Horace McMillan was properly mystified. He’d just moved to Santa Barbara with his young wife and baby daughter, and they were looking to buy a house. In his early thirties, McMillan was educated and easygoing. He’d served nearly five years in the military. He was a doctor with all the privileges needed to practice in the local hospitals. Yet his agent was showing him nothing but dreck. “This is strange,” McMillan would recall. “All the beautiful homes up for sale and he’s showing me all these dumps.” McMillan asked the agent, “This is all you have?” The agent’s answer? “This is all we have.”

As it turns out, he was lying. 

The year was 1953, two years before the bus boycotts of Birmingham, Alabama, helped trigger what would become the Civil Rights movement. And Horace McMillan was a black man.