I grew up in West Michigan with two uncles who were UAW members. For many people, thinking about the UAW conjures up stories about Jimmy Hoffa, the good old days of Detroit's Big Three, or the involvement of the UAW with Democratic politics. In 1955, something happened in Milpitas, California, that didn't have anything to do with what you think of when I say UAW, and it had an unlikely accomplice: the Quakers.
In 1955, a developer named David Bohannon built a white-only subdivision named Sunnyhills in Milpitas, other developers built similar whites-only housing projects. Ford had announced that it was moving its assembly plant from Richmond (north of San Francisco) to Milpitas (north of San Jose). It would not be difficult for the white middle class UAW workers to find new housing in the area, but almost impossible for the plant's Black workers.
At this point, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC, a Quaker group committed to racial integration) offered to helped Ford's housing committee find a developer willing to build integrated housing. There was just one catch, everyone else was committed to stopping any such project.
The first hurdle was financing, no San Francisco Bay or San Jose area financial institution would lend them the money to build the houses, so the AFSC went to Metropolitan Life Insurance Company's vice-president, also a Quaker, who agreed to finance the project (this despite Met Life's own history of financing racially segregated projects).
Problem solved, now we can move ahead and build homes for workers with good paying jobs, right? Nope. The Santa Clara Board of Supervisors rezoned the chosen housing site from residential to industrial. When they picked a new plot, the Mountain View officials made it clear that no permits would be issued. A third attempt resulted in the local town increasing the minimum lot size to 8,000 square feet (from 6,000), ensuring that such homes would be unaffordable to middle class workers. The builder recruited by the AFSC gave up and walked away from the project.
The new builder hired by the AFSC wanted to build two separate segregated projects, a white one in the suburbs and one for Blacks between the Ford plant and land zoned for heavy industry. Here is where this ugly story finds a ray of hope. The choice of moving ahead with these two projects was put to the UAW workers of the new Ford plant. The majority of these workers were white, and had much less trouble finding housing than their co-workers. "Although the membership was overwhelmingly white, the union adopted a policy that it would support only developers who would commit to integrated housing." (The Color of Law, p. 118, emphasis mine)
A third builder obtained a tract of land next to David Bohannon's whites-only Sunnyhills project. The UAW was able to tell its Black members in Richmond that a new development, Agua Caliente, was being built. "David Bohannon's company, however, remained fiercely opposed to an integrated project adjoining Sunnyhills, and after a San Francisco newspaper reveled the plan to establish 'the first subdivision in the Bay Area where Negro families will be sold homes without discrimination,' the company began to pressure the newly formed Milpitas City Council to prevent the construction of Agua Caliente by denying it access to sewer lines." (p. 119) The City Council follow suit, raising the sewer connection fee by a factor of 10. It was a clear plan to prevent minorities from living close to Sunnyhills. When the builder persisted, despite this racist price increase, Bohannon's company filed a nuisance lawsuit to prevent the project from using a county owned drainage ditch between the properties. The UAW, not known for rolling over, responded with their own offensive, boycotting the Sunnyhills project, and showing up at open houses to discourage other would-be buyers.
Eventually, Bohannon sold his company to a new developer who also purchased Agua Caliente, and construction was able to be completed. Problem over? Not yet. The FHA continued to refuse to insure mortgages to borrowers living in integrated neighborhoods (a racist federal policy), making the cost of mortgages to buyers in the development higher with an increased 5.5-9% interest rate. This could be thought of as an 'integration fee', designed to discourage integrated housing projects. The UAW offered to guarantee the loans with its pension fund, at which point the FHA backed down provided that the development be converted to a co-op so that Blacks owned a piece of the housing development not individual homes.
In the end, the efforts of the Quaker AFSC and the UAW resulted in a completed project, but the higher cost of delays, legal fees, and financing made the homes affordable only to Ford's highest paid workers. The Ford plant closed in 1984, and today Milpitas has many Hispanic and Asian families, but only 2% of the population is Black.
"The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods...part of a national system by which state and local governments supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery." (p. 122)
While this story is disturbing for how deep and abiding it reveals racism to be in America's story, it also shows a second theme: the power of good men and women to fight injustice, even if they can't always achieve a clean win. So, when you need an interesting historic anecdote, share the time that the UAW worked with Quakers to integrate a housing project in California.
* This post is adapted from The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
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