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Yahoo!Caucasians Only: When I moved into Santa Barbara’s San Roque neighborhood recently, I learned that when the county recorded this part of the subdivision in 1948, no one but “Caucasians” could live here.
“Occupancy of said residential lots shall be restricted to members of the Caucasian Race,” reads part “D” of the “Protective Covenants.”
Which means that if presidential candidate Barack Obama time-traveled back to 1948, he might have trouble moving in with his wife and two children. As the notice with my title insurance points out, these kinds of restrictions are illegal due to state and federal fair housing laws enacted since then and can’t be enforced.
On the Beat
Whether the Caucasians-only restriction was ever enforced on my street in San Roque, or anywhere else in the county, I don’t know. Situated on the upper-State-Street northside, San Roque is considered one of the town’s most comfortable middle-income family neighborhoods, but in postwar Santa Barbara I doubt if it was some sort of elite enclave for the rich wishing to avoid having to share it with minorities.
According to the covenants, any property owner in my La Cumbre Park No. 2 could sue a violator. Title officials I talked to see these racial restrictions fairly often in the original documents copied when someone buys a home in Santa Barbara County. “I’ve seen it a lot,” one escrow officer told me. “It’s horrifying.”
It might have been especially chilling to the black family that lives up the street from me. Such is our country’s history of “legal” discrimination, even in the North.
When developers of the tract, north of State Street near Alamar Avenue, recorded the subdivision with the county they listed all sorts of restrictions.
This included such things as setbacks, building heights, requirements that no home be less than 900 square feet in area, stipulations that hedges couldn’t exceed five feet nor fences exceed four feet, and that a “grass lawn shall be planted and maintained in all front yards of residential lots.” No “noxious or offensive activity” could be engaged in, “nor shall anything be done thereon which may become an annoyance or nuisance to the neighborhood,” and no one could live in a “trailer, basement, tent, shack, garage, barn or other outbuilding.”
Such urban restrictions, and many others, including some against keeping farm animals behind the house, have a long history in Santa Barbara County. When it was common for wealthy families to employ live-in Chinese servants, some Caucasians-only restrictions made an exception to allow servants to reside in a home.
While I couldn’t learn whether the Caucasians-only restriction recorded on my tract was ever invoked, I do know that a U.S. Supreme Court decision at about the same time made it invalid. One case originated in 1945, when a black family named Shelley bought a home in St. Louis, Missouri. They had no idea that a restrictive covenant had been in place on the property since 1911, according to an account on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. “The restrictive covenant barred ‘people of the Negro or Mongolian Race’ from owning the property. Neighbors sued to restrain the Shelleys from taking possession of the property they had purchased.”
Learned justices on the Missouri Supreme Court, instead of throwing the suit out of court, found the covenant enforceable. The Shelleys lost. The court, in all its dubious wisdom, found that this was just a private agreement between the original parties that “ran with the land.”
A similar case came up in Detroit. A black couple, Orsel and Minnie McGhee, wanted to buy the home they’d rented for many years. In a lower court, one question raised was, what is a “Caucasian?” When the U.S. Supreme Court heard the two cases, one of the attorneys representing the McGhees was Thurgood Marshall. He became the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court, by President Lyndon Johnson, in 1967.
The Supreme Court decided the case on May 3, 1948. It was unanimous, 6-0. Three justices did not participate. The decision: Such racial covenants are, on their face, invalid under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment Equal Protection clause. The word apparently did not travel to Santa Barbara very quickly, because on July 30 the same year, at 50 minutes past 3 p.m., the county recorder put the official stamp on the San Roque document.
This, of course, was before Rosa Parks’s refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus, Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic leadership, freedom riders, and the 1964 civil rights legislation. Yet developers nationally continued to insert the covenants into property deeds until the 1960s.
As I read the Supreme Court’s decision on my front porch, a young black woman who lives up the street walked by. I waved at her and she waved at me and we said, “Hi.” Sue and I are new on the block and I expect to get to know her and other neighbors soon.
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Barney Brantingham can be reached at barney@independent.com or 805-965-5205. He writes online columns throughout the week and a print column on Thursdays.
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Are you not from Chicago?...I am, and we both know Chicago (at least when I lived there until '73, was quite racist.
When a some friends of my parents wanted to move into Edgebrook, Edgebrook was a "restricted" area. The friends where a husband and wife: He was Jewish (a Sabra no less) and she an American of Swedish descent. When he came to the States he adopted the harmless-sounding name of "Lenny Morrison" so his wife--"Mrs. Morrison" went to the real estate office and did the negotiations, but ultimately the couple decided to move to another part of Chicago.
This article raises an interesting point: That while Southerners bear the brunt of being called racists, I can tell you that just from the experiences of my childhood in Chicago that Yankees could be just as intolerant as the side that lost the Civil War. I'd hear my parents tell me racism was wrong yet when I'd go to school I'd hear things the other kids would say that I need not repeat here. But then again, history is written by the victors isn't it?
billclausen (anonymous profile)
October 30, 2008 at 2:52 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Graduating from UCSB forty years ago we moved into the heart off San Roque and one would have thought we hand landed from Mars considering the welcome we got. The word had got out that we had been living in that den of iniquity, Isla Visa ,where people burned banks and smoked pot. Dismayed neighbours looked on, most from behind twitching drapes as our furniture was unloaded. As the months went by they slowly thawed as the loud music and pot parties did not evolve, clearly relief was taking the place of fear of the unusual, as it began to dawn on our neighbours we would not cook and eat their children during midnight rituals or spirit them off in a strange machine to a far away planet. People who were to become our dearest, oldest, and in many cases sorely missed friends began to wave at my husband as he left each morning for work; and I had coffee invitations during those sunny and blissful days of nesting and preparing for our first son's appearance. Just before we chose our home in San Roque our realtor showed us a copy of Sunset magazine with an article mentioning this area's climate. It quoted San Roque as being one of the most desirable areas in which to live in Southern California. They were right. After all those years I would not want to live anywhere else. Welcome.
samuel (anonymous profile)
October 30, 2008 at 6:34 a.m. (Suggest removal)
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