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A city south of San Francisco, about an hour’s drive from Richmond, where Ford Motor decided to relocate its large factory after World War II. Unlike in Richmond, there was virtually no housing for African Americans in Milpitas, which meant that black Ford workers like Frank Stevenson had to choose between leaving their jobs or commuting an hour each way to and from work (he chose the latter, and did so for more than 20 years). One religious group tried to build an integrated suburb for Ford workers in Milpitas, but faced severe delays and cost overruns due to opposition from the local government, rival real estate developers like David Bohannon, and the federal government. Although the neighborhood was finally built and merged with Bohannon’s all-white Sunnyhills, it became too expensive for African American Ford workers and ultimately did not achieve its aims. Even today, as a result of this 20th-century segregation, Milpitas has almost no African American residents.
Milpitas, CA Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Milpitas, CA or refer to Milpitas, CA. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 8
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The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods. It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.
Taken in isolation, we can easily dismiss such devices as aberrations. But when we consider them as a whole, we can see that they were part of a national system by which state and local government supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery.
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Milpitas, CA Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Milpitas, CA appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: If San Francisco, Then Everywhere?
Car sales spiked in the 1950s, leading Ford to build a larger plant in Milpitas, which is an hour’s drive southwest from Richmond. Suburbs began arising to house this plant’s...
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...few years after Frank Stevenson moved to Richmond, the renowned writer Wallace Stegner moved near Milpitas, to teach at Stanford University. Unable to find housing, he “joined and then helped to...
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Chapter 8: Local Tactics
...American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) sought to help black Ford workers find housing in all-white Milpitas. Since no existing neighborhood would accept African American people, the AFSC decided to build its...
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...Bohannon’s project in-progress, a white neighborhood called Sunnyhills, and Bohannon soon convinced the city of Milpitas—whose mayor was a real estate agent—to hike the price of Agua Caliente's sewer access tenfold....
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...and gave up on moving to Sunnyhills, although a few eventually did. Regardless, even today, Milpitas has almost no black residents. As new factories opened up in Milpitas over the last...
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In this chapter’s Part II, Rothstein notes that Milpitas shows local governments’ “extraordinary creativity” in promoting segregation. These examples are not “aberrations,” but rather...
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In Part III, Rothstein notes that Milpitas’s local government was using “common segregation tactics” that were popular across the United States. In...
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Chapter 10: Suppressed Incomes
...Rothstein tells the story of Mahwah, New Jersey. Just as Ford moved from Richmond to Milpitas in California, it moved from a small site near New York City to the more...
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