable in polite public talk
but was laudable even by progressive and pluralistic standards…Removing the
offending languages from the ballot is presented symbolically as a move toward
freeing the minority language citizens.” In addition, because proponents demonized
“ethnic bosses,” “ward-type manipulators,” and “political scoundrels” who allegedly
defended bilingual ballots to maintain their own base of power “[a]ny minority
leader who spoke in favor of bilingual ballots was effectively discredited, since the
very act of speaking out for bilingual ballots could be interpreted as providing
positive evidence of the Pro-‘O’ allegations of self-interest.”
22

Woolard points out that in characterizing those who relied on multilingual
ballots as “poorly informed and incompetent voters” trapped in “linguistic ghettos,”
proponents implicitly delegitimized their right to participate in elections, while
simultaneously naturalizing “English [as] a vehicle of pure information.” In this
discourse, the voting process becomes degraded and sullied by uninformed and
corruptible voters who can only prove their fitness for civic recognition and
participation by renouncing their reliance on any language other than English.
In spite of opposition from Mayor Diane Feinstein, most of Kopp’s
colleagues on the Board of Supervisors, and all of the city’s Democratic Clubs, San

22
Kathryn Woolard, "Voting Rights, Liberal Voters and the Official Movement," in Perspectives on
Official English: The Campaign for English as the Official Language of the USA, ed. Karen L. Adams
and Daniel T. Brink (Berlin, 1990), 135-136.

308
Francisco voters approved Proposition “O” by a 62 to 38 margin. The measure
passed in normally liberal-leaning areas such as Eureka Valley and Potrero Hill, as
well as in the neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of African American
and gay voters; it was only barely defeated in heavily Asian American and Latino
areas of the city.
23
Proposition “O” was non-binding—local voters did not have the
authority to override a federal mandate. But the outcome affirmed U.S. English’s
belief that English Only campaigns could succeed without seeming to resort to
strident nativist appeals; they too could command the pluralist language of minority
empowerment. For many years, U.S. English leaders would remind observers that
their proposal first won widespread backing in “perhaps the most liberal and
ethnically diverse city in the country.”
24

Buoyed by this success, U.S. English leaders quickly established the
“California Committee for Ballots in English”—with Diamond and Hayakawa as co-
chairs--to qualify an advisory ballot measure nearly identical to Proposition “O” for
the statewide ballot in 1984. Tanton had established up a series of non-profit entities
based in Michigan to funnel money to the projects he championed, including FAIR
and U.S. English. Though the network of organizations shared many of the same
consultants, staff and funding sources, their public faces were entirely distinct. In this
case, Tanton used the “US English Legislative Task Force” to direct more than
$185,000 to the 1984 California ballot initiative effort, which comprised more than

23
Ibid., 128.
24
Stanley Diamond, "English--The Official Language of California, 1983-1988," in Perspectives on
Official English: The Campaign for English as the Official Language of the USA, ed. Karen L. Adams
and Daniel T. Brink (Berlin, 1990), 112.

309
90 percent of the campaign’s entire budget.
25
The funding allowed the group to hire
signature gatherers to circulate petitions. By June 1984, with 626,321 signatures
collected, the measure was certified for the November ballot as Proposition 38.
26

Like the San Francisco measure, Proposition 38 was purely advisory; it
required the Governor to write the Secretary of State, Congress and Attorney General
a letter stating: "The People of the State of California recognizing the importance of
a common language in unifying our diverse nation hereby urge that Federal law be
amended so that ballots, voters' pamphlets and all other official voting materials shall
be printed in English only." It also included a “Findings” section which affirmed
many of the pluralist themes tested in the Proposition “O” campaign. The measure’s
first finding asserted: “The United States has been and will continue to be enriched
by the cultural contributions of immigrants from many countries with many different
traditions.” It further declared that while the English language “permits interchange
of ideas at many levels and encourages societal integration” multilingual ballots were
“divisive, costly and often delay or prevent our immigrant citizens from moving into
the economic, political, educational and social mainstream of our country.”
27

Again, U.S. English embraced the rhetoric of “diversity” and “inclusion” for
specific strategic reasons. The California electorate had not even voted on a ballot
initiative related to immigration or language since 1946, when it rejected a measure
to extend the provisions of the anti-Japanese Alien Land Law. While the intervening

25
Campaign Expenditures Filings for Proposition 36, California State Archives, Sacramento
26
Asian Week Jun 29, 1984
27
California Ballot Propositions, November 1984, California Secretary of State

310
period had been marked by some attempts to systematically exclude or remove large
groups of immigrants--such as the INS’s “Operation Wetback” deportations of the
early 1950s and the surveillance and expulsions authorized by the McCarran-Walter
Act of 1952--the state had not witnessed any significant populist or grassroots
political projects aimed at immigrant exclusion or control during this time.
Immigrants certainly continued to face a broad range of restrictions and
encumbrances during this period, but a sustained anti-immigrant political project had
yet to coalesce. Well into the 1980s, for example, then-Senator Pete Wilson
aggressively supported guest worker programs to meet the labor needs of California
agribusiness. During his bid for the Senate in 1982, Wilson declared at a Costa Mesa
real estate meeting: "I deplore the (Immigration and Naturalization Service) raids on
farms here in the roundup of illegal aliens. Our economy needs such workers, and
I'm for a guest worker program to allow such farmhands to come in to do the work
when Americans won't take the jobs."
28
Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan
similarly denounced the proposed Simpson-Mazzoli Act in 1984 (which included
increased penalties against employers for hiring undocumented workers) as an unfair
attack on immigrant workers.
29

Indeed, in the early 1980s, Tanton himself failed in his attempt to build a
local membership base and organization for FAIR in Southern California for FAIR’s
goals of sharply curtailing immigration into the United States. In 1982, amidst a

28
“Charting Wilson's Transformation on Immigration.” Los Angeles Times. Nov 2, 1994; pg. 3.
29
Unz, "California and the End of White America." The Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which was eventually
passed in 1986, imposed sanctions against employers who hired undocumented workers.

311
growing recession and rising unemployment rates, Tanton took 10 months away
from his ophthalmology practice to work full-time on expanding local chapters of
FAIR. During this period, he contracted the services of Marie Koenig, a well-
connected conservative and free-lance publicist based in Pasadena who was active
around many right-wing issues for many years, to help build a membership and
donor base for FAIR in the region. Koenig helped FAIR publicize 10 billboards
recently raised along Los Angeles area freeways which read: “HELP US STOP
ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION. The job you save may be your own” and to sponsor a
press conference promoting FAIR’s local work at the Los Angeles Press Club.
Koenig also wrote more than a personal dozen letters on Tanton’s behalf to other
conservative associates and friends asking them to host fundraisers in their homes for
FAIR in order to help the organization “become better known to the area’s
community leaders who are in a position to support a concerted campaign” against
“illegal immigration.” The press conference received little attention and Koenig
failed to secure any commitments for fundraisers or meetings with Tanton. FAIR
eventually abandoned its strategy of growing local chapters, focusing almost
exclusively on lobbying Congress and continuing its direct mail funding appeals.
30

FAIR’s inability to ignite a local political movement around immigrant
exclusion was not exceptional. The lack of a broad restrictionist movement during

30
The quote is from various personal letters from Koenig to associates from early 1982. See also
letters between Koenig and Tanton during this period in Folder: “Immigration: Federation for
Immigration Reform,” Box 13, Marie Koenig Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. On
Koenig, see “A Conservative’s Mother Lode.” Los Angeles Times July 7, 2007; pg. C1. On Tanton’s
description of FAIR’s early focus on national rather than local efforts, see his internal memo from
1986 about the organization’s early development, published by the Souther Poverty Law Center at
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=123. Accessed June 1, 2007.

312
this time can be traced to a number of countervailing forces—the United States’
geopolitical interests in Cold War Asia (and to a lesser extent, Latin America), the
labor needs of domestic employers in a wide range sectors, and, as Chapter 2
explored, the rise of cultural pluralism as a central current within both California and
national political culture. These forces culminated in the passage of the Immigration
and Nationality Act of 1965, which resulted in large net increases in immigration to
the United States from Asia and Latin America in particular.
31
California became the
leading destination for this generation of new arrivals. A1983 Time magazine cover
story on immigration to Los Angeles described the “exotic multitudes…altering the
collective beat and bop of L.A., the city's smells and colors” resulting from more
than 2 million foreign born immigrants arriving to the metropolitan region since
1970, and 90,000 in 1982 alone. In spite of some alarmist references to the
“invasion” of the city, the magazine’s cover christened Los Angeles “The New Ellis
Island” suggesting the waves of newcomers, including “60,000 Samoans and 30,000
Thais, 200,000 Salvadorans and 175,000 Armenians” were infusing the sprawling
metropolis with new life and vibrancy.
32

31
Ngai, Impossible Subjects : Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Ngai notes that the
1965 Acts were contradictory. The legislation both “liberalized” immigration law by authorizing new
migration streams from non-Western European countries while heightening the distinctions between
“legal” and “illegal” migrants On the vicissitudes of labor-capital relations and the production of
racial categories within postwar immigration, see especially Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian
American Cultural Politics (Durham, 1996).
32
"The New Ellis Island" Time, Jun. 13, 1983.

313
Percentage Foreign Born in Major California Cities, 1940-1990
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990
Year
Percentage of Population Foreign
Born
Fresno
Long Beach
Los Angeles
Oakland
Sacramento
San Diego
San Francisco

From the perspective of John Tanton, rising levels of foreign immigration to
the U.S. posed a threat, yet there was little space for meaningful public debate over
immigration policy. He claimed in a 1986 interview that “[t]oo often when you bring
up the subject of immigration, you just get Emma Lazarus’ poem (which appears on
the Statute of Liberty) back, and that’s the end of the conversation.”
33
As one of
Tanton’s early colleagues on the board of FAIR explained, the prevailing popular
assumption when the organization began was that “restrictionist ideas [against
immigration] must somehow derive from the reactionary side of the national
character” harkening back to an earlier era of Eugenics and a concern with “racial

33
“U.S. English’s Links to Anti-Immigration Groups.” Asian Week Vol 7, Number 51 Aug 15, 1986.
Figure 11: Percentage of Foreign Born in Major California Cities, 1940-1990
Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850-2000,
U.S. Census Bureau.

314
purity.” As we shall see, Tanton, in spite of his putatively “liberal” credentials as a
conservationist and environmentalist, did not renounce such ideas entirely. But
Tanton and others were eminently aware they would gain little traction in their
attempts to force debate on immigration policy if they employed the harsh tones
associated with the earlier era of nativism. As Tanton’s colleague explained: “The
restrictionist case can and must be articulated from centrist, and even liberal or
radical, perspectives.” FAIR focused on addressing the “economic and political
impact of immigration on average Americans” while generally avoiding questions of
“assimilation and pluralism.”
34
James Crawford, a leading scholar of the English
Only effort explains the decision to establish U.S. English as a separate entity from
FAIR was primarily a tactical measure. “To charge linguistic minorities with
refusing to assimilate and simultaneously to propose limiting their numbers smacked
of ethnic intolerance, a return to the old nativism. It would reveal an impolitic
analysis…that the problem was not merely the quantity of new immigrants, but the
quality: too many Hispanics.”
35
It was thus entirely deliberate that U.S. English’s
first foray into a statewide ballot initiative was an advisory measure fused with
references to “the enriching experience of living with and learning from other
cultures.” U.S. English had no intention of being painted as the Workingman’s Party
of its era.
36

34
James Crawford, Hold your Tongue: Bilingualism and the politics of English Only (Reading, MA,
1992). 152-153.
35
Ibid. 153.
36
On the Workingman’s Party, which championed the exclusion of Chinese workers in the late
nineteenth century, see Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in
California.

315
The campaign for Proposition 38 was a low key affair. Nominally led by
Hayakawa, Diamond and Republican Assemblyman Frank Hill of Whittier, another
former Hayakawa staffer member, the campaign attacked multilingual ballots
through three core themes: (1) the “burden” imposed on both taxpayers and those
“earlier immigrants [who]… learned English in their new country in order to
participate fully in American life;” (2) the disservice done to immigrants themselves,
through claims, for example, that a bilingual ballot “demean[s]… Hispanics and
Asians and…classifies them as ‘different;’” and (3) the “unity” that would be
restored to a fragmented society once the ballots were abolished.
37
The Proposition
38 ballot argument concluded: “The United States as, a country of immigrants from
other lands with different languages and cultures, has had the enriching experience of
living with and learning from other cultures. We learn from each other because we
are unified by a common language, English. We must preserve that unity.”
38

Collectively, these arguments demonstrate the subtle play between
xenophobia and xenophilia described by Bonnie Honig. On the one hand, immigrants
are characterized within this discourse as a threat to the integrity of the democratic
system—uninformed and easily “led into block [sic] voting by opportunistic political
leaders” as well as potential perpetrators of voter “abuse” and fraud. And they are
explicitly racialized: the Proposition 38 ballot argument asserted “only Hispanic,
Asian American, American Indian and Alaskan native languages are targeted for
special treatment in the law.” Finally, by making continual references to “foreign

37
Crawford, Hold your Tongue: Bilingualism and the politics of English Only. 153.
38
California Secretary of State

316
language ballots” the measure suggested that the nation’s linguistic heritage and
character was defined by English alone, and that the quality of American
exceptionalism extends from this tradition of a “unified common language.” Erased
in this account is California’s own history of official bilingualism—the state’s first
Constitution in 1849 was written in both English and Spanish, and the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo ceding California from Mexico to the U.S. has been interpreted
by many as providing Spanish and English equal standing in government and
education.
39
Absent this history, these xenophobic narratives figure the immigrant as
the “taker”—the “free-rider” who drains the nation of social, political and economic
resources.
On the other hand, the discourse offered by Proposition 38 proponents left
open, and even celebrated the possibility of immigrant redemption and inclusion. By
fetishizing a mythical “earlier generation” of newcomers who learned English as a
matter of course and contributed to the nation-building project, these narratives
instruct the current generation of immigrants of their obligation to do the same.
Honig points to the figure of the “immigrant supercitizen” in such claims—
exemplified by the ubiquitous photos of large groups of proud newcomers
participating in citizenship swearing-in ceremonies—in sustaining and reproducing a
“nationalist narrative of choiceworthiness;” helping to shore up a perceived sense of
fragmentation and social disintegration. Here we have the figure of the foreigner as

39
California’s 1879 Constitution did include an English language provision that was later deleted as
surplusage in 1966, when the Legislature streamlined the Constitution. Connie Dyste, "Proposition
63: The California English Language Amendment," Applied Linguistics 10 (1989): 314.

317
the “giver”—dutifully contributing to the economy, modeling traditional relations of
family, and re-performing the ritual of consent and choice central to the founding
myths of the country. Yet as Honig points out, this iconic characterization is hardly
innocuous. “Since the presumed test of both a good and a bad foreigner is the
measure of her contribution to the restoration of the nation rather than, say, to the
nation’s transformation or attenuation, nationalist xenophilia tends to feed and
(re)produce nationalist xenophobia as its partner.”
76

Following Honig’s analysis, we can understand the ideological work
embodied in even an “advisory” measure such as Proposition 38. The initiative’s
proponents rehearsed the terms by which a renewed public debate over immigration
as a “problem” might be conducted. Even opponents would have to frame their
arguments in on these terms, celebrating the “good immigrant” narrative in order to
discredit the attacks implicit in the proposed measure. The Los Angeles Times
editorial against Proposition 38 concluded: “Thousands of Latinos and Asians have
found California a hospitable state in which to live. They strive for good jobs, they
look for a good place to raise their children, they seek economic opportunity and
political tolerance.”
40
The ballot argument against Proposition 38 similarly asserted:
“Hispanics and Asian Americans want very much to learn English. It is one of the
keys to economic advancement and social integration...In fact, bilingual ballots
encourage assimilation by encouraging all citizens to participate in their
government.” Here the consenting, productive, and loyal immigrant is deployed to

40
“English Ballots Only: No on 38.” Los Angeles Times, Oct 12, 1984; pg. OC_A10.

318
undermine representations of the immigrant as “taker.” Yet as Honig points out
“xenophilic insistence that immigrants are givers to the nation itself feeds the
xenophobic anxiety that they might really be takers from it.”
41
In both
representations, immigrants are charged with an obligation to perform and reproduce
a host of practices and relations necessary to sustain the nation.
The organized opposition to Proposition 38 was extremely limited—it
consisted of a few ad hoc groups spread across the state. Cesar Chavez organized
several press conferences and rallies in conjunction with a voter education
mobilization designed to defeat Proposition 38, as well as three other initiatives on
the November 1998 ballot: a Jarvis sponsored tax-limitation measure, and
Republican-backed initiatives to cut welfare benefits and modify the redistricting
process. Chavez offered a different analysis of the problem presented by Proposition
38, arguing that proponents were attempting to block the rights of farmworkers to
vote in order to “do something about racism in the schools, how the police
treat…kids, and the way Anglo politicians take our people for granted.”
42
Indeed, for
the most part, the original vision animating the campaign to win multilingual ballots
in the 1970s—the historic disenfranchisement of language minority voters by the
state—was almost completely lost in the debates initiated by Proposition 38.
43
More
often, bilingual ballots were defended as a regrettable but necessary form of remedial

41
Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner. 99.
42
Chavez “Dear Friend” letter against Propositions 36, 38, 39, and 41” Folder: “1984 General
Election Ballot Initiatives,” UCLA Campaign Archives. “Chavez Mobilizing to Defeat 4 Ballot
Issues.” Los Angeles Times pg OC_A1.
43
The ballot argument against Proposition 38 did mention the Voting Rights Act several times, but
the legislation received little attention in media coverage of the isse.

319
assistance, described by one Proposition 38 opponent in Los Angeles as a small
concession to “allow 9,300 elderly Latinos to read voting materials in their own
language.”
44

Proposition 38 was approved by more than 70 percent of the statewide
electorate and passed in all 58 counties. In San Francisco, 56 percent of voters
favored the measure, a slight decrease from the 62 percent that approved of
Proposition “O” 12 months earlier. It is interesting to note that while the measure
passed in liberal, predominantly white cities such as Santa Monica, it was defeated
soundly in Inglewood and Compton, two Los Angeles cities with large numbers of
African American voters.
45
Relative to the other five initiatives on the ballot, which
collectively drew more than $32 million in campaign expenditures, only $120,000
was spent on the Proposition 38 campaign, all of it by proponents.
46
In spite of these
relatively small expenditures, three polls taken in the two months before the elections
suggested that voters were widely familiar with the measure by election day.

Early Sept Early Oct Late Oct
Have not seen/heard 43 37 27
Have seen/heard 57 63 73
Favor 40 42 48
Oppose 13 16 20
Undecided 4 5 5

44
“Proposition 38, an Exercise in Degrading Democracy,” by Bill Press. Los Angeles Times, Oct. 28,
1984; pg G5.
45
California Secretary of State. Supplement to the Statement of the Vote. November 6, 1984.
46
“$32 Million Spent on ’84 Initiatives” Los Angeles Times May 9, 1985 pg B33
Table 3: Polling Trends for Proposition 38 (1984)
California Poll, Release #1265, September 26, 1984.

320

Thus U.S. English again secured the outcome it sought. As Diamond argued
just before the election “California is the first test in the nation…We think if we win
and it is overwhelming, Congress is going to have to pay very close attention to
this.”
47

Proposition 63: The Official English Measure
Within two months after the passage of Proposition 38, Assemblyman Frank
Hill introduced a bill to the Legislature to declare English the state’s official
language. Hill’s legislation mirrored much of Hayakawa’s 1981 proposed federal
Constitutional Amendment; its primary enforcement mechanism required the
Legislature to “endorse” the official language “by appropriate legislation.” Hill
suggested the measure was in large part symbolic: “"Keep in mind that we have an
official state bird (the valley quail) and an official state flower (the California
poppy)…There is no reason we shouldn't have an official state language."
48
At the
same time, emboldened by the passage of Proposition 38, U.S. English began
positioning the legislation as a “response” to the state’s burgeoning Spanish-
speaking population. Hill claimed that the overwhelming passage of Proposition 38
demonstrated that Californians did not want a bilingual society. Hayakawa explained

47
“Prop 38. Seeks End to Bilingual Ballot Data.” Los Angeles Times Sep 20, 1984; pg. A3. In fact, a
revision to the Voting Rights Act in 1982 lowered the obligation of political jurisdictions to send out
bilingual voting materials; in California, only 10 counties in the Central Valley had large enough
percentages of Spanish-speaking voters to invoke “Minorities in County See Disenfranchisement.”
Los Angeles Times Aug 9, 1984; pg. C3.
48
Asian Week Jan 11, 1985.

321
the Official English bill was “an Hispanic issue…Many (Latino) students go to
transitional classes in which they are taught in Spanish year after year…[and]
graduate from the sixth or eighth grade without knowing English worth a damn."
49

Attacks such as these were never substantiated—the limited number of studies
conducted on bilingual education at that point generally found such programs to be
much more effective in both English language acquisition and overall academic
development.
50

Hill’s legislation did not make it out of the Democratic-controlled Assembly
Government Organization Committee. While other Republicans expressed support
for the measure, no one could suggest that their constituents were specifically
clamoring for an Official English measure. Only six states carried similar legislation
on their books; several were relics of World War I era policies adopted in a time of
considerable anti-German sentiment. Hill’s legislation was quickly put to a vote and
lost. When Diamond asked Committee chair Richard Alatorre for the debate to be
extended, the Los Angeles Assemblyman replied: “I’m from Mexico and bilingual. I
find your bill offensive.”
51

Hayakawa and Diamond immediately promised another statewide ballot
initiative to carry their Official English legislation. Alatorre’s snub soon found its

49
“Bill Introduced to Make English California’s Official Language.” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 9, 1985;
pg. SD3.
50
See “The Political Paradoxes of Bilingual Education” in Crawford, At War With Diversity: US
Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety. Crawford suggests that the preponderance of contemporary
studies point to the overall effectiveness of bilingual education programs in comparison to those that
stress English immersion.
51
“The State.” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1985. See Diamond’s account of the incident in Diamond,
"English--The Official Language of California, 1983-1988."

322
way into U.S. English’s steady stream of direct mail fundraising solicitations.
Always signed by Hayakawa, the appeals described a looming crisis which required
the reader’s immediate attention: “In recent years, something has been going on that
concerns me deeply. Some ethnic leaders seem to have a goal of creating several
bilingual and bicultural states… Foremost among the states marked for bilingualism
is California.” Quoting Alatorre’s stern rebuke to Diamond, Hayakawa asked: “Have
any other ethnic leaders, in all our history, ever made such statements! I think not.”
A call to action always followed. “I hope I can depend on you. It’s not too late. We
must save our common language before the erosion becomes irreversible.”
52
Readers
who lived in California were urged to circulate and return petitions to place the
measure on the ballot. Other mailings typically included “surveys” for readers to
complete and return to U.S. English, posing questions such as “Do you favor
providing election materials in foreign languages?” The envelopes, with a photo of
Hayakawa, similarly stated: “I need your opinion…Should English be designated the
Official Language of the United States?” Devices such as these not only brought tens
of thousands of new members into U.S. English, they reinforced the organization’s
populist image--while the government ignored them, U.S. English solicited their
opinions.
53

U.S. English’s use of the ballot initiative and its heavy reliance on direct mail
registered the influence that Paul Gann and Howard Jarvis’ anti-tax efforts had on

52
“Dear Friend” letter from Hayakawa to U.S. English supporters, no date (probably 1985) in Box
161, Folder 8: “US English Materials,” NCLR.
53
Letters from Hayakawa in Box 161, Folder 8: “US English Materials,” NCLR.

323
issue based advocacy organizations nationally. While some liberally-oriented groups
working on issues such as environmental protection and the nuclear freeze made use
of similar tactics, they were taken up most widely by conservative-leaning
organizations.
54
Five of the six measures on the 1984 ballot—including Proposition
38, a Jarvis tax limitation measure, and a proposal to drastically cut the state’s
welfare program—were sponsored by Republican politicians or conservative
activists.
55
Gann’s Sacramento-based People’s Advocate organization in particular
had refined a systematic process for using both direct mail and paid petitioners to
meet their signature collection goals. Gann’s office collected and organized all the
petitions centrally before submitting them to the appropriate Registrar of Voters in
each county on the same day. In this way, the organization could claim a wide base
of “members” and “volunteers” while still maintaining tight control over the
signature gathering process.
56
Gann’s ballot initiatives also were addressed to a
racialized political community. Gann proposed his 1982 “Crime Victims Bill of
Rights” initiative at a time when several prominent Black and Latino elected
officials, most notably Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, rose to
prominent positions. Gann declared that the “professional politicians in Sacramento

54
In 1982 an anti-nuclear weapons advisory measure was approved by voters (Proposition 12) and in
1986, voters passed Proposition 65, a toxic discharge warnings and disclosure initiative sponsored by
environmental groups.
55
“Republicans Take the Initiative.” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 28, 1984; pg. G1. It is important to note,
however, that even the most well-financed measures did not enjoy guaranteed approval. In the 1984
election, Jarvis’ well-funded tax-slashing measure (Proposition 36) was rejected handily, as were the
welfare-cutting measure (Proposition 41) and a redistricting plan sponsored by Republican Governor
George Deukmejian (Proposition 39).
56
“Oral History Interview with Paul Gann.” Conducted by Gabrielle Morris (1987), Regional Oral
History Office, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley and the California State
Archives, State Government Oral History Program. pp 28-37.

324
have demonstrated more concern with the rights of criminals than with the rights of
innocent victims.” His subsequent proposal to cut legislative pay similarly exhorted
voters to reclaim their government from political elites like Brown.
57

Even before Hill’s proposal was rejected by the state Legislature, U.S.
English established the “California English Campaign” to begin qualifying the
legislation for the 1986 ballot. The campaign received nearly all of its financial
support over the next 22 months—about $800,000 all together—from U.S. English
and its related subsidiaries. Large chunks of the funding were initially provided as
loans to the campaign that were never subsequently repaid; others were made as
outright contributions. U.S. English claimed that half of its 200,000 nationwide
members in 1986 resided in California, and Diamond always painted the
organization as a volunteer-driven operation operating on a shoestring budget. Yet
because the organization, like the Gann group, did not rely on rallies, meetings or
other collective actions, its grassroots involvement and activity could never be
evaluated. Only Diamond, Hayakawa, Hill and a handful of others made public
statements on behalf of the campaign.
58

57
Gann’s Proposition 8, the “Crime Victims Bill of Rights” passed in 1982 with 57 percent of the
vote. His “California Fair Pay Amendment,” Proposition 61, received only 34 percent of the vote in
1986. From 1978 to 1986, Gann’s People’s Advocate organization played a significant role in
qualifying 5 initiatives for the ballot, 4 were adopted by voters. Gann also personally championed
Proposition 102 in 1988, a controversial measure which sought to eliminate anonymous AIDS testing
and mandate health care providers to report the names and personal information of all HIV-positive
patients. The measure was defeated. Gann died in 1989, contracted HIV from a blood transfusion
during heart surgery in 1982. See “Prop 22 Causes Ballot Box Déjà vu,” Patrick Runkle,
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/prop22/runkle.html. Accessed March 1, 2007.
58
On a handful of occasions, Diamond and Hayakawa did intervene in local disputes related to
language policy. In the Ventura county town of Fillmore, they advised a group of residents upset over
the expansion of bilingual education programs in a local school. To enormous controversy, the town
council of the small citrus community approved a non-binding Official English declaration resolution,

325
For its purposes U.S. English’s model of arm chair membership was highly
effective. The group rented mailing lists from other organizations supported by
Tanton, such as Californians for Population Control, to send blank petitions and
fundraising appeals, and paid American Petition Consultants nearly $350,000 to
collect signatures.
59
In July, 1986, Hayakawa announced the effort had collected
more than one million signatures to qualify the proposed constitutional amendment
for the ballot, the third highest total in the history of the state.
The language of Proposition 63 struck an effective balance between symbolic
declarations of state efforts “to preserve, protect and strengthen the English
language” without mentioning any specific policies or programs that would be
subject to repeal. Proponents could thus gesture towards the types of programs they
viewed with mistrust—“Governmental bilingual activities [which] cost millions of
taxpayers' dollars each year”—without giving opponents fodder to claim the measure
would harm essential services. In addition, proponents took great pains to clarify
that the measure only applied to government business. Hayakawa explained that “in
unofficial, private or religious or other circumstances, you can use any language you
like. You can have a prayer meeting, a crap game or a bingo tournament in any

making it the first municipality in the state to do so. Diamond and Hayakawa became similarly
involved in a controversy in the Los Angeles suburb of Monterey Park, counseling residents there to
circulate a petition to put an Official English measure on the ballot. The petition effort stalled, but as
in Fillmore, the controversy attracted considerable public attention, and fulfilled US English’s
objective of starting a “public conversation” over immigration and language policy. See Crawford,
Hold your Tongue: Bilingualism and the politics of English Only. 13-15. On Monterrey Park, see
Leland Saito, Race and Politics: Asian Americans, Latinos and Whites in a Los Angeles Suburb
(Urbana, 1998).
59
Campaign Filing Statements, Proposition 63, California State Archives, Sacramento.

326
language you like, but English is to be the language of government”
60

Such exemptions were dictated more by tactics than principle. Indeed, in
1985, Diamond organized a letter writing campaign to the local phone company,
protesting the decision to publish a Spanish language Yellow Pages, declaring in a
letter to local U.S. English supporters "Pacific Bell needs to be made aware of the
American public's concern about the erosion of English and its conviction that the
Spanish Yellow Pages further reduce the incentive to learn our language." Diamond
also attacked the Philip Morris corporation the same year, suggesting its advertising
in Spanish was promoting “dangerous divisiveness.”
61

Diamond renounced all such claims in the effort to pass Proposition 63. The
campaign repeatedly emphasized “languages in the home, church, private affairs, and
private businesses are not affected.” Diamond and others even objected whenever the
measure was characterized as “English Only” only legislation (they insisted on the
title “Official English”), even though it was U.S. English leaders who first
introduced the term in the campaign for Proposition 38.
62
In addition, while the
implementation mechanisms were vague, Proposition 63 did contain a section which
gave citizens a standing right to sue the state in order to enforce its findings, a
provision which Official English measures in other states did not include.

60
“Ideas and Trends; Is English the Only Language for Government.” NYT, Oct 26, 1986; pg. A6.
61

“California Elections Prop. 63 Roots Traced to Small Michigan City Measure to Make English
Official Language of State Sprang From Concern Over Immigration, Population.” Los Angeles Times,
Oct 20, 1986; pg. 3
62
Crawford, Hold your Tongue: Bilingualism and the politics of English Only.

327
In the public debate which followed, Proposition 63’s endorsers never tired
of declaring the anti-racist commitments of the measure. The San Francisco
Examiner editorialized:
The measure will not become…an implement of racism, a tool for
discrimination along ethnic lines. To the contrary, it will work to the vast
benefit of immigrants and others in our society whose prospects for
livelihood too often are crippled by deficiency in the language that propels
this country’s economic life... The majority that favors this proposition is
not racist or xenophobic, but simply realistic. We think the California
majority wants to help immigrants to assimilate and succeed, rather than to
raise a barrier against them. This is a law to help improve the melting pot,
not interfere with it.
63

U.S. English proclaimed it operated “squarely within the American political
mainstream, and reject[ed] all manifestations of cultural or linguistic chauvinism.”
64

In a pro-63 mailer entitled “How can you help unite California?” Hayakawa
confronted the issue directly:

The racist argument is the argument of desperation by the opposition. The
amendment encourages all immigrants to become fluent and literate in
English…Racist slurs usually come from ethnic political leaders who
attempt to maintain political leadership with fear statements and distorted
information.
65

Similarly, in a Los Angeles Times opinion column shortly before the election,
Hayakawa argued: “My goal as a linguist and former educator is to see the drop-out
rate among Latino students reduced to the lowest point feasible… I want them and
all children who experience language problems to be helped in resolving those

63
“Prop. 63 Deserves Approval” SF Examiner, October 24, 1986, reprinted in James Crawford, ed.,
Language Loyalties: A Source Book on the Official English Controversy (Chicago, 1992).
64
U.S. English brochure in UCLA Campaign Files, General Election, 1986.
65
Box 161, Folder 8: “US English Materials,” NCLR.

328
problems so they can communicate, assimilate and achieve.”
66

These arguments help us understand the ways that the very debate over
Official English legislation articulated and naturalized four particular claims about
the relationship between language, race and political power. First, the campaign
figured opposition to multilingualism in government as a race-neutral position
disembodied from any relations of power or authority. In this discourse, the history
of language discrimination and disenfranchisement that animated the efforts in the
1960s and 1970s to win multilingual ballots, bilingual education, and other public
programs became cast as a narrow debate over language acquisition and
“assimilation” strategies. Originally, the provision of multilingual services and
programs implicitly recognized the claims-making rights of historically excluded
language minorities. Here, it was these very claims-making rights that were negated;
multilingual services were unjustified because they were an accommodation to those
who lacked standing to make such demands.
Second, Proposition 63 proponents represented those whose primary
language was not English—always immigrants from Mexico, Latin America and
Asia—as having a “disability” and “problem” which Official English legislation
sought to cure. References to “sending a message” that English fluency was a
prerequisite for social mobility characterized these same groups as unmotivated and
lacking in an ambition shared by earlier generations of immigrants. As Hayakawa
commented: “The problem of California is that it is very often oversensitive to

66
“A Common Language, So All Can Pursue Common Goals” S.I. Hayakawa, Los Angeles Times,
Oct, 29, 1986. pg. 5.

329
linguistic minorities and, in effect, encourages many not to learn English at all by
making life too easy for people who don't speak English.”
67
Here, the rewards of
citizenship and recognition before the polity become tied to a particular
“behavior”—learning English, joining the “mainstream” and fulfilling the historical
obligation of the newcomer to celebrate the nation’s exception and promise.
Implicitly, those that chose not to obey these expectations forfeited their rights to
political recognition and standing.
Third, Proposition 63 proponents posited that English alone was the language
of enterprise, education, and most importantly, progress. “Ethnic enclaves” were
pathologized as marginal sites of public life. Other languages (and cultures) could be
used in private settings, but they must be excluded from the public sphere in order to
safeguard the common good. But as USC journalism professor Felix Gutierrez
pointed out in an opinion editorial published in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
most large corporations would not be concur with this contention. “Spanish is fast
becoming a language of commerce in the state….The amendment, if it passes, is
unlikely to stop companies from telling Latinos ‘Coke Lo Es,’ or urging them to ask
for ‘Otra fria, otra Coors.’” Gutierrez explained that while Spanish speakers would
still get targeted for their consumer dollars and taxes, they would receive fewer
“services than their English-speaking neighbors.” Thus, “the existing social,
economic and educational gaps between Anglos and Latinos would grow, not

67 “Ideas and Trends; Is English the Only Language for Government?” New York Times, Oct 26,
1986; pg A6.

330
diminish.”
68
By characterizing English as the privileged medium of citizenry and
progress, the measure naturalized the claim that English speakers were entitled to
benefits and rights to which non-English speakers were not.
Finally, Official English proponents invited observers to recognize in the
measure a “problem” that went well beyond language acquisition and effective
citizenry. Caltech political scientist Bruce Cain gave voice to such a perspective
when he observed that “there are a lot of reasonable people out there who are
worried about what's going to happen to California society if we have too many
people who don't speak English, who have a genuine concern about whether the
fabric of society can absorb so many new people."
69
That is, in staging a public
debate over a relatively innocuous advisory measure, English Only proponents
depicted and framed a much larger political question in racial terms: In an era of
fiscal limitations and austerity, who was “fit for citizenship?” What limitations could
the “innocent” members of the populace—the native-born, dutiful citizens who
worked hard, spoke English, and paid taxes—place on those who were clearly not
innocent? And what must newcomers, especially from Asia, Mexico and other parts
of Latin America, do in order to prove their fitness to the other members of the
populace?
70

Indeed, connections between language debates and immigration levels were

68
“A New Language of California Commerce—Spanish.” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Oct 3,
1986.
69
“California Elections Many Supporters Also Favor Bilingual Education, Ballots Latino Backing of
`English-Only' a Puzzle.” Los Angeles Times, Oct 25, 1986; pg.1. “Prop. 63-a New Battle in Historical
War of Words.” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 21, 1986; pg. 3.
70
For an example of the way this question has been explored in relation to immigration and public
health, see Molina, Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940.

331
precisely what Tanton and others at U.S. English hoped to kindle. Tanton explained
in an interview that the “language question is derivative of immigration policy. Large
numbers of immigrants are coming from the same (non-English) language
backgrounds. They create communities where English is not spoken…[leading to]
institutional segregation and a gradual loss of national unity.”
71
Provoking a public
debate on language policy created space for longer term political efforts to “to make
immigration a subject of conversation among thinking people.” As I suggest in the
next section, this debate also forced the opponents of U.S. English to recite many of
the claims and ideas above in their attempt to win credibility with the electorate.

Opposition to Proposition 63
In mid-August, “Californians United Against Proposition 63” launched their
campaign, almost a month and a half after the measure qualified for the ballot. An
ACLU leader quickly conceded that the opposition should have probably begun
organizing soon after the passage of Proposition 38; U.S. English had a 15 month
head start in framing its issue within public debate, raising funds, and constituting an
audience for the measure through the signature gathering process and direct mail
appeals.
72

A coalition of unions, civil rights, and advocacy organizations led the
opposition, including the ACLU, the California Teachers Association, the Service
Employees Union, the Mexican American Political Association, the Japanese

71
“U.S. English’s Links to Anti-Immigration Groups.” Asian Week, Aug 15, 1986.
72
English Only Foes Get Some Legislative Help,” Los Angeles Times

332
American Citizens League, and others. Support from prominent African American
organizations was less forthcoming; the NAACP, faithful opponents of all of the
earlier anti-civil rights ballot initiatives addressed in this study, did not formally join
the coalition, perhaps still frustrated by the lack of support it received in the school
desegregation struggles a few years earlier. The anti-63 campaign raised only
$120,000 (compared to approximately $800,000 by the measure’s proponents)
securing minor donations from groups such as the Bank of Canton, the Chinese
Chamber of Commerce, and Phillip Morris, which had been the target of earlier
criticism by U.S. English for its Spanish language advertising.
73

With no funds for television or radio advertising and only a limited budget
for voter mailings and other printed materials, the opposition focused on securing
endorsements and disseminating information to its members. It developed and
distributed a hefty information kit filled with a detailed analysis of the measure’s
faults and offered a wide range of factual evidence to contradict the proponents’
arguments. Like the opponents of Proposition 14 in 1964 and the anti-busing
initiatives of the 1970s, the anti-Proposition 63 coalition won the battle over official
endorsements. Only a handful of groups and elected officials, including the
California Republican Party, the American Legion, and Senator Pete Wilson,
endorsed the measure. Even several members of U.S. English’s Advisory Board—
high profile figures whom the organization listed on its letter head and in most of its
official communications—withdrew their support for the organization because of

73
Campaign Filing Statements, Proposition 63, California State Archives, Sacramento.

333
Proposition 63. Norman Cousins, the former editor of the Saturday Review, resigned
from his position during the campaign, stating that while he was sympathetic to the
"original concern of the sponsors" of Proposition 63, he feared “a momentum may
have been created that is carrying us in an unwise and unhealthy direction" because
of the “negative symbolic significance” of the measure. Others listed as Advisory
Board members, including newsman Walter Cronkite and authors Gore Vidal and
Saul Bellow, claimed they were either unaware of the measure or opposed it.
74

By contrast, many of the state’s most recognizable opinion leaders came out
strongly against the measure. Republican Governor George Deukmejian issued a
statement calling Proposition 63 an “unnecessary, confusing and counterproductive
way to emphasize the importance of a common language,” that would “cause fear,
confusion and resentment among many minority Californians, who see the measure
as an effort to legislate the cultural superiority of native English-speaking people.”
75

The ballot arguments against Proposition 63 were signed by Attorney General John
Van de Kamp, San Francisco Mayor Diane Feinstein, Assembly Speaker Willie
Brown, and Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates. Most of the state’s leading
dailies, including the San Diego Tribune, Stockton Register, San Francisco
Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times editorialized against the initiative.
76
The
Sacramento Bee, which had endorsed Proposition 38, called the Official English

74
“Norman Cousins Drops His Support of Prop. 63.” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 16, 1986, pg. 3.
75
Memo from Gov Deukmejian in opposition to Proposition 63, September 2, 1986, in Box 161,
Folder 4: “Prop 63 (1 of 3),” NCLR.
76
Tatalovich, Nativism Reborn? The Official English Language Movement and the American States.
116.

334
measure “unnecessary and therefore gratuitously insulting to the millions of
Californians who come from other nations and have totally committed themselves to
this country.”
77

The campaign against Proposition 63 developed three main arguments. First,
it sought to challenge the claim that recent immigrants were reluctant to learn
English or to participate in the “mainstream” of California society. Hayakawa had
argued that Proposition 63 would “protect California against Hispanic leaders who
say America must become a bilingual nation” while Hill testified at a legislative
hearing that groups like LULAC, MAPA, and MALDEF sought to keep Latino
immigrants in "a language ghetto, a language barrio, where they're out of touch with
the common language of this country."
78
To discredit such charges, opponents
suggested an alternative account, one of hard working immigrants anxious to
“contribute to and enter the mainstream of American life.” The anti-63 ballot
argument asserted that “the overwhelming majority of immigrants want to learn
English… a recent study shows that 98% of Latin [sic] parents say it is essential for
their children to read and write English well. Asians, Latinos and other recent
immigrants fill long waiting lists for English courses at community colleges and
adult schools.” It was legislation such as Proposition 63, opponents charged, that
would “discourage rather than encourage the assimilation of new citizens” thus
“preventing them from becoming better, more involved citizens while making the

77
Sacramento Bee, Sep 10 1986.
78
“Prop 63 Backer Will Try to Defeat Opposing Candidates.” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 1, 1986.
“California Elections English-Only Proposition Kindles Minorities' Fears,” Los Angeles Times , Oct.
12, 1986; pg. 1.

335
transition into American society.” Opponents frequently cited a RAND study which
reported that 90 percent of first-generation Mexican Americans born in the U.S. were
proficient in English and that by the second generation the majority spoke English
only. They also pointed to the tens of thousands of people on waiting lists for spaces
in English as a Second Language classes (ESL) across the state.
79

While celebrating the civic commitment and determination of recent
immigrants, Proposition 63’s opponents also largely conceded that new immigrants
might well pose a problem to other Californians. The anti-63 ballot argument quoted
from a resolution passed by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors against
the measure which stated:
In many areas ... non-English-speaking persons have sometimes represented
a problem for schoolteachers, service providers, law enforcement officers,
who are unable to understand them. The problem will be solved over time as
newcomers learn English. It has happened many times before in our history.
In the meanwhile ... common sense ... good will, sensitivity, and humor will
help us through this challenging period.

The second main argument made by Proposition 63 opponents was that the
measure violated American traditions of fair play, tolerance, and respect for
difference. An anti-63 flyer charged that “[b]y legally sanctioning the punishment of
those with limited language ability, Proposition 63 breeds intolerance and bigotry.”

79
In 1986, the Los Angeles School District turned away 40,000 people from its ESL programs.
“Immigrants a Rush to the Classrooms” Los Angeles Times, Sep 24, 1986. In addition, such programs
were also vastly underfunded. A nonpartisan legislative analyst reported that of the $200 million
appropriated to adult education programs in 1986, only $500,000 or .0025 percent was allocated to
ESL programs; only three percent of the state’s $3.2 special education billion budget was earmarked
for Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students. (“Analysis of Proposition 63…Summary of Key
Provisions” Ballot ’86, summary prepared by Senate Office of Research. Nd, Box 161, Folder 4: Prop
63 (1 of 3), NCLR.

336
The cover of one of the pamphlets published by the campaign read “America! Where
people come from all over the world seeking freedom…” and included an image of
the Statue of Liberty.
80
Another publication labeled the measure an “Un-American
idea” that threatened to “tarnish California’s proud history of tolerance and
diversity.” The ballot argument similarly contrasted the recent centennial anniversary
of the Statue of Liberty—“that glorious 4th of July brought all Americans
together”—against Proposition 63’s intention to “divide us and tarnish our proud
heritage of tolerance and diversity.” Thus, according to Irvin R. Lai, national
president of the Chinese-American Citizens Alliance, Proposition 63’s proponents
were “anti-minority, anti-immigration and anti-foreign language."
81

Finally, the campaign against Proposition 63 raised the possibility of a series
of catastrophic incidents that could occur if the measure were fully implemented.
Opponents warned of the elimination of “multilingual police, fire, and emergency
services such as 911 telephone operators” that could compromise “the lives and
safety of potential victims.” Non-English-speaking parents would be deprived of
information about enrolling their children in school; the measure could even ban
“foreign street signs and the teaching of languages in public schools.”
It would be folly to suggest that a different set of ballot arguments or
messages would have reversed the outcome of the election. Not only did the
measure’s proponents have an enormous advantage in terms of resources and
preparation, the very framing of an “Official English” ballot question left little

80
Mailer in Box 161, Folder 5, NCLR
81
“English-Only Foes Get Some Legislative Help.” Los Angeles Times, Aug 14, 1986; pg. 3.

337
ground for dissent. In the brief period of time most voters dedicate to deliberating
any particular ballot initiative, explaining Proposition 63’s harmful consequences
was almost impossible. The measure’s ambiguity was its strength. It effectively
invoked the spectacle of a problem—a menacing, racially marked other bent on
fracturing the unity of the populace—while reciting familiar pluralist shibboleths.
Though the measure’s overwhelming success on election day suggests its
passage were inevitable, the opposition’s arguments and strategy are critical to
examine. Several points are important here. First, the campaign’s late start and
limited base of grassroots support registered an important restriction in the reach and
capacity of civil rights organizations during this period. Consider that U.S. English
spent years in the early 1980s contemplating, testing, and refining approaches to
shaping the public debate over language policy and (by implication) immigration.
They effectively constituted an audience for their arguments, and adopted a long-
term strategy to influence public perceptions. Their opponents, by contrast, could
only make reactive, eleventh hour challenges to these claims. The legal advocacy
and policy organizations that led much of the resistance to Proposition 63 had little
experience or capacity in communicating directly to the electorate; their strengths
and talents lay elsewhere.
Second, we should consider how the opponents of Proposition 63 echoed
many of the claims of the measure’s proponents. The narratives animating both
campaigns were remarkably similar. Both celebrated the nation’s traditions of
diversity and inclusion in the most exceptionalist terms. Because questions of power

338
and structure were rendered unintelligible in such accounts, language policy debates
become depoliticized, disembodied from any relations of hierarchy or authority. The
anti-63 campaign valorized the same representation of the “good immigrant”
committed to rapid assimilation, patriotism, and national belonging–the iconic
supercitizen--while begging “good will, sensitivity, and humor” for those struggling
with this charge. Yet as Honig reminds us, this celebrated figure always summons
and even requires it’s opposite—the “bad immigrant” who takes, rather than gives,
and must be excluded from the body politic.
Finally, in raising the specters of extremism and catastrophe, the anti-63
campaign actually provided a reliable foil against which the measure’s proponents
could define their own innocence. That is, every time the initiative’s opponents
accused the measure’s sponsors of ethnocentrism or intolerance—invoking the figure
of the narrow-minded bigot incapable of accepting difference—it gave proponents an
opportunity to assert their own pluralist commitments and values. It was not all
immigrants they opposed—only those whose behavior threatened the polity. These
immigrants, in fact, did not have rights that could be violated; they had forfeited such
rights by refusing to assume the proper values and conduct. In largely ceding this
point, opponents’ charges of racism seemed unfounded. Racism—as defined in this
discourse—involves the denial of recognition or power based on ascriptive
characteristics--ethnicity, race, nationality and so forth. Here, because it was
(allegedly) behavior or conduct, rather than such ascriptive characteristics, which
served as the basis of exclusion, racism could not be charged.

339
The logic in crafting such arguments in order to defeat the measure was clear.
If the white electorate could be convinced of the benign, even positive intentions and
aspirations of most immigrants, their antipathies might not be aroused. But by
accepting and even endorsing the proposition that some immigrants might be less
than worthy of the benefits of citizenship and political recognition, they did little to
contest the larger purpose of this project--to naturalize and nourish an articulation
between language, “nationality,” race, and political power. That is, in extolling the
exemplary citizenship practices of immigrants—hard working, tax-paying, law
abiding subjects who simply want to purse the American Dream—English Only
proponents implicitly acknowledged both the presence and the threat of those
newcomers who did not seem to fulfill these expectations. Here, the xenophobia
targeting the “bad immigrant” requires a xenophilic celebration of the idealized
immigrant subject.

The Proposition 63 Election and its Aftermath

Voter awareness of Proposition 63 was extremely high; by early September,
more than 90 percent of respondents to one poll had heard of the measure, and more
than two-thirds stated they intended to vote yes.
82
Indeed the measure ultimately
passed by 73 percent statewide, and in all 58 counties. The California Poll suggested
that support for the measure tended to be higher among conservatives, Republicans,
and white voters, though it was also backed among Democrats and the small samples

82
“Voters back ‘English-only’ proposition.” San Francisco Examiner, September 12, 1986; pg. A22.

340
of Black and Asian voters polled. It even passed in heavily Democratic cities such as
San Francisco (53 percent yes), Oakland (51 percent yes), and Santa Monica (58
percent yes).
83
Only among Latinos (who according to one estimate voted against the
measure by a 60 to 40 margin) and moderate to strong liberals was the measure
rejected.
84

Immediately after the election, U.S. English leaders went on the offensive.
Diamond told the Oakland Tribune, “I believe that we tapped into deep, deep
feelings of resentment that voters have against immigrants who they perceive as
being unwilling to learn English.”
85
Assemblyman Hill declared he would sponsor
legislation to curtail bilingual education programs as well as multilingual welfare
services and driver’s license tests.
86
J. William Orozco, a Southern California
spokesman for the campaign, called for the elimination of school notices sent home
in languages other than English, adding “if you continue to put crutches under
people, they're never going to learn English."
87
U.S. English soon announced the
creation of a “Center for the Implementation of Proposition 63” to coordinate
potential legal actions and other activities aimed at implementing the measure.
88

Jessica Fiske, director of the ACLU of Southern California declared that she was

83
California Secretary of State. Supplement to the Statement of the Vote, November 4, 1986.
84
Dyste, "Proposition 63: The California English Language Amendment," 327.California Poll,
November 1986 (N=1034), reprinted in Citrin et al., "The "Official English" Movement and the
Symbolic Politics of Language in the United States," 549, 550. California voters faced 12 other
initiatives (including bond measure) on the November 1986 ballot. Notably, they rejected both Gann’s
attempt to limit public employees’ pay and benefits by a wide margin (Proposition 61), as well as a
Lyndon LaRouche-sponsored initiative to add AIDS to the list of communicable diseases (Proposition
64); an environmental protection measure, Proposition 65, did pass.
85
Oakland Tribune Nov. 7, 1986; A4.
86
San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 6, 1986; pg 9.
87
Quoted in Crawford, Hold your Tongue: Bilingualism and the politics of English Only. 20.
88
“Update” Volume V, No 1 Jan-Feb 1987 Box 161, Folder 3, NCLR.

341
“expecting an avalanche” of litigation and other actions.
89

In early 1987, Diamond filed a complaint under Proposition 63’s enforcement
provisions, which allowed individuals the right to sue the state to enforce the
legislation. Diamond sought to compel San Francisco and two other municipalities to
stop providing multilingual election materials, claiming such materials violated the
initiative. Attorney General John Van de Kamp issued a nonbinding determination
that he interpreted the law as only requiring voting materials to be made available in
English, rather than prohibiting such materials from being available in languages
other than English. The Legislature, for its part, also refused to enact any of the bills
proposed by Hill and others to specifically ban particular multilingual materials or
programs.
90

Diamond was furious and promised an overwhelming backlash. He
excoriated lawmakers for seeking to:
…cripple, gut, and emasculate the Amendment that was the Will of THE
PEOPLE…They are out to make Proposition 63 meaningless even though the
Amendment won by large majorities in all their districts. Do they care about
you the voter? Hell no… THE PEOPLE are stirring, blood pressures are
moving up. There is a whisper out there on the way to a relentless,
irreversible roar. Can you get away with this one? It’s HELL, HELL, no.
91

Diamond soon promised a $200,000 fundraising drive to support lawsuits
against school districts or local government entities in Los Angeles, San Francisco,

89
“ Assemblyman Vows to Carry the Ball for English-Only Action.” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 6,
1986; pg. 3.
90
The Legislature also declined to act on a proposal by Assemblyman Elihu Harris of Oakland that
would have severely limited the standing to sue provided for by the initiative. Elisabeth Gerber et al.,
Stealing the Initiative: How State Government Responds to Direct Democracy (Upper Saddle River,
NJ, 2001). 35-37.
91
Crawford, Hold your Tongue: Bilingualism and the politics of English Only. 21.

342
Alameda County and San Diego.
92
His threats echoed Frank Hill’s earlier promise
that if lawmakers refused to implement the measure, the California English
Campaign would return to “its network of 60,000 volunteers, put it on the ballot and
pass it over the heads of the Legislature."
93

Yet contrary to these promises, over the next five years, only six lawsuits (all
by private individuals) were filed under the enforcement provisions of the measure;
five dealt with English Only rules in the workplace.
94
No significant individual or
collective challenges emerged to force implementation of the measure. Part of this
inaction stemmed from the tactical interests of U.S. English in other states.
Aggressive litigation or enforcement of Proposition 63 might have compromised the
prospects of English Only ballot initiatives and legislation the group was backing in
other states, including Florida, Colorado, and Arizona. Indeed, by mid-1987, leaders
such as Hayakawa seemed content with realizing the symbolic intentions of the
ballot measure without ending any particular programs.
95

But even if U.S. English decided against bringing such actions, why did the
“relentless, irreversible roar” promised by Diamond fail to materialize? After all, the
initiative provided any individual or citizen’s group the standing to sue in state court

92
“Proposition 63: Much Talk, Few Effects.” Education Week, June 17, 1987.
93
“ Assemblyman Vows to Carry the Ball for English-Only Action.” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 6,
1986; pg. 3.
94
“Fighting Words: California's Official-Language Law Promises to Preserve and Protect English.
The Question Is, Can the State Preserve and Protect Its Citizens' Civil Rights at the Same Time?” Los
Angeles Times, Jun 10, 1990; pg. 10.
95
Hayakawa always seemed less intent on eviscerating specific programs than Diamond, Hill and
others. He commented before the election: “My colleagues in U.S. English and the California English
campaign are much more doctrinaire than I am…They are asking for much more in the way of
results." “California Elections English-Only Proposition Kindles Minorities' Fears.” Los Angeles
Times, Oct 12, 1986.

343
if they felt a state or local agency was violating the initiative. And there was no
shortage of programs in California that employed and provided multilingual
materials and services: About one in eight of California’s four million public school
students were enrolled in bilingual education programs and the state government had
established at least 3,300 positions for bilingual workers to assist members of the
public in accessing motor vehicle, unemployment and other services.
96
Given the
overwhelming passage of the measure, why did no effort emerge to challenge such
programs?
Here, we must be cautious in interpreting the widespread endorsement of
Proposition 63 in singular or unequivocal terms. Most polls conducted on English
Only measures suggest a more complicated perspective. On the one hand, in nearly
every poll conducted, respondents endorsed the concept of declaring English the
official language (in fact, large majorities assumed that it already was) and agreed
with statements that speaking and writing in English was important in “making
someone a true American” and that “if you live in the U.S. you should be able to
speak English.”
97

On the other hand, contrary to the interpretation offered not only by Hill and
Diamond, but often by their opponents, support for measures such as Proposition 63
did not express a monolithic stance against multilingualism or immigrants not fluent

96
Mandates to hire multilingual state employees stemmed from a 1973 law stipulating that when five
percent or more of the clientele seeking state services do not speak English, the state was required to
hire appropriate bilingual staff. “California Braces for Change with English as Official Language.”
NYT, Nov. 26, 1986; pg A20.
97
Dyste, "Proposition 63: The California English Language Amendment," 325.

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in English. In a 1988 California Poll, only 18 percent of Anglo respondents stated
they were “very worried” that the growth of Latino and Asian communities would
threaten the “American way of life.”
98
A survey conducted by a UCLA graduate
student found that respondents offered wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory
understandings of the legislation. Only a small percentage of respondents to the
California Poll found that support for the measure stemmed from an instrumental
concern such as reducing the costs imposed by providing multilingual services and
materials.
99
Other state and national polls consistently evidenced support for non-
English speaking immigrants to maintain their “native” language and customs. As
political scientist Jack Citrin and colleagues concluded, “public opinion data suggest
that attitudes towards immigrants are ambivalent.” The success of Proposition 63 and
other Official English measures, they argued, reflected the way groups such as U.S.
English “won the battle over how to define the symbolic meaning of language
policy” by “infusing this stance with patriotic overtones” and nationalist
affirmations.
100
The decision not to enforce Proposition 63 did not trigger a popular
backlash because voters did not share or express a singular consensus on the
initiative’s meaning, purpose or intentions.
Yet as a statement of ideological commitment and consensus, the measure
largely rendered such ambivalences imperceptible. The ballot measure instead

98
Cited in Citrin et al., "The "Official English" Movement and the Symbolic Politics of Language in
the United States," 549.
99
Dyste, "Proposition 63: The California English Language Amendment," 323, 325.
100
Citrin et al., "The "Official English" Movement and the Symbolic Politics of Language in the
United States," 549, 550.

345
suggested—even performed—the conclusion that a vast majority of the electorate
stood unwaveringly opposed to a multilingual society. As important, its widespread
passage reinforced the proponents’ claims that Proposition 63 had “nothing to do
with race.” As one pollster concluded, “I don’t think anybody is prepared to say in
excess of 70 percent of the voters in California are racist.”
101

These two seemingly paradoxical conclusions—that the electorate was
strongly and perhaps unalterably hostile towards multilingualism (and by extension
towards many immigrants) and that this hostility was “racially innocent”—
increasingly became treated as unassailable within statewide political culture. This
effect would soon embolden other political actors to launch more aggressive,
populist assaults targeting the so-called “bad immigrants” and their elite protectors.
In addition, the initiatives helped persuade their opponents that making anti-racist
claims before the electorate was self-defeating; they concluded that the majority of
voters viewed most immigrants with suspicion and antagonism, and it was futile to
counter this innate hostility. As the ACLU’s Jessica Fiske commented, the
Proposition 63 outcome had “an undertone of fear--people have looked at the
changing demographics and they have voted . . . out of a sense of panic.
102

101
“Voters back ‘English-only’ proposition.” San Francisco Examiner, Sep 12, 1986; pg. A22.
102
“ Assemblyman Vows to Carry the Ball for English-Only Action.” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 6,
1986; pg. 3.

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The Rise and Fall of U.S. English
For the first two years after the Proposition 63 triumph, U.S. English
continued its rapid ascent. In 1987 alone, 37 state legislatures deliberated Official
English measures, primarily at the behest of U.S. English. Five states--Arkansas,
Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, and South Carolina--adopted the
legislation. The following November, the organization replicated the California
initiative campaign with equal success in Arizona, Colorado, and Florida; sixteen
states now had official English policies. In addition, the organization hired as
president Linda Chavez, who won acclaim in conservative circles for her opposition
to affirmative as a Reagan-appointed director of the Commission on Civil Rights.
While Chavez had few admirers among other Latinos, she helped burnish U.S.
English’s image as an inclusive organization free of racial enmity. “Hispanics who
learn English will be able to avail themselves to opportunities,” she wrote in a U.S.
English newsletter. “Those who do not will be relegated to second class-citizenship.
I don’t want to see that happen to my people.”
103

But a month before the November 1988 election, the Arizona Republic
printed portions of a confidential memo written by Tanton two years earlier. The
memo, prepared for a close-knit group of Tanton’s colleagues from FAIR, U.S.
English, and allied organizations contemplated a series of hypothetical and largely
apocalyptic scenarios that might result if immigration from Mexico and Latin
America continued unabated. He warned of “ill-educated people” who would bring

103
Quoted in Crawford, "What's Behind Official English?," 172.

347
“the tradition of the mordida (bribe)” and a corrupt Catholicism into U.S. politics.
Tanton asked: “Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a
group that is simply more fertile?... As Whites see their power and control over their
lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? …[P]erhaps this is the first
instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with
their pants down!”
104

A torrent of negative publicity unfolded after the memo’s disclosure. Chavez
quickly resigned in protest, and Tanton soon quit his own position as board chair.
The scandal also focused new attention on U.S. English’s financial sponsors.
Proposition 63 opponents had attempted to challenge the large amounts of cash
proponents received from a variety of Michigan-based funding sources. All of this
funding, it turned out, was connected to a single corporate entity, “U.S. Inc.,” used
by Tanton to channel money from several ultra conservative foundations and donors,
including the secretive Pioneer Fund, a long-time supporter of Eugenicist and other
“race betterment” projects. A subsequent series of investigative articles published by
James Crawford revealed several figures with connections to white supremacist and
neo-Nazi formations within Tanton’s circles. Tanton steadfastly maintained his own

104
Memo to WITAN IV Attendees from John Tanton, October 10, 1986. In the memo, Tanton recites
a number of crude assertions and rhetorical questions—“ What are the differences in educability
between Hispanics (with their 50% dropout rate) and Asiatics (with their excellent school records and
long tradition of scholarship)?” and “In agriculture, the Whites and Asiatics will own and manage, but
will not be able to speak to the Hispanic field workers. They will need bilingual foremen. Does this
sound like social peace?...Keep in mind the poor educational level of the field hands. Yet he
concludes the memo with a surprising and revealing self-identification. Just as only Nixon could go to
China, “the issues we’re touching on here must be broached by liberals. The conservatives simply
cannot do it without tainting the whole subject.” Tanton fully identified as a “liberal.” A copy of the
memo is available at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, Summer 2002, at
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?sid=125. Accessed February 1, 2007.

348
“racial innocence,” declaring in a letter to supporters: “No, I am not a racist. I want
to bring all members of the American family together to share in our Thanksgiving
feast—but I want us to be able to speak to each other when we’re gathered around
the table. Make no mistake, my desire for national unity is my real sin.”
105

Conclusion
How do we best evaluate Tanton’s use of the California initiative process as a
“political laboratory” for his vision of “national unity?” As policy measures, the
initiatives carried no weight. Today, the state and many local governments conduct a
wide range of business in multiple languages, including the publication of multiracial
ballots, with little objection from the public. Moreover, the “Official English”
movement has no significant presence in state politics; its agenda seems quite
removed from the immediate concerns of most Californians.
106

105
Crawford, Hold your Tongue: Bilingualism and the politics of English Only. 162. Tanton
continued to be centrally involved in debates over immigration and language after resigning from U.S.
English. See the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “The Puppeteer,” Issue 106, Summer 2002.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/intrep.jsp?iid=7. Accessed February 23, 2007. U.S. English
remained roiled in a series of internal controversies after the Tanton incident—including disclosures
by Stanley Diamond about widespread financial improprieties within its California activities—yet still
managed to sustain its successful direct mail fundraising activities, and to a lesser extent, its
Washington D.C. lobbying activities. While only one other Official English state amendment has been
adopted since the Tanton scandal erupted (in Alabama in 1990, with minimal involvement of U.S.
English), the organization continues to lobby for national and state-level English Only policies, and in
2007 claimed more than 1.8 million members. While Tanton has no association with the organization,
the group’s Advisory Board includes figures such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and golfing legend
Arnold Palmer. http://www.us-english.org/inc/default.asp . Accessed March 7, 2007. On Tanton’s
political identifications, see also Christopher Hayes, "Keeping America Empty: How one small-town
conservationist launched today's anti-immigration movement," In These Times, April 24 2006.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2608/. Accessed March 31, 2007.
106
Though it is important to note that as of 2005, 23 of the 28 states that have Official English
policies on their books adopted the legislation since 1980 and efforts to aggressively enforce the
legislation, while rare in California, continue to occur in other states. Schildkraut, Press One for
English: Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American Identity. 1-3, 15. More recently, former

349
Yet the debates inaugurated by Propositions 38 and 63 are still worthy of our
attention. These initiatives did not simply give voice to a pre-existing, fully formed
nativist identity which was unleashed by a large wave of newcomers. Instead, the
debates reveal the ways a set of political actors attempted to shape contradictory,
often ambivalent ideas about immigration and language in service of their own
deeply hierarchical social vision. As James Crawford observed, “language
restrictionism was a way to organize inchoate resentments about the new
diversity.”
107
My argument here is not the initiatives were “not racist” or even “less
racist” than nativist projects of the past. Racism--the “fatal coupling” of power and
difference--operates in both the openly xenophobic political movements of
generations past and the putatively benign “Official English” efforts examined
here.
108

U.S. English leaders did not play a formal role in the passage of Proposition
187 in 1994 or Proposition 227 in 1998, though one of the drafters of Proposition
187, Alan Nelson, was a lobbyist for FAIR (which still counted Tanton as a board
member) and FAIR ran television advertisements in favor of the measure in the
weeks before the election.
109
Ron Unz, the proponent of Proposition 227, took great
pains to distance his anti-bilingual education measure from organizations such as
FAIR or U.S. English, finding their shrill politics at odds with the tones of inclusion

Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich has called for an end to multilingual ballots nationally and
an end to bilingual education, policies he attempted to advance unsuccessfully as Speaker of the
House in the mid-1990s. “Gingrich Decries Bilingual Ballots.” Associated Press. March 31, 2007.
107
Crawford, At War With Diversity: US Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety. 115.
108
Gilmore, "Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography."
109
“Proposition 187 Measure's Foes Try to Shift Focus From Walkouts to Issues.” Los Angeles
Times, Nov 4, 1994; pg. 3.

350
and empowerment he sought to strike with his “English for the Children” measure.
110

For Unz, recipients of grants from the far right Pioneer Fund could do little to rebuild
the reputation of the Republican Party, which endured considerable criticism for its
support of Proposition 187.
111

But the connections between the English Only initiatives of the 1980s and the
immigrant benefits and bilingual education initiatives of the 1990s are critical. At a
time when no clear public consensus existed over the role and meaning of the many
newcomers arriving to California during this time, the measures helped to stage a
public debate over the obligations of citizenship and grounds on which exclusion
from particular rights and recognition might be made acceptable, forging and
articulating the terms of a “public consensus” amidst deeply ambivalent and
contradictory currents of opinion.
The “good immigrant/bad immigrant” distinctions which the English Only
measures both proposed and renewed operated similarly in Propositions 187 and
227. Proposition 187’s proponents built their effort to restrict public benefits and
education almost entirely on the figure of the “bad immigrant,” warning that “the
ILLEGAL ALIEN invasion” was thrusting the state into “economic and social
bankruptcy.” The distinctions were rendered clearly in an infamous television ad run
by the Pete Wilson campaign in support of the measure. The ad began with grainy
footage of shadowy figures scaling a large fence as a voiceover intoned: “They keep
coming and coming…” The ad then cut to images of a citizenship swearing-in

110
Crawford, At War With Diversity: US Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety. 104-127.
111
Unz, "California and the End of White America."

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ceremony, depicting proud newcomers pledging their allegiance to their new nation.
The assertion was not only that there is “a wrong way and a right” way to enter the
country, but that those who choose the “wrong way” were beyond the pale of social
or political recognition.
112
While Unz opposed Proposition 187 and framed his
Proposition 227 as an enlightened vehicle of immigrant empowerment--arguing that
“Latino immigrant children are the principal victims of bilingual education”—his
measure operated in the same register. For Unz, English language immersion
provided the means by which immigrant students (and their parents) could be
prepared for economic, social and political citizenship and liberated from the self-
serving ethnic bureaucrats who defended bilingual education programs to maintain
their own authority. That is, bilingual education was tarnished as the province of the
“bad immigrant”--who remained isolated and thus unfit for true citizenship--and the
“good immigrant” who could be redeemed through English language immersion.
Like the opponents of the English Only measures, the groups which attempted to
defeat Proposition 187 and 227 could do little more than articulate these same terms
and distinctions towards different policy goals.
Thus, while the English Only measures of the 1980s had no impact on public
policy, the debates they unleashed rehearsed the terms of future conflicts over
immigration and race in the 1990s. These measures are best understood as a
process—a kind of crucible—in which contending political forces attempt to

112
On the Wilson ad and imagery and narratives within the Proposition 187 debate, see Kent Ono and
John Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia,
2002), Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public
Discourse (Austin, TX, 2002).

352
naturalize and establish a particular relationship between race, identity and power.

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CONCLUSION:
BLUE STATE RACISM

Ten months after California voters approved Proposition 209, the November
1996 ballot initiative banning public affirmative action programs, Reverend Jesse
Jackson led a march of several thousand protestors across the Golden Gate Bridge.
Coinciding with the first day the law was to be implemented, the “March to Save the
Dream" sought not only to denounce the far-reaching measure, but to rally and
bolster civil rights activists reeling from a string of electoral defeats. Almost three
years earlier, voters overwhelmingly endorsed ballot propositions to eliminate public
education and most services to many undocumented immigrants, and to institute
draconian “Three Strikes” criminal sentencing laws. Looming on the horizon was
another ballot measure to prohibit bilingual education in California public schools.
Much of the crowd’s ire was directed towards Governor Pete Wilson and
University of California Regent Ward Connerly, the African American businessman
and Wilson ally who nominally led the Proposition 209 campaign. Their use of the
rhetoric and imagery associated with Martin Luther King Jr.—the ballot measure
was dubbed the “California Civil Rights Initiative”--infuriated their opponents.
Jackson told the crowd: "Those who did not march with [King], who did not support
him, cannot be the interpreters of the dream. I can interpret the dream. I marched
with him. I walked with him and talked with him."
1

Jackson’s charge echoed not only a common sentiment among many of the

1
“Thousands Rally Against 209” San Francisco Chronicle, August 29, 1997.

354
activists who labored to defeat these ballot propositions, but also pointed to
something of an unfulfilled desire. If the opponents of civil rights would simply end
their ideological charade and reveal their true racists intentions, none of these bitter
debates would have erupted. The regularly sounded refrain that Connerly, Wilson
and others appropriated the language of the civil rights movement speaks to a
particular understanding of the proprietary character of social ideas. From this
perspective, the ideals of civil rights—“empowerment,” “opportunity,” “justice” and
“equality”--belong to Jackson and his supporters in a way they do not belong to
Connerly and Wilson.
But as Nicos Poulantzas has noted, ideological commitments are not
“number-plates” worn on the back of particular groups or classes as they struggle on
the battlefield of politics—the “racists” expressing one ideology and the “anti-
racists” another.
2
Hegemonic ideological formations are never so static and singular.
As Raymond Williams argues, they are hegemonic precisely because they can adapt
to new political conditions, ideas and movements, constantly renovating and
renewing their own logics and propositions. Moreover, these frameworks “produce
and limit” their own opposition, constantly “neutralizing, changing or actually
incorporating” the way such opposition is practiced.
3

In this study, I have tracked the development of a particular ideological
formation—what I describe as the “colorblind consensus”—which constructs “race”
as an attribute or characteristic embodied in the individual and defines “racism” as an

2
Nicos Poulantzas, "Marxist Political Theory in Britain," New Left Review (1967): 67.
3
Williams, Marxism and Literature. 114.

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illogical belief, judgment or bias based on such characteristics. Race exists here as a
force of nature; political debate, therefore, can only focus on when and how race can
rightfully be recognized, and to what ends.
I have explored the development of this formation through three categories of
analysis: Ideology, Politics, and Identification. Ballot initiatives, I have suggested,
are a generative site in which to analyze the relationships between these categories,
as they cast in sharp relief the way organized political actors construct specific
ideological narratives in service of their own political vision, constituting or
reshaping various forms of political community in the process. Many of the leading
civil rights and racial justice issues of the postwar era—employment discrimination,
fair housing, school desegregation, and language rights—have been deliberated
through such ballot propositions.
This history should cast new light on the eruption of racialized ballot
initiatives in the 1990s. The use of “civil rights” language and symbols to attack
affirmative action in the mid-1990s continued a long-standing pattern in postwar
California political culture. For example, immediately at the end of World War II,
business leaders deftly deployed the emergent “liberal” language of “tolerance” and
“unity” in their campaign to defeat the Fair Employment Practices (FEP) ballot
initiative. Eschewing the more explicit defenses of racial hierarchy that had been in
plain view within California political discourse prior to the war, the anti-FEP effort
called itself the “Committee for Tolerance” and claimed that the proposed anti-
discrimination initiative would set back the cause of “harmonious relations.” Their

356
campaign demonstrated that the language and framework of anti-racism was far
more pliable than its liberal proponents had hoped or anticipated. The foes of anti-
discrimination laws could also claim to be “racially innocent”—declaring that their
hearts and minds had been purged of bigotry and intolerance, and that any bore no
responsibility for prevailing inequalities.
This pattern continued in 1964, when the California Real Estate Association
(CREA) built its campaign for a ballot initiative to exempt the housing industry from
nearly all anti-discrimination legislation around a defense of “property rights.” Alert
to the growing resonance of the principles of equal protection and “fairness,” the
realtors renounced their long-standing support for official policies of discrimination.
Like the employers fighting the FEP initiative, the CREA’s putatively “race neutral”
language was in fact deeply racialized—rooted in the assumption that white property
owners both possessed a “right” to discriminate by race and that such a right was
foundational to their standing and authority.
The ballot initiatives against school desegregation in 1972 and 1979
examined in Chapter 4 demonstrated the further transformation of political strategies
of civil rights opponents in response to new conditions. The 1972 measure,
championed by a conservative Republican lawmaker from a white working class
suburb, was adopted by the electorate but eventually overturned by the courts as a
violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Proponents of the 1979 measure, by
contrast, not only incorporated new legal principles and claims to safeguard the
proposition from legal challenges, they actively sought out the support of Mexican

357
American and African American activists dissatisfied with the direction of prevailing
desegregation remedies. Their initiative both withstood judicial review and lent
enormous credibility to the position that opposition to mandatory school
desegregation had “nothing to do with race.” Likewise, proponents of two “English
Only” initiatives in the mid-1980s utilized arguments about immigrant empowerment
and incorporation. The distinctions they crafted between “good immigrants” who had
proved themselves worthy of inclusion and “bad immigrants” who were beyond the
pale of redemption were critical and helped shape the high profile debates which
erupted in the 1990s over immigration.
In each of these campaigns, organized forces opposed to particular civil
rights policies not only developed new language and frameworks in response to the
changing political terrain, they also made effective use of their resources to
constitute an audience for their claims. Business leaders fighting fair employment
legislation used direct mail and their relationships with the state’s leading
newspapers to advance their campaign. The CREA pressed its vast network of local
realtors into action to qualify and win support for its anti-fair housing ballot
initiative. The opponents of mandatory school desegregation in the late 1970s
util