Calvin Goode still lives on the property he bought in central Phoenix in 1955, in a small home at Jefferson and 15th streets, steps away from historic Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church.

At the time, it was one of the few neighborhoods where black Arizonans were allowed to buy homes. Now, it’s jutted up against a light-rail line, near a prestigious Great Hearts charter school, on the edge of an upscale apartment housing boom.

After growing up attending segregated schools in Gila Bend and Phoenix in the 1940s, Goode in 1972 became the second black person to serve on the Phoenix City Council. He held the position for 22 years. 

MORE: Martin Luther King Jr. Day events around Phoenix honor civil-rights leader

“I can’t speak for all people, but I am an African-American and I’m 90 years old — I’ll be 91 this month — and I’ve come through segregation, discrimination, and I still feel we are still not completely living by the American creed of liberty, justice and freedom for all people,” Goode said.

He said he remembered once, when he was a young man, he applied for a job at a Phoenix high school and was denied because the principal did not want him supervising white women. 

“I think that we are still discriminated against in parts of our country and denied many things,” Goode said. “Have we made progress? Yes. But not the kind of progress that I think we could make or would make.”

Goode spoke with The Arizona Republic ahead of Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a holiday he was instrumental in getting observed in the city of Phoenix. 

In honor of Goode and the holiday he helped create, The Republic looks back on a few of the state’s most historic leaders and moments in civil-rights history. 

Fight over Martin Luther King Jr. Day 

Arizona has had the most complicated history with Martin Luther King Jr. Day of any state in the country. 

Arizona first recognized the national holiday along with the rest of the country in 1986, after President Ronald Reagan declared it so.

But the next year, new Gov. Evan Mecham rescinded it, saying former Gov. Bruce Babbitt had not had the authority to single-handedly declare a paid state holiday.

So began a fight over the holiday that tore at lawmakers, voters and civic leaders for six years.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1988, an estimated 15,000 people gathered in downtown Phoenix for a march to the Arizona State Capitol protesting the state’s refusal to recognize the holiday. It was a rainy, cold, windy day, but so many people attended that the crowd flooded three lanes of traffic.  

Years of political fighting over the holiday created a national image of Arizona as a state locked in a racial battle.

Several big-name musicians and national conventions canceled their Arizona events. After two ballot propositions to make the day a state holiday failed, the National Football League relocated the 1993 Super Bowl from Sun Devil Stadium to Pasadena, California.

Finally, voters approved a state King holiday in November 1992, making Arizona the only state that put it to a vote of the people and saw it pass.

The Rev. Warren H. Stewart, a community leader who helped coordinate the effort to get the holiday, told The Republic in 2012 that voter approval meant the majority of Arizonans understood that “this isn’t just about a black man or black people. This is about America. This shows America at our best when it comes to civil rights, how we changed as a result of Martin Luther King Jr.”

Segregation approved before statehood

In 1909, before Arizona was a state, the territorial Legislature passed a law allowing segregation.

Territorial Gov. Joseph Kibbey vetoed the measure, but that was overturned by lawmakers. Phoenix voted to segregate its own schools the next year.

MORE: Get free admission to national parks on MLK Day, Jan. 15

“When Arizona achieved statehood in 1912, only two laws addressed the question of
segregation. One of these laws prevented ‘intermarriage between persons of
Caucasian blood and their descendants with Negroes.’ The other law provided for the
establishment of segregated elementary schools,” according to a report from Phoenix’s Historic Preservation Office. 

Phoenix Union Colored High School was founded in downtown Phoenix in 1926 as a school only for black students. It was renamed George Washington Carver High School in 1943. 

For decades, Arizona law also stated that “the marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay or Hindu is null and void.”

A Tucson couple — Henry Oyama, who was Japanese-American, and Mary Ann Jordan, who was white — challenged that law on Dec. 11, 1959.

Less than two weeks later, the Pima County Superior Court struck down the state’s anti-miscegenation law as unconstitutional. The couple married five days later, according to the Arizona Capitol Times. 

If it had been appealed, the case could have set legal precedent across Arizona and even in other states. But the Arizona Legislature repealed the law, and the case was dismissed.

Many other states kept bans on interracial marriage until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Loving v. Virginia in 1967.

Redlining and a historic recording

Millye Carter Bloodworth moved to Arizona in 1975 to start a new life.

“I was directed to buy home on McDowell and 25th Place, and 25th Street was the Phoenix city limits and there was no lights going from 25th Place all the way to Scottsdale,” she said. “I wasn’t accustomed to that because Chicago and Detroit is big city and big lights.”

She recalled the back of the title on her home read, “Do not sell to colored or Mexicans.”

“I should have kept the title,” she said, laughing.

Carter Bloodworth, now 67, said soon after she bought a few other homes on the street and turned them in to Buffalo Haus, one of the first group homes in the state for people with HIV/AIDS. 

She said she and brother Maurice Carter, who was one of the first black drag queens in Arizona, initially found the state’s attitude on equal rights to be behind the times. 

“My brother and I being African-American were always the outsiders, but invited in. That way, the person could say, ‘I’m not prejudiced, Ms. Ebony is my friend,’ ” she said. “I’m like ‘Oh, my God, we went through this in the ’60s. now we have to go through it in the ’80s?’ “

Her words echoed what civil-rights leader Lincoln Ragsdale said about his time in Phoenix beginning in the late 1940s: “Phoenix was just like Mississippi. People were just as bigoted. They had segregation. They had signs in many places, ‘Mexicans and Negroes not welcome.’ “

Ragsdale and his wife, Eleanor, founded the Greater Phoenix Council for Civic Unity and in 1952 helped bring a lawsuit challenging the legality of school segregation.

Judge Fred C. Struckmeyer ruled on the case, deciding that “a half-century of intolerance is enough” and that Arizona’s segregation of black students was unconstitutional and illegal.

His decision came in 1953, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court did the same in its Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

It is believed that Lincoln Ragsdale is responsible for audio recordings of Martin Luther King Jr.’s first and only appearance in Arizona that were found in a Goodwill store in 2013.

In 1964, just a month before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act, King addressed 8,000 people at Arizona State University.

“No section of our country can boast of clean hands in the area of brotherhood,” he said to the crowd. “And it is one thing for a white person of good will outside of the North to rise up with righteous indignation when a bus is burned with freedom riders in Anniston, Alabama, or when a church is bombed in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four, inoffending, innocent, beautiful Negro girls, but it is just as necessary for a white person of good will outside of the South to rise up with righteous indignation when a Negro cannot live in your neighborhood, or when a Negro cannot get a job in your particular firm, or when a Negro cannot join your professional or academic society, your fraternity or sorority. If this problem is to be solved, there must be a sort of divine discontent.”

Less than two weeks later, Phoenix passed an ordinance outlawing discrimination in public places, according to ASU Now.

Arizona gets its first black mayor 

To say Arizona trailed the nation in getting its first black mayor is an understatement.

The nation’s first was George D. Carroll of Richmond, California, who won in 1964. By the end of the ’60s, black men had become mayors in cities in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, Kentucky, North Carolina and Mississippi and in Washington, D.C.

Arizona elected its first black mayor in 1990, when Chandler voters elected Coy Payne. 

In a 2005 interview with a city historian, Payne recalled growing up in a segregated Chandler in the 1940s. 

“There were some restaurants here in Chandler that we could not go in and sit down and have a meal. We had to sit on a certain side of the theater when we went to a movie,” he said.

The only high school he was allowed to attend was the all-black George Washington Carver High School in downtown Phoenix, an hour bus ride away. 

“I feel that if I had gone to an integrated school, that I would have gone farther than I really did academically in the school systems,” he said.

MORE: These four people are ‘Living the Dream’ as Martin Luther King Jr. imagined

Still, he enjoyed high school and said “the only suffering we really did was materially. We did not have all the materials we possibly could have had in other schools. Textbooks were usually secondhand or used.”

He said ROTC uniforms were tattered and repaired, and the rifles were so beaten up that students had to work on them to make them presentable for competitions against other Phoenix Union schools. 

“We learned self-preservation. We learned how to deal with adversity and we learned how to, even though we were not in a diverse society, we learned the steps we needed to take when we did get into an integrated society like at college,” he said. “I had never sat in a classroom with white kids until I went to college.”

Payne attended ASU, but dropped out of in 1949. 

“It was a shock,” he said. “I guess there was a great feeling of low self-esteem. … I felt out of place, I felt my world had come to an end.”

He was drafted by the U.S. Army and served in the Korean War. He later returned to ASU and finished his degree in education in 1958. He worked in the education field for decades. 

As for his time as mayor, he said one of the first issues that came up during his first term was the turmoil over Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Arizona. 

“Chandler was involved in a resolution to the state of Arizona in support of the MLK holiday, and I was glad to see that happen,” he said. “It meant a lot to a lot of people. It also helped a lot of people who thought they wouldn’t be helped by it because it put people’s minds at ease about the importance of a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.”

In his opinion, race was not a factor in his election.

“We were just people. I forgot my color, I forgot my ethnicity, I was really able to put that aside and act on the premise that I’m a human being and by the grace of God I can go as far as I’m willing to take the step to do,” he said. “That’s the ultimate in a person’s life, if they can lay aside personal differences and then come together to work the problems that may exist.”

READ MORE:

Your Turn: 4 things you can do to honor Martin Luther King in 2018

19 historical African-American properties in Phoenix

Phoenix’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2017 march fills the streets with signs and songs

 

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