By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO -- Prior to the 1960s, Jews in San Diego were routinely barred from purchasing homes in certain areas, most notably, La Jolla, by real estate agents who believed the more "exclusive" a neighborhood was, the higher the commissions they would earn as they sold individual properties. 

Covenants, codes and restrictions written right into the deeds of certain properties routinely prohibited the property being sold to anyone who was not a Caucasian.  Although Jews were also white, many real estate agents believed that to be really "white," one also needed to be Christian.

Even to this day, almost a half century later, some of our city's older Jewish residents remember, with bitterness, how humiliated they were made to feel because they were not Christians. Yet, as badly as these practices made Jews feel in San Diego, they were not nearly so pervasive, nor debilitating, as were an interwoven net of discriminatory practices against African Americans throughout Southern California

Because racism was practiced so nakedly in the American South, and segregation was so obvious in the apartment house and tenement districts of the urban North, there was a myth that in spread-out Southern California, where suburban whites often  had little or no contact with African Americans,  that race relations were good.  Not so.

L.A. City Limits methodically tells the story of how African Americans not only were discriminated against when they tried to purchase housing outside the black ghettoes of South Central Los Angeles and Watts, but also how some industries and some labor unions teamed up to prevent them from obtaining some jobs, or advancing in others. 

Poorer blacks were geographically and economically confined to these ghettos, where educational programs were second-class, and public transportation to other areas of the city was dreadfully insufficient. Although some middle class blacks were able to move over white protest to more affluent neighborhoods bordering the black areas, like their poorer brothers and sisters, they still suffered from a lack of political representation and from racial profiling by the police whenever they happened to go beyond those boundaries  They also were banned from certain "white" beaches, swimming pools and parks.

Whereas earlier in the 20th century, schools in Watts, South Central Los Angeles and the black suburbs of Compton and the Adams Avenue District were racially mixed, they became increasingly segregated as Mexican-Americans, Asian-Americans and Jews were more successful in moving to other neighborhoods.

For the most part, author Sides portrays Jews of as the allies of African-Americans  in the fight against discrimination — particularly in the political and legal arenas. But he makes it clear the Jewish record was far from spotless.  The garment industry was notorious for the exploitatively low wages it paid its workers.  And among the builders of large housing developments, where African-Americans were purposefully excluded, some, to our shame, were Jews.