‘When We Were Colored, A Mother’s Story’ looks back on Oak Park life in the 1950s
When my family arrived in Oak Park in 1952, the Cold War was in full swing. The United States Air Force was expanding, and my dad, Bill Rutland, a civilian logistics engineer, was transferred from Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to Sacramento’s McClellan Air Force Base, along with hundreds of others. Finding a place to live was a struggle.
“The housing official at the base had found houses for his white colleagues with little or no difficulty. Brand-new, better than average tract homes, with an executive air, boasting of built-in modern appliances and situated near the base where they worked. And for about $250 down – But for Bill, nothing.”
This is how Eva Rutland, my mother, described my father’s search for a house in her memoir. My play, “When We Were Colored, A Mother’s Story,” is adapted from her work. It takes joy in looking back on a time, a place – and my middle-class black family – that are uniquely rooted in Sacramento and, particularly, the year 1952 in Oak Park.
Blocked from white neighborhoods by racial discrimination in housing that was pervasive – encouraged and sanctioned by the government – Dad was on his own. After weeks of being shown one shack after another by a black real estate agent, Dad eventually went searching on his own. He found a ramshackle house on the edge of Curtis Park, just off Broadway and a block or two west of what was officially Oak Park. As my mother explained, he saw some Asians playing in a yard across the street from a house with a “for sale” sign on it.
He figured if they would sell to Asians, they would sell to “coloreds.” And they did. But the black real estate agent was not allowed even to broker the deal. A white agent had to be brought in.
In those early days, we worshipped, at the Oak Park Congregational Church. My brother, sisters and I went to the library and attended ballet, tap dance and acrobatics classes at the Oak Park Community Center, a handsome brick building right across the street from McClatchy Park. We took piano lessons from an elderly white lady whose 5th Avenue house is gone now.
My mother did her serious food shopping at Arata Brothers on 34th Street. And every summer, the State Fair took place at Stockton Boulevard and Broadway. The old Oak Park fairgrounds, with its tree-lined avenues and graceful brick buildings was a favorite summertime gathering spot for all of Sacramento.
In 1965, my father was transferred to Europe, so my family left Sacramento for a few years. I didn’t return until after I graduated from college in the early 1970s. By then, the Oak Park I had known was gone.
As Sacramento State sociologist Jesus Hernandez, the local expert on housing discrimination has exhaustively documented, misguided urban renewal, discriminatory lending practices and freeway construction propelled Oak Park’s decline.
Urged on by the business community, The Sacramento Bee and other influential forces in the city, slum clearance upended troubled, but still vibrant, ethnic communities along Capitol Avenue and in what was known as the West End.
Thousands of displaced Japanese, Chinese, African Americans and Hispanics crowded into Oak Park, one of the very few city neighborhoods where racial covenants were not in place.
Federal lending guidelines declared integrated neighborhoods financially risky, so no federally-backed loans were available to build new housing in Oak Park or to finance improvements of existing housing. Not coincidentally, freeways were built just where racial covenants ended. Highway 99 on Oak Park’s west side, and Highway 50 to the north, sealed multiracial Oak Park off from its more affluent whiter neighbors. Social unrest in the ‘60s and ’70s further decimated the community.
But that was 50 years ago. Today, parts of Oak Park, particularly north Oak Park, are in the midst of an exciting but still fragile renaissance. New restaurants and businesses, hip new condos and apartments have sprouted along Broadway. Fixins, the soul food restaurant opened just a few months ago by former mayor and Oak Park native Kevin Johnson, is the most obvious symbol of the neighborhood’s comeback. I see young middle-class black families, who no longer live in the neighborhood but whose parents and grandparents used to live there, dining at Fixins on fried chicken and collard greens.
Skeptics, Jesus Hernandez among them, worry about gentrification, and with good reason. During the mortgage crisis, speculators bought huge swaths of Oak Park. In recent years, housing prices and rents have soared beyond the means of people who’ve lived there for years.
I, too, worry that poor people of color will be displaced again, but it’s not an issue just for Oak Park. All of Sacramento – all of California – is facing a housing affordability crisis that urgently needs to be addressed.