Quick & dirty history lesson on Huntington Beach! HB was a small coastal town that was so unpopular lots of land were given away with the purchase of encyclopedia sets. (Some families didn’t know about these encyclopedia lots until they inherited them.) 1/?

Some of the families who got these lots found out they’d struck liquid gold when HB was found to be largely situated on oil fields. For years it was an oil town, but still not especially popular place to live. (The 1st high school’s/my alma mater’s mascot is Oiler man.) 2/?

When schools started to integrate following Brown v Board, white parents sought a workaround to keep their kids segregated. HB was perfect - still relatively remote, bussing would have been too inconvenient and expensive. Property values skyrocketed. 3/?

It became a hub of white supremacy in So Cal. The KKK and eventually neo-nazis took root, and it’s easier to maintain white supremacy when communities stay segregated. It’s easier to discriminate against someone you’ve never encountered. 4/?

It’s been progressive in some ways - HB’s former congressman Rohrabacher was considerably pro-cannabis because it’s a stoner surf town - but still holds to the racism that raised it, from Islamophobic post-9/11 stabbings on main st to actual white supremacist rallies today. /end