When Eula Mae Love left the tiny, segregated town of Varnado, Louisiana as a teenager in 1953, she was beating a familiar path west, or so she must have hoped.

She traded a small southern town, seventy miles north of New Orleans, where mules tilled cornfields and a single street divided white from “colored,” for the cars and freeways of the cosmopolitan California metropolis. Love graduated from Compton High School and worked in the factories of Anaheim; she married, raised three daughters, and bought a small house in Watts, Los Angeles.

Back home, in 1965, nightriders murdered Varnado’s first black deputy sheriff — the kind of racist terror that Love and her family had fled. But contrary to the familiar plot, Southern California was no land of milk and honey.