Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities Review

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(More customer reviews)This is the book I have been waiting for. I have been an avid collector of anything and everything Los Angeles, especially it's historical evolution, the heavy hitters who built it out of a pueblo, it's architecture, it's microcosms, and most significantly, it's people.
This book begins with a very well researched essay on the predominatly Black enlaves of Baldwin Hills (film maker John Singleton descibes Baldwin Hills as "the Black Greenwich Village") and a later chapter about Lemiert Park (next door to Baldwin Hills), the new 'mecca' for Black arts and cultural happenings in LA. There is great detail about these now (still fairly pristine) Black middle class residential areas once banned anyone non White from home ownership as late as 1950. I was raised in Lemiert Park, attended schools there so this compilation of "urban essays" really hit a nerve with me. I knew every place mentioned. Besides being able to relate with the good, bad and ugly aspects of "life in the Crenshaw community" (which includes Bladwin, View Park, lemiert and Ladea Heights), this excellent book also goes into great detail about other Black LA areas, like the Oakwood section in Venice, CA. and how the neighbors banned together to take control back of their area from rampant crime and drugs. Much is written about the huge post WWII migration of Blacks form the South tothat yearned for a better life in sunny LA-from Central Avenue to West Adams and then further west only to find a new style of more subtle opression. How Hollywood portrays Black life in LA. There is a fascinating chapter on how gangs (Crips in particular) formed and grew like a bad desease throughout LA County and across state lines. and how the murder rate in LA reached epidemic proportions when crack Cocaine hit the streets. Dealers quickly utliized gang members as retailers. The '65 Watts and '92 King riots are discussed in terms of not just the trigger that ignited them, but the agonizing and festering horrific LAPD law enforcement and political conditions that made two such outbusrsts ripe at two different times-proving that not a lot has changed for Blacks in Los Angeles after 27 years.
But these are just some examples. It reads well, hard to put down, the research is excellent, and this book really tells a story of a city in tatters, but with a few scant glimmers of hope for young Blacks and other minorities. It;s not really a doom & gloom read, but it states in plain speak harsh realities of living in LA.
I strongly feel this particular book should be recommended reading in high schools and local colleges. It says volumes about our way of life and is very educational.

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Los Angeles is well-known as a temperate paradise with expansive beaches and mountain vistas, a booming luxury housing market, and the home of glamorous Hollywood. During the first half of the twentieth century, Los Angeles was also seen as a mecca for both African Americans and a steady stream of migrants from around the country and the world, transforming Los Angeles into one of the world's most diverse cities. The city has become a multicultural maze in which many now fear that the political clout of the region's large black population has been lost. Nonetheless, the dream of a better life lives on for black Angelenos today, despite the harsh social and economic conditions many confront.

Black Los Angeles is the culmination of a groundbreaking research project from the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA that presents an in-depth analysis of the historical and contemporary contours of black life in Los Angeles. Based on innovative research, the original essays are multi-disciplinary in approach and comprehensive in scope, connecting the dots between the city's racial past, present, and future. Through historical and contemporary anecdotes, oral histories, maps, photographs, illustrations, and demographic data, we see that Black Los Angeles is and has always been a space of profound contradictions. Just as Los Angeles has come to symbolize the complexities of the early twenty-first-century city, so too has Black Los Angeles come to embody the complex realities of race in so-called "colorblind" times.

Contributors: Melina Abdullah, Alex Alonso, Dionne Bennett, Joshua Bloom, Edna Bonacich, Scot Brown, Reginald Chapple, Lola Smallwood Cuevas, Andrew Deener, Regina Freer, Jooyoung Lee, Mignon R. Moore, Lanita Morris, Neva Pemberton, Steven C. Pitts, Carrie Petrucci, Gwendelyn Rivera, Paul Robinson, M. Belinda Tucker, Paul Von Blum, Mary Weaver, Sonya Winton, and Nancy Wang Yuen.

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