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PORTSIDE CULTURE

NEW BIO OF BAY AREA AUTHOR JESSICA MITFORD RECALLS KEY HOUSING FIGHT
 
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Steve Early
February 2, 2026
Beyond Chron
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_ Telling the story of Jessica Mitford and the fight to integrate
public housing in Richmond, California is an inspiration for today's
movements for both housing and against ICE and defense of immigrants.
_

Image credit: Mechanics' Institute a California nonprofit public
benefit corporation,

 

During World War II, the shipyard workforce in Richmond numbered one
hundred thousand—and 20 percent was non-white.  By 1945, Richmond
had the largest public housing program in the nation, with
seventy-three thousand residents. Eighty percent of Richmond’s black
residents lived in these hastily constructed units but in racially
segregated fashion.

As a “thank you” for their war-time service building ships to
defeat fascism, Richmond’s fourteen thousand African Americans
became victims of renewed housing and job discrimination and wholesale
displacement efforts, after the war.

Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford
[[link removed]]By
Carla KaplanHarperCollins; 592 pagesNovember 25, 2025Hardcover:
 $40.00; Now:  $32.00ISBN: 9780061578946ISBN 10: 0061578940 

 
HarperCollins
 

The city’s federally funded projects became a major battle- ground
because of discrimination by the powerful all-white Richmond Housing
Authority (RHA). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the RHA showered
nonwhite public housing tenants with eviction notices warning that
their apartment buildings were about to be torn down. As the Trump
Administration would say today, it was time for their
“self-deportation”—to anywhere outside the city limits.

The RHA’s demolition plans were protested by the local National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as a blatant
scheme to drive African Americans out of town. Black tenants responded
by signing petitions and attending mass meetings, picketing the RHA,
and organizing rent strikes, all of which slowed the process.
Nevertheless, by 1953, all seventeen of the public housing projects
near the former Kaiser shipyard had been dismantled.

Private housing options elsewhere in the city were far more limited
for blacks than whites, as Navy veteran and American Legion post
vice-commander Wilbur Gary discovered. Gary tried to move his wife,
Borece, and their seven children from public housing scheduled for
destruction. Their new home, purchased through a black real estate
agent, was located at 2821 Brook Way in a subdivision of eight hundred
single-family homes called Rollingwood. That was a neighborhood
previously occupied only by white defense industry workers and their
dependents.

At their new Richmond address, the Gary family was greeted by white
racists who planted a KKK-style cross on their lawn. The downtown
office window of their realtor, Neitha Williams, was shattered by a
brick. On the night of March 7, 1952, after the family actually moved
in, a menacing crowd of four hundred white men and teenage boys
gathered outside their new home to curse at them, hurl insults, and
throw rocks.

A LYNCH MOB IN RICHMOND

This unruly mob ignored the county sheriff when he read parts of a
U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing restrictive covenants (of the
sort that white homeowners wrongly assumed would bar neighbors of the
wrong color, in perpetuity).  The white protestors were similarly
unmoved by the arrival of three white ministers who carried a U.S.
flag and a copy of the Constitution. The sheriff’s department made
no arrests and little effort to defuse the situation.

Fortunately, hundreds of Bay Area progressives, both black and white,
rushed to the scene that night–and for as long as it took
thereafter–to defend the Gary family.  They formed a “human
chain” around the house facing the screaming mob, in what became
round-the-clock shifts.

Among the first to arrive from Oakland was a key organizer of this
fight, an immigrant from Britain whose activist career is now the
subject of a new biography called _Trouble Maker: The Fierce, Unruly,
Life of Jessica Mitford._ (Harper-Collins, 2025)

Written by literature professor Carla Kaplan, this book cites many
other examples of Mitford’s exemplary 20th century solidarity with
causes ranging from fighting fascism in Spain in the 1930s to saving
the lives of unjustly convicted death row prisoners in the U.S.

According to Kaplan, Mitford—although coming from an extremely
privileged background—was able to “transform herself into an
engaged, effective ally because she sought others out who had reshaped
their lives through personal sacrifice. She read. She listened.”

In the Gary case, her more experienced partner was Buddy Green, a
fellow Communist Party member, military veteran, and leader of the
East Bay branch of the left-wing Civil Rights Congress (CRC). As
Kaplan reports, the CRC took a “a more activist approach to the
fight for civil rights—not only in court but in the streets—to
picket and do things that were considered, at the time, beneath the
dignity of the NAACP.”

Green and Mitford’s hurried consultation with the besieged Gary
family led to “a many-pronged approach: physical protection of the
house, trade union resolutions demanding police protection, and
distribution of leaflets, drawn up by the CRC, throughout the Bay
Area.” While keeping its distance from the CRC, the Richmond NAACP
mobilized its members, to join more radical out-of-towners.
Eventually, two dozen white home-owners broke ranks. They wrote a
letter welcoming the Gary family to their neighborhood, which Green
and Mitford widely publicized.

Community and labor campaigners then demanded that the Richmond city
council ban segregation in post-war public housing. A special council
session heard complaints about joblessness and other problems facing
the city’s non-white residents. The city’s own discriminatory
hiring practices came under fire. At the time, Richmond—which is an
80 percent non-white city today– had no firefighters who were people
of color and only two black police officers.

SOUNDING THE ALARM, THEN AND NOW

As Kaplan argues, the successful defense of the Gary family showed the
potential of “an inter-racial, cross-class, cross-gender
coalition” capable of mobilizing at a moment’s notice. This was
similar to today’s emergency response efforts triggered by the local
appearance of any uniformed thugs from Immigration Control and
Enforcement (ICE).

A decade after her involvement in Richmond’s most famous fair
housing fight, Jessica Mitford became one of the leading
“muckrakers” in America. In 1963, she published a best-selling
book on widespread consumer rip-offs by the funeral industry. In _The
American Way of Death_ and many related articles, Mitford exposed
“corrupt and predatory practices” that exploited millions of poor
and working-class people after a death in their families. Her
investigative journalism led to major regulatory reforms and positive
changes in funeral home behavior.

During her varied late-in-life journalism career, Mitford published
multiple memoirs and tackled other topics like prison reform, Nixon
Administration prosecution of political dissenters, and the
over-medicalization of child birth Mitford’s _American Way of Birth_
was one of her last works.

_Beyond Chron_ readers will find_ Troublemaker_ to be a long read (as
in 581 pages worth). But the subject of this autobiography, who died
in 1996, was a long-time maker of “good trouble.” Her exemplary
activism is worthy of emulation by defenders of civil rights, civil
liberties, consumer protection, and immigrants in the East Bay today.
As foes of Trump here and across the country sound the alarm about the
menacing arrival of ICE, the Gary family story reminds us about the
importance of showing up in time!

_[STEVE EARLY is a free-lance journalist and labor activist who has
lived in  Richmond since 2012. He is the author of Refinery Town: Big
Oil, Big Money, and the Making of an American City (Beacon Press,
2018), which tells this Richmond history story and others. He can be
reached at [email protected]__.]_

* Jessica Mitford
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* Housing
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* public housing
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* Racism
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* Black-white unity
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* inter-racial unity
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* Richmond CA
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* Bay Area
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* California
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* U.S. history
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* Left History
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* radical history
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* NAACP
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* Communists
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* World War II
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* post-World War II
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* African American veterans
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