San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Debt owed to Black Californians
In September of 1963, California lawmakers passed a bill that should have marked a historic moment in the American civil rights movement. After decades of formal and informal policies designed to keep people of color — especially Black Californians — confined to segregated and blighted urban neighborhoods, the Rumford Fair Housing Act outlawed racism and discrimination in the state’s housing market.
Rumford was the kind of bold civil rights action people think of when bestowing upon California the progressive reputation it enjoys today; the law predated the federal Fair Housing Act by five years.
Too often, however, this rose-colored view of California liberalism ignores the state’s full history.
Almost immediately after Rumford’s passage, opponents of the bill began harvesting signatures to overturn it. These efforts culminated in the 1964 California Fair Housing initiative — a ballot measure known as Proposition 14.
With Orwellian aplomb, the measure proposed enshrining racial housing discrimination in the state’s Constitution under the guise of “property rights” — by allowing companies and individuals to refuse to rent or sell property “to any person as he chooses.”
If there was any doubt as to which group Prop. 14 was targeting, then-aspiring governor Ronald Reagan was not shy about laying that truth bare.
“If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has the right to do so,” he said in support of the measure.
Californians agreed. Prop. 14 passed by an overwhelming 2-to-1 margin along racial lines, with the weight of the state’s white majority behind the initiative. According to a 1964 postmortem piece in The Chronicle, 53% of San Franciscans voted yes to Prop. 14, with white neighborhoods like the Sunset giving the measure their overwhelming support.
In the aftermath of the vote, NAACP leaders branded California
the “Mississippi of the West,” a moniker that has been airbrushed away with time.
Now, nearly 60 years after the passage of Rumford, California is attempting to pry the state’s ignominious history out of the collective memory hole — and set a new national standard in its attempts to redress our nation’s history of antiBlack racism. The California Reparations Task Force recently completed its exhaustive final report documenting a comprehensive litany of historical injustices perpetrated against Black Californians. Included in the report are recommendations for how the state can finally make amends.
These efforts, like Rumford before them, have faced a backlash — with online commentariat dismissing them as irresponsible virtue signaling amid the state’s budgetary woes.
Anyone who bothers to read
the task force’s report, however, will see in its expansive documentation of racism and discrimination targeting Black Californians, the obvious imperative for remediation. To argue otherwise is cheap sophistry.
Prop. 14 is not the most egregious example of harm perpetrated against Black Californians. Though morally loathsome, the measure was immediately challenged in court and was ultimately thrown out prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which would have rendered it moot.
Instead, what Prop. 14 demonstrates is broad culpability.
California’s legacy of racism doesn’t fall solely on the shoulders of a few evil corporations or a handful of despotic politicians or isolated hate groups. Rather, basic civil rights were put to a public fiat and ordinary residents of California overwhelmingly chose to use
the power of the ballot box to make racism and segregation the law of the land. In doing so they undeniably affirmed and took ownership of decades of racist policies that preceded the Prop. 14 vote — and of the harm those policies caused. And there was harm. Racist housing policies alone confined Black Californians to neighborhoods with poor schools, poor transit options and environmental waste. They denied Black residents equal access to the real estate market, historically, the single greatest generator of American wealth. They similarly denied equal access to federal and state tax financial incentives for home ownership.
These harms were tangible and consequential. Their repercussions endure. Black Californians are entitled to remediation. And if there was any debate over who is responsible for paying the tab, the
legacy of Prop. 14 ends that discussion.
Many Californians were either born long after Prop. 14’s passage or moved to the state from elsewhere. Count most members of this Editorial Board among them. But when you buy a house with a rotting foundation, it is yours to fix. Those of us who call California home have inherited its debts and its credits.
Questions about reparations remain, including who is eligible and what form they should take. Cash payments? Free college tuition? Zero-interest home loans?
We don’t presume to have the answers. But there should be no doubt that a debt is owed to Black Californians. And the payment of that debt is long overdue.