African Americans in Los Angeles

by

Keenan Norris

• LAST REVIEWED: 19 April 2023
• LAST MODIFIED: 27 March 2019
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0069

Introduction

The word “California” derives from Spanish novelist Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s bastardization of the Arabic “khalifa.” Montalvo’s use is probably a relic of the Moorish occupation of Spain. Calafia, the black warrior queen of Montalvo’s 1510 novel Las sergas de Esplandián, ruled the mythic island of California. The mythos of an island populated solely by black Amazons persisted among the conquistadors, who brought with them a contingent of actual Africans, enslaved persons whose free mestizo descendants would one day help to found El Pueblo de Los Angeles, the settlement that would become Los Angeles, California. While African-descended people today make up less than 10 percent of Los Angeles’s population and have, in the city’s iteration as American territory, never comprised more than 20 percent of Los Angeles citizens, Black Angelenos have played a remarkably centrifugal role in the city’s history. In 1931, while a University of Southern California graduate student, Jessie Elizabeth Bromilow published a thesis on a man little recognized in American annals, the black mestizo Pio Pico, the last governor of the Mexican state of Alta California. Based in Los Angeles, heir to a leading family un Mexican California, Pico nevertheless died forgotten. The scholarship of historians concerned with California’s black history has recovered his story and the stories of other black mestizos of Mexican California. In the 20th century, large-scale African-American migration from Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas to work in the Second World War defense industries reshaped the city. Scholarship that has focused on post–Second World War Black Los Angeles’s music, jazz and hip-hop, and its gang violence has garnered great attention. Yet, equally important is the record of the civil rights struggles in the city, which spurred changes in local and national law. Emerging from an era of widespread protest, Tom Bradley attracted a multiracial constituency and became the city’s most impactful mayor, maneuvering Los Angeles to the center of the Pacific Rim’s economic network, bringing the Olympics and an international airport to the global mega-city. But Bradley’s tenure has long come under criticism from scholars and cultural commentators on multiple fronts, not least for the disenfranchisement of the black working class and the concurrent rise of Los Angeles’s black gang culture that it witnessed. The record of Black Los Angeles is, thus, a record of its manifold complexities, racial, spatial, political, cultural.

General Overviews

It is surprising, given Los Angeles’s centrality to America’s and, indeed, the world’s culture and economy, that more comprehensive scholarship has not been produced about African-American history and presence in the city of Los Angeles. Jack Forbes, primarily a scholar of Native American history, also devoted much study to the confluence between black and Native American peoples in the colonial era Far West, in particular his work Afro-Americans in the Far West: A Handbook for Educators (Forbes 1966). Taylor 1998 is also concerned with this same time period and the confluence between the subjugated peoples of the American West. Wagner 2007 chronicles the lives and accomplishments of ten particularly influential 19th-century black women of the Far West, highlighting the often primary role that black women have played in Black California’s abolition, civil rights, and political and economic self-determination movements. Sides 2006, Flamming 2006, and Cox Yarborough 1996 (Central Avenue: Its Rise and Fall, 1890–1955) examine the Great Migration of African Americans out of the American South to Los Angeles. Wilkerson 2010 also adds to this literature, profiling Dr. Robert Pershing’s journey from Louisiana to Los Angeles and relaying the major scholarship on the westward migration of African Americans during the mid-20th century. Hunt and Ramon 2010 and Nanda 2011 are ambitious edited interdisciplinary anthologies that seek, through collection of historical documents, the writings of leading literary lights, as well as lesser-known journalists, scholars, novelists and poets, to provide a comprehensive record of Black California’s history, subjugation, artistic, cultural, and political ascendance and complexity. Most recently, Campbell 2016 chronicles the prehistory and pre–Great Migration history of Los Angeles’s black population.

• Campbell, Marne L. Making Black Los Angeles: Class, Gender, and Community, 1850–1917. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

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  Campbell chronicles the mythic prehistory of Black California and then in subsequent chapters examines African Americans’ formation of communities in 19th- and early 20th-century Los Angeles, with specific attention to Charlotta Bass’s work and DuBois’s “Colored California.”

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• Cox, Bette Yarbrough. Central Avenue: Its Rise and Fall, 1890–1955. Los Angeles: BEEM, 1996.

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  Cox provides the history of Central Avenue’s heyday as a black cultural and economic thoroughfare in the first half of the 20th century and its decline after the Second World War.

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• Flamming, Douglas. Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. Oakland: University of California Press, 2006.

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  Charlotta Bass’s life and work is used as a prism through which to examine black migration to Los Angeles, the civil rights movement in the city, the pre–Second World War Central Avenue commercial district and black life during the Great Depression.

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• Forbes, Jack D. Afro-Americans in the Far West: A Handbook for Educators. Berkeley: The Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development, 1966.

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  A proposed curriculum and annotated bibliography for educators developing a curriculum focused on African-American migration and contributions to America’s western region. The handbook is now available for free online in PDF form.

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• Hunt, Darnell, and Ana-Christina Ramon, eds. Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

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  This anthology collects multidisciplinary scholarly essays on the historic and contemporary breadth of Black Angeleno experience, from the city’s founding under Spanish rule to the diverse, complicated metropolis faced by African Americans in the 21st century.

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• Nanda, Aparajita, ed. Black California: A Literary Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2011.

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  This literary anthology presents primary source historical documents, articles chronicling major events in the history of African Americans in California, and well-known novelists and poets chronicling black experience through creative and journalistic literature.

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• Sides, Josh L. A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. Oakland: University of California Press, 2006.

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  With specific chapters on the migration of a family out of Louisiana, DuBois in California, Second World War migration, the black working class in Los Angeles, etc. Sides examines the totality of the 20th-century black experience in Los Angeles.

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• Taylor, Quintard. In Search of the Racial Frontier African Americans in the American West 1528–1990. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

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  Though the black population out West is relatively small, Taylor argues that African Americans have been central figures in the settlement and development of the American West.

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• Wagner, Tricia Martineau. African American Women of the Old West. Guilford, CT: TwoDot, 2007.

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  Wagner’s work examines the lives of Western pioneers doubly under-discussed due to their race (black) and gender (female) in the annals of the American West.

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• Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Vintage, 2010.

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  Wilkerson profiles black migrants, Ida Mae Gladney, who migrates from Mississippi to Chicago; George Starlling, who leaves Florida for Harlem; and Robert Pershing, whose journey takes him from Louisiana to Los Angeles, and examines the totality of the Great Migration.

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Primary Sources

Don Pio Pico addressed the Señor Consul to the United States of North America, Don Tomas O. Larkin. The letter, Pico 1846, is among the more interesting documents in our record of early Black Angeleno literature, even more so because it predates American control of California. Bromilow 1931 is the earliest history of the life of Pio Pico. Forbes 2015 elaborates on this history with an essay in the scholarly anthology Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, which documents the African presence in California during the Spanish colonial era. John W. Ravage collects a unique trove of primary source documents with over two hundred never-before-published photographs of African Americans living in the Far West during the middle and late 19th century (Ravage 1997). The University of Southern California’s Digital Library has archived the Charlotta Bass 2012, a collection of images of Bass’s life and work as the managing editor of the California Eagle, during which time the newspaper chronicled Los Angeles’s civil rights movement and the Black Los Angeles experience in general. W. E. B. DuBois penned “Colored California” (DuBois 1913), an account of his observations of Los Angeles and the other cities to which he traveled. DuBois both notes the opportunities present in Los Angeles and the persistence of a color line that functions to disadvantage African Americans relative to whites. Delilah Beasley published The Negro Trailblazers of California (Beasley 1919), a compilation of the historical documents related to African-American life in California that were archived in the Bancroft Library at the University of California at that time. Bond 1936 is a dissertation that provides contemporary accounts of the Great Migration of African Americans to Los Angeles. Fritsch 1998 looks back on the life and political history of Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’s first and, to date, only black mayor, in a New York Times article published immediately after Bradley’s passing.

• Beasley, Delilah. The Negro Trailblazers of California: A Compilation of Records from the California Archives in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, in Berkeley; and from the Diaries, Old Papers, and Conversations of Old Pioneers in the State of California. . . Los Angeles, 1919.

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  A record of African-American pioneers based on oral histories and primary source documents that in 1919 Beasley found in the California Archives and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

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• Bond, J. Max. “The Negro in Los Angeles: A Dissertation.” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1936.

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  Bond’s doctoral dissertation provides contemporaneous documentation of the shifting racial demography of Los Angeles during the Great Migration.

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• Bromilow, Jessie Elizabeth. “Don Pio de Jesus Pico: His Biography and Place in History.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, August, 1931.

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  Bromilow’s thesis details Pico’s racially mixed ancestry, his family’s high status in Mexican California, and his biography as a major political figure in early Los Angeles history.

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• Charlotta Bass. California Eagle Photograph Collection, 1870–1960. University of Southern California Libraries. Digital Library, 2012.

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  This collection is comprised of almost five hundred photographs from the personal papers and artifacts of Bass, managing editor of the California Eagle from 1912 to 1951. Included are images of Bass’s personal life and photographs from the Eagle’s news coverage.

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• DuBois, W. E. B. “Colored California.” California Number. The Crisis 6.4 (August 1913).

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  DuBois penned “Colored California” after visiting the West Coast for the first time in 1913. Excited by the beauty of the region and the opportunities available to African Americans there, DuBois spearheaded the establishment of NAACP chapters in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

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• Forbes, Jack D. “The Early African Heritage of California.” In Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California. Edited by Lawrence B. de Graaf, Lawrence B. de Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2015.

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  Forbes’s essay provides a history of the African presence in present-day California concurrent with Spanish conquest. The piece occupies a unique historical role and is often cited by scholars of African-American history of the American West.

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• Fritsch, Jane. “Tom Bradley, Mayor in Era of Los Angeles Growth, Dies.” New York Times, 30 September 1998.

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  This New York Times article marked the passing of Tom Bradley, the first black mayor of a major city in the American West.

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• Pico, Don Pio. “Santa Barbara June 29 of 1846.” In Black California: A Literary Anthology. Letter to the Señor Consul, 1–3. Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 1846.

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  In this June 29, Pico’s letter protests the “great number of North American foreigners who have invaded” the territory of California over which he presides as governor.

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• Ravage, John W. Black Pioneers: Images of the Black Experience on the North American Frontier. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997.

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  This book is an archive of over two hundred never-before-published photographs depicting African-American prospectors, miners, ship captains, gamblers, outlaws, rodeo stars, and one of only five known photographs of Mary Fields, bar owner, post-mistress, and Wells-Fargo Express shotgun rider.

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Early Los Angeles

Though the myths of black presence in California suggest a black past far more ancient, the historical reality is that African presence in California dates to its Spanish conquest in the early 1500s. The mixed-race settlers of what would one day become Los Angeles, California, were descended from Africans enslaved and trafficked by Spanish conquistadors to the territory of New Spain in the 1500s and 1600s, as well as the Spaniards themselves, the Native Americans who had lived on the land for millennia, and immigrants from the Philippines and many other nations as well. In 1781, the settlement that would one day eventuate into Los Angeles was founded as El Pueblo de Los Angeles by a group of forty-four settlers, twenty-six of whom were of some African ancestry. Juan Francisco Reyes became alcalde (municipal magistrate) of the pueblo briefly in 1790 and from 1793 to 1795. Reyes was an Afro-Mestizo, as was the last governor of the state of California under Mexican rule (Alta California), Pio Pico. From its inception and under governments Mexican and American, Los Angeles’s identity has been polyglot, migratory, and mutable.

Migration and Immigration

Los Angeles’s black history in the 20th century was marked by successive waves of in-migration, primarily from Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas beginning in the first decade of the century and continuing at varying degrees of intensity up to the 1970s. In the decades since, the African-American population of the city has steadily decreased; however, the city has seen significant increase of the population of black immigrants from Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

Demographic Trends 1970s to the Present

With the deindustrialization of American cities in the 1970s and 1980s, the heroin and crack cocaine epidemics and the rising tide of gang violence, all of which hit Los Angeles as hard as any city in the country, Black Los Angeles suffered mightily; its neighborhoods were ground zero for the importation of drugs by foreign interests and spiraling rates of crime, compelling its population to look elsewhere for safety and prosperity. Between 1985 and 1990, 61,773 Black Angelenos left Los Angeles County altogether, most moving to the adjacent Inland Empire region to the East. Others moved back to the South. Between 1980 and 1990, the Inland Empire could claim the fastest growing black population of any region in the nation with a 119 percent growth rate. A loose conglomerate of small- and medium-sized cities, the best known of which include Riverside, San Bernardino, Moreno Valley, and Rancho Cucamonga, the Inland Empire, while geographically part of the Los Angeles Basin and sharing many of Los Angeles’s cultural and demographic features, is a separate region several dozen miles from Los Angeles proper.

Politics and Power

The mythology originating from Spanish novelist Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 1510 Las sergas de Esplandián of an island called California ruled by black Amazons and protected by griffins presages, however fantastically, California’s place in the Black American mythos as a land of opportunity and a potential zone of Black Power. From its inception as a Mexican state, California has had a legacy of black leadership. The Afro-Mestizo Francisco Reyes was the first of these African-descended leaders, serving as alcalde for Pueblo de Los Angeles from 1793 to 1795. In the 19th century, Pio Pico held a variety of posts within city and state government under both Mexican and American rule. In the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century, Jim Crow extended well beyond the American South, restricting where African Americans could buy and rent homes throughout the country, including Los Angeles. This segregation by custom extended to the political arena, driving black politics to the fringes, where civil rights organizations like the NAACP and Universal Negro Improvement Association cultivated significant followings among African-Americans in California and all across the West Coast. With the civil rights movement came a new era in black political influence in the state and in the city. In the 1970s, Mayor Tom Bradley and Congresswoman Yvonne Braithwaite-Burke rose to power in Los Angeles. Later, as the 20th century gave way to the 21st, Congresswoman Maxine Waters and transplanted Black Angeleno celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Magic Johnson, and LeBron James have made their mark on regional and national politics.

Representative Areas of Black Los Angeles

At least since the Great Migration, African-Americans in Los Angeles have been associated with the nebulous region known as South Central or South Los Angeles. It is not a contiguous region but rather a cultural and racial designation that encompasses areas as geographically and socioeconomically separate as Watts and Baldwin Hills. In a sense, it is merely short hand for “where black people in L.A. live.” In the late 19th century, the Brick Block neighborhood on Spring Street emerged as the first nexus point of black culture in the city. By the 1920s, with the first significant waves of black migrants from the Southwest, that cultural center shifted to Central Avenue, which became a commercial and artistic thoroughfare, with the jazz scene of particular note. By mid-century, Central Avenue was recognized nationally as one of the prime centers of that great African-American musical tradition. The latter decades of the 20th century witnessed Los Angeles’s de-industrialization, which was also centered on Central Avenue, the factories that had provided its economic base disappearing one after the next. Black Los Angeles suffered numerous, systematic shocks from the 1970s to 1990s, the crack cocaine epidemic, out-of-control gang violence, and the advent of mass incarceration among them. By the late 20th century, Leimert Park had replaced Central Avenue as the city’s African-American artistic heart. Meanwhile, as Hollywood became less racist and diversified somewhat, Baldwin Hills, an affluent, predominantly black neighborhood, became notable for its preponderance of black celebrities.