Blacks Cherish Community as Population Groups Shift

They come for the contagious gospel choir, the rollicking sermons and preacher’s booming voice, rippling over the pews. At Santa Ana’s Second Baptist Church, parishioners also come for the comfortable haven created by the faces that surround them--African American faces.

“There is something uniquely special,” said the Rev. John McReynolds, “about being with my people on a Sunday in worship.”

Second Baptist is the oldest of more than a dozen African American churches defying the demographics of Orange County. They are thriving despite census numbers that show blacks make up 2% of the county population and are so scattered they barely register in most census tracts.

Although the county’s rapidly shifting population has been marked by Latino, white and Asian clusters, blacks have defied that trend.

According to the 2000 census, there were 42,639 to 59,426 blacks and mixed-race blacks living in the county. The population is spread across the county, with blacks making up less than 7% in virtually all census tracts. The phenomenon is part of a national trend for blacks to move from their traditional inner-city neighborhoods to the suburbs.

In this new demographic reality, preserving a black identity becomes more imperative, McReynolds and others say, because being invisible means being irrelevant.

Lake Forest Mayor Kathryn McCullough, the first African American mayor in Orange County and one of the few black elected officials in the county, points to the dearth of African Americans in city halls and county offices as evidence of this irrelevance.

“It almost tells you, ‘You don’t exist or we don’t care,’ ” said McCullough, a Missouri native who moved to El Toro in 1969 with her husband, a former Marine.

Integrated military bases brought the first significant flow of African Americans into Orange County. From 1950 to 1970, the county’s black population shot from 1,000 to 10,000, mostly concentrated in neighborhoods near the El Toro and Tustin bases.

The soldiers and their families added to a burgeoning black community in west Santa Ana, where black churches and businesses thrived.

Federal antidiscrimination laws in housing in the mid-1970s aided the flow, swelling the county’s black population to 40,000 by 1990.

In the last decade, the closure of the bases, coupled with dwindling aerospace jobs, led to a steady exodus of blacks from the county, but they were more than supplanted by migration from elsewhere, including upwardly mobile blacks, lured by Orange County’s growing supply of posh homes.

‘This Was Birch Country’

For many, it was a move laden with apprehension, said Lawrence B. de Graaf, professor of history at Cal State Fullerton and co-editor of “Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California,” a recently published compilation of essays about black migration.

“This was John Birch country; the KKK used to be active here,” he said. “Up until at least 1990, that was still the entrenched image many blacks had of Orange County.”

Those who overcame their misgivings found themselves “lost in a sea of whites,” de Graaf said. Today, parts of that sea have turned Latino and Asian, and some longtime black residents feel a different kind of unease.

“There are no black neighborhoods anymore,” lamented Tessie McAllister, 81, who joined Johnson Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Santa Ana in 1946, when the area was mostly black.

Johnson’s pastor, the Rev. Timothy E. Tyler, said that for older members of his church who grew up in a more racially charged era, “It is easy to feel sort of bitter about your surroundings. Tessie went from being a minority [in a white area] to being a minority [in a Latino area].”

“I try to emphasize that we are not in competition [with other groups]” said Tyler, who introduced Spanish sermons in his church four years ago. The challenge for Orange County’s black community, he stressed, is not setting itself apart, but remaining pertinent in a society that has historically disenfranchised minorities.

That’s why cultural anchors, like Johnson Chapel and Second Baptist, are so important, Tyler and others said.

“I look forward to Sundays,” Caroline Jackson of Irvine said following services at Second Baptist. “It brings unity with people who understand your trials and tribulations.”

A Sense of Belonging

The churches offer more than spiritual salvation; they deliver what McReynolds calls “personal stabilization,” a sense of belonging.

“At Saddleback High School [in Santa Ana], there is one black senior girl graduating this year and that’s my daughter,” said McReynolds, who’s 47, intense and engaging. “If Melissa was not in a black church surrounding, how would she have a chance to celebrate life with other black kids?”

Second Baptist, founded in 1922, has 1,800 members--the most ever--and continues to grow. It is in west Santa Ana, once the hub of Orange County’s black community and still home to nine other predominantly African American churches.

Others have opened elsewhere in the county, including Macedonia Christian Fellowship Church in Aliso Viejo, which has grown from 90 members to about 400 since it was founded two years ago.

Macedonia’s pastor, the Rev. Lance Hardaway, prefers to call his church “diverse” rather than “Afrocentric.” But many in his congregation, which is more than three-quarters African American, have sought out Macedonia because they felt disconnected at mostly white churches, he said. “There is a church for everyone, but a church may not be for everyone.”

Others, however, said the diminished relevance of race is the true sign of progress. Last year, Karen Robinson became the first black elected to the City Council in Costa Mesa, a city which is less than 2% black.

“Society has reached a place where someone like us can be elected among a group of people who are not like us for qualities that have nothing to do with race,” Robinson said. “As an African American council member, I know just being there and having black skin speaks volumes.”