King’s California dream interrupted and still unfulfilled
Half a century after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, it’s hard to compare the man we celebrate with the one who lived.
Don’t get me wrong: I like the King we celebrate well enough. That King — the fuzzy, feel-good one who had a dream, the one whose image was splashed across a Dodge ad during the Super Bowl — is beatific and beautiful. It’s nice to see him portrayed as someone who experienced far more peace than he actually had in his short life.
But it’s false comfort, especially for Californians. The radical King has far more to teach us. And considering our current, broken state of affairs, I’d argue that more of us need to connect the dots between today and King’s California campaign.
Many Californians don’t even know that King had a California campaign. This goes back to the idea of a “celebrated” King — the one who fought violent injustice among evil, benighted Southern whites and never noticed that the rest of the country was also a hotbed of racism and discrimination.
In fact, King actively fought against all myths and excuses used to justify segregation and inequality, whether it was “law and order” in the Northeast or, in the California of the 1960s, the coded language of “residential property rights.”
In 1963, California passed a fair housing act, known as the Rumford Act, which was intended to eliminate housing discrimination based on race, gender, religious belief or national origin. Many restrictive covenants were specially designed to exclude African American, Asian and Latino residents.
The next year, with the support of conservative groups like the John Birch Society, the California Real Estate Association placed Proposition 14 on the ballot. The association sold the initiative, which repealed the Rumford Act, as a “homeowner rights” issue.
Color me shocked that California had a fair housing problem in the 1960s.
California has spent the decades since the 1960s failing to build housing, failing to the extent that all its major cities are currently experiencing crises in housing and homelessness and displacement. All of these crises disproportionately affect African American residents.
Today, we still hear the language of “homeowner rights,” and it’s still used for exclusionary purposes.
In Marin — currently the most segregated county in California, previously home to whites-only subdivisions — residents and real estate agents block affordable-housing developments by floating pictures of gang members or accusing county officials of having “volunteered us for the ghetto.” (Both incidents took place during a 2013 attempt to turn a failing Marinwood shopping center into affordable-housing units.)
In San Francisco, residents aren’t much more subtle. During a 2016 community meeting in affluent Forest Hill, residents seeking to block an affordablehousing development for seniors talked about “sex offenders,” “drug addictions” and wanting their kids to be able to play outside.
In both of these recent instances, the rights of less-affluent people — which, as King knew, inevitably meant African Americans — to live with dignity were given no recognition and no consideration.
Who could’ve guessed the roots of all this go deep?
Well, anyone who was around in 1964, especially someone like King. By the time he was assassinated in 1968, he was a hated man — one who was demanding economic as well as racial justice, one who insisted on the truth that discrimination, greed and violence are all tied together in a Gordian knot that spans the reach of the entire country.
When he came to the Bay Area in 1964, he didn’t let the Bay Area off the hook.
In a February 1964 speech at Contra Costa College in San Pablo, he called the Rumford Act “a great step forward” and efforts to repeal it “a real tragedy.”
“If democracy is to live, then segregation must die,” King said during the speech, “because segregation relegates persons to the status of things.”
King lost his California campaign, by the way.
Voters here chose housing segregation, and they chose it overwhelmingly: Proposition 14 passed with 65 percent of the vote. San Francisco voted in favor of it; so did Marin County, Contra Costa County, San Mateo County, Alameda County and Santa Clara County.
It took the courts, which secured so many important victories for the civil rights movement, to secure California’s eventual victory for fair housing, too. The California Supreme Court decided Proposition 14 violated the 14th Amendment in 1966. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed.
Housing segregation died in the Bay Area, just so it could live on by other means.
The King we celebrate is conveniently dead, so there’s no way to know what he would’ve thought about our current predicament.
But the radical King? The one who remains living and clear in his letters and his actions, the one whose tough lessons have gone mostly ignored? He would’ve been disappointed in California, but he would not have been surprised.
He also would’ve been fighting us and our terrible, segregating housing policies — every step of the way. Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @caillemillner