Black Los Angeles: 1930-2020
Spring Street, looking north toward "Baker Block," an office building complex that once dominated the Los Angeles skyline, 1885 (City of Los Angeles Archives)
The African-American experience in Los Angeles has been one of wild success and heartbreaking failure, one of 'living the California dream' and also a nightmare of racial bias, segregation, discrimination and violence. Space makes race and race makes place, so the geographer might argue. As our study group at California State University, Northridge explores the history of Black Los Angeles as part of an overall analysis of the case for municipal reparations, we offer this story map as a foundational artifact of any study of Black Los Angelenos. The series of maps show how African-Americans were confined to a few specific neighborhoods south of downtown throughout much of the 20th century. Prevented from moving into the shiny new suburbs on the Westside and the San Fernando Valley, first by de jure and later de facto housing policies, Black families were denied the opportunity to fully benefit from the robust growth of housing value over many decades. Not until mid-1970s, nearly 40 years after the US Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants an unconstitutional violation of would-be homeowners’ right to equal protection under the law, were Black families finally allowed to buy homes in all neighborhoods in Los Angeles.