William Byron Rumford

William Byron Rumford (February 2, 1908 – June 12, 1986) was an American pharmacist and politician. He was the first African American elected to a state public office in Northern California.

Family background Rumford was born in Courtland, Arizona, a now-defunct mining town, the second of Chauncey G. Rumford and Margaret Lee Johnson's two sons. His father, who had left the family when Rumford was very young, lived in Los Angeles, where his family had moved in about 1910 from Iowa by way of Colorado Springs.

Rumford's mother's side were some of the first American settlers of Arizona. His maternal grandmother ran a boarding house in Tombstone and fought to keep the Tucson public schools desegregated. When Whites established separate schools, she relocated to Los Angeles, having decided that "she was not going to bring those kids up in a segregated environment." Rumford remained with his mother in Tucson, where she worked as a housekeeper. His older brother Chauncey moved to Los Angeles to live with his father and paternal grandmother, and Rumford and his mother soon moved to Phoenix, where she married a barber, Elmer J. Williams. They joined the rest of the family in Los Angeles in 1915, living for a time in a large house on Burlington Avenue. There, his paternal grandmother's sister, who was a songwriter, poet, and painter, helped Delilah L. Beasley write her 1916 history The Negro Trail Blazers of California.

His stepfather, however, did not take to Los Angeles well, and returned the family to Phoenix. His mother and stepfather had children of their own, and Williams paid little attention to the Rumford brothers, who had to work to survive.

Education Rumford graduated from Carver High School, a segregated high school in Phoenix in 1926. He was inspired to attend the University of California, Berkeley, by his high school teachers, particularly Ellis Knox, a Berkeley alumnus who later became the first African American to receive a doctorate on the West Coast. At the age of 18, he moved to San Francisco and worked for a year before enrolling in Sacramento Junior College. He was accepted to the school of pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco, and worked as a parking valet and a doorman at night. He graduated in 1931.

Rumford was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha (ΑΦΑ) fraternity.

Career In 1933, Rumford passed the examination for employment with the State of California at a time when few blacks worked for the state. He also took the examination for investigator on the California Board of Pharmacy, passing the written portion twice, but failing the oral portion two times. "I think I frightened everybody to death on the board when I was there for my oral examination. [...] I took the examination for food and drug investigator and I flunked the oral after they asked me about Joe Louis. And later I came back, took it again, and I flunked it again."

Legislative career One of Rumford's most important achievements was the passage of the California Fair Employment Practices Act, which outlawed employment discrimination. The bill had originally been introduced by Hawkins in 1945, but it never got out of committee. C. L. Dellums (uncle of Congressman and future Oakland mayor Ronald J. Dellums) and other members of the NAACP lobbied in favor of the bill. It passed the assembly in 1955 with the support of Democrats, some of whom were personally opposed to it but succumbed to pressure from within the party, and even a few Republicans, "because they thought it was basically and morally right."

Honors Rumford was honored at the 1972 World Symposium on Air Pollution Control, which recognized his contributions to the fight against air pollution.

In 1980, a segment of state highway 24, the Grove-Shafter Freeway, was renamed the William Byron Rumford Freeway in his honor.

The postal station at the Oakland federal building is named for him, as is a senior housing community in Berkeley.

His archives are housed in the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

A bronze monument to Rumford by artist Dana King was dedicated near the location of his pharmacy on Sacramento Street at Julia Street in Berkeley in July 2016.