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• 1 2013-07-14T16:51:51-07:00 Eastside Story: African-American Central Ave From Biddy Mason to Watts, 1781-1959 31 image_header 2018-11-01T18:15:45-07:00 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 official “center” of Los Angeles City is Main Street at First St. Street numbers start there at 1 and increase along all four cardinal directions of the compass. Streets and avenues north and south, east and west of that intersection usually have the “N,” “S” “E,” or “W” prefix, as in 802 South Central Ave. But because of the Spanish SW to NE alignment of the original city, Main Street runs westward as it heads south, and opens up a larger and larger space between it and the LA River, so that almost all of the room for expansion southward was east of Main Street. For this reason, the most familiar place name for the neighborhoods south of Downtown until the 1950s was “The Eastside.”
  
  The Eastside faced east: toward East LA, the historic center of the vast Mexican and Latin American community. The Eastside also faced northeast: toward Downtown. The major rail lines from all points east entered Los Angeles through the San Gabriel Valley. African Americans, beginning on that block of Azusa where Pentecostalism began, continued building community institutions southward from the parcels that Biddy Mason had developed, establishing the most visible ethnic community on the Eastside
  
  Most important were the churches: The Mount Zion Baptist Church at 6th and Maple, the Second Baptist at 8th and San Julian, then the latest First African Methodist Episcopal, at 8th and Towne. “In 1903, the Reverend J.E. Edwards, pastor of the First A.M.E Church, Jefferson Lewis Edmunds, editor of the Liberator, and Frederick Roberts, an attorney, created a local civil rights organization known simply as the Forum.”[5]
  
  The institutional life of the community centered on Central Ave between 8th and Pico by 1920. Joe and Charlotta Bass edited the California Eagle at 8th and Central and “Something approximating the official birth of the Central Avenue business district occurred in early 1916, when Sidney Dones opened the Booker T. Washington Building at 10th and Central Avenue: “Procured,” the Eagle boomed, “for Colored Business Men.” As historian Douglas Flamming observes, however, the neighborhood surrounding these anchors of African American community life was not at all exclusively African American. His account of a single block in the heart of the African American district belies the ruling ideology of segregation. The entire block of Central across from the Bass’s Eagle office was occupied by whites--“mostly Midwesterners and native Californians.” On Birch Street, a residential block near Central and 8th, the families in the census manuscript were as follows:
   

  “No. 816A—a Mexican American couple native to California with one child At home, he a cement laborer, she a housewife.

  No. 816B—a Mexican American couple from Arizona with three children, he a warehouse laborer, she a housewife.

  No. 818—a Japanese couple with three California­born children, he the proprietor of a produce market, she a housewife.

  No. 820—a couple from Mexico with one California-born child, he a driver for a dairy business, she a housewife.

  No. 822A—an African American couple, one from Kansas, the other from Tennessee, with no children, he a porter, she a housewife.

  No. 824—a Japanese couple, one of whom immigrated in 1899, the other in 1916, with no children, he a worker at a produce market, she a housewife.

  No. 836—an African American couple, one from Tennessee, the other from Texas, he a machinist in a garage, she a housewife, with two Texas-born children at school and a black roomer (a porter).”27

   

  This highly diverse section of the city was home to a large percentage of blue­collar workers for the obvious reason that it was close to the industrial spine of the metropolis; the Southern Pacific yards were only a few blocks to the east, where the huge warehouse and factory district lay on both sides of the Los Angeles River. Through its own press, institutions, and politicians, the African American community in effect “claimed” the Central Avenue district, so that its reputation was primarily indexed to that place. Black-owned businesses and churches would continue to head southward along Central Avenue through the 1940s, but the neighborhoods surrounding the Avenue would continue to be highly diverse. Most remarkably, the area was always home to thousands of White Anglos, living side­-by-side with African Americans, Japanese, and Mexicans. The rules of segregation did not bar whites from living among people of color in neighborhoods that had always been mixed. Those rules simply attempted to establish all-white zones of exclusion outside of the mixed Downtown, Eastside, Boyle Heights, and scores of other borderlands that never submitted to racial apartheid.
  
  A remarkable "Central Avenue Business Directory" for the year 1940 has been converted by the author and collaborators into a map form, showing Arts and Entertainment, Churches, and a range of sites that constitute the neighborhood as a community.
  
  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. 
  
  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]
  
  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]
  
  Central Avenue's Theaters in the 1940s [MAP]
  
  The vitality of Central Avenue Avenue, made 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 theaters, 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 theaters 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 traveling 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.
   

  Jordan High--as it was known, rarely David Starr Jordan--had an equally impressive music department, where Mingus struggled to keep up with the standards for music reading when he joined the symphony orchestra there in the mid-30s.

  Mingus was determined. Fellow Jordan High student and clarinetist Buddy Collette found him on the street shining shoes and offered him a place in his budding jazz band, to pioneer the new sound that was replacing swing as new cutting edge: Bebop. The form originated on New York’s 52nd St. but immediately travelled west with Charlie Parker, who took up in residence on LA’s Central Avenue “from late 1945 to spring of 1947,” as well as from Dizzie Gillespie, who also frequented LA’s clubs in those immediate postwar years.[37]

  
  Jazz made democracy public within and across the borders imposed on it. On a daily basis, life was productive and immensely creative, especially in music. During the very same year as the Fremont High School Effigy Burning and the mixed-race couples raid on the Sugar Hill home in 1947, Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray led an hours-long jazz concert at the Elk’s Club on Central at Jefferson, with Howard McGhee on double base, and Sonny Criss on Alto sax. They started the set with “Bopera (Disorder at the Border),” a number that lasted more than twenty minutes, elongated by a string of solos by all of the artists. Dexter Gordon’s “Bopera” was just one manifestation of the general movement to “jam,” improvising in a giant music studio in the streets and clubs and homes of the Eastside.[38]
  
  Of jam sessions, RJ Smith writes:
  
  “They happened anywhere: in a nightclub, in a tea room, in an empty field between a gas station and a florist’s shop at 42nd and Central. Buddy Collette and Charles Mingus jammed on the streetcars. Dizzie Gillespie jammed with a bunch of wizened New Orleans originators; once, the Ellington, Basie and Lunceford bands were in town at the same time and their parts all jammed together. When the piano master Art Tatum was on his deathbed, a group of the Avenue’s finest keyboardists visited him; one after another they played something for the master. That, too, was a jam session. Jams were a mix of comity and tragedy, of the tutorial and the gladiatorial. Frequently, Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker was on the premises.”[39]
  
  Dizzie Gillespie brought Charlie “Bird” Parker to LA as part of his Rebop Six ensemble for an engagement at Billy Berg’s Supper Club that lasted from December 1946 to January 1947. Mingus, at 24 was already recognized as a prodigy. To make ends meet, he ghost-composed movie score passages for the great motion picture composer Dimitri Tiomkin: “He would give us an assignment like, ‘Write this for eight bars; modulate to the key of C and I’ll be back a little later.”[40] An ambitious composer and bass virtuoso, Mingus appeared with many established greats by this time, by he found a relatively stable place by 1947 in Lionel Hampton’s big band, composing and soloing as well.[41] By 1952 Mingus had moved to New York to perform with Parker, working with him until the latter’s death shortly after their legendary Massey Hall concert.[42] Mingus, whose career had an enormous impact on jazz, had completed a common artistic circuit into and out of Los Angeles, establishing in New York his “Jazz Workshop,” also called the “School of Mingus”[43]
  
  The departure of Mingus in 1953 can be seen as emblematic of the profound transformation of Black Los Angeles in the 1950s, and transformation that was in its very essence geographic. The persistent efforts of Loren Miller, Crispus Wright, Edwin Jefferson, and other African American attorneys to challenge the color line began to have an impact following the defeat of restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer (334 U.S. 1) in 1948. The wealthiest African Americans had already started a migration west of Main Street (the effective color line for most of “Eastside” Central Ave), a geographical protruberance heavily watched by the LAPD. Lacking effective enforcement, real estate segregationists were unable to stem a swelling exodus of black families who could afford to continue this demographic movement in the 1950s. With the desegregation of the Musicians Union in 19**, the freedom of Black musicians to perform all around the metropolis meant that white audiences were no longer required to frequent clubs and businesses on Central Ave, and blacks audiences were increasingly free to follow those performers to white neighborhoods, so business declined precipitously on Central Ave by the late 1950s, due to a flight of black capital and the decline of patronage.
  
  The exodus of more-affluent blacks from Eastside/Central Avenue in the 1950s is fraught with tragic irony. It was made possible by the collapse of legal segregation, but the main beneficiaries were middle-class and professional blacks who could afford to find more expensive homes to the west. Poorer, mainly working-class Blacks remained on Central Avenue, and witnessed the immediate collapse of the local economy as retail stores, movie theatres, and jazz clubs closed due to a diminished customer base with less purchasing power. By the late 1950s most of the big theatres and music clubs had closed. By 1960 Jefferson High School’s legendary African American music teacher Samuel Browne asked the LA Unified School District for a transfer to new Pacific Palisades High School—an all-white neighborhood—because he no longer had sufficiently motivated music students to teach at Jefferson High.[44] By the time of the 1965 Watts Rebellion the Eastside/Central Avenue neighborhood had essentially become an economic ghetto, segregated in effect by class as an overlay to the older race segregation.
  
  The years 1959-60 were marked in Los Angeles by a turn toward militancy, or at least toward greater urgency for the cause of democracy. Mighty events roiled the public sphere, beginning with Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution in 1959, the Greensboro, North Carolina lunch counter sit-ins, and the Nixon-Kennedy presidential campaign of 1960. Many African American celebrities spoke out for Civil Rights, and one of them was the legendary fighter Joe Louis, successor to Jack Johnson as a symbol of black power, whose defeat of Germany’s Max Schmeling in 1938 humiliated the Nazis. Conversely, Louis became a major figure in the U.S. War Department’s publicity program during the Second World War. Louis became a familiar face in Hollywood, which produced The Joe Louis Story in 1953. Louis was one of many inspired by the Cuban Revolution, endorsing its freedom from racial discrimination. In 1960 he signed a short-lived public relations deal with Castro which his wife, the Los Angeles layer Martha Jefferson, quickly got him out of, due to the backlash from the Truman State Department and anti-communist heat in the mainstream press.[45]
  
  The greatest number of whites living in Los Angeles County peaked in the year 1960. Every year thereafter, their numbers declined—a very important and little-discussed feature of the long demographic history of Los Angeles. It means that Europeans “whites” were predominant population of Los Angeles for less than a century: the 80 years between 1880 and 1960. The incipient decline in the 1960s might have helped ease the process of desegregation, but the white leadership was clueless about the roiling seas about them and would never have considered relinquishing social, cultural, and economic power. Conflict in the public sphere was only starting to come out in the open in 1960, culminating in Watts Rebellion of 1965. 
  
  
  
  
  
  [5] De Graaf and Taylor (2001): 19-20; Cox (2001): 252.
  
  [6] Find the scene in Hollers when he visits his girlfriend’s house on Sugar Hill. Great, angry portrait of class distance.
  
  [7] Freer (2005).
  
  [8] Smith (2006): 8.
  
  [9] Bogle (2005): 79.
  
  [10] Quoted in Vangelisti and Calbi (1999), pp. 133-4; Himes (1972-76).
  
  [11] Himes (1945), p. 3.
  
  [12] McWilliams (1944): 128-9.
  
  [13] Mazón (1984); Quotation from Pitt and Pitt (1997): 571.
  
  [14] Smith (2006): 31.
  
  [15] Smith (2006): 88.
  
  [16] Smith (2006): ***; Kurashige ( 2008): 151-54.
  
  [17] “Two Get Posts on American Council on Race Relations,” Los Angeles Times 18 April 1946, p. 24.
  
  [18] Steinberg (1962).
  
  [19] “Community Action Brings Decline in Race Tension at Fremont High,” Los Angels Sentinel, 29 May 1947, page 1.
  
  [20] “Author Observes Racial Outbreaks Here Irrational,” Los Angeles Sentinel 9 Jan 1947, p. 7.
  
  [21] “Catholic Policy of Segregation Said Deliberate,” Los Angeles Sentinel 30 Jan 1947, p. 7.
  
  [22] “Catholic Policy of Segregation Said Deliberate,” Los Angeles Sentinel 30 Jan 1947, p. 7.
  
  [23] “Police Raid Fraternity Party in Sugar Hill Residence, Los Angeles Sentinel 20 May 1948, p. 1.
  
  [24] “Police Raid Fraternity Party in Sugar Hill Residence, Los Angeles Sentinel 20 May 1948, p. 1.
  
  [25] “Restrictive Covenants.” Editorial, Los Angeles Times, 5 May 1948.
  
  [26] Cousens and Field (1958).
  
  
  
  [27] Author interview with Zane Meckler, 19 June 1997.
  
  [28] Author interview with Ersey O’Brien, 6 July 2007.
  
  [29] Quoted in Cox (2001): 251. This is an exaggeration. Boyle Heights and several other communities were also very diverse.
  
  [30] Cox (1993): 19; Reed (1992): 423, Otis (1993): 13-15.
  
  [31] O’Brien interview (2007); Cox (1993): 31.
  
  [32] Addresses from The Official Central Avenue District Directory (A Business and Professional Guide), March 1940, and from the Los Angeles City Directories, 1920-1953.
  
  [33] Priestly (1982): 1-3.
  
  [34] Mingus (1971): 65-6.
  
  [35] Quoted in Priestly (1982): 2.
  
  [36] Cox (2001): 263.
  
  [37] Smith (2006): 259; Cox (2001): 266.
  
  [38]
  
  [39] Smith (2006): 259.
  
  [40] Mingus quoted in Priestly (1982): 31.
  
  [41] “Lucky Thompson’s Trio with Charlie Mingus on Bass,” Display advertisement for “Tommy’s Night Owl,” 4400 S.San Pedro St., Los Angeles Sentinel 21 Feb. 1946.
  
  [42] Priestly (1982): 34-5; 49-53.
  
  [43] Santoro (2000): 6.
  
  [44] Cox (2001): 263, 269; For the Musicians’s Union, see Smith (2006): *-*.
  
  [45] L.J. Brock Brockenbury, “Bigotry Conquers Joe Louis,” Los Angeles Sentinel 23 June 1960, p. B 8.
  
  [46] Schrank (2008), p. 277.
  
  [47] Connor (2008): 74.
• 1 2013-08-11T14:07:29-07:00 Walter Gordon's Photographic Tour of African American Los Angeles, 1920s-1960s 15 Photographic Narrative plain 2013-09-20T22:22:49-07:00 Born in Santa Monica on 22 June 1908, Walter Gordon Jr. was the son of a real estate agent and investor, Walter Gordon, Senior , who maintained an office on the prominent corner of Central Ave and Adams Blvd in the 1920s. 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, Robert "Bob" Jones, pillories this set in his 1945 novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go. 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. 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, in his own words, is Walter Gordon's visual tour of Central Avenue society, political and cultural: #8 Real Estate Office, 1923 Two customers visit the real estate office of Walter L. 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. #6 The Jockey Club 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. #7 Power Ladies Some “power ladies” in the local African-American community gather for a meeting in the 1940s. Seated at left is Betty Hill, a social activist and founder of the Women’s Political Study club. Next to her is Dr. Vada Sommerville, the first Black female graduate of USC’s School of Dentistry and a founding member of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP. Standing in the back, third from left, is the social and labor activist Jessie Lee Terry. Next to her is Martha Jefferson, the first Black female attorney to practice law here. #10 Black Attorneys for Republican Goodwin Knight, 1952 Ivan Johnson, the first Black member of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, stands in support of Goodwin Knight (seated at center), governor of California from 1953–1959. To the left of Knight is accountant B. B. Bratton. At far right is Vincent Monroe Townsend, an attorney and veteran actor who played the judge on Amos and Andy. #14 Charlotta Bass and Walter Gordon Charlotta Bass, the owner and editor of the pioneering Black community newspaper The California Eagle, 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. #18  Bessie Bruington Burke Teachers gather at a backyard party held by Bessie Bruington Burke in the early 1950s. Burke was the first Black teacher and principal in Los Angeles. Her mother secured support for her daughter’s professional aspirations from the Forum, an African-American civic organization headquartered at the corner of Eighth and Wall Streets. Burke broke through the prevailing color barrier thanks to a combination of the Forum’s considerable influence and her own impeccable academic qualifications. #24  Ethel Sissle and the Red Cross Ethel Sissle, former wife of songwriter Noble Sissle, drives a Red Cross vehicle with army personnel shortly after World War II. Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake created and directed Shuffle Along, the first Black production on Broadway. #26  Trumpeter Valaida Snow Valaida Snow, on the left in the front row, sits with friends at Wrigley Field, a baseball stadium formerly located at Avalon Boulevard and 42nd Street in Los Angeles. A remarkable trumpet player, Snow was captured by the Nazis in 1941 while entertaining in Copenhagen. Although threatened with execution during her eighteen months in incarceration, her life may have been spared due to her musical talent. This photograph is probably from the late 1940s, some time after her release. Behind her sits Honey Murphy, owner of the Last Chance Restaurant and Club situated at 108th Street and Central Avenue. #30  Claude Hudson and Henry Wallace Dr. H. Claude Hudson, a dentist, founder of Broadway Savings and Loan, and president of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, listens to a speech by Henry Wallace, the former vice president (1941–1945) and Progressive Party candidate for president in 1948. #33  Rev. Clayton Powell Reverend Clayton Donovan Russell addresses an audience at the Peoples’ Independent Church of Christ at 18th and Paloma Streets in the early 1940s. Russell, who grew up in Boyle Heights and graduated from USC, embodied the church’s influence in the Los Angeles Black community. He began preaching at the age of seven, soon catching the attention of Reverend N. P. Greggs of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church. Greggs left First AME in 1915 to found the Peoples’ Church and took Russell with him. When Russell succeeded Greggs as pastor in 1935 he revitalized the church’s influence by introducing radio broadcasts of his sermons, joining the Sentinel’s Leon Washington in the “Don’t shop where you can’t work” movement, creating innovative community work programs during the Depression, and organizing the Los Angeles Negro Victory Committee to aid the cause in World War II. Russell’s progressive views earned him a loyal following until his death in 1981. #34  The Club Alabam in Full Swing An audience takes in a show at the Club Alabam at the height of its popularity in the 1940s. Some of the notable attendees include, from left to right: Tillie Euliss (wearing a mink coat), who was a popular waitress at the Dunbar Hotel; Clarence Moore, owner of the Mimo Club at 29th Street and Western Avenue; actress Lillian Randolph; Elihue “Black Dot” McGee, a well-known Central Avenue figure; Club Alabam singer Juliett Ball; and with his hand on his chin, Prince Spencer—one of the fill-ins for the Nicholas Brothers and later, a keno operator at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. #38 Dunbar Hotel Cocktail Lounge Dr. John Sommerville and his wife, Vada Watson, the first African-Americans to graduate from the USC School of Dentistry, opened the Dunbar Hotel in 1928. Located at 4225 S. Central Avenue, the establishment and its adjacent nightclub quickly became the focus of the area’s music scene. The manager of the hotel’s cocktail lounge may be seen in this photomontage from the 1940s. #39 Entertainment Celebrities Entertainment celebrities pose at a home party in the early to mid-1940s. Standing from left to right are: Jennie S. Bruington, mother of Bessie Bruington Burke; actor Ben Carter, who played Ben Shadrack in Green Pastures; Jack Chase, a popular local prize fighter married to the woman standing next to him, actress Lillian Randolph; actress Hattie McDaniel, winner of an Academy Award for Gone With The Wind (1939); C. W. Hill; tenor George Garner, who led the Southernaires; his wife; and finally, Lillian Cumber, the first Black entertainment agent in Southern California. Seated, from left to right are: Herman Spurlock, who was a colorful sportsman; actress Lillian Beavers; and society figure Naomi Green, pictured next to her husband Eddie Green, star of the long-running play Duffy’s Tavern. #42 Central Ave. Journalists with Walter Winchell A group of journalists gather to discuss their work. Pictured from left to right are Joe Harris, author of the “Smoke Rings” column in the Los Angeles Sentinel; Walter Winchell, a nationally syndicated radio personality; Joe Adams, the first Black radio announcer in Los Angeles and manager of singer Ray Charles; and Leon Washington, founder of the Sentinel, which grew under his stewardship from a throwaway sheet to one of the leading African-American newspapers in the country. Washington began a desegregation effort on Central Avenue in the early 1930s, called “Don’t shop where you can’t work.” #43 Maceo Sheffield Maceo Sheffield, seen here in the late 1930s, was one of the most colorful personalities in the African-American community that encompassed Central Avenue in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a veritable renaissance man whose resume included actor, producer, pilot, police officer, and photographer (with a few of his snapshots making their way into Walter Gordon’s collection). #51  Billy Holliday Defiant and Victorious Billie Holliday leaves Los Angeles Superior Court after the dismissal of the criminal case against her (see below). #22  Billy Holliday On Trial 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. #59  Billy Holliday's Manager with Walter Gordon John Levy (left) and Walter Gordon stand in the court hallway before Billie Holiday’s criminal assault trial. Levy was Holliday’s manager and boyfriend for much of her turbulent career. #47  Billy Holliday with her Attorney Walter Gordon Billie Holliday poses with her attorney Walter Gordon in Los Angeles Superior court. Holliday was sued for more than one million dollars damage by a man claiming intellectual property theft of a song. Gordon fought and won the case for her. #50  Billy Holliday's Thank-You Note Billie Holliday sent Walter Gordon this autographed photo upon the successful resolution of her intellectual property court case. #57  Billy Holliday with Walter Gordon Walter Gordon and Billie Holliday seen soon after the successful outcome of her intellectual property court case. #52  LAPD's Integrated Baseball Team, with Future Mayor Tom Bradley The Saints, LAPD Newton Division’s baseball team, pose for a team photograph around 1945. Kneeling on the left are Sgts. Bob Green and Kinney Harris. Standing in back, third from left, is the former three-term mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley. Third from right is Thomas “Red” Davis. Although they could be teammates in baseball, Black and White officers were not allowed to patrol together until 1961. #53  LA's and Chicago's Black Politicos A group of prominent politicians and community leaders meet at the Southern Pacific train station at 5th Street and Central Avenue in the late 1930s. Seen here, from left to right: Assemblyman Augustus Hawkins; Titus Alexander, a leading member of the Forum; Congressman Arthur Mitchell of Chicago and his wife; USC Law School graduate Bert McDonald, who was a member of the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office and the half-brother of Dunbar Hotel founder Vada Sommerville; and longtime local attorney Hugh Macbeth, who provided legal counsel for the Forum in the early twentieth century and promoted Black resorts like Val Verde and “Little Liberia”—a retreat in Baja California that operated from the 1920s through the 1940s. #54 Satchmo and Friends 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. #55  Gentlemen of Influence Four distinguished men of the community pose for a photograph sometime in the late 1930s–early 1940s. From left to right are Norman Houston of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company; boxing champion Joe Louis; attorney Charles Matthews, who worked for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office; and Fred Roberts, who in 1918, became the first African-American elected to the State Assembly. #60  Curtis Caville Taylor and the African American Power Elite Veteran attorney Curtis Caville Taylor (center, facing viewer) celebrates a birthday party in the mid-1950s with friends and colleagues. Taylor, who came to Los Angeles around 1915, was admired in the Black community for his affable nature as well as his deep roots in the city. The event was held in the Benedict Canyon home of retired Superior Court Judge Earl Broady, who employed clever subterfuge to buy a place in an area where Black people were not yet welcome. To see the inside of the house, Broady’s wife Maude posed as the maid of Jack Tenner, a white attorney. Tenner purchased the property and promptly transferred title to the Broadys. In the foreground with her back to the camera is current Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, with Walter Gordon standing to her right.