In February 1952, Wilbur and Borece Gary purchased a small home in San Pablo, California, a little north of Richmond. When the young couple and their children moved in the next month, they were greeted by a mob of more than one hundred of their new neighbors. Shouting epithets, throwing rocks, and burning a cross on the Garys’ front lawn, these white locals were incensed by the prospect of declining property values they believed would result from the arrival of a black family in their suburban development. The sheriff of San Pablo took it all in with bemused indifference.
Not Decca Treuhaft, as the thirty-four-year-old English expatriate Jessica Mitford was then known. Mitford—a mother of three young children and executive secretary of the East Bay Civil Rights Congress, a Communist Party front organization—“got wind of what was going on and almost single-handedly organized about 400 people” to defend the Garys’ home the next evening, as Buddy Green, an African American reporter for the People’s World newspaper, later recalled. With Green at her side, Mitford dashed straight through the crowd to the Garys’ front door. The protective buffer of longshoremen, warehouse workers, and progressive-minded citizens that arrived soon thereafter kept the mob at bay that evening and for several nights to come.
The Garys’ resolve, bolstered by this show of support, finally compelled the San Pablo political establishment to take the family’s plight seriously. Not only did the rock throwing end, but the local governing body also vowed to guarantee the Garys’ safety, began formal inquiries into housing segregation, and established a community-relations committee. The edifice of Jim Crow in that part of California began to crack.
In addition to being an example of the noblest cause embraced by the American Communist Party, the Gary episode was a dramatic and characteristic demonstration of Jessica Mitford’s mettle. Raised to assume her title as an English aristocrat, Mitford, who died in 1996 at the age of seventy-eight, chose instead to become a radical activist and crusading journalist on behalf of the public interest in her adopted United States.
As it happens, we now find ourselves in another “season of the Mitfords,” in the fine phrase of the longtime San Francisco Chronicle editor Peter Y. Sussman. In addition to Outrageous, a new British television series about the Mitford family before World War II, Carla Kaplan’s biography Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford and a new paperback edition of Sussman’s own edited collection of her letters are both appearing this fall. Like cicadas, the Mitford brood seem to reemerge every fifteen or so years to engage and captivate a new generation of readers.