nine• Dreams Deferred

I can truthfully say that my first television appearances drew nothing but positive reviews; but in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll also say that the shows drew only one review. A Richmond Independent newspaper columnist, who watched me host a production of The Miss Bronze Showcase on KTVU, wrote that somebody should find someplace for me on television. In a burst of naive optimism, I bought up copies of that column and mailed it off to every TV station in the San Francisco Bay Area, daring to dream that someone would take the hint and hire me. I don’t know what I was thinking—to my knowledge there was not a solitary black woman in TV news.

But in the early 1960s, the aspirations of African Americans were taking flight like never before. We were inspired by a Baptist minister from Georgia with a firm faith in nonviolence and a devotion to equality. He had held aloft his own dream that someday all God’s children “will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.’”

I still remember the night I was working late to finish KDIA’s traffic logs when I looked up to see two men in dark suits walking slowly across the darkened office outside my door. One of them, whom I recognized by his gait, was Frank Clarke, handler of the station’s lucrative national ad accounts. The man silhouetted next to him was shorter, broad chested, his face indiscernible under his fedora—and yet there was something oddly familiar about him.

“Good evening, Belva,” said Clarke, who always managed to sound as though he were speaking into a microphone. Then they came into focus beneath a flickering fluorescent light and I caught my breath. “I trust you know Martin?”

I nodded, recognizing the preposterousness of the notion that Belvagene Melton Davis was on a first-name basis with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I had heard office gossip that Clarke was a close chum of King, that the two had met in Boston, and that Frank had been a participant in King’s wedding to Coretta Scott—but I had my doubts. Now the evidence was irrefutable.

“It’s an honor to meet you,” I said, stretching out my hand.

He took it, replying that he was pleased to meet me as well. We exchanged a few pleasantries that I was too nervous to commit to memory: something about his appearance at the Oakland Auditorium to raise money for the struggles down South. His appearances always drew a packed house, from a young lawyer named Willie Brown to an impatient activist named Bobby Seale. Local black leaders would pass the hats and exhort all of us to dig deep, and we did. Bill and I believed the cause was righteous. And donating helped assuage the subconscious guilt many of us felt for failing to join the front lines in Birmingham. But Dr. King never tried to make anyone feel guilty. He’d say you can help pay for the buses, you can help pay for the food, and you can pray for us.

Whatever Dr. King specifically said to me that night, what I would always recall was impressionistic: his sonorous, soothing voice and his extraordinary politeness.

“If you’ll excuse us,” Frank interjected, “we’re on our way to my office to smoke a couple of good cigars and unwind.”

“Of course,” I said, waiting until the door to Frank’s office clicked shut before I reached for the telephone.

“Bill,” I whispered into the receiver, “you are never gonna believe who’s here...”

In 1963, Dr. King traveled more than 275,000 miles coast-to-coast and, in defiance of crackpot death threats, delivered more than 350 speeches—many of them to raise funds for a planned convergence on the nation’s capital. In his California appearances, he mingled erudite observations with soul-stirring simplicity: “I say good night to you by quoting the words of an old Negro slave. ‘We ain’t what we ought to be and we ain’t what we want to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God we ain’t what we was.’”

At an Emancipation Centennial rally in the Oakland Auditorium, Dr. King exhorted audiences to boycott businesses that were refusing to train or hire black workers. He often made such suggestions with a twist of wry, suggesting, for example, that people quit buying Wonder bread until “we make Wonder bread wonder where the money went.”

On August 28, 1963, the March on Washington drew an estimated quarter of a million people. Millions more who heard Dr. King articulate his dream began investing in dreams of their own. I was one of those dreamers.

While the national focus was on Jim Crow practices in the Deep South, blacks suffered their insidious effects in California too. Remember, San Francisco Giants star Willie Mays was barred from purchasing a home on Miraloma Drive in the city’s tony, lily-white Sherwood Forest neighborhood after neighbors objected that his family’s presence would drive down property values. One of those neighbors told the Chronicle, “I certainly wouldn’t like to have a colored family near me!”

The slugger’s wife, Marghuerite, summed up the situation this way: “Down in Alabama where we come from, you know your place, and that’s something, at least. But up here it’s all a lot of camouflage. They grin in your face, and then deceive you.”

Only after then mayor George Christopher, a Greek immigrant, invited the Mayses to be his houseguests did the seller relent. But the Mayses didn’t last two years in the house; during that time they endured humiliations including a bottle that sailed through their front window with a racist note attached.

With wartime jobs gone and blacks staying put, the lit fuse of frustration was burning toward a tinderbox. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Art Hoppe described the incendiary landscape:

By 1964, the local NAACP was plotting lawsuits to force recalcitrant Bay Area businesses to halt discriminatory hiring.

But then a new tactic, swifter and more effective, began to catch on: the demonstration. The first big one was against Mel’s Drive-In, a burger joint that served blacks but refused to hire them. Targeting the San Francisco diner—which was co-owned by San Francisco supervisor and mayoral candidate Harold Dobbs—more than one hundred people occupied all the seats, and they refused to order until Mel’s hired blacks. Pickets went up at the diner and at Dobbs’s home. After losing the election, he signed an agreement to integrate hiring for up-front jobs.

At Lucky’s grocery stores, protesters would fill their shopping carts to the brim, unload their contents at the counter, wait until cashiers had rung up every item by hand, and then declare, “I’ll pay for these items when you start hiring Negros!” As checkout registers clogged, shopping ground to a standstill.

At San Francisco’s swank Sheraton Palace Hotel, which employed 19 blacks in only menial cleaning jobs out of a staff of 550, about five hundred demonstrators clasped hands and encircled the hotel inside and out; then they staged a “sleep in” that transformed the lobby floor into a wall-to-wall carpet of protesters.

And because the car dealerships that lined “Auto Row” along Van Ness Avenue also hired blacks only as janitors, hundreds of white and black protesters staged demonstrations at both the Cadillac dealership and the Lincoln-Mercury dealership to force a hiring accord.

As challenging as the situation was for blacks, women faced multiple obstacles, especially in media. Although a few females had been working as reporters, columnists, and editors for newspapers, and a handful more as DJs or radio hosts, we mostly were consigned to covering life’s curlicues: fashion, entertainment, society happenings. Whether white or black, females did fluff.

But I knew I wanted more. I felt as though someone had hit the fast-forward button and the world around me was advancing in a blur. I was captivated by the big stories, and I wanted to be a part of them.

One of my entrées was through KDIA news director Louis Freeman, who was stretched too thin doing every newscast and all the station’s field reporting, not to mention its gospel music show. I volunteered to be his “pick-up person,” gathering notes and quotes at Berkeley City Council meetings, community organizing sessions, and the like.

We were in the incubator of a new political consciousness. Tens of thousands of black families such as mine—having deserted Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Tennessee and having resettled in California—were discovering the potency of politics. It was heady stuff. Back home, our parents had been unable to even register to vote. Here, not only could blacks cast ballots, but they even could elect a few of their own. California, which had dispatched its first black legislator, Frederick Roberts, to Sacramento in 1917, sent its first black congressman, Gus Hawkins, to Washington in 1963. He would go on to author Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to establish the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

I was acquainted with many of the East Bay’s rising political wizards. Brilliant bon vivant Willie Brown, who would someday dominate state politics as speaker of the assembly and then serve as mayor of San Francisco, was dating a high school friend of mine while both were students at San Francisco State. Future congressman and mayor Ron Dellums was a member of Edith’s “Kitchen Cabinet” and one of her “main horses.” And of course William Byron Rumford, proprietor of my old local drugstore in Berkeley, became a state assemblyman and hometown hero in 1963 after he won enactment of the Fair Housing Bill outlawing discrimination in private housing. The real estate industry and angry white property owners persuaded state voters a year later to amend the state constitution to nullify the act, although ultimately the California and U.S. Supreme Courts would uphold Rumford’s law.

The white backlash was indicative of the growing notion among California whites that we were pushing too far, too fast. As San Francisco human relations coordinator James Mitchell, a former Eisenhower labor secretary, told Time magazine, “What Negroes have to remember is something they tend to forget: that they are a minority, and that they can only achieve what they want with the support of the majority.” White resistance was unmistakable as it whipped through the Cow Palace during the 1964 GOP convention—the experience that solidified my determination to become a real reporter.

I had little hope of achieving that dream at KDIA, which was moving away from individualized radio and fast embracing corporate-directed, rigidly formatted playlists. The impetus may have been the payola scandal, which revealed that record company reps were bribing DJs to guarantee more play for songs on the reps’ labels. I was flabbergasted by the revelations—nobody had ever offered me a dime, perhaps because they figured that housewives listening to The Belva Davis Show composed an inconsequential sliver of the record-buying public.

But radio was becoming more robotic, and I didn’t want to be a robot. So I decided to quit KDIA even though I had no other job lined up. Within days, we learned that Bill was about to lose his job at the Berkeley Camera Shop. The logical course of action might have been to reconsider my ill-timed resignation, but suffice it to say we defied logic. Instead, Bill and I doubled-down to buy our first house together before the bank would discover we were losing our sources of income.

We swiftly settled on a tidy eighteen-thousand-dollar ranch house in El Cerrito, a suburb north of Berkeley, where real estate was comparatively cheap. In fact, our mortgage payment of $143 a month was less than the rent on our more fashionable place in Berkeley. The El Cerrito house was nondescript, save for a large portrait of Jesus Christ painted directly on the dining room wall. The house had only two bedrooms, but we subdivided the attached garage, making half of it a bedroom for Steven and the other half a darkroom for Bill’s new freelance photography.

For a while, the sacrifice of our garage appeared prescient: we fell behind on our Mustang’s payments, prompting the bank to repossess it. But a former KDIA DJ—who had gone to work for the bank—intervened and helped us retrieve our car.

Although we didn’t encounter discrimination when purchasing our house, El Cerrito’s predominant whiteness would carom through our lives at random. My heart broke the day young Darolyn came home and crumpled into a chair with a forlorn sigh. “Dee Dee, what’s wrong?” I asked. She explained the inexplicable as best she could: The Brownie troop leader at her elementary school had told her she would not be allowed to join the all-white troop. “I don’t understand why I can’t be a Brownie—I’m brown!” my daughter exclaimed. I complained to the school, but I was told the matter was out of their hands because, although the troop met on school property, Girl Scouts is a private organization.

Soon I lined up another radio job, this time as a clerk and occasional DJ for KJAZ—a station that, as its call letters suggested, played jazz to the exclusion of everything else. Profitability was elusive, and the owner often collected trade-out merchandise instead of cash from small advertisers who couldn’t pay. Then, in turn, the owner tried to cajole us employees into accepting the trade-outs in lieu of salary. Example: a tire shop might advertise on the station and offer a free set of tires to the DJ. On our old Mustang, that free set of tires came in handy. Usually, though, I held out for the cash.

After a few months, I landed a job as the unlikely new voice of the station that in 1966 became KNEW. I say unlikely, because KNEW was a pop station of monochromatically white on-air personalities and the station reveled in playing the bland tunes: Petula Clark singing “Downtown”; Wayne Newton crooning “Red Roses for a Blue Lady”; and the Beach Boys and Annette Funicello extolling the “fun, fun, fun” of surfing. I doubt any black listeners tuned in. But with President Lyndon B. Johnson signing Executive Order 11246, which required federal contractors to use affirmative action to help alleviate racial inequities, and with the United Church of Christ and NAACP challenging the FCC licenses of stations that turned a blind eye to the black community, a growing number of broadcast stations felt compelled to make at least a token minority hire.

I would come in to KNEW a couple of days a week to voice its public service announcements and promotional spots. In addition, the station used me as DJ of its late weekend music shows, from nine at night to one in the morning Saturday and Sunday. I was instructed to strictly adhere to the station’s approved playlist. Sometimes around midnight, my inner rebel got the better of me, and I would sneak in a cut by Miles Davis or Duke Ellington. On a couple of occasions, the edgier track hadn’t finished before station manager Varner Paulsen was phoning me on the studio’s inside line, demanding to know why my show was broadcasting unapproved music. I would fib and tell him I thought the track had been approved, and he would grumble and hang up.

But I was most mystified the night Paulsen called in for what he said was simply a private chat.

“So how are you feeling about how things are going at the station?” he ventured.

“Fine—I’m having a great time,” I lied, desperate to retain a steady paycheck even if it meant that my brain replayed bad surfer tunes in my dreams.

“Well, good, that’s good...,” he said. After an interminable pause, he followed with, “You know, Belva, I don’t know quite how to say this... but I was just wondering about your sound.”

More awkward silence.

“My sound?” I asked. “Is there a problem with the way I sound? Do you need me to lower my pitch?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s just that we’d like our listeners to know who you are.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean, who you really are.”

“Mr. Paulsen, I am who I am, and this is what I sound like.”

“Well, maybe if you could sound a little more, you know...”

“A little more what?”

Then it hit me. The station had gone to all the effort of hiring a black woman, and they wanted to be sure they got full credit for their gesture. The unspoken word, the word Varner Paulsen was too squeamish to utter, was Negro.

Radio was paying my mortgage, but my dreams still were invested in television. I zeroed in on KGO-TV in San Francisco as the station most likely to take a chance on me. It had a reputation for unconventional programming, with a lineup including local fitness guru Jack LaLanne and ex-striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, whom the station had made a talk show host. Of course I didn’t know a soul with hiring authority at KGO; but I worked every possible peripheral connection. And when I discovered that the station had an opening for an anchor to launch a new early morning news show, I man aged to snare an interview with the station’s general manager, David Sacks. But he kept me waiting outside his office for two hours—perhaps hoping I would either give up or go away—at which point a receptionist told me he had to cancel. Undaunted, I rescheduled for another day. On my way out, I ran into a friend, fashion designer LaVetta Forbes, who designed gowns for Nancy Wilson and the Supremes and was at the station arranging a fashion exhibit for Gypsy Rose Lee’s show. LaVetta in turn introduced me to actress Ingrid Bergman’s daughter Pia Lindström, a guest on Gypsy’s show because she had completed an American Express–sponsored cross-country trip using only her credit card. Pia asked what brought me to KGO, and I gave her all the details about the new anchor post I was hoping to win, surprised by her keen interest in what I had to say.

But my rescheduled interview with the station manager a few days later was a disaster. Sacks beckoned me into his office and listened to me discuss why I thought I could do a good job. Then he smiled sympathetically, as though someone in my family had just died. I can only imagine that, in his own inept way, he was trying to be pleasantly complimentary. “I’m sorry, but we’re just not hiring any Negresses,” he said with mild chagrin, rising to his feet to usher me out. “Besides, we’ve already filled the morning anchor job. But I want you to rest assured that if we ever do decide to hire a Negress, you’ll definitely be on our list.”

Speechless by his casual likening of me to a caged tiger, I felt sick to my stomach and barely made it to the parking lot before bursting into tears.

KGO debuted its early morning news show soon after. Its newly hired anchor was Pia Lindström.