Citizens of Asian America: Democracy and Race during the Cold War

Chapter 1. Legislating Nonwhite Crossings into White Suburbia

21 chapter 1 Legislating Nonwhite Crossings into White Suburbia Just two days after Tommy Amer moved into his newly purchased home in South Los Angeles, his neighbors stopped by to inform him that they had filed an injunction against him. The petition before the Los Angeles Superior Court demanded that Amer be removed from the premises of his home. As Amer recounted many years later, his neighbors emphasized that the filing of the injunction was nothing personal; they merely acted to protect their property values from diminishing with the residence of an Asian American in their suburban tract. While Amer was aware that the home he purchased in 1946 was in a covenanted area—that homeowners had come together since 1941 to sign an agreement limiting the residency of the Firth Main Street Boulevard Tract to persons of white or Caucasian race—he claimed not to have understood how this racial restrictive covenant could actually ban him from living in the house that he lawfully purchased. Amer noted that he was only twenty-four at the time and had just returned home from fighting in World War II. He believed in earnest that his rights were protected by the Constitution and was not aware that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1926 that racial restrictive covenants were the actions of private individuals and not of the state and were thereby not in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.1 There were other reasons that led Amer to believe that his living on 127 West 56th Street was not going to incite the ire of his neighbors. From 22 Legislating Nonwhite Crossings what Amer could tell, the area where he purchased his home looked as if it were on the verge of being integrated. His neighbors across the street, the Hickersons, were black. Amer learned only after he was served with the injunction that the Hickersons were also embroiled in a legal battle to retain the ownership and occupancy of their home. Amer remembered how the previous homeowner had hinted to him that his white neighbors would not go after him since they were mainly concerned with ridding the neighborhood of the two black families that had moved in. But as he learned, the whites-only restriction that worked to prohibit his black neighbors from living in the Firth Main Street Boulevard Tract had applied to him, a Chinese American, as well. Following the receipt of court papers, Amer embarked on a two-year legal battle to reside in his home in South Los Angeles. Later he recalled in an interview that his campaign against residential segregation was born not out of a desire to fight for equal rights but out of an imposed necessity to do so, as he was unable to find housing elsewhere and was unsure if he could recover financially from the loss of his home. What Amer did not foresee was that his case would be among the seven lawsuits admitted for review by the U.S. Supreme Court that resulted in the 1948 landmark ruling against the state enforcement of racial restrictive covenants.2 This chapter examines the Amer case, along with a companion suit that involved a Korean American, Yin Kim, to explicate the various forces that called into question the practice of race-based restrictions in housing during the early Cold War years. While the housing shortage of the postwar period triggered a rise in the number of lawsuits that contested the legality of racial restrictive covenants, the advent of the Cold War incited the federal government to come out in support of the legal struggle against housing segregation. Much of the federal government’s efforts to invalidate the whites-only rule grew out of the need to counter Soviet propaganda that highlighted racist practices in the United States to undermine the credibility of American democracy. The campaign against race-based restrictions in housing had thereby enabled the state to tell a different story about U.S. democracy, one that emphasized the nation’s commitment to creating a socially just world. This chapter details how the Amer and Kim cases importantly shaped this story about race and U.S. democracy in the national legal campaign against the state enforcement of racial restrictive covenants. Legislating Nonwhite Crossings 23 Before these two lawsuits gained national prominence, they were embroiled in California’s legal campaign to end housing segregation. The Amer and Kim...