“In Sacramento, Gov. Pat Brown proposed sweeping legislation to end racial discrimination in housing. ‘No man should be deprived of the right of acquiring a home of his own because of the color of his skin,’ Brown asserted. ” George Skelton, “Pat Brown Stood Firm on Civil Rights, ”
Los Angeles Times , July 28, 2013 http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cap-housing-20130729,0,5447474.column
As we celebrate the 50 th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, a signal moment in the national struggle for civil rights, we recollect an historic event here in California in that same year when Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown signed the Rumford Fair Housing Act. The Rumford Act was designed to eliminate racial discrimination in housing, five years before the federal Fair Housing Act.
It was a landmark in the history of racial equality in America.
The Pat Brown Institute at Cal State Los Angeles has commissioned a new historical essay by CSULA Emeritus Professor of History Professor Martin Schiesl on the creation of the Rumford Act.
Professor Schiesl is a noted expert on Pat Brown’s governorship and in particular his deep commitment to racial equality. Dr. Schiesl’s essay makes clear that Governor Brown pushed hard for the law even when others, even within his own political camp, feared the political consequences. A year later voters approved Proposition 14 to overturn the Rumford Act, an action that was itself reversed by the courts. The law survived.
The Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs was established at Cal State Los Angeles in 1987.
The PBI is a nonpartisan, applied public policy center dedicated to the quest for social justice and equality of opportunity, enlightened civic engagement, and an enhanced quality of life for all
Californians. It sustains the vision and legacy of the former governor through convening public policy forums, engaging multi-sector stakeholders and diverse communities, and conducting timely policy research and community-driven initiatives. To learn more about the Institute, see www.patbrowninstitute.org
With best regards,
Raphael Sonenshein
Executive Director
5151 State University Drive Los Angeles, CA 90032 | T 323.343.3770 | F 323.343.3774

THE EDMUND G. “PAT” BROWN INSTITUTE OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS |
California State University, Los Angeles
By Martin Schiesl
Professor Emeritus of History
California State University, Los Angeles
August, 2013
Discrimination and segregation in housing existed throughout metropolitan California in the 1950s. Most real estate brokers kept African- Americans and other racial minorities away from white neighborhoods and restricted them to districts where minorities already lived. Many landlords also refused to rent to people of color.
1 Los Angeles was the most segregated city in the state. The black population rose from 171,209 in 1950 to 334,916 in 1960; ninety-four per cent of them lived in the south central part of the city.
2 Many of the houses were deteriorated and dilapidated through age and neglect. The residents also suffered much overcrowding, a lack of public services, and an unhealthy mixture of industrial and residential land use.
3 newcomers, of whom some had arrived to work in technical jobs in defense firms, only found housing in the northern part of Pacoima.
4 Urban housing in northern California was equally segregated. Nonwhite residents lived in the central, oldest, and poorest parts of San Francisco and other cities.
5 Even if they could afford housing in outlying communities, most of the new homes were not available to them. Some 335,000 homes were built in six San Francisco Bay Area counties from 1950 to 1958, of which only 3,000 were sold to nonwhite buyers.
6
Such segregation would face strong opposition from liberal leaders of the Democratic party in California. Running in
1958 on a platform partly devoted to racial reform, Attorney
General Edmund G. “Pat” Brown defeated Republican Senator
William F. Knowland by a million votes and carried 54 of the state’s 58 counties. The Democrats also won control of both houses of the legislature for the first time since 1878. Governor
Brown called for a law that would end employment discrimination.
African Americans were kept out of many residential areas of Los Angeles in the 1950s.
There was also considerable housing discrimination in the San Fernando Valley. The Valley’s population jumped from
311,106 to 739,570 in the 1950s. Most private builders and developers chose not to sell homes to nonwhite families and isolated them from numerous residential tracts. Black
Assemblymen William Byron Rumford (left) and Augustus F. Hawkins (right) discuss legislative matters, ca 1960.
Policy briefs are available on the Pat Brown Institute website: www.patbrowninstitute.org

Assemblymen Augustus F. Hawkins and William Byron Rumford, the only African-American members of the legislature, secured passage of the
Fair Employment Practices Act in April, 1959. The Act prohibited discriminatory practices in the workplace and established the Fair Employment Practices
Commission (FEPC) to guard against such behavior. Racial injustice was also of much concern to Democratic Assemblyman Jesse Unruh. Marv Holen, a member of Unruh’s staff, met with Lee Nichols, a local television reporter and graduate of a school in Los Angeles that had denied admission to a black child. They drafted an extensive civil rights bill for Unruh. He inserted in the measure an amendment to the California Civil Code that extended sanctions against discrimination to all public accomodations. It also forbade discrimination in business dealings, including all real estate transactions. Anyone who suffered this practice could recover damages in the courts. With substantial support from
Governor Brown, Unruh moved his civil rights bill through the legislature in
May, 1959.
7
Another racial issue in housing practices involved the federal government. Many of the houses built in white suburban districts were financed with mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Administration and loans from the Veterans Administration. Together, these agencies insured about sixty per cent of new homes in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s.
8 Leaders of the California branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) strongly objected to these practices and asked Assemblyman Augustus Hawkins to take action. Hawkins drafted a fair housing bill that prohibited discrimination in all publicly-assisted housing.
Backing the measure were the NAACP, the Mexican American Community
Service Organization, some labor unions, and many church councils. It carried in the Assembly by a vote of 67 to 9 and passed unanimously in the Senate in May, 1959.
9 “Frankly speaking, some of us (Democrats) were afraid that an act which included private housing would not pass, and we wanted a half loaf rather than lose everything,” Hawkins declared at a hearing on racial problems in
California held by the United States Commission on Civil Rights in early 1960.” 10
Governor Brown, however, insisted on the whole loaf. Housing discrimination, he believed, would continue unless the state took steps to guarantee residential opportunity for all California residents. He told the
Civil Rights Commission that government could no longer “hide behind the reactionary and discredited folk tale that segregation and discrimination are natural and tolerable because minorities prefer to be restricted in the ghetto.” 11
He persuaded Hawkins to draft a new housing bill in early 1961. It extended the ban on discrimination in publicly-assisted homes to private housing. It also provided different enforcement. A complainant, under the Unruh Civil Rights
Act, could hire a lawyer and pursue litigation until a remedy was available. This process, however, was a heavy burden on many minority citizens who could not afford the litigation. The new bill provided that the FEPC would enforce the discrimination ban. The Commission was authorized to receive complaints of discrimination and to do its own investigation. In cases where there was clear evidence of discrimination, the commission could ask for a court injunction against those responsible for such behavior.
12
The California Committee for Fair Practices held a rally for the fair housing bill in Sacramento in April, 1961. Delegates from civic organizations throughout the state attended the event. Among the speakers were Governor
Brown, Assemblymen Hawkins and William Byron Rumford, and Tarea Hall
Pittman, regional director of the NAACP. Brown promised that he would “put the full power of government behind the effort to eliminate discrimination in the field of housing.” 13 The bill passed the Assembly by a margin of 44 to
31. It moved on to the Senate and was reviewed by the Committee on
Governmental Efficiency. Headed by conservative Democrat Luther Gibson, the committee added amendments that restricted the discrimination ban to publicly-assisted housing and sent the measure to the Governor’s Advisory
Commission on Housing Problems for further study.
14
The Commission decided to examine the Unruh Civil Rights Act and the Hawkins Fair Housing Act. It concluded that both laws, while major advances in the regulation of housing, did not cover the “bulk of the housing in which discrimination is practiced.” It proposed that they be amended to prohibit discrimination in “all real estate operations” and recommended that enforcement authority be assigned to the FEPC.
15
The real estate industry also came under attack by state Attorney
General Stanley Mosk. In the spring of 1962, the Chicago Commission on Human
Relations did a survey of the racial composition of local boards of the National
Association of Real Estate Boards in major cities. Of forty-two boards, five had two black members, four had one member, and twenty-eight had none. In
California, only Berkeley and San Francisco admitted blacks. Announcing that
“discriminatory practices bear no relation to the legitimate ends and purposes for which realty boards are organized,” Mosk ruled that all boards in the state must admit black realtors.
16
Pat Brown pushed action against housing discrimination to a higher level. Running for re-election in November of 1962, he defeated former
Vice President Richard Nixon by almost 300,000 votes. Democrats also won a number of contests and retained their majority in the legislature.
17 “When discrimination exists in private housing, the disadvantages to our whole society are obvious,” Brown told the legislature in February, 1963. “Tensions are
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aggravated. Our American principles of equality are ignored.” Drawing on the report of the Advisory Commission on Housing Problems, he called for an expansion of the Hawkins Act to cover most housing on the market for rental or sale and urged that the FEPC “be given the same authority with respect to housing that it has with respect to employment.” 18
Assemblymen William Byron Rumford confers with Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, ca 1960.
Few legislators could meet Brown’s request better than William
Byron Rumford. He had considerable experience in dealing with racial issues.
Elected from Berkeley to the Assembly in 1948, Rumford won passage in 1949 of a bill that barred discrimination in the state National Guard. He served on the
Civil Service Committee which addressed issues of discrimination in government employment and co-authored the 1959 Fair Employment Practices Act. Augustus Hawkins was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1962.
When Hawkins left Sacramento for Washington, D.C., Rumford replaced him as the chief legislative strategist in fair housing. He took sections of the
Unruh and Hawkins’ Acts and put them in a new fair housing bill. The new bill provided that the FEPC would enforce the discrimination ban. The commission was authorized to receive complaints of discrimination and to do its own investigation. Rumford presented the bill in the Assembly. After some debate, it was referred to the Committee on Economy and Efficiency for review.
19
Political developments in Berkeley created a difficult situation for
Rumford. In January, 1963, the city council, in an effort to dismantle segregated neighborhoods and establish integrated schools, passed an ordinance that prohibited discrimination because of color, race, religion, national origin, or ancestry in the rental, sale, or leasing of housing accomodations. It also provided a fine and jail sentence for violation of the law. Several homeowner groups, backed by the Berkeley real estate board and the California Real Estate
Association, gathered enough signatures to hold a citywide referendum, giving voters an opportunity to overturn the ordinance.
20 Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh saw the referendum as a danger to Democratic legislators and the Rumford housing bill. “I don’t want to hoist a storm warning on this (Berkeley referendum),” he told a group of reporters. “There is still a great deal of discrimination in
California and legislation may be needed to fight it but we have also come a fair way in this field. I would not like to jeopardize what we have done already by precipitous action in the future.” 21
Leading NAACP attorney Loren Miller strongly disagreed. He had long fought against housing segregation in Los Angeles. “California cannot and should not rest in the halfway house on the road to equality,” he wrote in a letter to Unruh in February, 1963. “It must be either move forward or it will regress.
Refusal of the legislators to consider and enact housing legislation will not constitute a ‘breathing spell’ but rather a turning back from a task undertaken four years ago.” 22 One month later, several prominent persons attended a hearing of the Assembly Committee on Efficiency and Economy and forcefully endorsed the Rumford measure. Among them were Attorney General Stanley Mosk,
NAACP director Tarea Hall Pittman, and Thomas Pitt, executive secretary of the
California Federation of Labor. The committee added a few amendments and returned the bill to the Assembly with a recommendation that it be passed.
23
The next hurdle was the Ways and Means Committee. Some members of the committee objected to the penalty provision of the bill. The housing controversy in Berkeley didn’t help matters. In April, voters overturned the fair housing law and elected a mayor and two council members who had opposed integrated housing.
24 Worried about the impact of the
Berkeley election on the legislature, Unruh persuaded Rumford to add two key amendments to his bill. One removed the penalty provision and gave the FEPC power to issue restraining orders. The other changed the coverage of housing without public assistance from a single unit occupied by the owner to “not more than four units occupied in whole or in part by the owner as his residence.”
The Ways and Means committee returned the bill to the lower house with the recommendation that it be passed with the amendments. The bill met
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with criticism and hostility from some conservative legislators. The Assembly approved the measure by a vote of 47 to 25, with all Democrats and three
Republicans voting for it.
25
The bill moved on to the Senate. Albert McKee, head of the
Associated Real Property Brokers, an organization composed mostly of black realtors, attended a hearing of the Committee on Governmental
Efficiency in May and spoke strongly in favor of the measure. Arguing against it were member of several financial institutions and suburban real estate agencies. Chairman Luther Gibson announced that the committee would vote on the bill the following week. The meeting was postponed.
26 This delay ignited much discontent in the chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in
Sacramento. Several members of the group occupied the second floor rotunda between the Senate and Assembly and vowed to stay until the Rumford bill was passed. Governor Brown, who was giving two of his grandchildren a tour of the
Capitol, visited some of the CORE demonstrators and thanked them for backing the bill.
27
Brown was upset with the delay over the measure. He asked the
Democratic organization, both the official party and the numerous volunteer activists, to get more directly involved in the campaign for fair housing.
Members of the State Central Committee and leaders of the California Democratic
Council, an organization composed of volunteer political clubs throughout the state, met in Sacramento and demanded passage of the Rumford bill. The
Governmental Efficiency Committee held another meeting on June 14 and invited Rumford and several other legislators. Luther Gibson spoke against the bill. He claimed that it infringed upon the property rights of individual homeowners and stated that his committee would “never approve a bill prohibiting discrimination in private housing.” Several CORE members were in the room and loudly protested against his opposition. Gibson proposed an amendment that provided that the measure apply to single-unit homes only if they had publicly-assisted financing. Rumford informed him that such loans accounted for just twenty-five per cent of new single unit dwellings in the state.
He rejected the amendment and insisted that private housing remain part of his bill.
28
Pressured by Governor Brown, the Governmental Efficiency
Committee resumed review of the measure. The committee added some minor amendments and returned it to the upper house. The bill moved on to the Senate Finance Committee, which returned it to Gibson’s committee with a recommendation that it be approved. Many other measures, however, were scheduled ahead of the bill. Fearful that his bill might be shelved until the end of the session, Rumford persuaded Luther Gibson to return it to the full Senate on July 21. Assembly Speaker Unruh provided vital support. He announced that there would be no vote on senate bills until the upper house acted on the
Rumford measure.
29
At 11:00 P.M., an hour before adjournment, Democrat Edwin J.
Regan asked for a vote. Senate president Hugh Burns, a conservative
Democrat, refused his request. Regan demanded a vote on his motion, got it passed by 20 to 16, and cleared the way for a vote on the Rumford bill.
The Senate passed the bill by a margin of 22 to 13 and sent it back to the lower house. The Rumford Fair Housing Act carried in the Assembly by 63 to 9, just minutes before the 1963 legislative session ended. It covered all publicly-assisted housing and seventy per cent of private housing.
30
Rumford received a standing ovation from the Assembly and the
CORE demonstrators who had slept on the floor for three weeks broke into a victory song. Governor Brown called the measure “an historic step toward giving every Californian the right to live where he pleases” and signed the bill with much pride one month afterwards.
31 Years later he stated that the Rumford Act was “one of the great victories” of his career.
32
Under Pat Brown’s dynamic leadership, California emerged in 1963 as the model of racial reform in the western United States. It became the fifth state to have a fair housing law.
33 The Rumford Act moved California far down the road of social equality. It provided African Americans and other racial minorities with an enormous legal wall against housing discrimination and segregation.
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1. Davis McIntire, Residence and Race: Final Compre-
hensive Report to the Commission on Race and Housing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 239-241; Herbert Hill,
“Demographic Change and Racial Ghettos: The Crisis of American
Cities,” Journal of Urban Law 44 (1966): 249; Robert W. Cherny,
Richard Griswold Castillo, and Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo,
Competing Visions: A History of California (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2005), 324-325.
2. Los Angeles County Commission on Human
Relations, Population and Housing in Los Angeles County: A
Study in the Growth of Residential Segregation (Los Angeles: Los
Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, 1963), folder
“Housing,” box 19, Mervyn M. Dymally Papers, John F. Kennedy
Memorial Library, California State University, Los Angeles, 1.
3. Commission on Race and Housing, Where Shall We
Live? Report of the Commission on Race and Housing (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1958), 4-5; Cherny, Castillo, and
Lemke-Santangelo, Competing Visions, 325.
4. Los Angeles County Commission on Human
Relations, Population and Housing, 3; Daniel Hosang, “Race and the Mythology of California’s Lost Paradise,” Boom: A Journal of
California 1 (Spring 2011): 37.
5. McIntire, Residence and Race, 38-39; Commission on Race and Housing, Where Shall We Live?, 4.
6. Hill, “Demographic Change and Racial Ghettos,” 251.
7. Martin Schiesl, “The Struggle for Equality: Racial
Reform and Party Politics in California, 1950-1966,” in Martin
Schiesl, ed., Responsible Liberalism: Edmund G. “Pat” Brown
and Reform Government in California, 1958-1967 (Los Angeles:
Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Institute of Public Affairs, California State
University, Los Angeles, 2003), 104-107.
8. Hill, “Demographic Change and Racial Ghettos,” 251.
9. “Fair Housing Bill Wins Crucial Vote,” folder “Press
Releases. 1959,” box 99, Augustus F. Hawkins Papers, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles; Schiesl, “The Struggle for Equality,”
107.
10. Hearings before the United States Commission
on Civil Rights (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,
1960), 124.
11. Ibid., 633.
12. Schiesl, “The Struggle for Equality,” 108.
13. “Rally for Fair Housing. The Hawkins Bill ( A.B.
801),” folder 2-5, box 2, Max Mont Collection, Urban Archives
Center, California State University, Northridge; “Address by Governor Edmund G. Brown,” April 15, 1961, ibid.
14. Thomas W. Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race
Relations: California’s Rumford Act and Proposition 14 (Berkeley:
Institute of Government Studies, University of California,
Berkeley, 1967), 14-15.
15. Governor’s Advisory Commission on Housing
Problems, Report on Housing in California (San Francisco,
1963), 67-68.
16. “Mosk Rules California R E Boards Must Open
Rosters,” Trends in Housing 6 (September-October 1962): 2.
17. Ethan Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times
of Pat Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 246.
18. “Statement of Governor Edmund G. Brown on
Civil Rights,” February 14, 1963, Journal of the Assembly,
Legislature of the State of California, Regular Session, vol. 1, 7
January-21 June 1963, 625.
19. William Byron Rumford, “Legislator for Fair
Employment, Fair Housing, and Public Health,” Earl Warren
Oral History Project, conducted by Joyce A. Henderson, Amelia
Fry, and Edward France, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft
Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1973, 39-42, 55-56,
114; Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations, 20, 22.
20. Thomas W. Casstevens, “The Defeat of Berkeley’s Fair Housing Ordinance,” in Lynn W. Eley and Thomas W.
Casstevens, eds. The Politics of Fair Housing Legislation: State
and Local Case Studies (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968), 207, 216-17.
21. “Unruh Sees Implications in Housing Bias Vote,”
Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1963. See also Bill Boyarsky,
Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2008), 98.
22. Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los
Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 99; Loren Miller to Jesse
Unruh, February 26, 1963, folder 3, box 12, Loren Miller Papers,
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
23-24.
23. Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations,
24. Casstevens, “Defeat of Berkeley’s Fair-Housing
Ordinance,” 226.
25. Rumford, “Legislator for Fair Employment,” 115-
116; Lawrence W. Crouchett, William Byron Rumford: The Life
and Public Services of a California Legislator (El Cerrito, CA:
Downey Place Publishing House, 1984), 65.
26. Crouchett, William Byron Rumford, 66; Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations, 30-31.
27. “Race Equality Body Stages Sit-in,” Sacramento
Bee, May 29, 1963; “Brown Thanks Sit-in Group,” San Francisco
Chronicle, May 31, 1963.
28. Crouchett, William Byron Rumford, 66; A. E. Lyons, “Chances for Fai Housing Bill Collapse Amid Verbal Battle,”
Sacramento Bee, June 14, 1963.
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34-36.
29. Casstevens, Politics, Housing and Race Relations,
30. Ibid., 37.
31. “Applause Resounds in Capitol,” Sacramento Bee,
June 22, 1963; Rarick, California Rising, 265-267.
32. Edmund G. Brown, Sr., “Years of Growth, 1939-
1966: Law Enforcement, Politics, and the Governor’s Office, an oral history conducted 1977-1981 by Malca Chall, Amelia R.
Fry, Gabrielle Morris, and James Rowland, Regional Oral History
Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1982, 493.
33 “Calif. and Conn. Enact Fair Housing Statutes,”
Trends in Housing 7 (May-June 1963): 1, 4.
Martin Schiesl is Professor Emeritus of History at California State University, Los Angeles. His specialties are the history of urban America in the twentieth century and the social, political, and governmental histories of Los Angeles and California since 1900. He is the author of The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1880-1920 , co-editor of 20 th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict, editor of Responsible Liberalism: Edmund G. “Pat”
Brown and Reform Government in California, 1958-1967 , and co-editor of City of Promise: Race and Historical Change in Los Angeles . He is currently writing a book on the policies, programs, and achievements of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in California from 1940 to 1980.
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