Death of a Suburban Dream: Race and Schools in Compton, California

3. Separate and Unequal

C h a p t e r 3 Separate and Unequal While picketing the freshly built Compton Crest development, a black GI and his friend a white GI, both just two weeks back from Korea, argued with the white residents. “We’re fighting for you—we’re facing bullets for you— why can’t we live here?”1 Irate white homeowners told the California Eagle, a black newspaper, “We fought all the way from Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge! We have a right to these homes. When we bought ’em—there were big signs all through this Compton tract, ‘Highly Restricted!’—that’s the way we bought and that’s the way it’s going to stay!”2 Though the advertisements for the 535-home tract called out to veterans, the developers never intended to include all of them. Compton Crest, like the rest of the town in 1950, was explicitly meant for whites.3 Like blacks across the country, African Americans in the Los Angeles area did not accept Compton’s racial lines, and, along with some white allies, actively challenged the development’s restrictions. In the debates that arose over integrating Compton Crest, both proponents and opponents used their status as veterans to justify their position on residential segregation. Integration was coming to Compton, but not easily. As they began to reap the benefits of full citizenship after serving their country in wartime, African Americans sought their own suburban dream, and it was no coincidence that they settled in Compton. Like their white predecessors , they desired homeownership, quality schools, and safe streets. Having been segregated into a few overcrowded Los Angeles neighborhoods with the worst housing stock, blacks pushed against decades-long practices of racial discrimination and pursued the promise of the suburbs.4 While Compton was not an upper-middle-class area, it offered relatively affordable houses and was, both culturally and physically, a step out of the ghetto and toward that middle-class dream. 74 Chapter 3 Though Compton was an improvement from their previous neighborhoods , the full promise of the suburban good life eluded many of the town’s black residents. First, African American migration to Compton caused anxiety among some of the white residents, who linked their physical location to their class identity. Yet, while whites resisted, this is not a merely a story of blacks moving in and whites moving out, because not all whites could afford to leave Compton. As a result, this inner-ring suburb became contested ground. Comptonites fought vigorously over where people lived, who got jobs, and what schools children attended. At first whites’ racial discrimination kept Compton’s black population segregated on the west side of town. This restriction took its toll as it fostered racial prejudices in the school districts , which played out in the classrooms and schoolyards. Community leaders drew school boundaries to reinforce racial lines and the boundaries helped create social divisions. The stratification affected Comptonites’ daily lives as schools helped define the physical, cultural, and discursive divisions of the town. The segregation also proved costly for the already financially strapped suburb. Compton’s financial and social status became further threatened as white flight to other suburbs increased. Compton became a more racialized space, carrying all the assumptions that came along with being a minority town. As Compton got blacker, it lost its already precarious toehold on economic stability . Compton’s whites took their businesses with them as they left, and new businesses failed to invest in Compton. The black Compton suburbs were not the white Compton suburbs. Testing the Barrier Changes in the Los Angeles social geography as well as the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer and the 1953 Barrows v. Jackson Supreme Court decisions to eliminate racial covenants directly affected Compton.5 Many black families earned double incomes, allowing them realistically to set their sights on moving for “an opportunity, a step up.”6 Compton became this step. From 1947 through 1953, Compton annexed a little over two-and-a-half square miles, aiming to increase its tax base through residential and industrial growth.7 Much of this land was on the town’s western edge, adjacent to black communities. Tract developers took advantage of the unrestricted land and built houses that they sold to African Americans.8 As a result, Compton began to shift away from a Separate and Unequal 75 virtually all-white citizenry, with a small Latino...