This essay was published alongside the Zócalo public program “How Does the Inland Empire Strike Back Against Hate?,” presented in partnership with California Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, United We Stand, UCR ARTS, and UCR College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Watch the event here.

For over 25 years I have asked my students in U.S. history courses the same questions about Jim Crow:

“Where does Jim Crow ‘live’?”

“When did it begin?”

“How does it work?”

Their answers almost always focus on Southern states. I have taught in California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota, places with well-documented histories of racial segregation and discrimination. A wealth of scholarship shows Jim Crow was everywhere. Still, students cling to a belief that the history of white supremacy is a Southern history.

To push back against these simplified notions of racial discrimination in the U.S., I’ve made it my job to write and teach about Jim Crow in unexpected places—including California. The state embraces its reputation as a site for progressive thinking, the birthplace of the hippies and the Black Panthers, and a “free” state from its 1850 inception. Yet the state also developed innovative methods for containing and restricting people of color in public and private spaces—methods that continue to stoke racism in California and throughout the U.S. today.

One of the most successful people who fought back against those methods was Loren Miller, a lawyer who worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Los Angeles. Using Miller’s mid-20th-century career as a lens to examine Jim Crow in California offers a sense of the breadth of this discrimination—and of the importance of acknowledging and understanding it.

Miller was born in Pender, Nebraska, in 1903 and earned his law degree from Washburn Law School in Topeka, Kansas, in 1928. By the time he moved to California in 1929, the NAACP had been the leading civil rights organization in the nation for two decades, fighting to end discrimination, segregation, and lynching. The organization established a branch in Los Angeles in 1914.

In housing, neighborhoods, and schools, California had always excelled at creating white-only institutions. Its history of segregation began in the 1850s, when the state adopted so-called Black codes. These laws and practices kept African Americans out of a variety of places, from streetcars, theaters, and restaurants to political parties and witness stands, where they could not testify against white people until 1863. The state was especially proficient at creating white-only neighborhoods as it applied restrictive covenants and lending practices with aplomb.

Miller’s legal career took off quickly, fueled by the sheer volume of discrimination to fight in California. Between 1938 and 1948, when the Great Migration pulled thousands of African Americans to California, Miller appeared as the attorney in approximately 75 lawsuits involving discriminatory real estate practices. In December 1945, he won the Sugar Hill case, a decisive victory at the California Supreme Court that deemed restrictive covenants a violation of Black homeowners’ 14th Amendment rights. The case received extensive media attention, in part because one of the plaintiffs was the Academy Award-winning actress Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind. In 1954, along with Thurgood Marshall, Miller argued Shelley v. Kraemer, a landmark Supreme Court case in which the justices declared that the enforcement of racial restrictive covenants was unconstitutional.

Miller became the NAACP’s foremost expert on restrictive covenants’ legal intricacies and harmful effects in the U.S. In lectures to civic and human rights organizations around the country, he argued that the answer to most of the problems confronting Black Americans was “to find a solution to the complex housing problems that plague the urban Negro,” as he told a National Urban League audience in Pittsburgh in 1954. Housing discrimination led to other anti-Black practices and segregation, Miller noted—which kept Black people from achieving equality in education, the workplace, and beyond.

Miller never missed an opportunity to emphasize how dismal the situation was in his home state. “[M]ore Negro children attend all-Negro schools in Los Angeles than attend such schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Jackson, Mississippi, combined,” he told an audience at the Lake Arrowhead Conference on Equal Employment Opportunity, in a 1963 talk titled “The Problems of The Negro in Southern California.”

And Miller knew, firsthand, that California’s Jim Crow, despite its legalistic and genteel packaging, could be as violent as that of the South—and as hard to combat. In 1946, his law firm had taken on one of the state’s most devastating instances of racial violence.

In December 1945, refrigeration engineer O’Day Short, who was Black, moved with his wife Helen and their two small children to a previously all-white part of Fontana, in California’s San Bernardino County, to take a job at a Kaiser Steel mill. Days after the Short family moved into their home, a menacing posse warned them to leave the neighborhood. The Shorts stayed put. On December 16, their house burned to the ground. Helen and the children died from “shock from extensive burns” shortly after arriving at the hospital; O’Day died several weeks later.

The threats, arson, and murders of the Shorts were almost certainly the work of Ku Klux Klan vigilantes. The so-called Second Klan had been active in the area in the 1920s and months after the fire at the Shorts’ house, the group staged a major recruitment drive in San Bernardino County.

Miller and his law partner Ivan J. Johnson worked diligently on the Short case, but it never went to trial. The San Bernardino County Coroner quickly ruled that the deaths were caused by a fire of “unknown origin,” refusing to admit the threats against the Shorts as evidence.

Rumors circulated among white neighbors and local law enforcement that the Shorts had started the fire when they lit their stove; the Black press, including the California Eagle (which Miller later purchased), devoted considerable coverage to debunking that claim. An interracial coalition of civil rights workers, labor unions, and religious leaders pushed for justice, turning the murders into a rallying cry to stop residential segregation and the revitalized Ku Klux Klan. In 1946, California Attorney General Robert W. Kenny promised an independent investigation into the murders, but the grand jury adjourned without issuing a report.

Miller and Johnson had a stellar record fighting Jim Crow in the Golden State. But in the Short case, there were no victories. As the Black newspaper the Los Angeles Sentinel put it back in 1946, “All the Shorts are dead…Only Jim Crow is alive.”

When I teach my students about Miller and the Shorts, they begin to see that white supremacy had—and has—a long reach. The violence that Black Americans face today is rooted in their own backyards, and not just in the South. Understanding the pervasiveness of white supremacy and its “strange career” in unexpected places is crucial if we are to understand its resurgence today.