Racial relations during college.

 

COLLEGE 1957-1961

UCLA

My first freshman semester was at UCLA. I pledged Alpha Gamma Delta sorority. It was all white. There were black and Jewish sororities, and possibly some others.  Alpha Gam was very wary of anyone coming from Hawaii as they might be part Asian. We had a Jewish Sorority over for dinner one evening. The hashers put something on the tables derogatory to them, I don’t remember what it was. I didn’t know the connotation at the time., but the hashers did and our guests did.  We were embarrassed and apologized. The hashers were reprimanded, but they were not fired.

One of teachers (I think she was a graduate student) spent a lot of time bragging about the fact she was married to a Eurasian.

Classes were mixed all races. No incidents and no grade disparity. Coming from essentially all white schools, I guess I thought there would be.

GLENDALE COLLEGE

I had changed majors five times and wanted to take a semester off to decide what I wanted to major in. My mother said no. I was still 17, so I had to do as I was told and enrolled in Glendale Junior College. At the time junior colleges were part of the K-12 system not the college system. Back in Glendale, no contact with black students.

CALIFORNIA STATE COLLEGE AT LOS ANGELES

For upper division I went to California State College at Los Angeles. It is now a  university. For the most part, we just studied together as students. There were a lot minority students dues to its location near downtown LA.

One day I parked my car in the parking lot and a black woman spit on my car as she walked by. I first thought I might have accidently taken her parking place or nearly run her down. But she was too far from her car for the former and coming from the wrong direction for the latter.

I listened as a black classmate in college described going to a NAACP meeting in Tennessee or Kentucky that turned out to be Communist and he left.

CITY OF GLENDALE

At the end of my junior year, I got married and went to night school. I had a job with the Glendale Planning Department, working in zoning administration.

A family had converted a bus into living quarters to use for mission trips to Mexico. He neighbors complained that it was an eyesore. It was painted in what would become hippy style, but I wondered if there was more to it. The owners were the family of the cute little song leader that had dated the Korean hunk.

Glendale was having to stop the segregation of the city due to the Supreme Court decisions. They zoned car washes and other businesses that hired black employees to the very edge of time adjacent to Los Angeles hoping they would live in LA.

Worst of all for Glendale the Nazi party decided that since it was the largest all whit city in the country it would be a good place for their headquarters. Glendale did not. Situated between Pasadena and it’s Rose Bowl and Burbank and the TV studios, this was not what they wanted as their claim to fame. The Nazis moved in and their power went out. Glendale owned their own power and water company. They were very apologetic as it took about 2 weeks to fix. Finally, they had power and the water failed. This alternated until they left town for El Monte.

COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES

I had graduated, but my husband had not. I took a job with Los Angeles County as an examiner in their personnel department.

As I remember our divisions were pretty white. One more administrative division had a lot of women that had been hired during WWII, they tended to grade applicants down for being minority. Test development tended to grade them up. I just graded people. Sadly for all applicants how you scored on interviews was a bit arbitrary unlike the written exams.

The maintenance people that came in to clean at night had to have all black teams on a floor and all Hispanic on another floor because of the racial and gang tension there would be bloodshed if they didn’t.

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