African Americans in Los Angeles

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.