In the early 20th century, African Americans considered Los Angeles a refuge, a place where they might achieve prosperity unlike any they could know in their Southern homes. Legalized discrimination was less codified than in the Jim Crow South, affording black migrants like my grandmother a level of economic opportunity unheard of in the Southern cities from which they hailed. Settling around Central Avenue in neighborhoods like Watts, blacks began to build a community whose prosperity was, if limited, still unusual among black Americans.
After visiting Los Angeles in 1913, the scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois enthused about the city in terms that evoked Montalvo’s Terrestrial Paradise. “One never forgets Los Angeles and Pasadena,” he wrote in a brief account of a visit to Southern California for the August 1913 issue of Crisis. “One never forgets Los Angeles,” he rhapsodized. “[The] sensuous beauty of roses and orange blossoms, the air and the sunlight and the hospitality of all its races lingers long.” Du Bois seemed most enamored of the material comforts some black migrants were able to achieve in Los Angeles. He punctuated his article with photographs of handsome homes, successful black-owned businesses, and respectable middle class families. On the issue’s front cover a nattily dressed black Angeleno reclines on a craftsman home’s well-manicured lawn, enjoying a palm tree’s shade.
What Du Bois would not or could not say, lest the California myth dissolve: this prosperity was contingent, wholly at the mercy of the city’s white power brokers. As migrants of all races made their way to Los Angeles, the city’s population grew at a rapid rate. Many of these migrants were white Midwesterners. By 1926 nearly 90 percent of all Angelenos were white, and they used the law to ensure their power. Even as Du Bois sang black Los Angeles’ praises in 1913, the California legislature passed the Alien Land Act, which prohibited the sale of land to Japanese immigrants. Within this power structure, blacks could prosper—but only if that prosperity didn’t threaten that of white Californians.
Southern black migrants tested this delicate balance over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, flocking to Southern California in numbers that swelled the ranks of the South Central community. In 1920, African Americans were a small minority in Los Angeles, around 15,000; by 1940, they numbered over 100,000 people. The city’s white power structure responded by intensifying racial discrimination. Racially restrictive housing covenants, restrictions around where and when African Americans could use public swimming pools, and school segregation became the norm.
If laws didn’t prevent black migrants from overstepping their bounds, the threat of violence sufficed: the year after my grandmother arrived in the city, O’Day Short and his family integrated a white neighborhood in the de facto segregated city of Fontana. White neighbors greeted them with a cascade of death threats culminating in a bombing that destroyed the family’s home. Short, his wife Helen, and their two children Barry and Carol Ann were murdered.