How the U.S. Military Fueled Housing Integration in Orange County
In 1942, African American activists pressured President Roosevelt to desegregate the military and government contractors, at a time when most employment in the U.S. was still segregated. This meant that, during the Cold War, the military brought diversity to Orange County. In 1960, fully one-sixth of all African Americans in Orange County lived on the marine bases at Tustin and El Toro. Military veterans composed half of the heads of households in Orange County in the 1950s and military veterans were nearly all of the pioneers of racial desegregation in Orange County's suburban housing.
It was a military veteran, Gerald Harris, who braved firebombing, window-smashing, rug-slicing, concrete poured down his drains and a cross burnt on his lawn in 1956 when he was the first African American in the southern Placentia neighborhood of Kansas Avenue and Missouri Avenue. Twelve years later, in 1968, when retired Marine Corps sergeant John Frank Smith sought to move from Placentia's small Kansas Avenue neighborhood to a wealthier space in northern Placentia, Smith still faced neighbors throwing rocks through his windows and shoving him in his own driveway.
In an oral history interview in 2005, Smith recalled, "I got myself together and called some of my marine buddies, and about thirty of them came out here with a Marine Corps pickup truck — white and Black marines from El Toro. We canvassed the neighborhood, like door to door. They said, 'You don't want to mess with our little Gunnery Sergeant Smith…' Things were pretty quiet after that." Though Smith still had to ensure his children were treated fairly in school.
The military is often perceived as a conservative force, but the military also brought more equitable employment and housing to Orange County, where it was military camaraderie that supported desegregating leaders such as John Frank Smith. As Dorothy Mulkey explained when she brought her landmark fair-housing supreme court case in Santa Ana in 1967: "I had given the military three years of my life… and yet when I came out, I can't find a suitable place to live. I had a real problem with that."
Explore some of the spaces in Orange County shaped by the Cold War. Click on the starred map points to read more in-depth stories.
Similarly, Sammy Lee, a decorated war veteran, Olympic-medal winner, and U.S. spokesman sent abroad to try to win Asian friends during the Cold War, later noted, "I was invited to the White House, [but in Orange County] they said I couldn't buy a home in Garden Grove." Smith, Mulkey, Lee, and other veterans leveraged their military service to fight for housing integration, when the U.S.'s concern with winning Cold War allies abroad added public pressure to improving Civil Rights at home.
Further Reading
Dudziak, Mary. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2011.
Johnson, Robert and Charlene Riggins. A Different Shade of Orange: Voices of Orange County, California, Black Pioneers. California State University Fullerton's Center for Oral and Public History, 2009.
