Public Comment

In 1980, the evening news televised Ronald Reagan championing “states’ rights” at a campaign stop in Mississippi where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had been lynched. 

Three days earlier, the former California governor had been endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. 

My mother, a childhood survivor of World War II, abruptly turned from the television and said to me: “The day they shot Martin Luther King Jr., I was eight months pregnant with you. I was coming home from the store, and I could hear the radio from the next-door apartment. They said King had been shot.” 

I can’t forget that image of my mother, heavy with child and suddenly with grief. She had escaped war-torn China as a child, but despite her hard-won success, she found herself in a war here, too. In this war, MLK, the great man of peace, was shot dead in Memphis. 

They say that pregnancy can induce despair, but they rarely mention external political factors. Coincidentally, my mom’s first pregnancy took place during a nearly forgotten act of racial animosity: the campaign for California’s Proposition 14 in 1964, which MLK had fought against, and which my family also opposed. 

Proposition 14 was the initiative that Reagan first rode to political power, and which instilled dread in the hearts of black, Asian and Latino communities. It aimed to further entrench the same housing discrimination that had, through racially restrictive housing covenants, barred my grandfather (and millions of others non-caucasians) from purchasing homes. 

Sadly, the fact that it passed in Marin County will probably only be surprising to its white residents. As Marin’s tiny minority population knows, “liberal” Marin has been ranked by at least one study as the most racially unequal county in the state of California, and racial housing discrimination remains the foundation of that inequality, affecting all other outcomes. 

Proposition 14 was prompted by a modest reform act penned by Assemblyman William Byron Rumford. The Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 bolstered enforcement of existing laws against racially restrictive housing covenants and redlining. It was a historic piece of legislation, but mild enough to be supported by a Republican state assemblyman from Marin. 

Predictably, the California Real Estate Association’s outraged response to Rumford Act’s moderation was to sponsor Proposition 14, which asserted white Californians should have the right to unconstitutionally deny home sales and rentals to non-whites. 

If you were black, Latino or Asian, it was impossible not to recognize yet another assault against your tenuous civil rights. But it was a kingmaker for California Republicans: Reagan rode Proposition 14’s naked racism to a 1966 gubernatorial victory. 

Seventeen months after Reagan won, and seven days after MLK was assassinated, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act of 1968, a sweeping federal act vindicating Rumford’s California legislation. 

Today, the FHA remains more a legislative concept than enforced law. Here in Marin, the county’s decades-long refusal to adhere to even basic provisions of the FHA warranted special attention from HUD in the first year of the Obama administration. Even after that, Marin County still denies the legacy of its refusal to enforce fair housing law to substantial effect, most notably its decades-long failure to enforce the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Shelley v. Kramer. 

My mother and her sisters, who’d survived the brutal Japanese occupation of China, strongly supported reparations for Japanese Americans who were unconstitutionally and cruelly interned during World War II. Those reparations, while modest, finally arrived in 1990. But it is unethical for us to honor compensation for only one group, while ignoring our county’s far longer unconstitutional treatment of Latino and black communities. 

The legacy of Marin’s non-compliance with fair housing laws has caused particularly egregious damage to black residents since World War II. But that legacy now presents an ideal model for reparations: Marin County should deed the unincorporated parcel of Marin City back to the descendants of the shipyard workers unconstitutionally denied the right to buy property in the county after Shelley v. Kramer. 

It is the most practical method to compensate Marin’s historic black families for the multi-generational loss of capital, political power and lives caused by the denial of home ownership.