Minorities Escaping Urban Life Witness Rise in Racial Intolerance

Gail Williams recalls the day she first wandered down the main drag of this two-stoplightlight Mojave Desert town, marveling at the rock-strewn beauty of the landscape, taking in deep breaths of clean country air.

For the North Carolina transplant, exploring the isolated community turned into love at first sight. But she soon suspected the feeling was far from mutual.

In 1992, after buying a three-bedroom house for an unheard-of $58,000 and finding work as a nurse, the 38-year-old African American woman discovered a hidden hostility in the high desert.

There were dismissive looks from store clerks who rolled their eyes and refused to wait on her, bottles thrown at her home, a mailbox ripped from its base. Cars screeched past her house, their occupants shouting racial epithets.

When called about the ruined mailbox, local authorities assured Williams the incident was merely the work of troubled kids and suggested she get a post office box.

“Every day, I worry about what might happen to my house when I’m gone,” she said. “I have this nightmare that I’ll come home and find it burned to the ground.”

Williams and other minorities in this remote San Bernardino County desert community say they have faced rising racial intolerance in recent months.

In October, an 8-foot-high swastika was set afire at the home of a Latino family. Three local men later pleaded guilty to the crime, with one sentenced to three years in prison for racial terrorism.

Earlier that month, in what authorities termed a race-related crime, a white resident was charged with assault after brandished a metal pipe at an African American man who was visiting his apartment building.

Last year, another black resident said, youths lit crosses outside her home, prompting her to move back to Los Angeles. And a local black minister recently had the throats of several of his cows slashed.

Experts say such incidents are becoming more common in isolated areas across California and the nation as longtime residents have begun to feel threatened by minorities moving from cities to escape crime and violence.

“What blacks who move to these small towns need to understand is that they’re going to hit a brick wall,” said Cheryl Brown, a reporter for the Black Voice News in Riverside. “Like in Joshua Tree, they’re going to encounter white residents who moved there to get away from them.”

Statistics documenting racially motivated crimes in small towns are scarce, but national experts say the trend toward violence is both evident and alarming.

“Since 1980, there has been a distinct jump in racism in places where an influx of minorities has threatened the community’s status quo,” said Jack Levin, a sociology professor at Boston’s Northeastern University and co-author of “Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed.”

“These are places you might call defended neighborhoods, areas previously all white--and many are in rural areas.”

In many cases, the first spike of bias-motivated incidents comes immediately after the first nonwhite family moves into a white neighborhood, Levin said. The number of incidents wanes until the minority population reaches about 20%, then increases again. When minorities reach 50%, there is a third rise in hate crime incidents.

“Headquarters for most white supremacy groups in the U.S. are in rural areas,” Levin said. “That’s no coincidence.”

Added Mark Potok, the editor of Intelligence Report, a publication of the organization Klanwatch: “The ideology of hate groups has reached into rural areas further than ever before. In many areas, the targets of the violence are those perceived as uppity blacks from the city.”

Still, outlying communities have not developed a method of classifying such crimes. And experts say rural victims fear reprisal if they report such incidents.

“These crimes are so poorly reported in rural areas,” said Fred Persily, director of the California Assn. of Human Relations Organizations. “People are beaten and killed and officials don’t report it as a hate crime. Kids are driven from schools. It’s alarming.”

The minority population of San Bernardino County has risen dramatically since 1970, while the percentage of whites has declined, according to U.S. Census figures.

Between 1970 and 1990, the year of the last census, the percentage of white residents in San Bernardino County dropped from 79.8% to 60.8%. During the same period, the percentage of Latinos rose from 16% to 26.7% and the percentage of African Americans nearly doubled, from 4.2% to 7.7%

A String of Incidents

Several race-related incidents have been reported recently in isolated communities across San Bernardino County. In August, an African American man was beaten by skinheads as he bought gas at a station in Hesperia. A 45-year-old black man remains in a coma after he was beaten in October by three whites in what officials suspect is a hate crime.

And in Twentynine Palms, a biracial couple in March sued a real estate agent for allegedly refusing to show them homes in white areas and referring to them as “a salt-and-pepper team.”

While racial tensions are common in small-town America, the geographic isolation of places like Joshua Tree--population 12,000, a quarter of whom are minorities--contributes to intolerant attitudes toward minorities, officials say.

“A certain undercurrent of prejudice and antisocial attitudes exists out here,” said San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Capt. Ron Perret, who is stationed in Joshua Tree. “But we keep an eye on things, and when they reach the criminal level, we act swiftly.”

County officials and local prosecutors say that while racially motivated crimes do take place in the area, they remain the exception rather than the rule.

“We don’t see great numbers of hate-related cases,” said Dennis Christy, a chief deputy district attorney for San Bernardino County. “They’re still a relative rarity.”

But Marilyn Johnson, vice president of the Inland Empire chapters of the Urban League, said she is keeping a close watch on Joshua Tree. “We’re concerned that authorities are pushing acts of racism aside as the mere acts of children,” she said.

Meanwhile, Michael Gennaco, civil rights coordinator for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, is investigating the possibility of federal hate crime charges against the three men implicated in the Joshua Tree swastika burning.

“The case just strikes out at you,” he said. “We’ve got to be more vigilant watching for these hate crimes in rural areas. Because we know they happen out there.”

In the meantime, Gail Williams said she doesn’t go shopping without an escort. “I can’t imagine why people don’t want me here. I don’t bother anybody,” she said. “I want to tell people, ‘Please let me live here. Please leave me alone. I promise I won’t bother you.’ I just want to live in peace.”

A Sign of Hate

On a moonlit desert night in October, Laura Molina awoke to a blast of heat outside her Joshua Tree trailer.

That’s when she saw the blazing 8-foot-high swastika.

“I knew exactly what it meant,” said the 21-year-old Molina, who is Latina and dates a Samoan man. She relocated her mother and two sisters several years ago to escape L.A.’s gang violence, never dreaming it would follow her to the country. “I’ve seen it in the movies. They want you to come outside so they can beat you up.”

Weeks later, the family still can’t fathom the crime. The men charged are neighbors they often greeted on the street.

Molina’s mother, Josefina Duarte, believes townspeople are tired of the influx of urban outsiders. “The locals want to shut the door,” she said. “They don’t welcome newcomers.”

Days after the swastika incident, 75 people gathered for an anti-violence vigil organized by resident Elia Arce--who said she herself has been the victim of racial prejudice in town.

“I’m a Latina living with a white man, and people don’t like that here,” Arce said. “They tell us right to our faces that it’s wrong to mix the races, that it’s a sin. I just write it off to fear and ignorance of anything that’s different.”

The vigil was intended to get the town’s attention. “I wanted to send a message to those closed-minded people in Joshua Tree that not everyone shares their narrow view of life,” Arce said.

Those in search of isolation find Joshua Tree the perfect spot. The town’s residents like their country music and the quaint names of area byways like Rocking Chair and Old Woman Springs Road.

The unincorporated community sits alongside the popular Joshua Tree National Park, but still remains a lonely-looking place, a dusty eye-blink along California 62, a town on the road to someplace else.

Unemployment runs high and 25% of the residents are on welfare. Many are scattered outside town along the surrounding rocky hillsides.

More than three-quarters of Joshua Tree residents are white. “About 20% are Mexicans, at least that’s what we call them,” said Chamber of Commerce Treasurer Tracie McNamee. An estimated 2% are African American.

Since the economic recession of the early 1980s, said Levin, the Northeastern University sociologist, many small-town residents have faced financial hardship and have felt ignored by their government, which they believe has concentrated its resources on the inner city.

“They feel thrown away,” he said. “They see people of color taking jobs previously reserved for whites. And when these people from the urban areas show up on their doorstep, the mood is right for retaliation.”

Susan Chaney, editor of the Hi-Desert News, calls the area a magnet for those wanting to drop out of society. “It’s easier to be antisocial here than in the city,” she said. “Folks here just don’t interact well. They want to be left alone.”

Barbara Grady, who is black, agrees. Moving here two years ago, she found locals standoffish, and winced when her kids faced racial slurs at school.

The biggest scare came when youths burned crosses on her lawn last year, yelling they were “pure white Christians” who didn’t want her around. Grady reported the incident to the FBI, but officials would not confirm whether they are investigating the matter.

“The people of Joshua Tree ran me out of town,” said Grady, who now lives in Los Angeles. “I hope they’re happy.”

For 20 years, Wiley Burton, an area minister and husband of singer Nancy Wilson, says he has felt an undercurrent of racial tension. Recently, someone slashed the throats of several of his cows and spray-painted racial slurs on nearby telephone poles.

While he says most of his neighbors condemn such behavior, a few bad eggs cause trouble. “These situations are well-hidden, but they happen,” he said. “In towns where jobs are scarce, people get confused and start looking for scapegoats. There are vultures who prey on low self-esteem.”

Several white residents said they believe the community’s racist sentiments are relegated to pockets of opinionated people. Local bar owner John Dolan called the cross-burnings kids’ stuff: “The teens who do these things don’t even know what racism is.”

But Sandra Moore, an activist for the L.A.-based Congress of Racial Equality, says the incidents cannot be written off as the mere work of children. “What’s it going to take out there to get people’s attention? Does somebody have to get killed?”

Karen Callahan is one white resident who has felt the racial sting in Joshua Tree. “Sometimes this town reminds me of the comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s routine about rednecks,” she said. “But out here, it’s not so funny.”

Gail Williams believes the tension in Joshua Tree runs deeper than a couple of confused kids. “The people who drive past my house yelling ugly names are grown men and women,” said Williams, now a nurse in a Palm Springs hospital.

“I have no problem with the kids. It’s their parents who scare me.”