What was at stake?
King was in Fresno to protest a California housing law that would soon be approved by voters – one that made it legal for landlords to discriminate on the basis of race.
In June 1964, a wave of hope and determination swept through Fresno as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived. Walking from Fresno High to Fresno City College, 1,000 voices joined King in a hymn of liberation:
“Oh, Freedom. Oh, Freedom, before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave,” the thousand-strong crowd chanted.
King was in Fresno to protest a California housing law that would soon be approved by voters – one that made it legal for landlords to discriminate on the basis of race.
But his visit wasn’t merely a whistle-stop on a national tour; it was a crucible where Fresno’s local struggles for equality found purpose and momentum, said Jim Aldredge, an 85-year-old who attended the rally.
“He was a heavyweight,” Jim Aldredge told Fresnoland, who was then a young man navigating the complexities of race in Fresno. “We were talking about open housing and integration.”
As the nation teetered on the precipice of profound change – LBJ to sign the Civil Rights Act within a month, Watts to ignite a year later, Cesar Chávez poised to march on Fresno a year after that – King planted his flag in Fresno, standing defiant against California’s newest discriminatory housing laws.
King delivered two electrifying speeches: one on Echo Avenue, in front of Fresno High, and another at a packed, 3,000-person crowd at Ratcliffe Stadium. The Rev. Henry Mitchell from Second Baptist Church and Rutherford Gaston, local civil rights leaders, had brought King to Fresno.
King’s words resonated with the lived experiences of many Fresnans, Aldredge said. At the time King arrived, Aldredge said, a “Mason-Dixon Line” sliced through the city like a fault line, dividing Black and brown communities south of Belmont from the predominantly white areas beyond.
“If you were going to live in the ghetto of southwest Fresno, Edison High School area – it was always an exceptional situation when you found out that an African American had a house outside of west Fresno,” he said.
He described the city’s stark realities near Fresno High, where schools and housing access remained segregated.
“I’ll give you an example of the demographics right around that time – a little bit before then, Fresno High School had only one black student going there.”
MLK’s legacy in Fresno
King’s visit wasn’t just a fleeting spark. It ignited a spirit of activism that expanded beyond housing, spilling over in Fresno into education and the nascent farmworker movement years later.
After King Left, marches morphed into programs, Aldredge said, led by a new generation of people tackling segregation in classrooms and challenging suburban sprawl that threatened to further marginalize communities.
“It gave more energy to the local NAACP,” Aldredge said.
This was the era of the progressive Mayor Floyd Hyde, Aldredge said, who helped spearhead a Model Cities program that empowered neighborhoods to take their voices to the City Council and its general plans.
Much of the force behind the Model Cities program – which ended in a failed attempt in 1973 to stop the City Council from approving more suburban homes in north Fresno – came from the early NAACP organizing, he said.
“Floyd Hyde came on the scene after that (when King left) and picked up on those programs and put it into Model Cities,” he said.
Two years after King’s visit, Fresno experienced another ripple of the Civil Rights Movement – the arrival of the United Farm Workers in 1966. Their grape boycott, buoyed by the lingering spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, confronted the brutalities of California’s farm labor with their march to Sacramento.
Aldredge, who once toiled in San Joaquin Valley’s cotton and cantaloupe fields with workers under the Bracero program, remembers the harsh realities.
“There was no housing or anything for the farmworkers. So we slept under the truck and went and took baths out in the irrigation ditches,” he remembers. “They were exploiting those Braceros left and right.”
When hotels refused to accommodate the marching farmworkers in 1966, Aldredge stepped in, securing permission for them to camp out and shower in city parks. It was a small gesture but a potent symbol of solidarity.
Soon, the Civil Rights Movement and the farmworker movements refused to be segregated. As part of a “race relations” tour, Aldegredge recalled when newly elected Gov. Ronald Reagan insisted on segregated meetings in Fresno with Black, white, and Latino leaders from the San Joaquin Valley.
“Honestly, they thought they were doing the right thing doing it that way,” he said of Reagan and his staffers.
Cesar Chavez, Aldredge, and Dolores Huerta staged a walkout, a silent protest that reverberated through the corridors of power.
‘Haves and have-nots’
King’s words, uttered 60 years ago, resonate deeply: achieving true equality, he told the crowd at Ratcliffe Stadium that night, would take 90 years.
Fresno’s “Mason-Dixon Line” has shifted north, and issues of urban blight and discrimination remain some of Fresno’s defining concerns.
And yet, the tools wielded in that era have transformed, too.
Today, the right to fair housing in Fresno is not just about ensuring equal access to housing, according to California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta.
It’s also about safeguarding communities from the often invisible burdens of environmental racism—the disproportionate exposure to pollution and industrial blight borne by minority neighborhoods in south Fresno.
To Aldredge, the bridge to a Fresno where freedom isn’t just a song but a lived reality remains an age-old task.
“In Fresno, still, we’re a city of haves and have-nots.”
