Racial exclusion marred neighborhood's early history

By Dan Murphy
Viewpoint Staff Writer

Eva Rutland's recently reissued memoir, "When We Were Colored," shares many stories both candid and insightful about the cutting edge of integration in Curtis Park. Eva's childhood prepared her for this challenge, as she was raised in a mixed race neighborhood in Atlanta.

"I was in this mixed-up neighborhood… and it made me know that people were people, rich, poor, black, white…" said Rutland, now 90 years old.

She was also prepared to refute stereotyping, as a second generation college graduate. Her maternal grandfather, emancipated from slavery, became a successful shoemaker. He and Eva's grandmother put all of their nine surviving children through college.

In 1952, when Eva moved to Curtis Park, she and her family bought a home on 27th Street north of Second Avenue. This was the only area where homes were available for people of color. The housing stock there is among the oldest in Curtis Park, with some houses dating to the 1890s.

The lack of demand in the 1950s for these older houses provided an opportunity to those other than Caucasians wanting to live here. Sellers could not be faulted for taking any offer they could get. Even in the 1940s a few colored families had been able to gain purchase here, as evidenced by a sprinkling of their children in the Sierra School photographs.

Informal social pressure was not the only barrier to integration in Curtis Park. There was also the prospect of a lawsuit for crossing the color line.

Before World War I, there had been no legal restrictions on home ownership in Curtis Park based on ethnicity. None were needed, social pressure alone was sufficient. In a Nov. 6, 1910 issue of The Sacramento Bee, it was noted that there were "probably… between 800 and 1,000 Negro residents of Sacramento city and county," the smallest of the identified ethnic groups.

However, the World War stirred more people of color into the American melting pot. "In the war, the Negro had a chance to make good and he did make good," noted Dean William Pickens in an August 1919 lecture in Oak Park, sponsored by the AME Zion Church.

Later that month, a club for Negro veterans opened at 3401 Second Avenue. At the opening, Dr. G. C. Simmons said, "the colored people have not had the recognition politically to which they are entitled."

Of course, African Americans were not the only group against whom discrimination was practiced. In May of 1921, The Sacramento Bee reported that: "The purchase and occupancy of a dwelling at 2632-21st Street has aroused indignation in the neighborhood." Virulent editorials decrying the "Japanese menace" were a staple of this period.

The increased profile of minority groups after the war led to "a more striking recent restriction [in subdivision lot deeds] so [a purchaser] may be sure what the color and race of his next door neighbor will not be." (Sacramento Bee, Apr. 13, 1928.) Curtis Park's major new home subdivisions of the 1920s-South Curtis Oaks and Heilbron Oaks-have such restrictions in their deeds. "No Negro, Japanese or Chinese, or any person of African or Mongolian descent shall own or occupy any part of said premises," state the deeds from this period.

WWII led to an even greater leavening of white America. And it led to an even more disheartening reaction. Curtis Park homeowners in the major pre-WWI subdivisions built before 1920 south of Second Avenue had no deed restrictions to legally prevent sale of homes to people of color. This prospect led most of them to agree to record restrictive covenants.

Identical tract restriction agreements began circulation on Jan. 21, 1944 in Curtis Oaks, West Curtis Oaks and the West Curtis Oaks Addition. In each petition, was a clause to restrict the use of the signer's properties "to persons of the Caucasian Race forever." In the Curtis Oaks restriction recorded on Jan. 2, 1945, 161 lot owners-more than three quarters of the total-signed on. In West Curtis Oaks, 210 lot owners signed on to the restriction recorded on May 15, 1945. These covenants could be enforced by any signing homeowners to prevent a sale to a person of color.

The Supreme Court declared in 1948 that enforcement of such restrictions by means of a court injunction was unconstitutional. However, the question of enforcement by granting damages remained and was not outlawed until 1953, in a case from Los Angeles. Discrimination in public school assignment finally followed in 1954 with Brown vs. Board of Education. So the Rutlands, in moving into Curtis Park in 1952, were on the front lines of the post-war battle against segregation.

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