By Gabriel San Román
If Orange County once stood as “where the good Republicans go before they die,” it had a parallel reputation of being a place where Black folks had a hell of a time just trying to find a place to live.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the pages of “A Different Shade of Orange: Voices of Orange County, California, Black Pioneers,” which published 15 years ago as OC’s first tome of Black history.
Co-edited by Robert Johnson and Charlene Riggins, the book collected dozens of interviews of Black residents about their experiences throughout the decades from 1930 to 1980 as part of Cal State Fullerton’s Center for Oral and Public History.
Housing as a through line in the book isn’t surprising.
Before his passing in 2021, Johnson fought for the right of Black people to be his neighbors by serving on the board of the Fair Housing Council of OC.
In addition, he co-founded the Orange County Community Housing Corporation and would often out racist landlords by getting lease agreements denied to Black applicants before him.
OC’s share of Black residents topping out at about 2% also didn’t come by way of historical accident.
Learning OC Black History: Featuring: Wellington Bennett, Bea Jones, Joseph Mothershed & Cathy Steele on Sept. 28, 2024 at LibroMobile. Images courtesy of Wanda Reynolds & Alexander Jamal.
Whether noting the existence of “sundown towns” in Brea and Orange, where Black people had to leave by dusk, or by recalling realtors kowtowing to racist neighbors by not selling a home to a Black family, the book laid out a compelling case of rampant housing discrimination.
Along the way, “A Different Shade of Orange” introduced readers to civil rights heroes, pastors, entrepreneurs, community organizers, an Olympian and the first Black police officer in the county.
“Possibly the tilt towards these exceptional people is justified in that the Orange County Black community, considering its small size, has been exceptional in many areas of the community at large,” the book’s introduction argued. “But, this should be expected of people who had the grit and courage to move to Orange County and deal with being Black in a white milieu.”
One woman chock full of determination was Dorothy Mulkey, who sued landlord Neil Reitman for not renting a vacant apartment in Santa Ana to her and Lincoln, her husband.
The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Mulkey’s favor and invalidated California’s Proposition 14, which had voided the state’s Fair Housing Act, as discriminatory.
“I had a problem with a country that would allow you, a young girl, to go in at eighteen and a half to serve in the military, and yet, when I came out, I can’t find a suitable place to live,” Mulkey said in her interview. “I had a real problem with that.”
With housing discrimination prevalent, small Black communities in OC were largely confined to Truslow Avenue in Fullerton and a section of southwest of Santa Ana that became known as “Little Texas” due to many residents having moved there from the Lone Star State.
As Black activists and their allies pushed the boundaries of where they could settle, racism only seemed to ratchet up.
Learning OC Black History: Featuring: Wellington Bennett, Bea Jones, Joseph Mothershed & Cathy Steele
Josh Smith, another pioneering Black resident, served in the Marine Corps before being transferred to its El Toro air station. He bought a home in Placentia and became the first Black policeman in the city—and the county.
On patrol, white women spat on him during routine traffic stops.
At home, whites threw rocks through his windows.
One day, a group of white men confronted Smith and bluntly told him “we don’t want no ni***** living here” before slapping him across the face.
Smith pulled out his off-duty weapon and scared them off, as he recounted in his gripping narrative included in the book.
As Black activists and their allies pushed the boundaries of where they could settle, racism only seemed to ratchet up.
Stories like Smith’s underscore how “A Different Shade of Orange” is only made more compelling and timeless by its status as a historical corrective. Before the book’s arrival, Orange County historians rendered Black people largely invisible, save for a quick mention of Jamaican workers imported during World War II to pick crops in La Habra and Fullerton.
But as Johnson and Riggins showed, OC’s small Black community made for an otherwise outsized history, one that challenged the county’s bigotry and made it better by the effort.
Orange County treatments of Black history have only grown since “A Different Shade of Orange” first published in 2009. Later that same year, I co-wrote a cover story with Gustavo Arellano about the Black Panther Party in Orange County and the controversial murder trial of Santa Ana police officer Nelson Sasscer.
Six years later, I met Joseph Jackson, Jr., the leader of the Tougaloo Nine library sit-in in Jackson, Mississippi and told his story in the Weekly. Apart from fighting Jim Crow in the South, Jackson echoed a lot of common themes found in the book when he resettled in Orange County.
He recounted that racism here was slyer than the in-your-face bigotry of the South, which made it worse in some regards.
When Jackson found a nice apartment he wanted to rent north of 17th Street in Santa Ana, the landlord claimed she had just found new tenants and that he could get himself a good apartment south of 17th Street.
The next day, Jackson drove by the apartment and saw the “for rent” sign back in front of it.
In 2020, Harlen “Lamb” Lambert self-published his long-awaited memoir “Badge of Color,” which recounted his time as the first Black officer to suit up for the Santa Ana Police Department. Nothing short of a racist hazing from white John Birch Society activists in uniform forced him off the force after just a few years on the job.
Unfortunately, Johnson died while working on a follow-up book on OC Black history. Journalist Anthony Pignataro penned a cover story in the Weekly in 2019 about how the first Black residents of Placentia had their home firebombed with Molotov cocktails, in more fully fleshing out one of Johnson’s research areas.
While Asian and Latino populations in OC have turned the county into one that houses a people of color majority, the Black population hasn’t grown much in recent decades.
As the book goes to show, Black residents have dispersed across the county. Santa Ana is no longer the home of the Black History Parade, much less a Little Texas community. Anaheim is now the parade’s host city.
As Mary Owens said in her interview, “Orange County is not perfect, but it’s a great place to live.”
Black history in OC continues to be celebrated. Mulkey was recently honored by the Santa Ana City Council for her “outstanding contributions to the community.”
With ethnic studies soon to become a graduation requirement for high school students in California, “A Different Shade of Orange” is essential reading, especially in Orange County.
As Mary Owens said in her interview, “Orange County is not perfect, but it’s a great place to live.”
The rest of us are indebted to Owens and others featured in “A Different Shade of Orange” for having made it better.
Get a copy of A Different Shade of Orange: Voices of Orange County, California, Black Pioneers co-edited by Robert Johnson and Charlene Riggins from LibroMobile!
Gabriel San Román founded LibroMobile's Arts & Culture column in May 2020. Then he joined TimesOC, a Times Community News publication, as a feature writer in 2021, and worked from 2022-24 as a Metro reporter covering Orange County for the Los Angeles Times. San Román previously worked at OC Weekly – as a reporter, podcast producer and columnist – until the newspaper’s closing in late 2019. He also may just be the tallest Mexican in O.C.
Starting February 2023, #OffThePage is featuring Melanie Romero as our monthly columnist. Our Arts & Culture column was initially founded by local journalist Gabriel San Román in May 2020. Since then we have collaboratively featured over 25 stories and paid nearly 10 contributors from our community. Pitch Melanie a story or email us for more information!
Comments