50 Yrs. Ago In Property Rights

L.A. Times* lifer George Skelton uses the ugly Sterling mess to remind us how ugly we've always been, "we" not limited to Mississippi & Alabama, to name but two of the most egregious outcroppings of racial ugliness in these United States of Ugly, but including our own Gilded State.

This is the 50th anniversary year of Californians' voting overwhelmingly — 65% to 35% — to legalize precisely what Sterling was rapped for doing: discriminating because of race in the sale and rental of housing. Ultimately, both the state and U.S. supreme courts declared it unconstitutional.

But the racist measure, Proposition 14, probably was the most bitterly fought ballot initiative ever in California — and certainly among the most popular.

Then-Gov. Pat Brown — Jerry's outspoken and gutsy dad — called Prop. 14 a "cudgel of bigotry" and equated its backers to the "hate binge" of Hitler's Nazis.

The Times editorialized that Brown was being "inflammatory" and "overzealous." And it endorsed Prop. 14, asserting that while the paper opposed housing discrimination, it also supported "basic property rights." Fortunately, the courts later ruled that basic human rights trumped property rights.

A lot of ugly racism surfaced during that 1964 election campaign.

"Freedom to be unequal is really our national purpose," declared Nolan Frizzelle, president of the volunteer California Republican Assembly. "People have a right to discriminate in a free society." To prohibit it, he added, is "socialistic and communistic."

A member of the California Young Republicans board of directors said this in an open meeting: "Negroes are not accepted because they haven't made themselves acceptable." He was loudly applauded.

The Resentment & Property Party's Holiest Temporal Saint was there being his typical two-facedactor self.

That 1964 vote in favor of housing discrimination marked the beginning of a conservative counterrevolution† against California liberalism as represented in the public's mind by Pat Brown and leftist civil-rights and anti-war activists.

In two years, conservative Ronald Reagan ousted Brown from the governor's office, campaigning on, among other things, his strong opposition to the Fair Housing Act. Once the courts killed Prop. 14, Reagan vowed to scuttle the act.

But Reagan was evolving politically and, despite his rhetoric, really didn't try very hard.

Assemblyman Bill Bagley, a Republican moderate from Marin County who had opposed Prop. 14, was appointed by Democratic Assembly Speaker Jesse "Big Daddy" Unruh to chair a committee tasked with retooling the act as Reagan and the electorate presumably demanded. But Reagan privately let Bagley know that it would be just fine with him if the act was left intact.

"I simply never convened the committee," Bagley recalled to me last year. "I saved the act. Reagan never thanked me, but he'd never have been in position to run for president if he'd killed it."

Or he could have been elected in 1976 after opening his campaign in Selma, Alabama instead of the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Miss. Hey, who knows what, because anything can happen, right?

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*There's currently no paywall at the new mobile-friendly (& despite previous bitching in this space about such things, it's certainly no worse then the previous non-mobile style) L.A. Times site; no idea how long this will last, but what the hell.
†See here for the who-could-have-predicted end of that counterrevolution: The total buffoonery of Orly Taitz et al.