My wife, my children, and I have lived in homes across Fresno. Yet some of those deeds still declare that families like ours were never welcome. We were not the right race.

“Neither the said premises nor any building thereon shall in any manner be used or occupied by Asiatics, Mongolians, Hindus, Negroes, Armenians or any natives or descendants of the Turkish Empire, and said grantee agrees not to sell or lease said property, nor to convey by deed, any portion of said property except to persons belonging to the Caucasian race, and agrees not to lease, sell or convey … the whole or any portion of said property to any Armenian or to any descendant of an Armenian or to any lineal descendant of an Armenian, save and except (those) employed as servants by the residents.”

The sentence that follows reads: “No poultry or livestock of any kind shall be kept on said premises.”

By Brooke Ashjian

Opinion

That is the order of operations. Armenians, then chickens. Sixty years after the first Armenian stepped off a train here in 1881 — after the vineyards had been planted and the packing houses built and the sons sent to war — the civic imagination of this city had us filed with the barnyard animals.

I raise this now because a lifelong friend of mine is being filed somewhere he does not belong.

Arax Faces Accusations by FUSD Trustee

Donny Arax, the winningest football coach in Bullard High School history, has been accused by a politician on the FUSD school board of directing a career-ending racial slur at her child. Hе denies it, the case will go to a jury trial, and I am going to leave the facts of that day where they belong, which is with the process. What I can speak to is where the man comes from, because I have known it my entire life.

I want to be precise about history, because precision is the first thing it loses. What kept my family and countless others out of northwest Fresno and the country club districts was not a mood. It was not the ambient unpleasantness of a less enlightened time.

It was an instrument drafted by attorneys, recorded at the county, honored by the real estate industry and enforced by neighbors, from the early 1900s into the 1960s. Segregation in Fresno was not a failure of manners.

It was manufactured, here and across the country, and it worked.

The Arax Origins

What it manufactured was a neighborhood. The first home owned by the Ara Arax family stood on Tulare Avenue, just east of Roosevelt High School, on the side of town where this city
stacked everyone it had written out of the deeds.

Next door lived the Mariuses, a Black family who had come west from New York. Fitzalbert Marius was a brilliant surgeon whom the codes had sorted into the same category as an Armenian fruit peddler’s son.

He and Ara Arax became the closest of friends. Segregation is often described as a wall, but it is also a room, and it puts people in that room together. When even a world-class surgeon was not good enough for the block, Ara Arax stood with his neighbor — physically, at times — against the rest of it.

In the mid-1960s, Ara bought a lounge at Clinton and Weber called The Apartments and turned it into the first integrated nightclub in Fresno County. His method was not a manifesto. It was a bandstand.

He booked live music good enough that whites, Blacks, Chicanos, and Asians would sit in the same room to hear it, and in the summer of 1971 he brought Chuck Berry to Fresno for two sold-out shows.

He sought out Les Kimber, the westside publisher, and became one of the California Advocate’s most enthusiastic advertisers. He did this because he understood that a Black newspaper runs on ad revenue, and that where a man spends his money is a truer statement of his politics than anything he says at a luncheon.

Arax Did Not Leave His Neighborhood Behind

When the family was finally able to build in northwest Fresno, on ground that had been closed to Armenians within his own lifetime, Ara did not leave the old neighborhood behind. He became president of Spartan League Baseball at Sequoia Junior High and coached a championship team of Mexican, Black, and white kids, his son Mark among them. Until his murder in 1972, he was an outspoken supporter of the civil rights and farmworker movements.

Donny’s sister, Michelle, and his brother, Mark, have spent their working lives inside the ethic their father left them, which was never complicated: equal rights, all races, no exceptions, starting on the block where you live. Those who knew Ara tend to look at Donny and see a spirited replica — a man who still believes a team is the most efficient argument against a deed restriction ever devised.

A long list of successful young men has come through his football programs, of every race, culture and circumstance, and they credit Donny with their work ethic, their integrity, and a good share of the men they turned into.

Watch him work. A football coach cannot hide. He stands in front of dozens of teenagers from every neighborhood in this city, every day, for months at a stretch, and those kids read adults for a living. Ask the ones who played for him. Ask what he did for the kids who had nothing. That record exists, it is long, and it is not the record of a man who thinks less of anyone by color, nor of a man who uses racial epithets.

Fresno Calls Itself One of the Most Diverse Cities

Fresno has lately grown fond of calling itself one of the most diverse cities in America. Its politicians are the fondest of all — I should know, I was one of them for a while. And it is true. But we tell that story as though it happened to us, like weather. It did not. This city was deliberately sorted, by written rule, and it was unsorted by people who spent their evenings doing it by hand: booking a band, buying an ad, filling out a lineup card, shaking a neighbor’s hand across a property line the law said should not be crossed.

The codes are dead law now. The map they drew is not. Which is why the covenant deserves to be read out loud rather than filed away in embarrassment — read all the way to the end, including the part about the chickens.

Fresno’s civic leaders once filed us in with the livestock. I would ask whether Fresno Unified is now trying to file Donny Arax somewhere he does not belong. He is a great many things — a husband, a father, a coach, a friend, a mentor, a hero. He is not a racist!

In the coming days, his attorney will do the work of clearing his name in the place where names are properly cleared with eviscerating eloquence. I know how I expect it to end, because I know the pieces of the man his father made and the profoundly good man his son became.

About the Author

Brooke Ashjian is the founder and CEO of Seal Rite Paving and a former Fresno Unified School District trustee.

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