Dream home came with racial restrictions

In 1947, Frank Louis Drye, a highly decorated veteran of two world wars, brought his family from Alabama and bought a house in a well-to-do Los Angeles neighborhood. The purchase soon thrust the Dryes into the ranks of a growing group of African Americans battling then-common racial housing covenants.

After weeks of searching, Drye and his wife, Artoria, found what one of their daughters recently described as their “dream house” -- a five-bedroom, three-bath Mediterranean with an orange tree in the backyard. But the home on Arlington Avenue in the Country Club Park neighborhood west of downtown carried a deed restriction forbidding its sale to nonwhites.

In Los Angeles, as well as throughout much of the rest of the nation, many whites tried to keep neighborhoods from integrating by writing such deeds. The restrictions, or covenants, were considered permanent and applicable to all future owners and sellers.

In California, the practice became increasingly common during and after World War II, when large numbers of blacks left the South and moved to the state in search of good jobs and better lives.

Until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down racial covenants in 1948, blacks and other minorities who challenged the restrictions often faced hostile neighbors and nasty court fights.

It is unclear whether either the Dryes or the previous homeowner, who was white, knew about the deed restriction -- but it didn’t take long for the fact to surface.

Within two months of the Dryes’ moving into the house, nine white neighbors sued them and two other black families who had recently bought homes in the neighborhood.

Some neighbors were polite to their faces, recalled Mary Bell, one of the Dryes’ five children.

But several made it clear they wanted the Dryes and two other black families -- the Stricklands and the Stewards -- to leave, said Bell, a retired teacher who was 16 at the time.

Bell’s younger brother, Art Drye, also a retired teacher, was an impressionable 13-year-old enrolled at Mount Vernon Junior High School when the trouble started.

“I remember seeing a flier in our mail, organizing a neighborhood meeting that stated something like ‘These people are bringing down real estate prices in the neighborhood,’ ” he said.

Clarence Wright, the pastor of Wilshire Presbyterian Church, lived across the street from the Dryes and led eight other white residents in seeking court enforcement of the deed restrictions, according to the Los Angeles Sentinel, a prominent black-owned newspaper.

The Los Angeles Times and other white-owned newspapers largely ignored the case.

Frank Drye had devoted himself to his family, the Army and music, his children said.

He was born in North Carolina in 1889. As a young adult, he played the cornet with blues legend W.C. Handy and attended a conservatory in Chicago.

In 1915, he moved to Alabama, where he was hired as bandleader at the Tuskegee Institute, founded by prominent educator Booker T. Washington. That same year, he played taps at Washington’s funeral.

In 1918, Drye joined the Army’s all-black cavalry to fight in France in World War I.

That September, he was burned with mustard gas in the Argonne Forest and was awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Discharged with the rank of captain, he returned to Tuskegee.

He met and married Artoria Williams, then 23, who was visiting from Georgia, in 1921. She had earned a teaching degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C. The couple settled in Tuskegee, where their children were born.

They saved money for the home they intended to build someday.

But World War II interrupted that dream. Drye was recommissioned as the band master at the Tuskegee Army Air Base.

“His band toured the nation selling war bonds,” said Art Drye, the family’s youngest, now 73.

Suffering from heart problems and discharged with the rank of major, Frank Drye moved his family to Los Angeles at the suggestion of an Army buddy.

They lived with the buddy’s family -- a wife and three children -- until they could find a place of their own.

“Boy, it was crowded there,” recalled daughter Bell, who enrolled in Los Angeles City College while her parents did their house-hunting, a quest that took six weeks.

It was the Dryes’ first home, and they had saved 26 years to buy it.

“If Mom wanted that house, my father was going to make sure she got it. He then made sure she would stay in it,” said Bell.

They soon found themselves in court and eventually were one of a number of cases that helped overturn the racial covenants, including that of Oscar-winning actress Hattie McDaniel.

McDaniel, with other black residents of her Los Angeles neighborhood, triumphed when a judge in 1945 threw out a lawsuit by whites seeking to enforce racial deed restrictions.

The younger Drye said his parents refused to back down. They “grew up in the South, where it took years before they could vote, so they were used to that kind of adversity,” he said.

“They were very socially connected in the black community here, a very close-knit group, where somebody knew somebody who knew somebody.”

That somebody was Loren Miller, a crusading black lawyer and journalist writing for the Sentinel and the California Eagle about property owners and agents who refused to rent or sell to minorities.

The Dryes’ victory came in October 1947, when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Stanley Mosk, an ardent civil rights supporter, ruled that the covenants were unenforceable and dismissed the lawsuit.

“There is no more reprehensible, un-American activity than to attempt to deprive persons of their own homes on a master race theory,” said Mosk, who went on to become the longest-serving justice on the California Supreme Court.

He died in 2001, and his career, including the Drye case, is memorialized in a display at the civil courthouse that bears his name in downtown Los Angeles.

His son, Richard Mosk, an associate justice of the California Court of Appeal, said the ruling took courage: “It was pretty gutsy for a young Superior Court judge who has to face the electorate.”

Stanley Mosk also is held in high esteem by the Drye family. “He was one fine judge,” said Art Drye.

White families began to move out of Country Club Park in subsequent years.

“The Rev. Wright was the first to sell his house,” said Bell. “We even bought some of the furniture from one of the other families.”

Her parents were not bitter, despite the experience of having neighbors sue to get them out of their home.

“My parents were quiet, educated people,” Bell said. “They never sought notice for their role in this case. They just wanted to buy a house with a lot of space for themselves and their growing children.”

Frank Drye died in 1957 at 69, and Artoria lived in her dream house on Arlington Avenue until her death in 2004 at 106.

“They fought hard to keep it,” Bell said. “And my mother never wanted to leave it.”

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cecilia.rasmussen@latimes.com