A LOOK AT ARIZONA’S CIVIL-RIGHTS HISTORY
State long refused to recognize MLK holiday
Calvin Goode still lives on the property he bought in central Phoenix in 1955, in a small home at Jefferson and 15th streets, steps away from historic Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church.
At the time, it was one of the few neighborhoods where black Arizonans were allowed to buy homes. Now, it’s jutted up against a light-rail line, near a prestigious Great Hearts charter school, on the edge of an upscale apartment housing boom.
After growing up attending segregated schools in Gila Bend and Phoenix in the 1940s, Goode in 1972 became the second black person to serve on the Phoenix City Council. He held the position for 22 years.
“I can’t speak for all people, but I am an African-American and I’m 90 years old — I’ll be 91 this month — and I’ve come through segregation, discrimination, and I still feel we are still not completely living by the American creed of liberty, justice and freedom for all people,” Goode said.
He said he remembered once, when he was a young man, he applied for a job at a Phoenix high school and was denied because the principal did not want him supervising white women.
“I think that we are still discriminated against in parts of our country and denied many things,” Goode said. “Have we made progress? Yes. But not the kind of progress that I think we could make or would make.”
Goode spoke with The Arizona Republic ahead of Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday he was instrumental in getting observed in the city of Phoenix.
In honor of Goode and the holiday he helped create, The Republic looks back on a few of the state’s most historic leaders and moments in civil-rights history.
Arizona has had the most complicated history with Martin Luther King Jr. Day of any state in the country.
Arizona first recognized the national holiday along with the rest of the country in 1986, after President Ronald Reagan declared it so.
But the next year, new Gov. Evan Mecham rescinded it, saying former Gov. Bruce Babbitt had not had the authority to single-handedly declare a paid state holiday.
So began a fight over the holiday that tore at lawmakers, voters and civic leaders for six years.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1988, an estimated 15,000 people gathered in downtown Phoenix for a march to the Arizona State Capitol protesting the state’s refusal to recognize the holiday. It was a rainy, cold, windy day, but so many people attended that the crowd flooded three lanes of traffic.
Years of political fighting over the holiday created a national image of Arizona as a state locked in a racial battle.
Several big-name musicians and national conventions canceled their Arizona events. After two ballot propositions to make the day a state holiday failed, the National Football League relocated the 1993 Super Bowl from Sun Devil Stadium to Pasadena, California.
Finally, voters approved a state King holiday in November 1992, making Arizona the only state that put it to a vote of the people and saw it pass.
The Rev. Warren H. Stewart, a community leader who helped coordinate the effort to get the holiday, told The Republic in 2012 that voter approval meant the majority of Arizonans understood that “this isn’t just about a black man or black people. This is about America. This shows America at our best when it comes to civil rights, how we changed as a result of Martin Luther King Jr.”
In 1909, before Arizona was a state, the territorial Legislature passed a law allowing segregation.
Territorial Gov. Joseph Kibbey vetoed the measure, but that was overturned by lawmakers. Phoenix voted to segregate its own schools the next year.
“When Arizona achieved statehood in 1912, only two laws addressed the question of segregation. One of these laws prevented ‘intermarriage between persons of Caucasian blood and their descendants with Negroes.’ The other law provided for the establishment of segregated elementary schools,” according to a report from Phoenix’s Historic Preservation Office.
Phoenix Union Colored High School was founded in downtown Phoenix in 1926 as a school only for black students. It was renamed George Washington Carver High School in 1943.
For decades, Arizona law also stated that “the marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Ma-
lay or Hindu is null and void.”
A Tucson couple — Henry Oyama, who was Japanese-American, and Mary Ann Jordan, who was white — challenged that law on Dec. 11, 1959.
Less than two weeks later, the Pima County Superior Court struck down the state’s anti-miscegenation law as unconstitutional. The couple married five days later, according to the Arizona Capitol Times.
If it had been appealed, the case could have set legal precedent across Arizona and even in other states. But the Arizona Legislature repealed the law, and the case was dismissed.
Many other states kept bans on interracial marriage until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Loving v. Virginia in 1967.
Millye Carter Bloodworth moved to Arizona in 1975 to start a new life.
“I was directed to buy home on McDowell and 25th Place, and 25th Street was the Phoenix city limits and there was no lights going from 25th Place all the way to Scottsdale,” she said. “I wasn’t accustomed to that because Chicago and Detroit is big city and big lights.”
She recalled the back of the title on her home read, “Do not sell to colored or Mexicans.”
Carter Bloodworth, now 67, said soon after she bought a few other homes on the street and turned them in to Buffalo Haus, one of the first group homes in the state for people with HIV/ AIDS.
She said she and brother Maurice Carter, who was one of the first black drag queens in Arizona, initially found the state’s attitude on equal rights to be behind the times.
“My brother and I being African-American were always the outsiders, but invited in. That way, the person could say, ‘I’m not prejudiced, Ms. Ebony is my friend,’ ” she said. “I’m like ‘Oh, my God, we went through this in the ‘60s. now we have to go through it in the ’80s?’ ”
Her words echoed what civil-rights leader Lincoln Ragsdale said about his time in Phoenix beginning in the late 1940s: “Phoenix was just like Mississippi. People were just as bigoted. They had segregation. They had signs in many places, ‘Mexicans and Negroes not welcome.’ ”
Ragsdale and his wife, Eleanor, founded the Greater Phoenix Council for Civic Unity and in 1952 helped bring a lawsuit challenging the legality of school segregation.
Judge Fred C. Struckmeyer ruled on the case, deciding that “a half-century of intolerance is enough” and that Arizona’s segregation of black students was unconstitutional and illegal.
His decision came in 1953, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court did the same in its Brown v. Board of Education decision.
It is believed that Lincoln Ragsdale is responsible for audio recordings of Martin Luther King Jr.’s first and only appearance in Arizona that were found in a Goodwill store in 2013.
In 1964, just a month before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, King addressed 8,000 people at Arizona State University.
“No section of our country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood,” he said to the crowd. “If this problem is to be solved, there must be a sort of divine discontent.”
Less than two weeks later, Phoenix passed an ordinance outlawing discrimination in public places, according to ASU Now.
To say Arizona trailed the nation in getting its first black mayor is an understatement.
The nation’s first was George D. Carroll of Richmond, California, who won in 1964. By the end of the ’60s, black men had become mayors in cities in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, Kentucky, North Carolina and Mississippi and in Washington, D.C.
Arizona elected its first black mayor in 1990, when Chandler voters elected Coy Payne.
In a 2005 interview with a city historian, Payne recalled growing up in a segregated Chandler in the 1940s.
“There were some restaurants here in Chandler that we could not go in and sit down and have a meal. We had to sit on a certain side of the theater when we went to a movie,” he said.
The only high school he was allowed to attend was the all-black George Washington Carver High School in downtown Phoenix, an hour bus ride away.
“I feel that if I had gone to an integrated school, that I would have gone farther than I really did academically in the school systems,” he said.
As for his time as mayor, he said one of the first issues that came up during his first term was the turmoil over Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Arizona.
“Chandler was involved in a resolution to the state of Arizona in support of the MLK holiday, and I was glad to see that happen,” he said. “It meant a lot to a lot of people. It also helped a lot of people who thought they wouldn’t be helped by it because it put people’s minds at ease about the importance of a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.”