Word: rumford
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...sidestepped California's hottest state issue: repeal of the Rumford Act against racial discrimination in housing (TIME, Sept. 25). In agricultural areas, Murphy wins votes for his stand favoring the bracero program, under which fruit and vegetable farmers hire immigrant labor from Mexico. "You have to remember," explains Murphy, "that Americans can't do that kind of work. It's too hard. Mexicans are really good at that. They are built low to the ground, you see, so it is easier for them to stoop...
...that is beside the point. What really makes Rumford important is that his surname has come to serve as the one-word identification of the most bitterly fought issue in the nation's most populous state. In California, the intensity of interest in the "Rumford" issue overshadows that of such relatively piddling contests as the one between Johnson and Goldwater, or between recently appointed Democratic Senator Pierre Salinger and Republican Challenger George Murphy...
Shock Waves. Last year, in his capacity as a state legislator, W. Byron Rumford introduced a bill prohibiting discrimination for reasons of race or creed in the sale or rental of nearly all California real estate properties. The Democratic-controlled legislature was most reluctant to take any such action. But Democratic Governor Pat Brown put on all sorts of pressures; civil rights demonstrators staged sit-ins and hunger strikes, and just a few minutes before the 1963 session of the legislature ended, the Rumford bill was passed...
Proposition 14 would not only repeal the Rumford Act. It would also repeal sections of a couple of previously existing state laws against discrimination in housing matters. It would, moreover, in effect put into the California constitution a prohibition against all attempts-whether by state, city or county authorities-to act against any sort of housing discrimination...
...most present indications, Californians this November will vote to repeal the Rumford Act and place into their state constitution Proposition 14. The great imponderable is how much the issue will affect national and state Republican candidates...