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14 Darnell Hunt “Califia,” but more than half of the Spanish founders of the city in 1781, as Paul Robinson shows in chapter 1, were of African descent. Moreover, because California was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850—a fact that Du Bois underscores in his article from The Crisis—the foundation was laid for a rather peculiar and flexible racial order in the region.32 At the same time, the pioneering spirit associated with the opening of the West likely tickled the black migrant’s imagination as well. Blacks who came west from more settled and rigidly racist regions of the country clearly saw promise in the growing city, a place where it might actually be possible for blacks to realize the American Dream. But as the black population of Los Angeles swelled with the influx of migrants from Texas, Louisiana, and elsewhere during the first half of the twentieth century, racial realities more reflective of the Jim Crow South soon followed, eventually challenging the dream that so many had hoped to find in the growing metropolis. By the latter part of the twentieth century , prospects seemed more mixed than in Du Bois’s day. The urban uprisings of 1965 and 1992, as well as the diminished opportunities associated with those living in communities like “The Jungle,” stood side-byside with black overrepresentation among local elected officials and the enviable lifestyles of black Angelenos living in places like Baldwin Hills. At the same time, a steady stream of immigrants from Central and South America, Asia, and elsewhere had transformed Los Angeles into one of the world’s most diverse cities by the last decades of the twentieth century, a multicultural maze, some blacks feared, which threatened the political clout enjoyed by the region’s large black population. Although the County of Los Angeles boasted the second largest black population in the nation in 2007—nearly a million people—this population represented a relatively small, 9.5 percent of the county’s overall population.33 Not long after the University of California established a southern branch in Los Angeles in 1919, it enrolled perhaps its most celebrated alumnus. A young Ralph Bunche, who would go on to become the first African American awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, became the valedictorian of the school’s 1927 class. UCLA would have important connections to Black Los Angeles from its beginnings, educating many of the city’s black luminaries, including Bunche, the color-barrier-transcending Jackie Robinson, and Los Angeles’s “second” black mayor, Tom Bradley,34 among many others. But by the early years of the twenty-first century, as Ana-Christina Ramón and I examine in chapter 16, the local chapters of the National Urban League, NAACP, and other community-based Introduction 15 advocacy groups would be forced to form an alliance to challenge campus admissions policies that threatened to erase the black student presence from the publicly funded campus. Nonetheless, the dream of a better life lived on for many black Angelenos , despite the often harsh social and economic realities some confronted in the city. For all of the black families in Los Angeles able, for example, to celebrate the academic advancement of their young ones, there were others forced to endure the hardships associated with maintaining ties to loved ones behind bars—like the families interviewed by Belinda Tucker, Neva Pemberton, Mary Weaver, Gwendelyn Rivera, and Carrie Petrucci in chapter 6. While members of the black gay community studied by Mignon Moore in chapter 7 negotiated their place(s) in Black Los Angeles, others wrestled with environmental justice issues that, as Sonya Winton reveals in chapter 14, were largely ignored by mainstream environmental groups. To be sure, the struggle between American dreams and racial realities in Los Angeles continued in the early twenty-first century. In the final analysis, this book aims to address several critical questions associated with this struggle: What is the nature of the “black” in the space we refer to as “Black Los Angeles?” How can the history of a place be employed to make sense of the racial present? What lessons can be learned that might help make black dreams of a brighter future a reality in the region and beyond? And what can the case of “Black Los Angeles” teach us about race in America? Black Los Angeles is and has always been a space of profound contradictions. Just as Los Angeles has come to symbolize...

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