Glacial Change in the Promised Land

Never before, it is said, had the San Fernando Valley Assn. of Realtors staged such an impressive gala. Four hundred people had gathered at this black-tie-optional event Saturday evening at the Sheraton Universal, among them Mayor Richard Riordan and a Who’s Who of Valley lawmakers, all there to dine and schmooze and witness history in the making. “History in the Making,” in fact, was the banquet’s theme.

And what made this night so historic?

A 44-year-old Northridge man named Mel Wilson was being inaugurated as the group’s new president. He is the first African American, in fact the first person who isn’t white, to be so elected by his peers.

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Check the calendar if you must. This is 1997. And this is Los Angeles. You might think that we as a society would be beyond making a fuss over the first black this, the first Latino that. Before Riordan, L.A. had a black mayor for 20 years. Yet when the Valley Realtors elected a black man as president, there were pats on the back all around.

The Mel Wilson celebration, then, is one of those ambiguous milestones in race relations. Yes, America has come far, but it’s taken a circuitous route, and we’ve still got a way to go. The unity his election signifies is, in some ways, the flip side of the disharmony of the rancor over affirmative action, Ebonics and O.J. Simpson.

Spend an hour with Wilson in his Northridge office, listen to his up-by-the-bootstraps tale, and it’s easy to understand why he has won the respect of his peers. Nor is it difficult to understand why Mayor Riordan tapped him to serve on the Metropolitan Transit Authority board of directors.

The story is of a boy who never knew his father, a boy who grew up in deeply segregated Alabama, in the small town of Boligee. There was a school a quarter-mile from home but that was for whites, so Mel rode the bus 10 miles to the black school. He was 10 years old when his family piled its belongings into a U-Haul and drove West, settling in the Mission Hills-Pacoima area.

“This was like the Promised Land,” he says. It didn’t bother him that his new teachers sent him to a speech therapist to cure him of his thick Southern drawl. “I thought I was getting special attention.”

His mother and grandmother, Wilson says, instilled in him a drive to succeed. Wilson was gifted athletically, but at a junior high job fair, he says, he developed a burning desire to become a certified public accountant.

At Cal State Northridge he switched his emphasis to business management. He also tried out for the football team as a defensive back. Two years later he was awarded a scholarship and as a senior was named to the Kodak All-America team. He played professionally in Canada for two years before a knee injury sent him back to the Valley.

As a football star, Wilson says, he’d often be introduced around the Valley at civic meetings and charity events. Everybody wanted to shake the All American’s hand. But as a young real estate agent, he discovered, nobody in Northridge wanted to do business with him. So he went back home to Pacoima and Mission Hills, areas that generations of red-lining had deemed the place where black folks would live in the Valley.

Wilson worked hard, volunteered for good works and at age 30 became president of the Pacoima Chamber of Commerce. “I’d do projects, then bring in the elected officials to take credit,” he recalls, grinning. “They loved it.”

Pols started appointing him to various panels. In time Wilson’s networking led to his election as president of the Valley’s United Chambers of Commerce. In recent years, he says, colleagues had asked him to seek the leadership of the Realtors group, but he declined.

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“Fear,” he says, finally prompted him to run. This fear has nothing to with race, everything to do with business. In his address to the Realtors, he spoke of the need to adapt to the Internet and to develop “virtual” property walk-throughs via computer technology.

It was a proud night for Wilson. A religious man, he thanked the Lord and his family. He also saluted his fellow Realtists, a group that lives on as another reminder of this industry’s racist history. Blacks who were once barred from joining Realtor groups formed this alternative organization.

“Overall, the whole industry is opening up,” Wilson said a few days later.

Gone are the days that a black family looking to buy in Encino would be pointed to Pacoima. This, Wilson says, is both a sign of social progress and economic enlightenment.

“The thing that pushes it more than the morals,” he explains, “is the money.”