But the judge also decreed that the Kinchlows could not live there. They’d bought it from a white man who, as The Times put it, had “kicked over the traces” of the restrictive covenant to sell to them. ![]() and Mattie Kinchlow, could own the house in the restricted Crestmore neighborhood, on West 30th Street. In 1928, California’s Supreme Court overruled two Los Angeles judges and said that a Black L.A. There followed more court decisions propping up segregation by redlining and other means. Sometimes “those people” extended to Jews, or Asians, or Armenians, but first and last, they meant Black. Supreme Court declared that governments couldn’t officially enforce racial segregation but wink-wink, nudge-nudge, the door was still wide open for private neighborhood segregation, one deed at a time - a “covenant” of agreement that, for sure, I won’t sell to any of those people, will you, Bob? No sir, not me Tom, are you with us?Īnd that’s how it worked. One bullet broke a window across the street, and, surprise, the very next day some high-pressure negotiations began to get Carrere to sell. One night, so the cops said, Grund fired off a pistol to make it seem like the Carreres were under attack. Feelings against him and his family, as The Times put it genteelly, “were aroused,” and so a white colleague named Harry Grund “became almost a bodyguard” for the Carrere family. This R-1 segregation was taken so much for granted that it was news in 1926 when a Black shipping clerk named Mentis Carrere bought a house in the 700 block of West 85th Street in Los Angeles. (At the first look-see appointment, the man who opened the door said he was too busy watching “Perry Mason,” and shut the door in their faces.) In 1964, the Black writer Lynell George’s family went house hunting around Inglewood, and at the second house they stopped to see, someone down the street hollered the N-word at them. And Huntington Park? Man, a Negro couldn’t walk the streets in Huntington Park.” Signs on street corners in Huntington Park informed Black and Asian people that they were unwelcome, Laws said. hadn’t changed for decades after the Laws family arrived, according to how Law described it to The Times almost 40 years ago: “Out in Hollywood and West Los Angeles, Negros couldn’t live in those neighborhoods. ![]() Nat Laws was a babe in arms in 1910 when his parents, Henry and Anna, moved here. Restrictive covenants helped to ensure that the growing Black population was kept bottled up in many of the same neighborhoods of 1910, when the census showed that an astounding 36.1% of Black Angelenos owned their own homes. that “nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed.”Ī hundred or so California cities - among them Hawthorne and Glendale - were “sundown towns,” where Black people and sometimes other minorities dared not be found after dark, lest they be run out of town, run into jail or worse.Īlso not for Black Angelenos: some of those darling Spanish houses or Craftsman bungalows along the city’s spreading edges. for the Advancement of Colored People here and was impressed enough to say of L.A. Still, in 1913, the Black intellectual and writer W.E.B. ![]() For a long while, the percentage of Black Angelenos was low - about 2% in the 1910 census, peaking at above 11% around 1990. California entered the union in 1850 as a free state, not a slave state.
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