INTRODUCTION They Don’t Even Know
. In the late 1980s, Los Angeles record producer Dootsie Williams concluded that black youths were oblivious to the racial oppression all around them. He complained to friend and musician Johnny Otis that the new generation could not see the problem, much less its nuances. Born and raised in Jim Crow Alabama, and coming of age in the mixed community of Watts at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was enjoying a resurgence in Southern California, Williams knew bigotry.1 He told Otis that he had always been painfully aware of the ways racism shaped his life. It was once “so blatant,” he said. “But today it is so smooth and sneaky that our younger generation of Blacks is lulled into a sense of false fantasy. Hell, they don’t even know they’re being discriminated against.”2
Dootsie Williams had been part of an early wave of Los Angeles migrants drawn by the promise of an urban utopia. Though some would still mock it as the “Hell-Hole of the West,” LA by the 1910s had all the trappings of a California Eden: a lush Mediterranean landscape, a thriving entertainment industry, plentiful jobs, and an abundance of cheap, single-family bungalows.3 Around the turn of the century, Southern California boosters had begun to transform Los Angeles into a commodity to be carved up, advertised, and sold, not only to land developers and railroad tycoons, but to ordinary people (Fig. I.1). Los Angeles County in 1880 held just over thirty-three thousand people, a hamlet compared to the city of San Francisco with its roughly quarter of a million residents. But by the end of the 1920s, the county’s population had exploded, topping two million, making Los Angeles America’s most rapidly growing region and the premier migrant destination in the West.4
White Americans and foreign immigrants made up the vast majority of LA’s transplanted population throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But the county was also the final destination for thousands of African Americans. Dootsie Williams’s family was among those who left the Jim Crow South to go west rather than follow well-worn migratory routes to the north. W. E. B. Du Bois, prominent black activist and editor of the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, beguiled some with his poetic observations of “wonderful” Los Angeles, where the air was “scented with orange blossoms and the beautiful homes lay low crouching on the earth as though they loved its scents and flowers.” There, Du Bois noted with enthusiasm, the black community was a “hopeful group—with some wealth, large industrial opportunity and a buoyant spirit.”5
This was quite the tribute from a world traveler, a founding member of the NAACP, and the foremost African-American scholar of the “Negro” experience. Du Bois was an expert on the many cultural and institutional barriers in both southern society and northern life to black civil rights, black access to higher education, black economic autonomy, and black political power. Plus, he became a leading voice of protest against white violence, which reinforced the subjugation of his people “from Pennsylvania to Oregon and from Massachusetts to Mississippi.” For Du Bois, Los Angeles was a black promised land by comparison.6 Jefferson Lewis Edmonds, editor of the Los Angeles Liberator, agreed that African Americans who came to the West “in search of better things” were “not disappointed.” The Liberator touted the “splendid conditions found in California” and opportunities for success available to all, regardless of color.7
Fig I.1 Early twentieth-century postcard of what is now MacArthur Park, just west of South Central Los Angeles. Image originally printed by Edward H. Mitchell, courtesy of the Studio for Southern California History.
Patterns of early black settlement in southern Los Angeles County, however, exposed racial boundaries in the Golden State. Du Bois conceded that “the color line is there and sharply drawn.”8 African Americans who migrated to South Central Los Angeles and the unincorporated community of Watts in the early twentieth century bore witness to this. These newcomers were drawn by cheap land, access to downtown industry, proximity to transit hubs, and the relative diversity of the region south of downtown. Until the 1920s, the sliver of Los Angeles west of Central Avenue and east of Flower Street, along with the small suburb of Watts, where Dootsie Williams’s family settled, was ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically mixed—a patchwork of wealthy, middle-class, poor, Mexican, Japanese, Native American, Italian, Jewish, and black residents. Outside of South Los Angeles, however, the region looked much different. Restrictive housing covenants and other forms of resistance to neighborhood integration kept most of LA’s west side, including Culver City and Inglewood, in addition to LA’s south side, including Southgate, Lynwood, and Compton, nearly exclusively white. In 1930, the US Census counted fewer than a dozen black residents living in all of the above-listed places combined.9
Dootsie Williams reached adulthood in the 1920s, at a time when LA’s black communities began crystalizing, bound by housing discrimination and occupational limits but also by desires to be near other black Angelenos, black-run businesses, black churches, and black mutual-aid societies. New waves of African-American migrants came with their resources and their expectations, stretching the invisible boundaries of black Los Angeles by replacing the ethnic whites, Asians, and Latinos who moved further east and south.
By the 1930s, as African-American residents increasingly dominated the south-central corridor, the concentration of black talent reinforced economic, social, religious, and political networks. Buoyed by an activist black press and black nationalist slogans like “Don’t Spend Where You Can’t Work,” grocers, butchers, restaurateurs, barbers, hairdressers, seamstresses, junk dealers, childcare providers, legal professionals, physicians, construction contractors, and realtors thrived. Black-owned music venues like the Lincoln Theater and the Savoy featured renowned African-American performers, including Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, while the lavish Dunbar Hotel hosted celebrities from the realms of music, literature, sports, and activism, including bandleader Duke Ellington, poet Langston Hughes, boxing champ Joe Louis, and high-ranking members of the NAACP. The Fifty-Fourth Street Drugstore, Brother’s, Lovejoy’s, Honey Murphy’s, and other popular after-hours joints further enriched the district’s nightlife scene.10 This subsection of Los Angeles had its own churches, mutual-aid programs, political organizations, elite social clubs, and three newspapers. Add to all this a distinctly Southern Californian brand of home ownership—manicured lawns, backyard pools, and palm trees appear standard in early century photographs of South Central neighborhoods (Fig. I.2)—and these tightly-knit communities exemplified the triumph of black life in the West. As Du Bois put it in 1913, LA’s African-American people represented “the new blood of California with its snap and ambition.”11
Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, African Americans made up less than 4 percent of this unusually diverse urban population.12 Los Angeles was a sprawling metropolis that housed, within its broad mix of cultures and ethnicities, a postage stamp–sized black enclave largely removed from white society. As African Americans in the neighborhoods in and around South Central thrived, its people remained all but invisible to the rest of the city, creating the illusion of racial harmony.13
Fig I.2 Cover of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Crisis, August 1913 issue, featuring the Los Angeles home of Mr. and Mrs. William Foster. With its sprawling veranda, manicured lawn, and newly planted palm tree, it illustrated the “beauty and enterprise“ of black life in Los Angeles.
Image courtesy of The Modernist Journals Project, Brown and Tulsa Universities.
War and further migration complicated this. Even before the United States officially entered World War II in 1941, the Pacific Coast had become a vital defense industry center, with munitions plants, shipbuilding ports, airplane hangars, military bases, and infrastructure projects transforming Depression-era Southern California into a labor mecca. From 1940 to 1945, migrants in search of steady, high-wage, skilled work flooded the state, with manufacturing centers like Los Angeles and Long Beach attracting the bulk of newcomers. The vast majority were from the Midwest and the South, and, after the federal desegregation of the national defense industries in 1941, a disproportionate number were black.14 In the two decades following US entry into World War II, the number of African Americans in California rose from 124,306 in 1940 to 883,861 in 1960. In Los Angeles, the black population increased more than fivefold, from 63,774 residents to over 330,000. California’s wartime economic boom, followed by postwar opportunities in the aerospace, energy, consumer manufacturing, entertainment, and service industries, spurred one of the most significant African-American migrations in the nation’s history.15 Southern California appeared, once again, to be the ideal destination for those “in search of better things,” or as black wartime migrant Horace Tapscott put it, a “land of golden opportunity.”16
As LA’s population mushroomed, racial tensions that had once been diffuse, due in part to isolation and sprawl, took on more prominence. More frequent interactions between African Americans and whites inside the county’s places of work and leisure aggravated frictions related to employment, housing, policing, and education. Even as divisions hardened and tensions grew, however, economic and legal gains for black Angelenos seemed to soften the edges of bigotry. The World War II defense industry boom yielded new, lucrative employment opportunities for African Americans in Southern California. And even after war drew to a close and the scaling back of defense industries disproportionately affected black workers, African Americans in the region continued to make advances.17 Sustained access to government work and training programs, successful protests against racial barriers to the skilled professions, GI Bill entitlements, and labor unions helped protect black interests. Housing reformers, too, used a combination of political activism and legal action to fight racially restrictive practices, allowing for the community’s expansion westward into once lily-white neighborhoods like Inglewood and Baldwin Hills, and southward into the blue-collar suburbs of Southgate and Lynwood. Black Angeleno activists and homebuyers also succeeded in integrating the coveted “ideal home city” of Compton, which, by the 1950s, would become for upwardly mobile black families a promised land within the promised land.18
Viewed in comparison to southern oppression, even explicit examples of racial bigotry in Los Angeles could not eclipse the economic, political, and social wins. For many black Angelenos, California endured as an Eden relative to the Jim Crow South, from which most African-American migrants arrived. While Martin Luther King, Jr.’s civil rights movement battled state-sponsored white supremacy in the former Confederacy, Los Angeles seduced as “the land of the free, where segregation wasn’t too tough.”19 South Central community leader George Beavers, a native of Atlanta, Georgia, noted that year after year, Los Angeles beckoned refugees from all sorts of troubled circumstances. But for black southerners who had known the pain of racial apartheid, lynching, and political disenfranchisement, this California “heaven” proved especially alluring.20 The ideal of Los Angeles as a black promised land would remain powerful through the early 1960s, not only inspiring westward migration but framing narratives about a people’s dream achieved.
The 1965 uprising in Los Angeles threatened to undermine this faith in progress. The five-day rebellion (enduringly labeled the “Watts Riots” despite the fact that the riot area spanned much of South Central, and the precipitating arrest occurred at the intersection of 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard, west of Watts’s southern border) left thirty-four people dead, over one thousand injured, some four thousand arrested, and an estimated $200 million in property burned, looted, and destroyed. Until the 1992 LA riots, it stood as the most destructive episode of urban unrest in American history. Occurring against a backdrop of national civil rights victories, California’s healthy economy, and the prevailing sense that Los Angeles was the black promised land, the uprising stunned the country.21
LA’s police chief, William Parker, responded as if utterly flummoxed. To reporters, Parker insisted that his city had seen no signs of conflict among races. It was “quiet” as far as that was concerned, he said. In the days following the riots, Parker appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and dismissed a pointed question from journalist Len O’Connor about “a racial problem” in his jurisdiction. “Los Angeles offers more for the Negro citizens than any other city in the world,” he said, noting the irrelevance of federal civil rights legislation for his exceptionally progressive city. As if certifying the laudatory words of W. E. B. Du Bois from half a century before, Parker explained, “All of the gains in civil rights in the recent years have already existed in Los Angeles for a number of years.”22
In the fall of 1965, the California Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots published its report on root causes. In a number of ways, the report undermined Chief Parker’s public pronouncements. It cited, among other things, black unemployment in the riot area nearly three times higher than the county average, and a history of tension between African Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department. But the report also claimed of Los Angeles, after sketching its portrait relative to the nation’s other urban areas, that, for African Americans, “the opportunity to succeed is probably unequaled in any other major American city.” The neighborhoods of Watts and South Central, it noted, were not “slums” but communities where detached, single-family homes, a third of them owned by their occupants, lined “wide and usually quite clean” streets. Plus, the region’s black residents had full access to parks, playgrounds, movie theaters, shopping districts, public transportation, and voting booths. But the commission’s report seemed in conflict with itself, providing a litany of riot “causes and answers” alongside other evidence that, for African Americans, “Los Angeles conditions are superior.”23 Conclusions seemed as elusive as when Newsweek printed its August 30, 1965 cover. The weekly featured a photograph (Fig. I.3) of armed troopers in military jeeps rolling through the ravaged and smoky riot curfew zone, atop the question: “Los Angeles: Why?”24
Fig I.3 On August 6, 1965, a military convoy rolls through a Watts business district destroyed by rioting and arson. In the wake of the 1965 Los Angeles riots, the national press struggled to make sense of the rebellion and its precipitating events. RBM Vintage Images / Alamy Stock Photo.
For Dootsie Williams, the 1965 uprising simply confirmed that de jure segregation—that is, racial privilege dictated by the letter of the law—was only the most conspicuous mechanism of a far broader, more complex, “smooth and sneaky” system of racial oppression in the United States. For Williams, the riots revealed that in black Los Angeles achievements ultimately reinforced limitations; the realization of progress threw racial injustices into sharp relief.25
Over the course of decades, Dootsie Williams had cultivated a black entertainment empire in Los Angeles, developing a keen understanding of the recording industry and fashioning a fruitful career, first as a trumpeter, then a bandleader, then doing “A&R” (artists and repertoire development) for a recording label. By the early 1950s, in the midst of a thriving Los Angeles Central Avenue black arts scene, he had formed Blue Records. The label was eventually renamed Dootone and became nationally known for popular rhythm & blues releases and comedy records notable for their dirty—or “blue”—material. Williams earned a fortune from the successes of a local doo-wop group called the Penguins (of “Earth Angel” fame) and the era’s bluest comedian, John “Redd Foxx” Sanford. The Dootone label produced a wide range of African-American performers, most of them talents plucked from within LA’s most segregated and racially isolated communities. Williams took pride in promoting myriad forms of black expression, all of which resonated with his own experiences living in Los Angeles.26
Dootsie Williams imagined black Los Angeles as the polestar of black entertainment—with his own businesses at its core. He pictured film studios, television and radio stations, performance venues, and, of course, recording labels not only housed within the African-American communities of Los Angeles County but thriving because of those communities. With this goal in mind, and bothered by the absence of modern, black-owned event spaces in LA, he opened the Dooto Music Center, a $300,000 multiplex in Compton featuring spaces for the production of music, television, and movies along with an auditorium. In 1963, the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black-owned, black-run weekly, described the Dooto Music Center as “the most-needed cultural and recreational center in Southern California.”27
It was a space that Dootsie Williams would all but abandon in the 1970s, unable to recover financially from losses related to the 1965 uprising, a devastating slump in record sales, and a series of robberies. By 1975, Williams and his wife had cut their losses and invested much of their remaining wealth in beachfront property in Mexico. As Williams told his old business partner Doc Young, he was letting the Compton venue go because “I want to do other things.”28
The 1970s was a decade in which black Angelenos like Dootsie Williams labored to adapt to the new challenges of a post–civil rights cultural and political climate. Black Power and black nationalism, which had thrived in LA in the wake of the 1965 riots, had been all but smothered by federal counterintelligence programs and internal divisions. Yet, African-American activists, including some former militants, funneled their efforts into electoral politics, with the goal of electing more black and black-friendly leaders, amplifying the African-American voice in policymaking in the state, and ensuring that state and civic leaders would give more attention to the needs of their constituents. These men and women registered black Californians to vote and nurtured alliances with Latinos, Asians, white liberals, and working-class voting blocs—efforts that helped bring about the 1973 election of Tom Bradley, LA’s first African-American mayor and the first black candidate to be elected mayor of a predominantly white American city. Such significant political milestones came as unemployment among the region’s African-American residents rose well above the general population’s average. The local black press rang the alarm about joblessness specifically among black youth, which seemed to be turning relatively benign neighborhood social cliques and lowrider car clubs into criminal street gangs.
By the 1980s, deindustrialization, urban flight, and California’s tax revolt had devastated predominantly black communities like South Central, Inglewood, and Compton, exacerbating the problems of unemployment and poverty. An influx of new immigrants into Los Angeles during the decade meant that, for scarce jobs and resources, black residents faced heightened competition from neighboring minority groups, particularly Mexican and Korean residents, who were often similarly restricted by racial discrimination in housing and hiring. The introduction of rock, or “crack,” cocaine to LA streets in the same period inflamed the overlapping problems of substance abuse and violent crime.
But the 1970s and 1980s were also the decades in which popular culture and entertainment, much of it manufactured in and disseminated from Los Angeles, elevated a new generation of African-American stars, including Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Prince, Whitney Houston, and the Los Angeles Lakers’ Magic Johnson. Plus, within two decades of the 1965 uprising, the region became, yet again, a beacon of racial progress. Pristine enclaves like Windsor Hills, Baldwin Hills, and Ladera Heights housed LA’s black yuppies, celebrities, wealthy entrepreneurs like Dootsie Williams, and a rapidly expanding African-American middle class. Buoyed by enduring, and deeply cherished, mythologies about Southern California as an Eden of equal opportunity, LA in the 1980s appeared to be a bellwether for the future of America.
And perhaps it was. But not necessarily in the post-racial way the American public imagined. Los Angeles had the same economic, social, cultural, and political dilemmas as similar American cities, but managed to gild over them to save its reputation. That is, it was a promised land only on its glittering surface. When Dootsie Williams complained to his friend Johnny Otis about black youth in the 1980s “lulled into a sense of false fantasy,” he was expressing what were then widespread fears about a post-civil rights generation ill-equipped to respond to continued subjugation because it couldn’t see past the golden veneer. In Compton, where Williams had built his music enterprise, he knew kids old enough, many of them, to have some memory of Black Power. From his vantage point, these children had grown up amidst a political and cultural backlash to the Sixties but failed to recognize the implications of that backlash. By the mid-1980s, after all, the Huxtables were the most beloved American family on television, and President Ronald Reagan trumpeted the arrival of an era in which skin color no longer mattered and “all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed.” Dootsie Williams saw this younger generation uncritically absorbing the cultural messaging about a new “color-blind society.” Black kids in LA, he believed, were falling for the proverbial okeydoke.
In the early 1980s, a young Compton DJ named Alonzo Williams revived the shuttered Dooto Music Center by turning its auditorium into a nightclub. With some support from the Center’s old owner, Dooto’s became a wellspring of young black talent—a community of local artists that would ultimately prove Dootsie Williams wrong. The club helped to nurture the careers of Los Angeles DJs, rappers, producers, and entrepreneurs, among them, artists who would become the most controversial, and influential, entertainers of the late twentieth century. Sometimes the music addressed racism directly, and sometimes it didn’t, leaving fans and critics to guess how this young generation of black innovators chose to engage with institutional injustices. In fact, though broadly derided, the “gangsta” aesthetic that became synonymous with this West Coast music scene not only helped its participants dramatize their oppression, but ultimately became their best tool for provoking national dialogue about it.
To Live and Defy in LA begins by, first, tracing the peculiarities of Los Angeles in the early 1980s, in the age of Reagan, when romantic notions of LA hid the lived experiences of black youths coming of age there. Then, it tells the story of the music that exploded from behind that veil. This is a history of a West Coast phenomenon that was, in the tradition of the blues, a form of blunt self-expression, and thus a potent, if not immediately obvious, response to systems designed to silence and control black people.
Los Angeles gangsta rap, like the Los Angeles rebellions of 1965 and 1992, seared into the national imagination the most explicit and sensational details of LA’s urban crisis, complicating long-held, time-tested myths of the City of Angels. The music was sensational in its content, provocative in its commercial success, and radical in the message its makers and fans delivered: that America incubated inequality at its own peril.