New Bio of Jessica Mitford Recalls Fine Old Conflict Over Civil Rights 

During World War II, the shipyard workforce in Richmond, CA. numbered one hundred thousand—and 20 percent was non-white.  By 1945, Richmond had the largest public housing program in the nation, with seventy-three thousand residents. Eighty percent of Richmond’s black residents lived in these hastily constructed units but in racially segregated fashion.

As a “thank you” for their service building ships to defeat fascism in Germany and Japan, Richmond’s fourteen thousand African Americans became victims of renewed housing and job discrimination and wholesale displacement efforts, after the war.

The city’s federally funded projects became a major postwar battle- ground because of decisions made by the powerful, all-white Richmond Housing Authority (RHA). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, nonwhite public housing tenants were showered with eviction notices warning that their apartment buildings were about to be torn down. 

The RHA’s demolition plans were protested by the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) because they were clearly designed to drive African Americans out of town. Black tenants responded by signing petitions and attending mass meetings, picketing the RHA, and organizing rent strikes, all of which slowed the process. Nevertheless, by 1953, all seventeen of the public housing projects near Richmond harbor had been dismantled. 

Private housing options in the city were far more limited for blacks than whites, as navy veteran and American Legion post vice-commander Wilbur Gary discovered. He tried to move his wife, Borece, and their seven children from the Harbor Gate wartime housing project when it was scheduled for destruction. Their new home, purchased through a black real estate agent, was located at 2821 Brook Way in a subdivision of eight hundred single-family homes called Rollingwood. During the war, it was a neighborhood almost exclusively occupied by white defense industry workers. 

The Gary family was greeted by white racists who planted a KKK-style cross on their lawn. The downtown Richmond office window of their realtor, Neitha Williams, was shattered by a brick. On the night of March 7, 1952, after the family actually moved in, a menacing crowd of four hundred white men and teenage boys gathered outside their new home to curse at them, hurl insults, and throw rocks.

The unruly mob ignored the county sheriff when he read parts of a US Supreme Court decision outlawing restrictive covenants of the sort that white homeowners wrongly assumed would continue to protect them from new neighbors of the wrong color.  The white protestors were similarly unmoved by the arrival of three white ministers who carried a US flag and a copy of the Constitution. The sheriff’s department made no arrests and little effort to defuse the situation.

Fortunately, hundreds of Bay Area progressives, both black and white, rushed to the scene that night–and for as long as it took thereafter–to defend the Gary family.  They formed a “human chain” around the house facing the screaming mob, in what became round-the-clock shifts. Among the first to arrive from Oakland was a key organizer of this fight, an immigrant from Britain whose activist career is now the subject of a new biography called Trouble Maker: The Fierce, Unruly, Life of Jessica Mitford. (Harper-Collins, 2025) 

Written by literature professor Carla Kaplan, this book cites many other examples of Mitford’s exemplary 20^th century solidarity with causes ranging from fighting fascism in Spain in the 1930s to saving the lives of unjustly convicted death row prisoners in the U.S.

Despite coming from an extremely privileged background—described in Mittford’s own 1977 memoir A Fine Old Conflict— she was able to “transform herself into an engaged, effective ally because she sought others out who had reshaped their lives through personal sacrifice. She read. She listened.”

Communist Party Members

In the Gary case, her more experienced partner was Buddy Green, a fellow Communist Party member, military veteran, and leader of the East Bay branch of the left-wing Civil Rights Congress (CRC). As Kaplan reports, the CRC took a “a more activist approach to the fight for civil rights—not only in court but in the streets—to picket and do things that were considered, at the time, beneath the dignity of the NAACP.”

Green and Mitford’s hurried consultation with the besieged Gary family led to “a many-pronged approach: physical protection of the house, trade union resolutions demanding police protection, and distribution of leaflets, drawn up by the CRC, throughout the Bay Area.” While keeping its distance from the CRC, the Richmond NAACP mobilized its members, to join more radical out-of-towners. Eventually, two dozen white home-owners broke ranks. They wrote a letter welcoming the Gary family to their neighborhood, which Green and Mitford widely publicized.

Community and labor campaigners then demanded that the Richmond city council ban segregation in post-war public housing. A special council session heard complaints about joblessness and other problems facing the city’s non-white residents. The city’s own discriminatory hiring practices came under fire. At the time, Richmond had no nonwhite firefighters and only two black police officers.

Sounding the Alarm, Then and Now

As Kaplan argues, the successful defense of the Gary family showed the potential of “an inter-racial, cross-class, cross-gender coalition” capable of mobilizing at a moment’s notice. This was similar to today’s emergency response efforts triggered by the local appearance of any uniformed thugs from Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE).

A decade after her involvement in Richmond’s most famous fair housing fight, Jessica Mitford became one of the leading “muckrakers” in America. In 1963, she published a best-selling book on widespread consumer rip-offs by the funeral industry. In The American Way of Death and many related articles, Mitford exposed “corrupt and predatory practices” that exploited millions of poor and working-class people after a death in their families. Her investigative journalism led to major regulatory reforms and positive changes in funeral home behavior.

During her varied late-in-life journalism career, Mitford published multiple memoirs and tackled other topics like prison reform, Nixon Administration prosecution of political dissenters, and the over-medicalization of child birth Mitford’s American Way of Birth was one of her last works.

CounterPunch readers will find Troublemaker to be a long read (as in 581 pages worth). But the subject of this autobiography, who died in 1996, was a long-time maker of “good trouble.” Her exemplary activism is worthy of emulation by defenders of civil rights, civil liberties, and immigrants in California today. As foes of Trump here and across the country sound the alarm about the menacing arrival of ICE, the Gary family story reminds us about the importance of showing up in time!

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