BUILDING A MOVEMENT ON SAN BERNARDINO'S WESTSIDE

Integrating 16th Street

Lois and Harry Carson moved to 1479 16th Street in 1952 with their growing family when she was transferred to Norton Air Force Base from Memphis. They were one of a growing number of Black families attracted to the area by military bases and related industries in the 1950s and 60s. She soon got her first lesson in block busting and white flight, which she would experience again when she moved to the Rialto Bench in the early 60s.

Cross Burning & Car Bombing 1957

O’Day Short bombing in Fontana was not the last violent defense of the color line. James Dickens, a Black WWII vet, bought a house in this previously white neighborhood in 1957. On Aug 4 in the middle of the night, someone burned a cross on his lawn. The next month, someone put a stop sign in his front lawn. In October, his car caught fire while parked. The police dismissed his concerns about arson, but he knew it was part of the effort to keep this neighborhood white.

Black Community Faces White Flight 1956

Dr. Jean Peacock moved to San Bernardino from Flint Michigan as a teenager. The boundaries of the Black Westside continued to shift northward as more middle class families bought homes in previously all white neighborhoods. Sometimes these pioneers faced violence, but more often white families simply began to move away.

Firebombing 1963

Violent defense of white space continued into the 1960s. Lt. K.G. Jefferson was going to move with his wife and child into this home after Christmas to work at Norton Air Force Base. Before they could move into this white neighborhood, the house was firebombed. As with most Black housing pioneers, Lt. Jefferson, a graduate of UCLA in Physics, was far more educated than most of white neighbors. By the early 1960s, the city formally investigated this case as arson. But white resistance continued as the movement grew in San Bernardino.

Exclusions in Del Rosa 1961

Jimmy Jews, from Birmingham Alabama, encountered more subtle but persistent exclusions by landlords when he looked for housing in the Del Rosa neighborhood in 1961. He eventually gave up and moved to the Westside. He became a police officer and was later the first Black firefighter hired in San Bernardino in 1968, after years of community pressure on the fire department to open job opportunities to Black and Latino candidates. 

Tight Knit Community

Cheryl Brown describes how racial segregation had one positive consequence, producing a vibrant class-integrated community on the Westside in the 1950s and 60s, where Black middle class residents provided role models for kids growing up.

CORE Protests School Segregation 1963-5

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began organizing in San Bernardino in 1963, building a team of Black and white leaders to take direct action against school segregation. In March 1964, they led a protest at a School Board meeting to protest the failure of the board to "take positive action to correct racial imbalance" in the schools. Five members of CORE were arrested including Rev. D. Lyle Johnson, pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist church, Floyd “Buck” Wyatt (age 54), owner of Buck’s farm on the west side, Lloyd W. Honeycutt, Danny Joe Klein, and Ruby Ann Hamilton. They were represented by local lawyer Rufus Johnson and ultimately acquitted. This was only the first of many protests against unequal and segregated schools, which were created largely by housing segregation in San Bernardino.

Art Townsend & Precinct Reporter in the Movement 1965

The Precinct Reporter was founded by Art Townsend and Sam Martin in July 1965 as school desegregation protests were escalating in San Bernardino. Art Townsend served as a bridge figure between 1940s civil rights efforts and the 1960s. He was a founding member of CORE and an active supporter of the Community League of Mothers, and the paper became a vital vehicle for organizing for civil rights. Frances Grice remembered, “Art Townsend was our mentor. He became very close to us…He started promoting us and the League of Mothers... me, Bonnie and Val and Miss Lawndry and all the people.”

New Hope Baptist Church 1965

Rev David Campbell led New Hope Missionary Baptist church as the civil rights movement took off in the 1960s. Frances Grice described the church as "our Ebenezer." "When we started the civil rights movement. We went to New Hope for our first community meeting." New Hope had been founded in 1911 in the historic core of the westside but as the Black population moved north, so did the church opening a new building at 17th and Medical Center in 1965. New Hope Missionary Baptist remained a social center and a center for activism over the decades remains one of the largest Black congregations in San Bernardino.

Community League of Mothers Boycott for Desegregation 1965

The Community League of Mothers and CORE called a School Boycott and launched Freedom Schools as part of their school desegregation campaign in September 1965. The Freedom Schools were run by volunteers, with folk singer and teacher Clabe Hangan serving as principal. This freedom school in the Heavenly Gates Church of God in Christ served kids K-3 grade. Bobby Bivens remembered “a lot of discussion in the community as to whether to support the boycott or not support the boycott” because many still saw the  League of Mothers “as a bunch of rabble rousers.”

Penny University Folk Music & Civil Rights 1960s

This small folk music venue was opened at 162 S. Mount Vernon in 1963 by John and Olaya Ingro and it thrived in the regional folk music scene. John Ingro was a judge, a member of the Human Relations committee, and a white ally of civil rights efforts in the city. Singer Clabe Hangan (principal of the Freedom schools) was a regular, along with Sally Thomas and Keith & Rusty McNeil. They, along with the Mutonic 4, a gospel group from Redlands, became the core of the Messengers, a multiracial folk group that traveled around the region giving concerts to spread the message of the civil rights movement. Some of the members also mobilized to defend the home of Black family that broke the color line in Rialto in the mid 1960s. The folk music scene reminds us of the multiracial networks that came together to imagine and try to create a different future.

The Black Fathers Defend Youth at Cajon High 1968

The Black Fathers Organization founded by leaders like Rev. Dillard and Hardy Brown Sr. of Delmann Heights Church supported 350 students in a school boycott after racial violence when Cajon High opened and brought more Black students into white north San Bernardino neighborhoods in fall 1969. At a public meeting parent Wallace Greer asked, “Why can’t you build a high school in Black and Brown communities? You are building up white communities and tearing down Black and Brown communities. And why can’t we send whites to schools in Black communities?” Students won permission to start Black Student Unions and United Mexican American Student Clubs (UMAS) at the high school campuses.

National Council for Negro Women 1968

National Council for Negro Women (NCNW) chapters locally grew out of an earlier woman’s club Les Jeunes Amies founded by Lois Carson in the 1950s. Lois Carson helped found chapters throughout the Inland Empire, lifting up the teachings of Mary McLeod Bethune and Dorothy Height. NCNW allowed local women’s groups to connect with national groups and to build the leadership of local women. Many would become political pioneers like Lois Carson, Wilmer Amina Carter and Cheryl Brown. Listen to Wilmer Amina Carter talk about what NCNW means to her.

NAACP Lawsuit 1972 Muscott School

Frustrated with the slow pace of change, in 1972, Frances Grice and other activists joined with the NAACP to launch a lawsuit against Muscott School. They finally won in 1978, when Judge Egly ordered the school district to immediately desegregate plan immediately. Most of the plaintiffs were kids at Muscott school, including Bobby Bivens’ kids and Frances Grice’s daughter. Cheryl Brown describes the community's growing frustration with one effect of desegregation efforts, the closure of westside schools.