Selling the American Dream to All : James Robinson Defied Racism as a Realtor and a Neighborhood Agent for Change

In the late 1950s, armed with a realtor’s license and a strong desire to succeed, James Robinson began selling homes in the San Fernando Valley--at least in the tiny area of Pacoima where African Americans lived.

Ignoring the horror stories of racism and the unspoken covenants that kept blacks out of neighborhoods outside Pacoima, he set up shop and went to work selling not just homes, but suburban dreams for fellow blacks.

Over the years, Robinson, now 85, became a venerable master trader, able to navigate over and around residents enraged by the mere idea of having black neighbors.

“I was told that I wouldn’t be accepted--that I would never make it--because I was colored, but I wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “I was the first one out here, and I was trying to open the door up for the other folks.”

Robinson’s refusal to bend to peer pressure and threats cracked open the door for the start of a slow but steady westward migration of black residents across the Valley from Pacoima, the community in the northeast corner that was once the only area with many African American residents.

His experience, like that of many other blacks who sought better housing in areas traditionally reserved for whites, was a bitter-with-the-sweet reflection of the era’s struggle between racist housing policies and a desire for change, even by many whites.

Robinson “is kind of a living legend around here,” said Jim Ezell, a real estate agent with Mickie Ardi & Associates. “Longevity is not a cornerstone of our business, and he has been around forever.”

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The Valley’s African American population today is about 55,000, or about 4% of the region’s 1.5 million residents, and U.S. Census data suggests that the old pattern of where black residents live in the Valley has changed drastically, spreading from the northeast corner to all areas.

The changes were painful for some early residents and for Robinson, whose professional victories sometimes resulted in personal defeats.

“I was accused of leaving the small community of black realtors behind, but I told them that I saw myself as the guy who was opening the gates so the rest could eventually come with me,” he said.

Born in the small east Texas city of Marshall, Robinson attended Shorter College in Little Rock, Ark., before working his way first to Chicago and then to Los Angeles, where he met a man who would change his life--Joseph Beecham, a prominent African American real estate broker.

Robinson, who began working for Beecham in 1952, earned his own license in five years and decided to strike out on his own in Pacoima.

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He began selling homes in Valley View Village, a 200-acre tract of about 1,000 bungalows built by retired heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis. The small three-bedroom houses, most of which still stand on Pacoima side streets between Foothill Boulevard and San Fernando Road, sold for between $9,500 and $12,500, Robinson remembered.

At the time, this was the only Valley community where African-American home buyers were welcomed, those who lived there during that era recall unanimously. Although the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1948 that racial exclusion covenants long common in residential deeds could not be legally enforced, the written prohibitions had been replaced by unspoken agreements among home sellers and real estate dealers, Robinson says.

“I sold homes (in Pacoima) to black teachers, preachers and business people, because that’s the only place they could live in the Valley,” he said. “There were state laws on the books that made everything accessible to everyone, but there was still that gentleman’s agreement not to sell to blacks.”

After beginning in the “blacks-only” zone, however, he branched into other neighborhoods.

He also was part of a small black professional community that ran businesses on Van Nuys Boulevard. Robinson’s real estate office was next to a barber shop owned by Hillery T. Broadus. It was the place where black men sat, talked and compared their experiences, said Zedar Broadus, the barber’s son who today heads the San Fernando Valley chapter of the NAACP.

In 1962, influential members of the San Fernando Valley Assn. of Realtors nominated Robinson for membership.

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“There were members who didn’t want to see me cross the street” to their turf, he said, but membership gave him the access he needed to expand his business. Through contacts within the realtors’ group, he was introduced to the local political scene. Ernani Bernardi, the former Los Angeles city councilman who was a developer before he became a politician, remembers hiring Robinson to sell a 62-house project in Pacoima.

He used that access to write a proposal for the Pacoima Multi-Purpose Resource Center, which was constructed by the city for Pacoima residents in 1964. Over the years, Robinson has served on numerous advisory boards for city officials and been named an honorary mayor of Pacoima, the community he loves.

By the mid-1960s, Robinson was helping black families move into sometimes hostile white neighborhoods west of Sepulveda Boulevard, although home ownership in those neighborhoods took some doing.

Take the home purchased by Ken Kelly, now 66, an electrical engineer at Hughes Aircraft. In the spring of 1963, Kelly started looking at houses in the West Valley. He liked a five-bedroom house on a half-acre lot in Northridge, but when he inquired about it, a real estate agent told him it was unavailable.

After several months of seeing the “For Sale” still in the yard, he became suspicious and asked a white co-worker to check it out. Eventually, his co-worker purchased the house with Kelly’s money and signed it over to Kelly.

When he and his family moved in, the tract’s developer knocked on their door and offered them an all-expenses-paid vacation to leave the neighborhood for a couple of months while he tried to sell the remaining homes, Kelly recalled.

“I gave him a tongue-in-cheek estimate of what it would cost for my family to disappear,” Kelly said.

But most of the black families interviewed remember at least one neighbor who extended the hand of friendship, in contrast to those who would not accept them.

“I became good friends with four or five families,” Kelly said of his old house on Encino Avenue. “And there were four or five, it was clear, that were never going to be my friends.”

He remembers a white female neighbor embracing his wife as the other family moved away after years of friendship.

Still, Ted and Gloria Larkin of Northridge said they learned the best way to clear a West Valley real estate office in the early 1960s: walk in the front door with a black client.

The Larkins met Kelly and a handful of other black residents at the newly formed San Fernando Valley Fair Housing Council, which at the time was as important an organization for black residents as the NAACP, they said.

In 1963, the same year they purchased a home in the 8400 block of Garden Grove Avenue, both Larkins became realtors. As soon as they were certified to sell homes, they began filling a map at the fair housing office--designed to show where blacks lived in the Valley--with red pins indicating home sales to African American families.

“We had about 10 pins on the map when we started, and we ran out of pins, not just from me selling,” said Gloria Larkin. “Other people were selling, too.”

Robinson also experienced difficulties from some residents in the neighborhoods where he was trying to selling homes. Suspicious neighbors did everything from rip his “For Sale” signs from the ground to offer him a cash commission not to sell a home.

“I had residents from one neighborhood come to my office and investigate me and my business,” Robinson said.

Los Angeles School Board Supt. Sid Thompson, an African American, says that when he first started looking at Valley homes, he attended open houses where realtors ignored him. “When I finally got a chance to speak, the realtor told me, ‘There are brochures on the desk. Take one if you want,’ ” Thompson said.

When he realized what he was up against, he went to see Robinson, who was “gentlemanly but direct,” Thompson said. “He told me that my family deserved to live where we wanted to and he was going to help us accomplish that.”

With Robinson helping, Thompson moved his wife and two children to Mission Hills in the summer of 1960, in part to escape the daily commute from Hollywood to his job as a teacher at Pacoima Junior High School.

“He walked the deal through in a professional way,” Thompson remembered. “He had a resolve to get me in and I had resolve to go.”

Robinson warned Thompson that living in this neighborhood might prove a “little tricky.” But beyond a few egg-throwing incidents at his car and a confrontation with a woman who called him by a racial epithet, there were few problems, Thompson said.

Robinson both helped black home buyers integrate Valley neighborhoods and provided a foothold for black realtors who came after him, said Ben Slayton, a former realtor who ran one of the Valley’s largest real estate offices in the 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1964, before President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights bill, before affirmative action programs, there were few African Americans in professional positions, Slayton said.

“He saw something in me, he was my mentor,” said Slayton, now 54. “And I called him my father. If I had had an opportunity to choose my dad, he would have been my dad. He is a good man,” said Slayton, who opened his own office in Sylmar in 1964. The business expanded to employ 30 agents working at three Valley locations within 10 years and Slayton is now manager of the multifamily division of Western Bank.

Robinson’s days as a mentor and a realtor are pretty much over, but he still shows up at his one-room Mission Hills office almost every day. There are elderly longtime clients--most of them still living in Pacoima--who continute to need his help, he said.

And the faded license of Joseph Beecham, the man who gave him his first job, hangs in the far corner of the room, complying with Beecham’s last wish.

“It seems like history was repeating itself,” Robinson said. “Because my license hung in his office first,” he laughed.