The Lawrence Tract: racial integration in Palo Alto in the 1950s

Filed under: History, Race/Ethnicity
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Yesterday I learned about a chapter of Palo Alto history that I had been completely unaware of: the Lawrence Tract.

In 1948, a group started planning a community that would be intentionally multiracial: roughly a third of the homes would be occupied by white people, a third by Black people, and a third by people of Japanese or Chinese descent.

The community consisted of about 23 homes near Greer Road and Colorado Avenue, and especially on Lawrence Lane. That lane and the tract itself were named after Paul Lawrence, a Black man who participated in realizing the project. He didn’t live there, because he moved to Washington, DC to work at Howard University; but he moved back to Palo Alto in 1960, and I think his daughter was Kathy Lawrence, who was my chemistry teacher at Palo Alto High School in the ’80s.

There’s a lot more to the story of the Lawrence Tract. For example, a Peninsula Times-Tribune article from 1980 says:

“the Lawrence Tract rather successfully fulfilled its goal of an integrated neighborhood. In order to keep it such, the members incorporated to protect what was, in a sense, a restrictive covenant which said that a black family moving out would try to sell to other blacks, a white family to other whites and so on.”

…but I’m not sure how formal that agreement was; in particular, I don’t know whether there were formal racial covenants involved.

There’s some more information (and a bibliography) on a website about the Lawrence Tract, but that site looks to me like it’s something of a work in progress.

The 1980 Times-Tribune article is fascinating; in addition to more info about the Lawrence Tract, it also includes a story about Eichler initially keeping a Black family out of one of his developments, and then later becoming opposed to racist exclusion.

But content warning for spelling out the N-word (in a quote), and for some dubious phrasing around some racial terms, and for a couple of mentions of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.

It’s presented as a PDF of what I assume is a photocopy of the article, so it’s probably not very readable by screen readers.

I heard about the Tract in the Malcolm Gladwell interview on City Arts & Lectures on the radio yesterday. As usual, Gladwell muddled some stuff—for example, he seemed to be saying that the Tract required that exactly one-third of the homes would be reserved for each of the three groups involved (white people, Black people, and “Asians”), whereas the Times-Tribune article says that the numbers weren’t exactly one-third each even at the start. Gladwell also seemed to me (though I may have read too much into what he was saying) to be claiming that one-third is a magic number where everyone feels sufficiently represented, and that this one-third number is why the Tract wasn’t subject to “white flight” the way inner cities were. So I feel like it’s worth noting that Palo Alto is not an inner city, and that by the time of that 1980 article, the Tract had become “predominantly white.” And 23 houses is not a very big sample size on which to base a thesis.

(This entry was originally posted on Facebook on October 21, 2024.)

One Response to “The Lawrence Tract: racial integration in Palo Alto in the 1950s”

  1. Jim Keffer

    I’m reading Gladwell’s book also. He does seem to indicate that there was a formalized agreement among the community living on the Lawrence tract to maintain racial quotas. It’s an interesting concept that made me think more about other socially responsible ways to build communities.

    While diversity is certainly a desirable element, my thoughts go to self sufficiency and collaboration efforts that might promote a better quality of living in affordable housing neighborhoods. We all now the challenge associated with access to the “American Dream” among those in the lowest quartile of household income. It’s a gigantic challenge that currently seems insurmountable. What I like about the Lawrence project is that it was a micro project directed toward a macro problem.

    What if the answer to solving macro problems was actually a series of micro solutions that could actually get traction and achieve Gladwell’s illusive Tipping Point? I enjoyed a recent 60 Minutes segment about the University of Texas at Austin, because it showed how the school encourages it’s students to share all of their thoughts without fear of reprisal. I think I like it because it represents a departure from the norm. Dr Bruce Wilkinson, The author “the Prayer of Jabez” teaches a segment on exponential growth in which he shares that “Exponential Growth is Always Possible. But, what got you Here Won’t Get YOU There.”

    When I put together the notion of another Social Experiment to address Improving the Lives and Quality of Life among the least wealthy segment of Society, I think there’s room for a lor of potential best practices. Would The Lawrence Project quota system be a part of that? I doubt it in the world we live in today. But what would the ideal scenario look like?

    Potential Tax Incentives for Companies or Individuals willing to make contributions? ( I start with this because I think the ideal scenario might not need to be sponsored by the Govt. It’s been working on it for decades with what appears to be very limited progress.

    Above average access to Education and Healthcare are a must but these are very broad terms. What kind of Education gives any group of children and or adults the best opportunity to achieve fulfilling and well compensating careers? I think some of the answers may be in the writings of Dr Raj Chetty and Dr Ruby Payne ( A Framework for Understanding Generational Poverty).

    I’d love to start a conversation or debate, if that’s helpful and not self defeating, about what the best elements of a prototypical ideal community might be and how it could be modeled and scaled to reduce the overall cost to a level that moderately wealthy well intended individuals, business, religious or civic organizations could raise enough money to start one in their region.

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