On a flight recently, I saw a movie about a Black baseball player trying to be the first to play professionally*. In it, he brings his fiancee with him to an away game in New Orleans and she sees a whites only sign at a restroom, and comments that she has never seen that back home, which is California. Her home is shown to be fairly upper class as well, and sense is that she has never known discrimination wrt her race.
Was California particularly enlightened in racial matters? That seems surprising, considering the well known anti Far Eastern prejudice that existed there as exemplfied by the internment of Japanese-Americans during ww2.
Can’t rememeber the movie’s name, but it had Harrison Ford in a supporting role. As the question is about, history, not the film specifically, I think this question belongs in GQ.
*Probably messed up the history somewhat, but hey I know sweet fuck all about baseball.
The movie is 42, about Jackie Robinson, who would become the first black player since the 19th century in the National League and Major League Baseball.
The Robinsons assuredly encountered discrimination in California in the 1940s, they just wouldn’t have seen official segregation of public facilities.
Internment was a Federal policy, not a state one. There were a lot of Japanese interned in California because that is where the vast majority of them lived.
California wasn’t free of racial prejudice, but at the time, it was one of the best places to be black in America. There was a large population of blacks and well established middle class communities.
The movie was called 42; it told the story of Jackie Robinson and his breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball when Branch Rickey signed him to the Brooklyn Dodgers. I didn’t see the film, and cannot speak to its accuracy.
I’ll leave the sociological questions for others to address.
There were two types of segregation: de facto and de jure. The South (former Confederacy) had de jure segregation: actual laws against the mixing of the races and their use of public facilities (e.g. water fountains and rest sroom).
The other states had de facto segregation: no laws forbidding it, but custom and policy strongly against Blacks. There were no “white only” rest rooms or “white only” hotel, but if you were Black, you’d discover they were suddenly full. No law enforced these, but no one would help you get the room.
So if you never left California, you would never have seen a "whites only: sign,
California was certainly better than the South or the urban Northeast/Midwest for blacks, but people there still encountered prejudice. The book The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of the black migration out of the South after WWI. It follows three stories, one of which is about a man who moves to Los Angeles, and includes some detailed discussion of the types of prejudice (mostly social and professional) that he encounters there.
One has to keep in mind that California’s population was exploding in the mid-century years, largely due to the immigration of destitute people from the American South fleeing from the Great Depression or attracted to wartime work opportunities. These new Californians brought racism with them from the South. Also, California had a recent history of a racial discrimination against the Chinese, which at least paralleled if not exceeded the racism against Blacks in the South. And few stood up to object when Californians of Japanese ancestry were stripped of their property, family, liberty and dignity.
So racial discrimination was not completely alien to the mindset of the California populace.
I lived in Louisiana and Alabama in the 50s and California in the early 60s, and yes, there was a huge difference. I can’t recall a single instance in California in which I felt that Blacks were discriminated against, or in any way impeded from participation in social or economic activities. Although, to be sure, one would hear racist talk in private conversation.
When 4 students sat at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, beginning the whole wave a sit-ins over the next 6 months, they weren’t breaking any laws. Just custom.
CA had an anti-miscegenation law on the books until 1948, so there was that. And since Hollywood is in CA, those of us who grew up in the 60s or before certainly know that blacks were not given the same opportunities as whites in movies and TV during those times.
jtur88: You never watched TV or went to movies when you lived in CA in the 60s?
Schools, buses, restrooms, restaurants, all legally segregated in the south but only there. I certainly went to an integrated HS (few blacks, but one of them was the future conductor James Anderson DePriest). I don’t think there were any blacks in my elementary school but that was the result of residential segregation in Philadelphia. But my wife went to school in southern NJ, actually below the Mason-Dixon line, and her schools had been legally segregated until the end of WW II.
And segregation/exclusion by social custom was indirectly made enforceable (everywhere) because it was held that individual businesses had an unfettered right to transact only with whom they chose to.
Yes, there was de-facto segregation and racial discrimination all over the US, against blacks/asians/Latinos/natives. But in places like e.g. California they would not stoop to something so petty and offensive as posting water fountains with a “for whites only” sign. The South was the big battleground because there it was so blatant and shameless; because it had become by then the final stronghold of legally-mandated, not just socially customary, segregation and disenfranchisement; and because the advocates thereof insisted with not one hint of blushing that this was some sort of essential core value that had to be protected.
Well, technically although parts of South Jersey were at a latitude lower than some of the east segment of the M/D line, given that the line ended with Delaware’s borders the whole state of New Jersey was considered “north” of it – but yes, public segregation could also exist under local-government authority if not forbidden by the state. I can see those parts of NJ that were next to and did much business and movement of people with Delaware adopting similar practices to the communities across the river/bay, where de jure segregation was the rule.
Then, as now, I did not consider TV or movies to be an accurate representation of societal reality. The town I lived in California had an atypically high Black population, owing to a military base in the town.
Quite frankly from what my relatives have said there wasnt much black discrimination in South Dakota either. There was even one black family, the Carters, of Isabelle South Dakota that farmed and ran the towns general store. They got along with everyone, mostly northern european immigrants, just fine.
California had about 2% black population at the time of the move and most of those would have been well off relative to the rest of black americans due to the surge in good jobs in California during the war. Louisiana had about 10% black population and many of those may have been working in agriculture which made them relatively poor. It was probably a large contrast.
They were trespassing, having been asked to leave by Woolworth management. It is of course true that segregation was an official policy only in publicly owned facilities in NC, for what that’s worth.
