Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present

Abstract

To many, the idea of “black Los Angeles” conjures a set of disturbing images of burning buildings, drive-by shootings, and police brutality. Two recent monographs, however, challenge these violent stereotypes, illuminating the history of a restless and diverse black community in twentieth-century Los Angeles. Bound for Freedom, by Douglas Flamming, excavates the “local and concrete” history of black Los Angeles before World War II, recounting the effort to escape a deeply segregated and impoverished South after Reconstruction (Flamming, p. 1). Flamming conveys the profound sense of optimism that black southerners brought to Los Angeles and the conceptual dichotomy between southern tyranny and western freedom. Though Los Angeles was not the racial paradise that many sought, it did provide a “half free” environment that enabled the creation of a vital community that anchored black newcomers to the rapidly developing region (ibid., p. 13). Carefully analyzing a meticulous collection of census and municipal records, oral histories, letters, and newspapers, Flamming writes the history of black Los Angeles by focusing on the struggles of individuals and groups who sought equal opportunity in the far Southwest. Chapters relate the efforts to secure housing and employment, to buy and sell property, to establish businesses, newspapers, and churches, to elect black representatives, to support civil rights organizations such as the Afro-American Council and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), and to challenge white prejudice in the city's public and private spaces. The book also features, rather prominently, the noteworthy individu-als—those known as race men and race wom-en—who established themselves as community leaders: newspaper publishers such as Leon Washington, elected officials such as Fred Roberts and Augustus Hawkins, entrepreneurs such as John Somerville, and labor organizers such as Clarence Johnson. The story of the tireless Charlotta Bass, longtime editor of the California Eagle who eventually won a vice presidential nomination on the 1952 Progressive party ticket, opens and closes Flamming's narrative.