COMMENTARY ON BLACK HISTORY : It Took Decades of Struggle to Make This Month Meaningful : Prof. Carter Woodson’s dream of 1926 came true more slowly in Orange County than in many other places.

In 1926, black historian Carter G. Woodson inaugurated Negro History Week to recognize the contributions of African-Americans. This idea has evolved into designating February as Black History Month, with an array of lectures, programs and activities celebrating the achievements of African-Americans. Their primary purpose is to instill within blacks a sense of pride and to inform the general public of their accomplishments. As an activity by and largely for African-Americans, this celebration is as understandable as it has been enduring.

But some in Orange County will ask: “What is the meaning of this month to an area which long had a minuscule black presence and where today they account for less than 2% of its population? What lessons does black history hold for the nation at large?” I would reply that the experiences of African-Americans are not a contemporary fad but have lasting importance to understanding our nation’s history.

And there are few places where that history is less known but more insightful than Orange County.

Encompassing slavery and second-class citizenship, African-Americans have symbolized those who have not enjoyed equal rights or opportunities. Their virtual exclusion from Orange County for decades is a case in point.

While African-Americans were scarce in the West before World War II, Orange County was a particularly inhospitable area. Several towns had active Ku Klux Klans in the 1920s. They focused on other groups but helped set the county’s image as a poor place for blacks to live. In some places, blacks who stayed past dusk were arrested, and they found few jobs above menial labor. In 1940 only 287 blacks resided in Orange County.

World War II began a mass migration of black Americans to western cities, but Orange County attracted few of them. Blacks served at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, and some found jobs in the growing aerospace industry. But employment opportunities remained limited, and many who came to the county worked as laborers or maids.

Housing was even more restricted. Despite widespread building during the 1950s and ‘60s, few blacks were able to obtain homes outside of Santa Ana. In 1964 county voters supported Proposition 14, which nullified state fair housing laws, by a 3-to-1 margin. At a time when many criticized the treatment of blacks in Mississippi, some spoke of Orange County as its western counterpart.

Black History Month acknowledges this heritage of oppression by honoring persons who have helped to overcome it. During the 1960s particularly, Orange County brought forth such leaders. Its NAACP chapter campaigned to open employment opportunities, and several black Marines filed fair housing suits. Lincoln Mulkey, a Santa Ana postman, filed the lead suit that led the state Supreme Court to void Proposition 14. Others brought public attention to the county’s poverty problems and were among the first minority persons to gain elective office. Orange County had its own civil rights movement, and its accomplishments were substantial.

But overcoming discrimination did not close the income gap between black and white Americans. The Watts riots of 1965 brought attention to ghetto conditions and the warning that they were creating an America of “two societies, one white, one black, separate and unequal.”

Some thought Orange County was moving in that direction. Its black population more than tripled during the 1960s, but many had limited incomes. Two-thirds of them lived in Santa Ana, attending predominantly minority schools, while they remained virtually excluded from many other communities. Orange County seemed an example of the hopelessness of achieving integration or equality that made “black power” attractive to many African-Americans in the late ‘60s.

Since then, Orange County has done much to refute such despair. Its growing black population has entered business and government, often in white-collar positions. These jobs resulted from the county’s continuing boom, but blacks obtaining them was in part due to affirmative action programs and local groups that monitored them.

Even more striking was the opening of housing, largely in response to state and federal laws and pressure by local groups. As the black population more than doubled in the ‘70s, it located in many different areas, not in one ghetto. By 1980, Santa Ana contained only one-third of the county’s blacks and most children attended integrated schools. The 1980s would continue these trends. Quiet advances in occupational status were highlighted by four blacks serving as college presidents, and by 1990, blacks would live in every census tract with more than 100 people.

Orange County as an example of African-American success has its qualifications. Black History Month celebrates the achievements of one race, but that group is increasingly divided between a middle class and an underclass mired in poverty and crime.

Orange County may symbolize the former, but only a few miles away are examples of the latter, essentially kept out by runaway real estate prices and token efforts at affordable housing.

Finally, a spate of hate crimes over the past few years has revived the image of Orange County as a dangerous place for blacks.

But can a few cross-burnings negate widespread occupational advancement? Do continued complaints of housing discrimination offset their dispersal throughout the county?

Black History Month is a celebration, and the change of Orange County from a place blacks feared to set foot in to one where they enjoy a higher median income than in many other areas is worth celebrating. To have increased their population more than tenfold over the past 30 years while overcoming pressures toward ghettoization marks their history in Orange County as one of achievement.

In recognizing this we are realizing Prof. Woodson’s hope that Black History Month would be uplifting for blacks and whites alike.