O'Day Short and the Fire

The postwar mythology of the Inland Empire runs something like this: soldiers came home, factories hummed, suburbs spread, and the American middle class built itself a house in the sunshine east of Los Angeles. It is a story about opportunity. It is not a complete story.

In nineteen forty-five, a Black man named O'Day Short, a refrigerator engineer, purchased a home in a white neighborhood. Weeks later, the house exploded and burned. His wife and two children died within a day; Short himself died of his injuries about a month later, after being told his family had not survived.

No one was ever prosecuted.

The story of O'Day Short appears in the records of KCET's Lost LA documentary archive and in regional historical collections covering the postwar Inland Empire. It is not a complicated story. A man exercised a legal right. The coroner's jury called the fire's cause unknown, but an NAACP-hired investigator concluded it had been deliberately set. The legal system found no one to hold accountable. This was not an isolated event in California in the nineteen forties. It was a pattern, replicated from Fontana to Compton to Oakland, wherever Black workers who had migrated for wartime industrial jobs attempted to remain as permanent residents rather than temporary labor.

The Ku Klux Klan maintained an active presence in the Inland Empire in the postwar years. The AFL-affiliated skilled trade unions at Kaiser Steel largely excluded Black workers from apprenticeship programs. The company housing was informally segregated. These were not individual failures of character. They were systems, deliberate and defended.

Kaiser Steel is gone. The suburbs are still there. O'Day Short's name is not on anything in Fontana that I am aware of. This track is one of the few places you will hear it said aloud.