Yesterday I learned about a chapter of Palo Alto history that I had been completely unaware of: the Lawrence Tract.<\/p>\r\n
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.<\/p>\r\n
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\u2019t 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 \u201980s.<\/p>\r\n
There\u2019s a lot more to the story of the Lawrence Tract. For example, a Peninsula Times-Tribune<\/cite> article from 1980 says:<\/p>\r\n \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\r\n \u2026but I\u2019m not sure how formal that agreement was; in particular, I don\u2019t know whether there were formal racial covenants involved.<\/p>\r\n There\u2019s some more information (and a bibliography) on a website about the Lawrence Tract<\/a>, but that site looks to me like it\u2019s something of a work in progress.<\/p>\r\n
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