The CDU Advantage Pillars: Part I, Social Justice( continued)
1918, Spanish Flu Dr. Leonard Stovall Freedman’ s Hospital Ambulance until a conscious, ballot proposition driven effort culminated in statewide voting and ultimately court intervention in the mid- 60s. By then, everyone was hip to the game: South LA residents were running out of space, with no mass healthcare options, attending inferior educational institutions, feeling alarmingly frustrated and powerless with no reasonable alternative in sight.
African American families aspired to live in a more comfortable part of the city, but their skin color was a highly visible obstacle. Even entertainment celebrities and other world class Black notables were shut out. Their money, no matter how long, did not offer an en masse exodus away from their Black brethren. Whether you were a doctor, lawyer, salesman, or waitress, you lived in relatively close proximity to one another.
Then there were the sundown towns – places where Blacks could be arrested for being within the city limits after the skies grew dark. At that time, Glendale was the most notorious and Blacks warned each other about the blatant harassment from law enforcement agencies and the desire of white residents to keep them from walking the city’ s streets regardless of time of day.
And then there is the documented story of Black’ s Beach, located on Highland Avenue in the city of Manhattan Beach. That tragedy in the 1920s is but one example of shattered hopes. But the property was recently returned to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, in a precedent-setting case nearly a century after it had been taken by the city as a result of racial animus. It should be noted that a $ 47 million judgement was awarded on the family’ s behalf.
But the majority of cities that abutted the territories where African Americans lived in clusters had similar restrictions. Some were unwritten but fully enforced. Prior to 1965, Alameda Boulevard was generally known as the dividing line between Black and white Compton. A strong contingent of Mormons lived in East Compton prior to the rebellion. I discovered that fact while researching the city’ s history of housing practices. The city’ s records showed that many of these longtime residents had willed their Compton properties to the Mormon church upon their deaths.
South Gate, Lynwood, Norwalk, Downey, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Lawndale, Torrance, and the beach cities each had unwritten practices, similar covenants, and other restrictive laws used to intimidate Black people and keep them out.
Those above-mentioned areas that ringed Black Los Angeles communities were also suspected KKK strongholds. Further distant jurisdictions practiced discrimination in privately-owned restaurants and access to social gatherings. While attending UCLA in the late sixties, I was in a party of people denied dining access at a prominent chain restaurant one block east of Westwood and Wilshire Boulevards.
The Watts rebellion was an inevitable consequence of such friction by 1965. Another catalyst was the policing practices of LAPD developed and mandated by then-police chief William H. Parker; namesake of the succession of police administration buildings( Parker Center) in downtown LA.
Watts residents and the LAPD had a fractious history beginning in the 40s, when the newly opened Blodgett Tract centered at Wadsworth Boulevard and Imperial Highway invited working class Black residents to settle there. There was even a section of the community locally dubbed“ Beverly Watts”, a metaphor for the enthusiasm and thirst for upward mobility.
The prehistory to the Watts Revolt was a series of acts of institutional racism that sparked a crucible of frustration that could not be contained by 1965. The rebellion was a key spark that validated the concerns of Black leadership and had the effect of accelerated founding of King / Drew and the resultant Social Justice movement.
By contrast, in the post-WWII age, a time of rebuilding Europe, the beginning of the Cold War, and advancing the so-called mythology of“ American exceptionalism”, civil rights gained traction very slowly with resisters chiming in that people of color would not achieve equal rights in the speaker’ s lifetime. As a young student growing up in a formerly all-white neighborhood not too far from CDU in the late 50’ s – early 60s, I cannot tell you how many times I heard that message from my classmates’ parents.“ Not in my lifetime,” the adults would tell this pre-teen, as some sort of attempt at indoctrination or fear mongering.“ Not in my lifetime.”
But the US Supreme Court had enacted Brown v. Topeka Board of Education in 1954 and the floodgates were opened to school desegregation as the law of the land. By the late 1950s, with the Little Rock school desegregation case where President Dwight David Eisenhower sent federal troops to guard the Black youth, and later at the University of Mississippi with James Meredith, the winds of change had absolutely shifted. It should be noted
CDU College of Medicine | PG. 25