Electoral and Population Geography of South-Central Los Angeles

Electoral and Population Geography of South-Central Los Angeles A. William Dakan* The change in the geographical location of Negro citizens has significantly affected Negro political power. They have moved into the large cities of the North and the West where their right to vote has not been questioned and where their concentrated ballots could mean success or failure in national and local elections.1 Yet Wilson contends that "powerful constraints work against Negro influence in civic and public affairs—race prejudice, class differences, geographic concentrations, and weak economic position."2 The purposes of this investigation were to examine in part the expanding Democratic Negro vote in South-Central Los Angeles and to determine whether such expansion has permitted Negroes to wield considerable political leverage within the larger community. The study area is composed of 130 contiguous census tracts which have been grouped into Central, Avalon, Exposition, Green Meadows, Watts, Florence, University, Santa Barbara, and South Vermont statistical areas (Figures 1 and 2). Lying immediately south of the central business district, these tracts comprise the major and most centrally located Negro area of Los Angeles. The area received recent notoriety under the general misnomer of Watts during * When this paper was read at the 31st annual meeting of the Association, Mr. Dakan was a Masters candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles 90024. He is now a doctoral candidate at UCLA. 1 On the role of the Negro vote in the 1948 and 1960 presidential elections see Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Pocket Books, 1961), pp. 243-244. 2 James Q. Wilson, Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership (Glencoe, III.: The Free Press, 1960), p. 6. 135 136ASSOCIATION OF PACIFIC COAST GEOGRAPHERS the August Riots of 1965. Most of the study area falls within the curfew line established during the riots.3 Beginning with the 1940 census, population data for the area were reported by census tract. Not only are the decennial years 1940, 1950, and 1960 covered, but comparable data were available by tracts for special censuses in 1946 and 1956 and by statistical area for 1965.4 Table 1 summarizes the growth of the Negro populationby statistical areas shown in Figure 2. In the accompanying maps for each of the years cited, the cross-hatched areas indicate tracts within which 80 percent or more of the population was Negro, the stipled areas indicate tracts with a Negro majority. The Negro population of 1940 was located primarily in Central and Avalon statistical areas which contained 44,895 Negroes or twothirds of Los Angeles' total 1940 Negro population. The high increase in the proportion of Negroes in the total population of 1946may have resulted from the migration of laborers seeking employment in war expanded industries coupled with a constricted housing market which limited the residential choice of whites as well as Negroes. The proportion of Negroes in South-Central Los Angeles increased from 13.6 to 24.6 percent while the total Los Angeles Negro population more than doubled, increasing from 63,774 in 1940 to 133,082 in 1946.5 An initial territorial expansion of the Negro community into heretofore unentered tracts occurred in the post-war period from 1946 to 1950.6 Negro majority areas of Watts and Avalon were joined by a string of tracts with at least a Negro minority. Florence and Santa Barbara exhibited sizable Negro minorities, and each had some 3 Violence in the City—an end or a beginning? A Report by the Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, (Los Angeles, State of California, Dec. 2, 1965), map on end sheet. * U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940 (Washington , D.C., 1942), Census tract Data for Los Angeles, Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950 (Washington, D.C., 1952); Eighteenth Census of the United States, 1960 (Washington, D.C., 1962); Current Population Reports, Special Census of Los Angeles, February, 1946 (Washington, D.C., 1946); Current Population Reports, Special Census of Los Angeles, February 1956 (Washington, D.C., Oct., 1956); and, Special Census of South and East Los Angeles, November, 1965 (Washington, D.C, 1966). 5 U.S. Census...