As with the black communities of Harlem and Chicago, Los Angeles’s African Americans adapted to the color line by establishing their own institutions, mostly parallel to those monopolized by whites. Real estate agents, banks, contractors, insurance companies, and the entire range of retail and entertainment establishments. From the 1920s through the 1940s, the footprint of these institutions clustered along Central Avenue southward to Vernon. Along that path arose a remarkable range of venues for an entire parallel society. The places of freedom along this route became a hothouse of cultural achievement, and also a headquarters for battling the boundaries of the ruling “white” regime.

But the path of freedom for people of color hit the brick wall of white intolerance at Slauson Blvd, where white police, homeowner’s associations, unions, and gangs maintained a race boundary to contain blacks north of that artery—and well away from the jobs in the enormous Goodyear rubber plant that bordered Slauson. Blacks and other nonwhites knew not to walk south of Slauson. Because the major mixed-race settlement of Watts lay another three and a half miles south of Slauson, blacks, Asians, and Latinos knew to ride a streetcar or better, a car, down Central Avenue through this hostile territory.

Everyone called their neighborhood “The Eastside,” Central Avenue “The Avenue,” and one specific block, where the Dunbar Hotel stood, “The Block.” Thanks to segregation, the Eastside contained the full spectrum of African American society, from unskilled workers to lawyers, doctors, real estate investors, with musicians, skilled craftspeople, and everyone else in between. It was a city within a city. “We had everything we needed,” recalled longtime resident Ersey O’Brien, who was born a block west of Central Ave on Clinton St in January 1921 and came of age as part of The Avenue’s “renaissance” in the 1940s. By the time he was born,

Born in Santa Monica on 22 June 1908, Walter Gordon Jr. was the son of a real estate agent and investor. Walter Senior had a real estate office on the prominent corner of Central Ave and Adams Blvd, by 1923. The older black elite tended to settle westward along Adams, eventually crossing the supposed race line of Main to establish a colony known as “Sugar Hill” on Adams near Arlington. Chester Himes’s character *** pillories this set in If He Hollers Let Him Go.[6] Walter Jr. attended law school and in 1937 he opened his law practice in the front office of the California Eagle, edited by the Garveyite Charlotta Bass.[7] While Bass stirred-up a vibrant public sphere, reporting on bad cops and good Race Men, leading the “Don’t Shop Where You Can’t Work” campaign, Walter was not only writing for and helping with the Eagle, he was developing a clientele that put him at the center of action for decades. Specializing in entertainment and civil rights cases, Gordon represented Billie Holliday in 1953, when she was accused of slashing a white customer who catcalled her while she sang her trademark anthem, Abel Meeropol’s anti-lynching sorrow song, Strange Fruit.

Central Avenue was home to perhaps 60,000 African Americans in the 1930s, but it was a very small place, with a single “center,” at Central and 42nd. Place, the Dunbar Hotel. Word traveled quickly, as through a small town, and Gordon was just one among many who kept their ears tuned to the frequency of the Avenue. Walter Gordon collected photographs, mostly from and annotated them as he knew that society. Here is his visual tour of Central Avenue Society, in his own words:


WALTER GORDON SERIES
 

“Two customers visit the real estate office of Walter Gordon, Sr. (father of attorney Walter Gordon), at Adams Boulevard and Central Avenue in 1923. E.J. Porter sits in the foreground, followed by Ed Reese. Gordon is at the desk in back.”

 

Charlotta Bass, the owner and editor of the pioneering Black community newspaper The California Eagle [and Vice Presidential candidate with Henry Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket], receives a congratulatory proclamation on August 27, 1949, from her former paperboy, attorney Walter Lear Gordon, Jr. Upon Gordon’s graduation from law school, Bass invited him to set up his practice in the front portion of the Eagle’s building on Central Avenue, where this photograph was taken.

“A festive time at the Jockey Club on Central Avenue finds a group sampling the work of chef/owner Ralph Gibbs. From left to right, actress Dorothy Dandridge; pianist Hattie Hopgood; Earl ‘Red’ Griffith; entertainer/reporter Maggie Hathaway; an unidentified woman; Gibbs; and newspaper reporter Paul McGee.” [Gordon6.tif]

“Louis Armstrong (center) celebrates with friends at Lovejoy’s, an after-hours club located at 42nd and Central Avenue, across the street from the Club Alabam where he had performed earlier in the evening. The proprietor of the establishment, Alex Lovejoy, is seated second from the left.”

 

Billie Holiday stands with LAPD Detective Gosline in front of a courtroom while awaiting trial in the early 1950s. Holiday was singing “Strange Fruit” (a song about the lynching of African-Americans) in a West Hollywood club, when a member of the audience proceeded to heckle her. She left the stage midway through the song, allegedly slashed the heckler with a knife, and resumed singing. She was charged with assault and battery but the case was dismissed when the victim, under cross-examination by Walter Gordon, refused to give his name and address.

The Eastside in the 1930s and 40s had one of the finest high schools in the United States, Jefferson High, between Hooper, 33rd, Compton Ave, and 41st Sts. It was also a race-ethnic borderland, where whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos seriously got along, belonging to the same Latin Clubs, Chess Clubs, Drama Clubs, and scores of other associations. Jefferson’s alumni include choreographer Alvyn Ailey and U. S. ambassador and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Ralph Bunche. There were many important social clubs and gathering places on The Avenue in its heyday. The Musicians Local #767 at 11th and Central, “a community center, school clubhouse. Great parades down the Avenue begin here, featuring the bands of Lionel Hampton and Count Basie on flatbed trucks.”[8] Those flatbed trucks sometimes made stops along the way at some of the many venues likely overflowing with patrons: the Apex, the Alabam, and the Elk’s Lodge at the intersection of Santa Barabra Ave (now Martin Luther King, Jr, Ave.).

But the pulsing heart of the Avenue was the Dunbar Hotel at 42nd Place. Built as the first luxury (“first Class”) hotel serving The Race in Los Angeles by John and Vada Sommervile, both USC Dentistry School graduates, it was originally named Hotel Somerville. Completed in the unlucky year of 1929, the Somervilles were forced to sell it within a year, to a man on the opposite end of the social scale of respectability. The buyer who had ample cash in the first years of the Depression was Lucius Lomax, king of the underworld. His putative colorful past included fighting for the US in Cuba, for Pancho Villa in Mexico, and a two-year stint in Japan before developing a gambling and prostitution racket in Yakima, Washington, before arriving in LA. Lomax renamed the hotel after the African American poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and with that cultural gesture, determined that his son would go to college and make the family respectable. That same respect for culture fostered a vibrant jazz scene at the Dunbar, which shared a wall with the Club Alabam and hosed all visiting musicians, actors, and celebrities. Jack Johnson himself, the greatest black American fighter before Joe Louis, owned the bar on the Hotel’s first floor. Those regularly spotted in the lounge, writes historian Donald Bogle, (using periods for emphasis) included “Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson. Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong. Thurgood Marshall. Langston Hughes. Count Basie. Lena Horne. Dorothy Dandridge. Billie Holiday and Nina Mae McKinney.”[9]

Sidebar: Made with Hate

Demobilization and the resettlement of returning veterans (of all races), along with the return to civilian life of the interned Japanese Issei and Nissei put thousands into confrontational situations, competing for grossly inadequate housing stock. In March 17 1947, white students protesting the enrollment of black students at Fremont High School at the western foot of Bunker Hill burned an effigy with black features. This grotesque outbreak of symbolic violence among school kids mobilized the widest-ranging effort yet to confront intergroup tensions. Leaders of community-based organizations who had been separately confronting such problems met now to confront them in a unified way, and created in the summer and fall of 1947 the Community Relations Conference of Southern California (CRCSC), to coordinate the efforts of many organizations, including the following: American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, Japanese American Citizen's League, National Congress of American Indians, Jewish Labor Committee, Los Angeles Urban League, Los Angeles Branch of the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Pacific Coast Council on Intercultural Education.[17]

The CRCSC was off to an aggressive start. By 1948 it gained two recently-minted governmental agencies, The LA County Commission on Human Relations and the Pasadena Committee on Group Relations, along with the Greater LA CIO Council, the UAW, District 8; Claremont Intercultural Council; and the San Fernando Valley Council on Race Relations.[18] Unions were particularly courageous after the white student strike at Fremont High. They routinely declared for undiluted racial equality. Los Angeles Federation of Teachers, who submitted a formal letter to the Board of Education to stop the practice of steering students. They demanded further a policy to “welcome all students of the neighborhood,” and that “all pupils are entitled to equal services and a democratic community experience.”[19]

At a national level, these professionals organized “The National Association of Intergroup Relations Officials” (NAIRO, established 1947). Clearly, a concerted effort was taking place, initiated simultaneously from very different social and political locations. It was in this immediate post-World War II period that the term "Human Relations" became the dominant term for permanent governmental or NGO inter-group relations commissions. In January of 1947 the Sentinel published in serial form a remarkable investigation sponsored by the American Council on Race Relations, of race relations in Watts, Hollenbeck (East LA), and West Jefferson (Sugar Hill). The report found rampant hostilities erupting in these three communities, but made careful note of the different forms. In the working-class Hollenbeck neighborhood, rioting broke out between Mexicans and African Americans, even though “the basic tension is that between middle class Jews and working class Mexicans.” In Watts, according to Fisher, “the major tensions occur between predominantly Negro Watts and the surrounding ‘lili-white’ communities which fear and resist Negro infiltration.. Even so, the major violence that recently erupted consisted of a white youth gang attack on “on the Mexican residents of Watts. All accounts agree that Negroes were not involved in the affair.”[20]

The ACRR report impressively held “interracial” organization as the gold standard for overcoming racial tension, criticizing the Catholic Church for segregating its congregations and the Catholic Youth Organization in particular for creating single-race youth clubs.[21]

But the Human Relations liberals were no match for the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department. The founding members of the CRCSC had met at the Fellowship House, 3125 W. Adams Blvd, near Arlington, on 8 November 1947, several months after the Fremont High School effigy-burning.

Sugar Hill was the spatial spearhead of the Los Angeles Civil Rights movement, home to the leading African American lawyers such as Edwin Jefferson, his wife Martha Jefferson, Crispus Attucks Wright, and Walter Gordon. As the ACRR report observed, this black elite was flying solo in many respects:

“The Negro of West Jefferson and Sugar Hill wages his fight along caste lines. He contributes to the support of the NAACP, the Urban League, anti-covenant organizations and Negro professional societies. But his organizations have no mass following and reach scarcely at all into the Negro population of Watts and Hollenbeck.”[22]

Just six blocks away from the Fellowship House, on Hobart St near Western, the LAPD made a very public assault on the leading edge of civil rights elite in May of 1948, making it very clear that “interracial” was a social form not to be tolerated:

“Charging the police with breaking in to a private residence where the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity was holding a benefit cocktail party, Attorney Crispus Wright announced today that he will file suit against the Los Angeles Police Department.”

According to Wright, “the police action was completely unwarranted and was caused purely by the fact that there have been interracial parties held in the Davis home." Sugar Hill was truly an elite enclave, so this police assault was meant to be public. At 3:00 AM, the police reportedly broke down the front doors and went though the house breaking more doors down--the LAPD form of “knocking” in this kind of raid of intimidation.[23] “The officers were then said to have gone to the house in the rear of the residence and arrested the occupants for “resorting.” The arrested couple have been living in the rear of the house for several years as man and wife and witnesses state that the officers making the arrest refused to believe that, because the wife was white and the man colored that they were married.”[24] This incident went completely unreported by the Los Angeles Times.

The LAPD command were determined now to harass interracial mixing, and the Los Angeles Times, openly advocating segregation in its editorials, set the dominant white public standard for public opinion. Central Ave attorney Loren Miller had worked with Thurgood Marshall to present the landmark 1948 Shelly v. Kraemer, based in large part on a Los Angeles case. In response, the Los Angeles Times editorialized that “Racial groups almost everywhere have a tendency to cohere. Members ordinarily do not go adventuring out of their group areas unless driven to do so by the pressure of housing shortages.” Ironically following the same Chicago School script as the Human Relations professionals, Norman Chandler’s voice here is an appallingly false and indifferently unjust. Shrugging off the Shelly decision, Chandler encouraged white owners to band together still in allowable private collaboration to keep races separate. Those who believe, as the Times showed itself to believe, “that racial groups are mutually exclusive, and should be, must now consider the fact that the frictions of mixture will end only when provisions is made for ample group colonizing space.”[25]

Thus began the golden age of Human Relations, sporting a huge network of dedicated professionals who shared a liberal vision of race relations, a vision rooted firmly in the University of Chicago, in Robert Park’s “race relations cycle,” which taught that bad race relations were a product of bad behavior that proceeded from misunderstandings and could be meliorated through educational campaigns and good citizenship awards, publicizing new role models. NAIRO, in turn, established the Journal of Intergroup Relations, which published essays on both specific efforts in various cities, and on the larger questions at hand.[26] Based in academic psychology of “peer groups” and “out groups,” the Human Relations apparatchiki essentially failed to consider the underlying injustice of the social system that was common knowledge to African American, Asian, and Latino Angelenos.

Planted within all this impressive activity, however, were the seeds of future disarray, loss of focus, and disorganization. Coalitions among separately funded and focused community organizations fragment easily. Labor organizations were primarily interested in workplace issues, while ethnic-community based organizations were mainly concerned with issues affecting their group. The CRCSC organized by committees: on education, housing, labor, and legislation, among others, some more aggressive or talented leaders than others. A leading personality was Joseph Roos, a remarkable activist for racial tolerance that began in Chicago during the Great War and had infiltrated the Los Angeles Nazi Party in the late 1930s. Roos headed the legislative committee of CRCSC over several decades.

A central activist in this network, Zane Meckler, the leading members of the CRCSC never once met to discuss overall underlying causes of intergroup tension. Instead, they hammered away at specific issues, like the creation in the late 1950s of a fair teacher employment commission within the State Department of Education. "My point, and it’s a critical one," reflected Meckler, is "that at the practicioner level, we [were] a bunch of guys trying to describe an elephant. I’m holding his tail and you're holding his trunk and…we don’t see the larger picture of the elephant."[27]

That larger picture included first of all the great vitality of the Eastside, a vibrant and highly diverse cultural milieu. Paradoxically, its residents did not consider it a segregated place, because whites, blacks, Asian, Latinos all vied within its borders. “I never attended a segregated school,” remembered Ersey O’Brien, Jefferson High School Class of 1940. And he was right. It was the white schools that were segregated, such as nearby Fremont and Hamilton High Schools. O’Brien’s yearbook for 1940 looks like the United Nations, and every one of the many “clubs” (Latin, Spanish, Drama, etc) were fully integrated.[28]

The white supremacist ruling regime of Los Angels could do nothing about the diversity of the Eastside, so they tried to contain it. But its vitality attracted all races to the Avenue, making it “the only integrated setting in Los Angeles.”[29] The entertainment venues were almost too numerous to count. Central Avenue itself was lined by a string of landmark theatres, some sporting tall Art Deco facades, such as the Lincoln Theatre at Central Ave. and 23rd Street, which opened in 1926, premiering with Curtis Mosby’s orchestra, the Dixieland Blues Blowers, and Bill Russell’s revue. The Lincoln became the largest venue for black entertainment in the West.[30]

The Lincoln featured motion pictures, live stage shows, talent shows and vaudeville, earning critical acclaim as the "West Coast Apollo." For years, Bardu Ali’s band served as master of ceremonies, whose playbills boasted Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Lionel Hampton. Sunday stage attractions at the Lincoln Theatre cost thirty cents for adults, ten cents for children. Indeed, the big Central Ave theatres were so family-friendly that school children came on weekdays and did their homework there.[31] By 1940 the Lincoln Theatre competed for business with (if we were travelling from north to south): the Hub Theatre at 1007 Central Ave; the Rosebud Theatre at 1940 Central Ave.; the Gayety at 2407 Central Ave.; the Florence Mills Theater at 3511 Central Ave; the Bill Robinson Theatre at 4319 Central Ave.; and the Savoy Theatre at 5326 Central Avenue.[32]

By the immediate postwar years, the critical mass of cultural education and production on the Ave nearly exploded with an outpouring of young talent that tied together the Watts and Central Ave communities. Born in 1922, Charles Mingus grew up in a Watts in a household that, in his own account was filed with the high expectations of the middle class, black bourgeoisie, but also full of contradictions and confusing signals about the family’s race-ethnic identity. His father, Charles Mingus Sr., was a Staff Sargeant in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps stationed in Nogales, Arizona, who moved in 1922 with his ailing wife, Harriet Sophia Mingus, to 1621 East 108th Street, where the family lived until 1944. Harriet’s mother was Chinese, and her father British. His father was the son of a slave and a “Swedish lady in the Big House.”[33] With so many continents in his genetic make-up, Mingus had a hard time finding his place in a severely race-conscious world, even among people of color, where he was assigned the lowest rung on the ladder: “because, well, he was kind of a mongrel, lighter than some but not light enough to belong with the beautiful elegant blacks…” Mingus speaks of himself in the third person in his autobiography Beneath the Underdog:
 

Whenever he looked in the mirror and asked ‘What am I?’ he thought he could see a number of strains—Indian, African, Mexican, Asian and a certain amount of white from a source his father had boasted of. He wanted to be one or the other but he was a little of everything, wholly nothing, of no race, flag or friend.

In Mingus’s account, the incalculable cultural, economic, and legal prioritization of whiteness skewed everyone’s perspective: “So finally Charles gassed his hair straight and ran around with the other mongrels, the few Japanese, Mexicans, Jews and Greeks at Jordan High. The light Mexicans called themselves Spanish, the light Chinese said they were white.”[34] Meanwhile his own father “never gave us any pride in being black. I don’t think he was ashamed, I don’t think he knew anything about it, about the fact that there was anything to be proud about. And I think he put his hope sin the strength of the fact that he passed for white.”[35]

His mother died shortly after young Charles Mingus was born and his father remarried Mamie Caron, who determined that all of her children had a classical music education. On Central Avenue, musical education was hard to avoid. There were more than 200 music instructors in the neighborhood by 1930. Among these was the flamboyant William Wilkins, who had founded his Wilkins’s Piano Academy on Central Ave. in 1912. For decades, he and his assistant instructors trained thousands of children. One of these was Samuel Browne, who went on to earn a classical education at the University of Southern California, and became the first African American teacher at Jefferson High School in 1936. “His classes at Jefferson High School…produced some of the world’s most outstanding jazz players, including Dexter Gordon, Chico Hamilton, Sonny Criss, and Paul Bryant…”[36]

Four miles south in Watts, David Starr Jordan High School, founded 1922, boasts as alumni, the 1951 Nobel Prize winner (for discovery of Plutonium), Glenn T. Seaborg; three Olympic Gold Medalists: 1) The brilliantly, tragically, short-lived Florence Griffith-Joyner “Flo-Jo” (1959-1998) Olympian Gold Medalist, and since 1988, is still World Record holder in both 100 meter and 200 meter Dash, is quite literally the fastest woman in all of recorded human history, at least until this writing in late November 2014; 2) Hayes Edward Sanders, Hayes Edward "Big Ed" Sanders (1930-1954), Boxing Gold Medalist and first African American Olympic Heavyweight champion; 3) And Kevin YOung, another World-Record holder and Olympic Gold Medalist, whose 1992 400 meter Hurdle record stands unbroken in 2014.