Los Angeles

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• SOURCE: NPR
  10/10/2021
  

  How a Black Family Got Their Beach Back

  The historic Bruce's Beach case is inspiring social justice leaders and reparations activists to fight for other Black families whose ancestors were also victims of land theft in the United States.

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  9/10/2021
  

  Los Angeles Pioneered American Racial Segregation

  by Gene Slater

  The real estate industry acted as a cartel to limit the free market in housing to preserve racial homogeneity, claiming it was necessary to protect property values. This form of housing segregation was tested in the booming market of 1920s California and spread nationwide. 

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• SOURCE: Tropics of Meta
  8/27/2021
  

  A Historic Seaside Community: Recovering Santa Monica's "Inkwell" Beach

  by Brian Dunlap

  "Memorial Day 1920. A young African American chauffeur, Arthur Valentine, settled on “Whites Only” Topanga Beach. With friends and family, he stepped from his truck. Three sheriff’s deputies demanded that they leave."

• 
• SOURCE: KCET
  7/6/2021
  

  Before Downtown L.A.'s High Rises, Bunker Hill Was Simply Home

  "Today, the Victorian mansions of Bunker Hill are often remembered nostalgically, but the community was also a vibrant, walkable neighborhood in the middle of a bustling downtown."

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  5/27/2021
  

  California’s Novel Attempt at Land Reparations

  Los Angeles County will return title to land that once was "Bruce's Beach," one of the only Southern California oceanfront resorts welcoming Black visitors, to the descendants of the owners from whom the property was taken by eminent domain in 1927.

• 
• SOURCE: Vox
  5/17/2021
  

  The Violent Origin Story of Dodger Stadium

  by Ranjani Chakraborty and Melissa Hirsch

  Through interviews with several former residents of the area, Vox explores the story of their neighborhoods razed to make room for Dodger Stadium. It’s one that’s often missing from the history of Los Angeles and has created a double-edged relationship for some Dodger fans. Features commentary by historian Priscilla Leiva. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  5/2/2021
  

  L.A.’s History is Often Whitewashed, Romanticized and Censored. A New Push to Tell the Truth

  Christopher Hawthorne leads a Civic Memory Working Group convened by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, that works to reverse the city's tendency to boost myths in the place of public history. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/2/2021
  

  What Manhattan Beach, Calif., Says About Reparations

  "When a wealthy, liberal California town can’t bring itself to even apologize for seizing land from Black residents a century ago, it underscores what a long road lies ahead for justice and reconciliation."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  4/29/2020
  

  ‘I’ve Lost Everything to the Beast’: Reviewing 4 Books on MS-13

  by Rachel Nolan

  While the specter of the MS-13 gang has been central to political panics about immigration, the group's origins are American. A Latin American historian reviews four new books. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  4/5/2021
  

  What Manhattan Beach’s Racist Land Grab Really Meant

  by Alison Rose Jefferson

  Debates over  the redress of past racial injustice must acknowledge that some past actions have harmed communities in ways that can't be repaired, including the loss of space for communal leisure or equal access to everyday pleasures. 

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• SOURCE: The Metropole
  3/30/2021
  

  The Emergence Of Gangsta Rap — A Review Of To Live And Defy In LA

  by Katherine Rye Jewell

  A review by historian Katherine Rye Jewell of Felicia Angeja Viator's new book on the rise of "gangsta" rap music in the context of racism, poverty and policing in South Los Angeles in the 1980s. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  3/17/2021
  

  John Singleton Saw a Tenderness in Black L.A. that the World Refused to Look At

  John Singleton's films showed the fullness of life in South Central Los Angeles during the tumultuous 1990s that the news media didn't always portray.

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  3/17/2021
  

  The Future of L.A. is Here. Robin D.G. Kelley’s Radical Imagination Shows Us the Way

  Historian Robin Kelley discusses the work of his mentor Cedric Robinson, whose discussions in "Black Marxism" offer a way to circumvent the reductionist tendencies of the class- and race-oriented wings of the left today. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/11/2021
  

  This Black Family Ran a Thriving Beach Resort 100 Years Ago. They Want Their Land Back.

  The descendants of the Bruce family seek restitution for the taking of their family's beachfront land, which had been Southern California's first beach resort serving African Americans. Historian Alison Rose Jefferson says recreational access was an underappreciated facet of the struggle for justice. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/6/2021
  

  We Need to Put a Name to This Violence

  Attacks on Asian Americans in many cities have raised comparisons to Black-Korean tensions in Los Angeles at the time of the 1992 riots, but writer Jay Caspian Kang argues the comparison isn't apt, and more work needs to be done to determine whether a wave of hate crimes is happening, and if so, why. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  3/8/2021
  

  Latinos: The LA Times' 1983 Pulitzer Prize Winning Series Now Available

  The LA Times won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on Latinos in Southern California. Now this important journalistic primary source is available online. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  2/9/2021
  

  Behind these Names, You’ll Find Stories of L.A.'S Black History

  The city of Los Angeles's early Anglo history was marked by the national conflict over slavery, and local decisions granting freedom to Black Angelenos shaped the city. Longtime LA Times columnist Patt Morrison discusses the public markers to African American history in the city. 

• 
• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  10/29/2020
  

  The Dossier That Destroyed Frank Wilkinson’s Dream of Public Housing in LA

  by Eric Nusbaum

  Frank Wilkinson's advocacy for racially integrated public housing in Los Angeles set off a red-baiting campaign that landed him in prison. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  10/25/2020
  

  Sanctuary Unmasked: The First Time Los Angeles (Sort of) Became a City of Refuge

  by Paul A. Kramer

  Los Angeles’s first sanctuary law grew out of the refugee wave that had brought Alicia Rivera to the city. By 1982, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 refugees from El Salvador — a country with fewer than 5,000,000 people — and tens of thousands of Guatemalans had fled to the United States to escape murder, poverty, and starvation.  

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• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  10/13/2020
  

  A Scholar of American Doom Doesn’t See How Capitalism Can Fix This Crisis

  "There are probably a billion and a half people, maybe more, maybe 2 billion, in the informal working class who have simply been triaged already in advance. So the fate of a very large minority of humanity has been determined now."