April is Fair Housing Month, the time we annually celebrate the passing of the Fair Housing Act, the federal legislation designed to eliminate housing discrimination and create equal opportunity in every community.
Before the Fair Housing Act of 1968, owners and sellers could refuse to rent or sell to anyone, they could falsely deny the availability of housing for sale or rent, and they could set different terms to anyone based on a person’s race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or ability.
For the first 21 years of my life I lived in a segregated community, the Westside of San Bernardino, which was predominantly African-American. All of our neighbors first on California Street and then Gardena Street were other Black families. Yes all of them, except for Mr. and Mrs. Vox, who lived on the corner of 20th and Gardena. They seemed to belong to another time and place. They were, I believe, European immigrants who must have bought their home before World War II. That house, as I recall, looked much older than all the others that surrounded it, including ours. My mother recently explained that they owned a lot of citrus groves in the area and simply liked their quaint little house too much to move, even after the neighborhood became populated with young African-American families all around them.
Directly across the street from our house was the Macon family, Mr. and Mrs. Sam Macon, an older middle class couple, active in the community, and well known professionals whose grown children were also professionals – a nurse and an accountant. Next door to us was the Rush family, Dolly and Leroy, with their many kids and grandkids. There was always a house full there.
But Mr. and Mrs. Vox were the folks on the block who clearly didn’t belong. Like the fictional character Wilson from the television show Home Improvement, Mr. Vox never seemed to leave the confines of his chain link fence. I remember hearing him speak in broken English with a hard and guttural accent as he worked in his yard pruning his rose bushes or his kumquat tree. Fruit he would gather, bag, and pass over the fence to kids in the neighborhood. I don’t remember Mrs. Vox at all. But they were the only “diversity” I remember in that neighborhood.
Years later, when we moved to Pennsylvania Street, we once again had all Black neighbors. I never thought it odd. Never once wondered why. At the time, I had no idea that our neighborhoods were products of redlining, steering certain people to and away from certain communities based on their race. Almost every Black family I knew lived in Black neighborhoods, until my Aunt Zelma and her family moved to the hills of Redlands above Prospect Park. That was like a different world to me. They were the diversity. They were the trailblazers, an interracial family, in a very affluent and very White neighborhood.
While my youth was spent living in segregated communities, my son has grown-up in completely diverse neighborhoods. At 21, he has lived next to Latinos, Whites, Asians, a Black same sex household, older couples, families with young kids, in historically African-American neighborhoods, and in brand new developments carved out of acres of citrus groves.
I am not suggesting that segregated communities are a thing of the past, but because of the Fair Housing Act, whose passage was accelerated at the urging of President Lyndon B. Johnson immediately following the assassination of Martin Luther King, it’s nothing like it used to be. As my friends at the Fair Housing Council of Riverside County constantly remind me, discrimination in housing still exists. We must continue to educate buyers and renters of their rights and sellers and landlords of their responsibilities and restrictions under the law.
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