Covenants & Lost Neighborhoods

I recently visited the San Diego History Center to view the San Diego’s Lost Neighborhoods exhibition, which examines the local history of African-American communities displaced by redlining, freeway construction, and other discriminatory policies. One of those lost neighborhoods was in La Jolla, which was the setting for my historical novel The Esmeralda Goodbye.

This may come as a surprise to anyone visiting La Jolla today, but at one time a significant black population considered it home. As you’ll see in this map from the exhibition, black residents represented more than ten percent of La Jolla residents in the 1950s, the highest percentage of any community in San Diego at the time.

The map confirmed something I’d felt when I was writing The Esmeralda Goodbye. As a kid who grew up in La Jolla in the late fifties and sixties, I remembered a small but thriving black community you won’t find there today. It was one of the things I wanted to capture in some small way in my novel. The characters of Mabel and Willie Denton, Charlie Buchanon and Mr. Bell as well as Mr. Parker’s Little Pig BBQ were all inspired by memories of people and places from that time.

There were a number of reasons for the decline of the African-American population in La Jolla, but the most heinous and deliberate were the restrictive property covenants. Black residents were allowed to live in the homes of their employers but were otherwise confined to specific and less desirable parts of the town if they wanted to own their own home. As you’ll see from below, the covenants were used to keep anyone who wasn’t White or Caucasian from purchasing, renting or leasing residential properties. This restriction was intended to exclude Jewish owners as well.

As hinted at in my novel, the pending arrival of the University of California in the 1960s brought political pressure that resulted in the covenants being overturned. But the black community of La Jolla had already started to move on. As of 2023 the black population of La Jolla hovered around 1%.