This is the second installment of the Random Lengths News series about Blacks in the fabric of Los Angeles Harbor history and culture. In this column and subsequent columns, I will tell this history through the stories of Black Los Angeles Harbor Area families.
The many ways the Christian Church in America has been a tool that reinforces segregation is well documented. The 2016 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House, delves into that conversation in which Baldwin, in an interview with Dick Cavett, says: “I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian Church which is white and a Christian Church which is Black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians and I certainly cannot trust the Christian Church.”
Baldwin’s Malcolm X citation may have been a misattribution. It is documented that Martin Luther King Jr. said something similar: “I think it is one of the tragedies – one of the shameful tragedies – that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour, in Christian America.”
Baldwin’s and King’s assessments were true then and true now in a general sense, but I would argue that the assessments overlook the ways cross-racial collaboration in Christian spaces opened up the possibility for racial coalition politics in Los Angeles.
In San Pedro, these linkages are oldest and most pronounced between Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church, First Methodist Church, Trinity Lutheran Church, YMCA, YWCA, Toberman Settlement House, and San Pedro’s Holy Trinity parish.
A couple of days after Valentine’s Day, Random Lengths interviewed Walter Clements III about the lives his parents and family led from the 1950s to the 1970s and the institutions and historical changes that influenced the lives of the Clements family.
Walter Clements III’s earliest memories are from when his family lived in a settlement of Quonset huts built for returning veterans of World War II on a site just south of the Defense Fuel Supply Point on Western Avenue.
“We lived in what they call a Quonset hut, and they had it partitioned. [I remember because] my brother almost burned the whole family up here because he had found some matches and he liked throwing lit matches everywhere.”
He also remembers trash burnings, a regular part of life at Banning Homes, Channel Heights, Western Terraces, and other workforce housing in the Harbor Area.
After the Quonset huts, the Clements moved to 1846 Lanham, Banning Homes ― a street and site where Target now sits. He remembers Halloween at Banning Homes, in which celebrants would attempt climbing a greased light pole for fun.
“The other thing I remember about Banning Homes was the trash burnings,” Clements III said. “We’d go out there with our stuff … I don’t know how they would light the fire.”
Clements III couldn’t tell you if the burnings occurred monthly or weekly. But those were his earliest memories.
“All of my memories are basically with my older brother Jeff because he was the leader of our group. That’s how I got around. I followed him everywhere.”
Jeffrey Clements is Clements III’s older brother. He died last year this past May. Deacon Walter Clements died in 2011.
Clements/Daniels Connection
Deacon Clements is a figure that connects Black San Pedro of pre-World War II and post-World War II through his friendships and community involvement. One of those relationships happened to be with Roosevelt Daniels, who operated the Daniels Auto laundry and service station, first on 18th and Pacific Avenue, then later near 5th and Centre streets.
In 1950, Deacon Clements’ occupation was listed as a car washer at a service station. Daniels was likely Clements’ employer, mentor, and friend given the close family ties between the Daniels and the Clements families. Clements III recalled keeping the Daniels’ front yard on 18th and Alma neatly manicured alongside his older brother and father in the early 1960s. Daniels was 20 years older than Deacon Clements and lived in San Pedro 20 years before the Clements family’s arrival. And perhaps most importantly, they both called Mt. Sinai Baptist Church their church home.
Originally from Water Valley, Mississippi, Deacon Clements was the youngest of seven children. His father died from tuberculosis when he was 16, leaving his older brother and mother to tend the farm until he finished school.
At 18 years of age, Deacon Clements was 6 foot 1 inch and 162 pounds and already earning a man’s wage with Dunn & Smartt Construction Company in Millington, Tennessee before he was drafted to fight in World War II. When he returned, he married Dorothy Cunningham. After the war, Deacon Clements and Dorothy moved to San Pedro and got married. He started off working as a laborer while Dorothy with her exceptional sewing skills made a business out of making blouses.
By 1952, Deacon Clements joined Columbia Steel in Torrance. He lived by the creed, if you don’t work, you don’t eat. The Deacon worked the graveyard shift at the steel mill and washed cars during the day at a site across the street from Barton Hill Elementary. This is a work ethic he passed on to his two sons.
Clements noted that Rep. Glenn Anderson and Assemblyman Vincent Thomas were regular clients of his father’s car washing services.
“Daddy, every Saturday would have about three cars that he would wash and wax,” Clements said.
Deacon Clements went to school to become a welder when he arrived in San Pedro because there were welding jobs out here,” Clements III explained. “That’s why they came out here. I don’t know if it was at Todd Shipyard or someplace down on the dock. He was trying to get a job and eventually ended up at Columbia Steel Mill.”
It was at Columbia Steel that Deacon Clements lost his leg, causing him to have to wear a prosthesis for the rest of his life, though most people didn’t realize it, Clements explained. Deacon Clements would still climb a ladder to get atop a roof as if that wasn’t wrong and dangerous about the undertaking.
Clements called his dad a “jack-of-all-trades,” noting his father had skills as an electrician and brick mason.
“At our house (on MacArthur Pl, ) the bricks all around our house, daddy … put all of those bricks in our backyard and our side yard. He did all of that,” Clements said.
Clements said his father also helped with the Mt. Sinai Baptist church renovation that was completed in 1998. Clements remembered Leo’s Malt Shop standing next to the church. Leo and his mother, Frannie, gave the properties to the church, allowing the church to expand in size.
Clements also recalled Teals BBQ, owned by Jake Johnson, roughly where the Port Police building is today between Third and Fifth on Centre streets. He recalled Johnson’s hair salon and Harvey’s barbershop.
“The barbershop and the barbecue place, …was a big hit,” Clements said. Deacon Clements didn’t allow his family to eat out very much and he smoked his own barbeque, so Clements didn’t recall partaking in the barbecue at Teal’s BBQ.
“I don’t think we went out to eat in San Pedro but maybe three or four times in my whole life as a young kid,” Clements said. It wasn’t until he was an adult Norms, Coco’s, and Sizzler became family favorites.
Deacon Clements built the first house on MacArthur Place where Jeffrey and Walter grew up. After the brothers finished college he built the two units behind the main house on the property.
“After they built the freeway (the Harbor Freeway was completed in 1962) all of those people moved to different areas,” Clements III said. “They were able to move past First Street. First Street was sort of like the divided line. Before that, there were one or two families: the Garnichauds and the Daniels. Mr. and Mrs. Jackson [Jake and Clotel, owners of Teal’s BBQ and Clara Ruth’s hair salon], Leo and Lorraine Jackson [Leo’s Cocktail Lounge and Leo’s Malt Shop] moved. … Then the Butchers moved past First Street. Then the Gatlin’s moved past First Street … but all that was as a result of the freeway taking their homes.”
The area taken by the freeway was called Black Hill, situated east of Gaffey Street and north of the Harbor Freeway egress. Clements explained that it was called Black Hill because of the controlled burning that was practiced there in years past to reduce fire danger. Most others thought the area was named for the significant number of African Americans living in the area. When the Barton Hill Revitalization Project was formed in the early 1980s, the boundaries were later expanded to include Black Hill and the Bandini Canyon neighborhood between Gaffey and Bandini streets.
While crime was a concern in each of these communities, a growing concern was the lax zoning enforcement in their neighborhoods. As the elected chairman of the Black Hill Neighborhood Watch, Deacon Clements led the fight for lower-density zoning and forced the height limit to three stories in the North San Pedro neighborhoods.
In the 1930s, the San Pedro Chamber floated the idea of introducing segregation at Cabrillo Beach and public swimming pools. The idea was ultimately shot down, noting that building separate facilities for Blacks was too costly given their small number in the community.
The Christian and Jewish faith communities in San Pedro, both in public spaces and private interactions, engaged in conversations leading to more liberal outlooks on world peace, less racial animus and discrimination against Black people, and charitable work to heal the sick and help the impoverished.
The fruits of that labor resulted in the organizing of support for the California Fair Employment Practices Act, a statute passed and enacted in 1959 barring businesses and labor unions from discriminating against employees or job applicants based on their color, national origin, ancestry, religion, or race. And the Rumford Fair Housing Act in 1963.
Deacon Clements’ life in San Pedro is a reflection of the divine providence that African Americans in the Los Angeles Harbor Area have been able to live- largely sheltered from the same degree of institutional racial violence Blacks in other parts of the country experienced. Even today, many African Americans whose families lived in the Los Angeles Harbor for more than three generations would tell you that they didn’t know racism until they visited relatives who lived in Midwestern and Southern states.
I submit that this was not an accident or happenstance. But as the result of a progressive tradition born from the Abrahamic faith communities in the Los Angeles Harbor who aimed to be in alignment with their creator.
Since the early 1920s, the membership of the Harbor District Council of Social Agencies, later the Harbor District Advisory Council, were largely churches that provided shelter beds and food for the unsheltered and hungry; educational programming, and field trips for orphans and children who could not afford such privileges. The members of the Harbor District Advisory Council privately and publicly addressed racism and racial inequity. It shouldn’t be a surprise that through many of these organizations, Harbor residents of color became visible and became civically engaged with the various nodes of power in the Los Angeles Harbor. But none of it would have been possible if not for the black churches choosing to engage broader culture, infected by white supremacy. Hence, Olivia and Arthur Eskridge, Black San Pedro residents, formed the San Pedro Community Chorus featuring more than 50 vocalists, pulling singers from Mount Sinai Baptist Church and Black congregations in Long Beach.
Mt. Sinai continued with its Jubilee choirs through the decades and served as racial ambassadors, performing in neighboring churches in San Pedro, creating relationships that changed minds and hearts.
Deacon Clements was one of the fruits of this effort.
Deacon Clements lost his leg below the knee working for Columbia Steel. His family had long discussed the accident as being intentionally caused by a fellow worker out of racial spite. But rather than returning spite with spite he did the remarkable.
The Deacon, known for his easy smile as he was for his singing voice, took two sons to cut the lawns of a few close friends and the prankster that caused the Deacon’s leg to be amputated.
Clements III recalled the man as being afflicted by post-traumatic stress. “The guy … he was so afflicted in his mind by the trauma and the fact that he almost killed someone,” he said.
Deacon Clements kept on working at Columbia Steel until he retired, continued building units on his property, and continued barbequing and singing in Mount Sinai’s Jubilee choir.
This year marks the 100th Anniversary of Mount Sinai Baptist Church’s founding. The church plans to celebrate the anniversary in October and Random Lengths News will publish a column in this series examining the pivotal roles at pivotal moments that Mt. Sinai Baptist Church has played in the Los Angeles Harbor history.