In 1945, Oscar-winning actress Hattie McDaniel led more than 250 supporters into a Los Angeles courtroom to fight for her home—and the case would eventually help dismantle racially restrictive housing covenants across America. The battle began decades earlier. In 1940, census workers counted 63,700 Black residents in a Los Angeles of over 1. 5 million people.
Nearly seven in ten lived within a narrow corridor along Central Avenue, bounded by Alameda Street to the east, Broadway to the west, and Slauson Avenue to the south. Black families who attempted to buy south of Slauson during the 1920s and 1930s faced organized resistance, and sometimes violence. Inside those boundaries, however, a remarkable community had formed. By 1910, the Black homeownership rate in Los Angeles exceeded 36%, the highest among any Black community in the United States.
By that same decade, Los Angeles had surpassed San Francisco and Oakland to become the center of Black population, politics, and business in all of California. The 1940 census recorded about 5,000 Black residents in San Francisco and roughly 8,500 in Oakland. Los Angeles had more than seven times either number. Central Avenue was where all of this happened, because Central Avenue was the only place where it was allowed to happen.
The Dunbar Hotel, built by Drs. John and Vada Somerville—the first Black graduates of USC’s dental school—existed because no downtown hotel would rent a room to a Black traveler. The Lincoln Theatre earned the nickname “the Apollo of the West Coast. ” The Club Alabama sat near 42nd Street.
Churches, insurance companies, funeral homes, doctors’ offices, barbershops, and newspapers clustered within walking distance because there was nowhere else for them to go. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in defense industry hiring. The order emerged after A. Philip Randolph, the most powerful Black labor leader in America, threatened that tens of thousands of Black Americans would march on Washington.
The Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) was created to investigate complaints, but it lacked real enforcement power. Historians are blunt about the outcome: the federal government, more concerned with maximizing wartime production than ending segregation, failed to enforce its own anti-discrimination order. That work would fall to Black workers themselves. The order nonetheless changed everything in the South, where news spread faster than any government program could match.
Relatives wrote letters home describing wages unimaginable in cotton fields or domestic kitchens. In the wake of the order, hundreds of thousands of Black Americans began moving toward Los Angeles and its defense plants. Then came another presidential order. In February 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the military to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast.
More than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, were ordered to leave their homes. In Los Angeles, the order emptied Little Tokyo, a vibrant neighborhood of roughly 30,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom had to sell property, inventory, and equipment at whatever price buyers offered. Many were sent to Manzanar, a camp in Owens Valley surrounded by barbed wire, where over 11,000 people were held between March 1942 and November 1945. What they left behind became a ghost town in the heart of downtown Los Angeles.
Black residents watched what happened and understood the mechanism immediately. Black newspapers like the California Eagle covered the eviction with an unease the white press did not share. The only area in the city without racial restrictions on renters had just been emptied of all its residents. Within a year, storefronts on First Street carried new names.
The Digby Hotel had a new owner. Bebop music would play in a club a block from where a dry goods store once stood. The neighborhood received a new name that appeared in city directories, on business signs, and eventually on the sidewalk itself: Bronzeville. In 1942, the trains from Louisiana began arriving.
Between 1942 and 1945, nearly 340,000 Black Americans settled in California, with about 200,000 of them going to Los Angeles. The migrants came mostly from Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, and Southern Pacific rail lines westward were their path. Families did not choose Los Angeles at random—they chose it because a relative was already there, or a church member had written, or a brother-in-law had a job at a Long Beach factory and space in a corner of his room. The stretch of Jefferson Boulevard between Arlington Avenue and Tenth Avenue became known as “Little New Orleans.
” Creole culture reestablished itself in Catholic parishes, parochial schools, family gatherings, and eventually restaurants serving gumbo, red beans and rice, and po’boys to people who had grown up on them 2,000 miles east. A Black woman earning $3 per week as a domestic worker in Louisiana could make that amount in one shift at a California factory. But the calculations at the other end of the journey made no sense at all. Between 1940 and 1945, the white population of Los Angeles grew by less than 20%.
In those same five years, the Black population grew by roughly 110%. Only about 5% of the city’s residential areas allowed Black residents at all. Two hundred thousand people were arriving at only 5% of the city. By 1943, new arrivals were coming at a rate of about 5,000 per month.
City officials described the result as a public health emergency. Mayor Fletcher Bowron’s administration wrote to President Roosevelt urging construction of wartime emergency housing, describing appalling overcrowding—up to 16 adults and children in a single room. In some converted buildings, one bathroom was shared by up to 40 people. Apartments built for one family held three or four families.
Garages, basements, and back rooms were rented as living quarters. “Hot bed” arrangements were common, where a night-shift worker rented the same mattress a day-shift worker had just left. Landlords priced rents accordingly, charging more in restricted areas than white families paid for better housing in neighborhoods with parks and driveways. Tuberculosis rates rose in the most crowded complexes.
Schools operated on double sessions. Churches sheltered families with nowhere else to sleep. There was also friction within the Black community itself. Some pre-war Black Los Angeles residents welcomed the newcomers as reinforcements, customers, and opportunity.
Others saw the influx as a threat to the fragile peace their small community had maintained—and said so in the press. There was only one place in Los Angeles with vacant housing not subject to racial restrictions. It sat in the heart of downtown, bustling two years earlier and now silent. By 1943, Black buyers and renters began moving into the empty storefronts and apartments of Little Tokyo.
One of the first was a man named Leonard Christmas, who bought the Digby Hotel. Others followed. Landlords left with empty buildings were happy to rent to anyone with cash. The neighborhood needed a name, and it got one.
In 1943, Bronzeville emerged in an evacuated neighborhood. About 95% of Los Angeles wartime housing was racially restricted. Little Tokyo was part of the 5% that was not, for the simple reason that the people who lived there were no longer legally allowed to live anywhere on the West Coast. Almost immediately, the area became the most crowded in Southern California.
A neighborhood that had been home to about 30,000 Japanese Americans before the war absorbed a Black population estimated at between 25,000 and 80,000, depending on how boundaries were drawn and which year was counted. One historian described the district, now stripped of its founders, as a last-resort residence for migrants and old-timers alike. But Bronzeville was not merely a slum. Black-owned businesses opened in storefronts: barbershops, cafes, record stores, churches, and clubs.
The neighborhood sat at the northern end of the Central Avenue corridor, connecting it directly to the most important Black music scene west of Chicago. The Finale Club, a small upstairs room, became one of the most important addresses in American music history. In early 1946, Charlie Parker brought bebop to Los Angeles there, playing with a band that included a young Miles Davis. Coleman Hawkins played Bronzeville, as did T-Bone Walker and Herb Jeffries.
Heavyweight champion Joe Louis passed through. So did actress Louise Beavers. White Hollywood stars, including Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, came to hear music they could not hear anywhere else in the city. Two things were true at the same time in the same neighborhood.
Sixteen people slept in an upstairs room while 19-year-old Miles Davis learned his craft downstairs. That is the honest picture of Bronzeville—and the honest picture of Black Los Angeles in 1943. Meanwhile, the reason all these people had come to California in the first place—defense jobs—remained largely closed. Executive Order 8802 had been signed nearly two years earlier, but there was a second gate behind the first, controlled not by companies but by unions.
The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, Iron Shipbuilders and Helpers of America represented the vast majority of shipyard workers on the entire Pacific Coast. Its constitution contained a clause restricting race. Black workers could not be regular members. Instead, the union created separate auxiliary lodges for Black workers in 1937.
An auxiliary member paid dues like anyone else but had no vote in union affairs, no real access to grievance procedures, and no path to higher-paid skilled classifications. Each Black auxiliary was placed under the authority of the nearest white local. Walter Williams, a Black labor organizer who came to the Los Angeles waterfront in 1943, described the choice exactly as it was presented to him. He was told he would have to become an auxiliary member to work in the shipyards.
He never attended a meeting of that auxiliary. He said attending would have meant paying for and approving discrimination. Instead, Williams led a campaign to refuse to pay dues. Black workers would not finance their own segregation.
They organized a picket in front of the auxiliary itself to prevent Black workers from paying. The position was simple and public: if the Boilermakers wanted dues, they had to grant full membership. The committee petitioned Roosevelt’s FEPC for a hearing. The committee ruled that neither the union nor the companies should require the men to pay dues or harass them while working.
Community leaders also formed the Negro Victory Committee to fight discrimination in the local defense industry, and Williams later led the Shipyard Workers Committee for Equal Participation, founded in 1943. The pressure worked, but slowly, and it took a labor shortage to finish the job. After persistent resistance from employers and unions, Black workers were finally hired into Los Angeles defense plants in large numbers only by mid-1943, when the region faced a shortage of about 50,000 workers and industry could simply no longer afford racial discrimination. A city document recording the event states plainly that the efforts of Walter Williams and his committee were central to opening the factory gates to Black workers—even more than the order signed by the President of the United States.
The wages came, but a paycheck could not buy a home in a city that refused to sell homes to Black people. Between the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and January 1, 1945, the city of Los Angeles built 51,000 new housing units. Of those 51,000 units, only 942 were available to Black residents. The figure, reported by the Los Angeles Sentinel, one of the city’s Black newspapers, represents less than 2%.
The instrument that produced that number was the racially restrictive covenant. It was not a law or a city ordinance. It was a clause written into property deeds, agreed upon by owners, stating that the land could not be sold or rented to anyone not of the white race. Some covenants listed excluded groups by name.
Once the clause was recorded, it traveled with the property, and courts enforced it. By the 1940s, covenants covered Los Angeles neighborhoods so extensively that the map of areas where a Black family could legally live had barely changed since 1920, even as the Black population tripled. There was a line along Washington Boulevard that everyone understood. There was a line at Slauson Avenue.
There were lines at Alameda and Broadway. The covenant line was invisible at the street corner but solidly established in the county recorder’s office. The consequences extended far beyond housing. A family confined to a covenanted area sent their children to the schools there and shopped at the stores there.
They could not accumulate equity in a property that rose in value because they could not buy where property values rose. Even after the covenants were eventually invalidated, discriminatory lending continued to steer Black buyers toward areas where building wealth would remain difficult for generations. A Black welder at a Terminal Island shipyard in 1944 could earn union wages, buy war bonds, and save money in the bank—yet remain legally barred from buying a home four blocks from his workplace. That contradiction became indefensible, and Black lawyers in Los Angeles began studying it closely.
One was Loren Miller, a lawyer and NAACP activist who spent years constructing an argument no court had yet accepted: that a restrictive covenant is a private contract, but the moment a court enforces that contract, the state itself becomes the enforcer of racial exclusion, which violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution. He needed the right case.
In 1945, eight homeowners in a wealthy neighborhood provided one. West Adams Heights was one of the first exclusive neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Stone gates marked the entrances to Hobart, Harvard, and Oxford streets. Mansions were built for the city’s wealthiest families at the turn of the century, and every original deed carried a clause prohibiting sale or rental to anyone not of the white race.
By the mid-1930s, most of those original restrictions had quietly expired. In 1938, Norman Houston, president of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company and one of the most successful Black businessmen in California, purchased the home at 2211 South Hobart Boulevard. Eight white homeowners went to court almost immediately. They could not stop him.
Over the next seven years, more Black families arrived: Drs. John and Vada Somerville, the couple who built the Dunbar Hotel; actress Louise Beavers; singer Ethel Waters; bandleader Johnny Otis; entertainer Pearl Bailey; and Hattie McDaniel, who in 1940 became the first Black performer in history to win an Academy Award. Black residents began calling the neighborhood “Sugar Hill. ” Buyers paid $15,000 and up for the old mansions, restored them, and by most accounts earned the goodwill of the majority of their white neighbors.
But a minority of those neighbors did not accept it. Eight of them sued 31 Black residents, including McDaniel, demanding the courts enforce the original 1902 covenant and evict the families from their homes. Hattie McDaniel did not treat the matter as a private legal problem. She held strategy meetings in her home.
She organized. When the Sugar Hill case came before the Los Angeles Superior Court on December 5, 1945, she walked in leading the co-defendants and about 250 supporters. White plaintiffs’ lawyers argued restrictive covenants were protected under the Constitution and that Black owners should hand over their homes immediately. Loren Miller did not argue the facts.
He moved to bar any testimony from the plaintiffs on the ground that enforcing a racial covenant violated both the Fourteenth Amendment and the California Constitution. Judge Thurmond Clark did something no one expected. He adjourned the hearing, left the courtroom, and drove to West Adams Heights to see the neighborhood for himself. The next morning, he dismissed the case.
He stated that the time had come for members of the Black race to be granted, without reservations or evasion, the full rights guaranteed to them under the Fourteenth Amendment, and that judges had been avoiding the real question for far too long. It was the first ruling in the United States to use the Fourteenth Amendment to block enforcement of a racial covenant. Time magazine reported the news nationally on December 17, 1945. Three years later, in 1948, the U.
S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that no state court in America could enforce a racially restrictive covenant.
The wall that had confined 200,000 people to 5% of Los Angeles had finally been breached—and the breach began with an actress, a lawyer, and 250 people who came to support them.