Prejudice Amid Palm Trees : Civil rights: Baxter and Bernice Young remember unwritten sunset laws, the KKK and harassment during 70 years of life in Orange County. And it’s still no paradise today, they say.

As a young man, Baxter Young never let the sunset catch him in Fullerton. That was an unwritten law, which he and his friends obeyed.

And for most of his youth, restaurants, theaters and playhouses were off limits to Young. So were almost all jobs except shining shoes.

Those memories go back 70 years, and he shares them with Bernice Young, his wife for more than five decades. They have lived in a typical house in not-so-typical times, have worked steadily, raised five children and seen more generations follow. Their lives have been at once common and extraordinary.

As Black History Month begins today, the Youngs’ experiences and views of the county’s history of racial relations are shared by few others, because they arrived at a time when fewer than 20 other black families called Orange County home. And they stayed to watch it change from what they called a “desert” to a sprawling urban area.

For them, the history of U.S. civil rights was reflected in Orange County. Although racism was often more subtle than in other parts of the country, and violence rare, the question of race was ever present.

“When we first moved here I hated it, because there was nothing here,” said 75-year-old Bernice Young as she pushed her graying hair out of her eyes. “Looked like nothing but the desert, and there weren’t but a handful of black people, which was really new for me. I’d always been around my people.”

In 1927, her father, Edward McKinney, moved his family from Phoenix to growing Orange County.

“He had heard that California had a lot of opportunities starting up, but I still don’t know why Orange County was his first and only stop,” she said as she flipped through old photo albums with pictures of her father. “He worked as a janitor, and even when he got here he only got work on a regular basis sometimes.”

Bernice Young said adapting to her new surroundings, particularly the integrated school she began attending, took a long time.

“I’d always attended school with just black children, but here--I guess because there weren’t enough blacks to make a separate school--we all were there together.”

Baxter Young moved to Santa Ana with his parents and an older brother when he was 17. His older sister already lived in Santa Ana, where she cleaned house for a white family.

As one of just two black students attending Santa Ana High School in 1929, Young said, he fought classmates nearly every day.

“They were always calling . . . my name and saying things I wasn’t used to hearing. . . . And it’s hard to control your temper when people are saying things like that to you,” said Young, 78. “I grew up living with my own for most of my childhood and didn’t understand the way white people thought about me and my people.”

Because of his parents’ failing health, he and his brother were forced to work odd jobs while in school to support the household. Although small businesses had begun to open by then, both parents had trouble finding steady work.

“It was really hard back then finding a job for blacks,” he said. “They didn’t want you doing or working anywhere around them. Not washing the dishes or anything else. If you wanted to work, you had to make your own.”

Shining shoes on the corner and occasionally working as a glass washer at a local cafe became their basic sources of income.

“Those were real funny times,” he said. “Blacks were never really bothered like they were down South, where there were beatings and other things. But we weren’t accepted by whites, either.

“In Fullerton, there were only two blocks where blacks could live in the city, and you had to be off the street by the time the sun went down. But even with all that, I never had any type of really bad run-in with anybody. We’d exchange words or something or maybe a fistfight, but not much else.”

Shortly after the Youngs married in 1932, they bought a piece of land in an integrated neighborhood in Santa Ana and built the house they still live in today. For the most part, blacks could live anywhere in Orange County.

Still, many restaurants refused to serve them, movie theaters required blacks and Latinos to sit upstairs and the Ku Klux Klan was increasing in power.

In the 1940s, Baxter Young remembered, a friend of theirs helped to change some of that.

“He and his friends had gone to this cafe after the picture show and were refused service,” he said. “The next day my friend filed a complaint, and the courts summoned the owner to court. Our friend won the suit, plus $500 for all his friends that were refused service.

“That restaurant went out of business, and after that day, no restaurant refused a black person service.”

Bernice Young, meanwhile, was working as a cleaning woman when she found recruiting literature by the KKK on her employer’s desk one night.

“I’d cleaned for this guy who worked in real estate and would clean his desk and file cabinets,” she said. “Every now and then I would find little booklets with KKK written on them, so I am pretty sure he was a member. But he was always just as nice and considerate (as he could be) to me--never gave me any problems. What kind of sense that makes, I don’t know.”

In fact, historians say that during the 1920s in Anaheim, four-fifths of the City Council and most of the police force were members of the KKK.

The Youngs also have vivid memories of the political climate in those years. Baxter Young recalled that during the Depression, the mere mention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt caused trouble.

“My brother and I were shining shoes when this rich white guy came in for a shoeshine,” he said. “He was some big shot in the county, and he said that anyone who voted for Roosevelt ought to be run out of the county. “Now, my brother said that since it’s a free country, a person ought to be allowed to vote for whoever they please. And right after he said that, that big shot jumped up out of the chair and said he’d never get his shoes shined at our place again--and he never did.”

Shortly after World War II began, the black population in Orange County began to increase. Santa Ana lobbied for a military base, and in 1941 the Air Corps Training Center was built.

“With the bases popping up out here, you saw more and more black faces, because they were either in the military or working on the base,” Baxter Young said. “Now don’t get me wrong; it was never a lot of us--just enough to fill up the church on Sundays.”

It was also enough to allow Young to open the first black barbershop in Santa Ana in 1955.

But while the 1950s brought positive changes across the country, particularly in the South with emergence of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the changes in Orange County were for the worse, Young said.

“I never had any problems with police or the law the entire time that I lived here,” Young said. “But during the ‘50s, all that changed. A new police Administration came in, and it got so you couldn’t walk down the street without the white cops asking you what you were doing or where you were going. It was constant harassment and such a big change from the way it used to be, and today things aren’t a whole lot better. It’s like we’ve stopped in time.”

Their oldest son, Bennie, 56, agreed: “I experienced many of the same things my parents dealt with out here because I was growing up during that time period before the civil rights marches and voting laws, so things were still pretty bad.

“But I am more than grateful to my parents for being strong enough to stick it out here, when they could have just said forget it and moved on. You have to work to make things change, and that’s what they did.”

The couple’s past, Rev. John McReynolds, said the “Young family and in particular Bernice Young, have been the mainstay of the Second Baptist Church from it’s basic beginings. They have a rich knowledge of history in Orange County and wisdom from over the years that the church and the African-American community out here relies on, cherishes and respects.”

The Youngs’ house saw innumerable birthdays, weddings, christenings and even the death of one of their daughters. Now they have 12 grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, many of whom still live in the area.

Today, Baxter Young said, Orange County “is no more racist than anywhere else in the country, because the white man is the white man, and he is going to try to hold you back no matter where you go. That is how it was when I was a kid, for my children and my grandchildren.

“Out here you just face it more, because white people are all around out here. But it’s all the same no matter where you go.”

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