The Light-Years and Micromillimeters of Our History

Some serendipity put this book in my hands just now, in the wind-down days of Black History Month. It was published in 1948, the first--and for all I know the last--edition of the Negro Who’s Who in California.

It portrays a parallel world that existed in the years between the shimmering mirage of equality raised up like so much camouflage by the necessity and prosperity of World War II just gone, and the heartbreak and ferocity of the civil rights movement still to come.

In 1948, the South broke ranks with the Democratic Party over states’ rights--meaning integration--and the Supreme Court broke away from history, ruling that restrictive covenants that had kept white neighborhoods white were “unenforceable.” (It would be 20 more years before they were well and truly “unenforced.”)

The people in the Negro Who’s Who managed to prosper in a city where white department stores made black women put tissue paper over their hair before they could try on hats, where sections of seats at the movies and stretches of sand at the beach were designated for the Negro alone.

They were a black aristocracy, doctors and dentists, lawyers and artists, shop owners and publishers, insurance men and beauticians. There is some surge of nostalgia among African Americans for this world, I hear--at least for the part of it that spent black dollars with black merchants, that accorded standing and honor to blacks in a manner that, 50 years later, the Tantalus of integration has not yet begun to match.

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Leaf through this as you would through someone’s college yearbook, noting the garden clubs and the riding clubs, the hobbies and the sororities, and you might conclude that this amiable little world wasn’t so bad after all.

And then you read beyond the Orchid Club and church choir, to what they did, these men and women, and what forces they were up against to do it:

* Putnam Robert Smallwood, founder of the Home Owners Defense Council to end restrictive covenants, who loved golf--and must have had to play on a segregated course.

* Leon Whitaker, first black deputy district attorney, who boxed for Berkeley but gave up athletics after a match between Berkeley and Stanford was canceled because he was on the team.

* Jannie Sidney Bruington, whose daughter was the first black teacher and principal in Los Angeles’ schools, whose niece was the first black woman to graduate from Los Angeles High School.

* Charles Williams, “evacuated” from Los Angeles, as the book delicately puts it, with his Japanese wife for the duration of the war, returning to open a nightclub photo business with an “interracial staff of Negro, Caucasian, Japanese and Mexican camera girls.”

Richard Salinthus Whittaker, founder of L.A.’s first Negro hospital . . . Thomas L. Griffith, the lawyer who took Pasadena to court to open the Brookside Park swimming pool to all races . . . Roy and Minnie Lee Loggins, caterers to the movie studios and teachers to “all Negro girls of humble origins” . . . Jamaican-born John A. Somerville, first black graduate of USC and of its dental school, founder of the Dunbar Hotel, in whose home the first local NAACP branch was organized . . . Maceo Bruce Sheffield, movie serial stuntman, the West’s first Negro aviator, LAPD cop and opera impresario.

And the one who touched me most, actress Jessie Coles Grayson, whose distinction was her role in the film “Cass Timberlane,” a role that marked “the first time a Negro woman was called ‘Mrs.’ in a picture.”

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The calendar page of Black History Month has been bracketed this year by the sublime and the cartoonish--the presidential pardon of the first black West Point cadet, court-martialed 117 years ago because of his race, and the arrival in our carnival city of the Mardi Gras master, Dennis Rodman.

Another black man made history this month: James Byrd Jr., of Jasper, Texas, chained and dragged and torn to pieces behind a truck driven by a man whose own white skin is tattooed in all the semiotics of hate, a man just Tuesday convicted of Byrd’s murder.

After Byrd’s death, the people of Jasper went to their cemetery and took down the iron fence that separated the white graves and the black ones.

It is Black History Month, and this is not just an old book I hold, but a tape measure of our changed selves, marked sometimes in light-years and sometimes in micromillimeters, sometimes forward, and sometimes back.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes