Fresno Bee, CA
May 25 2008
Armenians recall Valley prejudice
By Doug Hoagland / The Fresno Bee05/24/08 22:19:18
Sam Kalfayan angrily grabbed the real estate salesman by the tie.
Kalfayan’s chest tightened beneath the U.S. Army uniform he still wore
after returning from World War II. Kalfayan had risked his life for
his country, but now he was being told he couldn’t buy a house in a
Fresno neighborhood because he was Armenian.
"I was so goddamned mad I could have killed the bastard," recalled
Kalfayan, now 97.
He felt as if he had been sucker-punched that summer day in 1945. Yet
the property restriction was nothing new. For decades, deeds barred
Armenians from some Fresno neighborhoods unless they were servants.
Prejudice and discrimination greeted Armenians as surely as the
Valley’s mild weather and towering mountains in the distance reminded
them of their homeland.
Early-day Armenians, including author William Saroyan, adjusted. But
they didn’t forget.
Saroyan’s previously unpublished novella, "Follow" — written about
1930 and now being serialized in The Bee — touches on prejudice.
In chapter four, protagonist Aram Diranian of Fresno scrawls
"American" on an application form when asked to describe his
nationality. "My people are Armenians," he acknowledges to an
employment-agency clerk who questions this answer.
But he silently thinks: "It would be good to get away from this
town. Here he would always be an Armenian, there would never be any
escape from that, but in the outer world no one would care what he
was, no one would dare look down upon him as an inferior."
Today, the discrimination is illegal and the prejudice has faded.
Many Valley residents know nothing about it. And some older Armenians
don’t like talking about those dark days.
While young Armenians such as 21-year-old Knar Mekhitarian of Fresno
have heard stories of prejudice and discrimination from family
members, their lives have been different.
"I don’t feel discriminated against, and that’s a good feeling,"
Mekhitarian said.
Yet some older Armenians offer poignant reminders.
"Just being what I am, I feel unclean," said 88-year-old Bob Der
Mugrdechian of Clovis, his voice quavering with emotion.
Prejudice "dies hard," and still exists, though subtly, said Dickran
Kouymjian, professor emeritus and just-retired director of the
Armenian studies program at California State University, Fresno. "It’s
just gone underground. The great majority of Fresnans has no prejudice
toward the Armenians. But there is a residual something. I don’t know
what you call it. Maybe suspicion."
Some think the fact that many Armenians prospered — doing better than
some established Fresnans — inflamed passions against them. But their
prosperity ultimately led to their acceptance in a society where — as
Saroyan once wrote — people respect money.
"That damn money did it," said 95-year-old Susie Baboian Hedges, a
Fresno Armenian who married an odar — a non-Armenian. "You can swing
your weight around when you have moola."
The most glaring prejudice and discrimination against Armenians in
Fresno occurred from the 1890s to the 1940s, and one of the first
documented cases took place in — of all places — a house of worship,
according to historical accounts.
In the 1890s, Congregational minister J.H. Collins demanded that
Armenians sit by themselves in church. He also removed hymnals and
Bibles from their seats and announced he wanted to rid his
congregation of Armenian parishioners. He even came down from the
pulpit during one Sunday service to supervise the expulsion of an
Armenian from a restricted pew. Church officials eventually censured
Collins, but the Armenians started their own Congregational
church. Pilgrim Armenian Congregational Church, now on First Street,
still exists.
Businesses discriminated, too. In 1899, The Traders Insurance Company
of Chicago sent its Fresno agent a letter instructing him to cancel
the policies of Armenians.
They were considered too risky and a "hazard" because they had enemies
in the community, the letter read.
Many insurance companies wouldn’t sell to Armenians because they were
suspected of buying policies on their businesses and then committing
arson, said Bill Secrest Jr., local history librarian at the Fresno
County Library.
One historian looked into the allegations but found no evidence to
support them, Secrest said.
Armenians also faced barriers in housing.
By 1920, most lived near Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church, at M
and Ventura avenues, in what was called Armenian Town. Neighborhoods
in the "exclusive" Fig Garden, Huntington Boulevard and Sunnyside
areas were off-limits to Armenian families, first by tacit
understanding among sellers and then by restrictive clauses in deeds,
Secrest said.
One property deed from the 1920s says that for 15 years no person of
"Negro or Mongolian origin, nor any subject or former subject of the
Turkish Empire" could live on the property, except as a household
worker.
Armenians had lived in the Ottoman Empire and genocide there killed
1.5 million of them between 1915 and 1923. The nation of Turkey
emerged from the empire’s collapse in World War I.
Many Armenians came to Fresno as political refugees.
Fresno had never before experienced a big influx of non-European
immigrants other than Chinese and Japanese.
The poor felt threatened by the hard-working Armenian merchants and
farmers, while the powerful disliked the Armenians’ ambition,
Kouymjian said.
People, it seemed, felt free to openly express their anti-Armenian
prejudice.
"Why encourage this decadent parasitic race to emigrate here when
there are millions of the finest stock in England, Scandinavia,
Germany and France ready to come here?" a Fresno doctor told Stanford
University doctoral student Richard LaPiere in the late
1920s. LaPiere, who was writing a dissertation about Fresno Armenians,
did not name the people he interviewed.
A teacher asked LaPiere: "Why should we try to assimilate these
peoples and disturb the otherwise smooth equilibrium of our race. I
believe in race purity and the pride of all peoples in keeping their
race pure."
Armenians drew on their own pride to help sustain them, Kouymjian
said. They knew their history — how their kings had battled the
mighty Roman Empire and how Armenia was the first Christian nation.
Photo: "Some things you don’t accept. That was an insult I couldn’t
take," says Sam Kalfayan, a U.S. Army veteran recounting how upon
returning from World War II in the summer of 1945 he was told he
couldn’t buy a house in a Fresno neighborhood because he was Armenian.
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
