Blooming Branches: Oppression and Solidarity in the 1920s and 1930s

Redlining the American Dream in Dayton Heights

In Part II of this series I looked at what shaped the Albrights as activists, bringing skills and talents to Dayton Heights that would contribute to building a successful community.  But a “successful” community depends on who is defining success. In Part III, it’s important to look at who and what defined the shape and character of the neighborhood, as well as the consequences for good and ill that ensued.

If you study the 1900, 1910, and 1920 census records for the Dayton Heights neighborhood, especially around Westmoreland, you will see the names of many Europeans, including French, German, and English settlers, along with a smattering of Swedish and Danish families.

1910 Census for the Dayton Heights area in Los Angeles, California. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

By the time of the 1930 census, the record paints a completely different picture.

1930 Census for the Dayton Heights area in Los Angeles, California. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

The late 1920s through early 1930s is the decade when Japanese immigrants, Issei (“first generation” of Japanese in the U.S.) and Nisei (the second generation of Japanese in America, U.S. citizens by birthright) families settled into the Dayton Heights tract. My grandmother, Crystal Albright Marshall, remembered the Ozawa family being one of the first Japanese families to arrive in the area, followed by the Endo, Saito, and Hoshizaki families. 100 years later, the Ozawa Boarding House and Ozawa Employment Agency buildings are still on the 500 block of Virgil Avenue and are now designated historical landmarks.

The Albright clan was growing and evolving as well. Josephine and George Albright’s first son, Roy, had moved back east to study music at Oberlin College. While there, he met his future wife Mae and they started their family. But when their two boys, Carl and Arthur Albright, were still quite young, Roy decided to move the family back to the homestead to be close to his parents, his sister Crystal (my grandmother), and his younger brother Wendell. 

As the Albright clan branched out, Dayton Heights changed not only demographically but in its very design. Orchards gave way to a French bakery and wine garden run by a beautiful French woman whose parrot loved coffee. Little stores started to spring up. If your day job didn’t involve growing your own vegetables, you could walk to Virgil avenue, where the 101 freeway now slices off the south west corner of the neighborhood, and buy vegetables just as fresh as if you had grown them yourself. The farmland was going, single family homes with big backyards were coming, and horses pulling fine buggies and working carts alike began sharing newly-defined streets with cars and trucks.

In the years before World War I, the Albright grandsons took to the more rural environment of the Township of Los Angeles after leaving the big cities of Ohio. There was always something to do and by their early teens, both boys, especially Carl, started working after school and on Saturdays. Mr. Suetake, who cultivated beds of cucumbers in a large greenhouse and ran a nursery on the corner of Madison Avenue and Middlebury Street, liked Carl’s interest in plants and growing them on a large scale. He took Carl under his wing, teaching him everything about the nursery business. Another local nursery was run by the Yoshida family, and Mama Jimmy, as the matriarch was known, was always trying to lure Carl away from Mr. Suetake, who was having none of it. Instead, if there was no work at the Suetake Nursery, he would send Carl west into North Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard to work for yet another Japanese outfit, where he would earn a dollar and a quarter a day. Carl said that if he went even farther into Laurel Canyon he could earn a dollar and a half a day.

From left to right, Carl and Arthur Albright stand behind their younger counterparts in the family portrait. Taken in Dayton Heights circa 1890. Photo courtsey of the Albright-Marshall Archives.

But no matter how fruitful this neighborhood was, it was not an island, sufficient unto itself, nor a state or country. And while Dayton Heights had always been a strong example of multiracial solidarity, the world continued spinning around it, sometimes in contrary directions and to contrary purposes.

During the early days of the 20^th century, the governments of both the United States and Japan struggled for power over Japanese immigration as well as territorial issues involving China and the Philippines.

“Between 1861 and 1940, approximately 275,000 Japanese immigrated to Hawaii and the mainland United States, the majority arriving between 1898 and 1924, at which point quotas were adopted that ended Asian immigration. Many worked in Hawaiian sugarcane fields as contract laborers. After their contracts expired, a small number remained and opened up shops. Other Japanese immigrants settled on the West Coast of [sic] mainland United States, cultivating marginal farmlands and fruit orchards, fishing, and operating small specialty shops. Their efforts yielded impressive results. Japanese Americans controlled less than 4 percent of farmland in 1940, but they produced more than 10 percent of the total value of the state’s farm resources.”

But the success and ingenuity of the Japanese Americans, primarily in farming, was unwelcomed competition to some, primarily based on racial animosity.  

During the same period, the peasant uprising that was the Russian Revolution of 1918 raised serious concerns in the U.S. government about the possible spread of communism in the United States among a growing and agitated population of laboring Americans who did not have a real stake in the capitalist enterprise. Politicians and business leaders believed that encouraging home ownership for working class white families would be a direct and effective way to combat the threat of communist infiltration. 

Over the next 25 years, the federal government developed tools explicitly intended to enable white families – their preferred citizens - to buy property, put down roots, and feel that they had a real shot at the American Dream. The federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was established in 1933 to provide low interest loans to these home buyers. To “protect” its investments, the HOLC enforced restrictive covenants and advanced other policies specifically to prevent the access of non-whites to ownership in certain areas. The HOLC hired appraisers to canvas and evaluate entire neighborhoods, map them, and rate their desirability for lending. Areas where Black people and immigrants lived were shaded in red on the appraisal maps (the origin of the term “redlining”) and, by definition, automatically deemed “undesirable” for investment by both the government and private investors. This meant high interest loans–if loans were available at all–more expensive insurance rates, and minimal public support for physical and social infrastructure, a clear example of systemic racism. 

In his Area Description Report of February 28, 1939, the government appraiser of the Dayton Heights neighborhood described it as follows:

“The population is highly heterogeneous with more than a sprinkling of subversive racial elements, there being several concentrations of Japanese and Negroes within the district. There is also quite a Jewish population adjacent to the synagogue which is located in the northern part.  While by no means a slum district, the area is definitely blighted and is accorded a ‘medial red’ grade.”

Josephine Albright. Circa 1930. Photo courtesy of the Albright-Marshall Archives.

Josephine Albright was a consistent, reliable source of information for her immigrant neighbors about elections, political parties and politicians, community development, and representation in their changing neighborhood. She and the Issei “obasans” (Japanese for grandmothers) also enjoyed sitting together on their porches, watching their grandchildren grow and play. Even though they didn’t speak each other’s language, there was much sharing of information, culture, food, and friendship. This comradery was the reality of what the HOLC had chosen to call “subversive racial elements.”  

In 1971, when my grandmother Crystal Albright wrote her history of the neighborhood, it was clear the one thing that gave her a great deal of pride was that no matter what changes occurred—or why—the neighborhood remained built on enduring friendships, extending across cultures and generations.

Barbara Jean Marhsall and J-Flats neighbor Kyoko Hoshizaki, circa 1940. Photo courtesy of the Albright-Marshall archives.

Again, the value of the neighborhood is defined by the observer.

By 1941, a substantial percentage of Japanese people living on the West Coast were either citizens of the United States (Nisei) or parents of native-born citizens (Issei). Their lives and futures were grounded in the United States, in California, and in Los Angeles. However, when the Japanese Imperial Army attacked Pearl Harbor, this heinous act provided just the spark needed to set in motion an equally heinous act by the U.S. government: the imprisonment of more than 125,000 Japanese Americans.

According to the National Parks Service, which administered at least two of the former prison camps:

“Lobbyists from western states, many representing competing economic interests or nativist groups, pressured Congress and President Roosevelt to remove persons of Japanese descent from the west coast…regardless of their Constitutional or civil rights. During congressional committee hearings, Department of Justice representatives raised constitutional and ethical objections to the proposal…”

Indeed, if there were expressed concerns about constitutional or civil rights or ethical considerations, those voices were drowned out because less than three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forced removal of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to “relocation camps” inland. The U.S. Army was charged with carrying out the task.

As a consequence, on April 1, 1942 dusk settled on a darkened Westmoreland Avenue. Over on Virgil Avenue, the Ozawa boarding house was empty, locked, and shuttered. On this night, family units from small to large slept in horse stalls at Santa Anita Race Track, where horses had slept the night before, or in bleak, hastily constructed Army barracks at the Pomona Fair Grounds, surrounded by armed guard towers and razor wire. Marbles, jump ropes, tricycles and bikes were left in homes waiting for a next day’s play that would never come.

---

Check back in two weeks for the final part of this four-part series.

—

PLEASE NOTE: This article was supported in part by Quien Es Tu Vecindario, a local 501(c)3 in the neighborhood, through a grant from the L.A. County Department of Arts and Culture as part of Creative Recovery L.A., an initiative funded by the American Rescue Plan.