Josh Sides. L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xiv + 288 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-23841-1.

Reviewed by Emily E. Straus (American History, Brandeis University)
Published on H-California (June, 2004)

California Dreaming? African-American Migration and the Limits of Freedom in Los Angeles

The "city limits" in the title of Josh Sides's recent work on the Los Angeles black community gives readers a glimpse into the book's larger argument, namely, that life in the city perpetuated the limitations found in the rural South. Throughout the twentieth century, African Americans thought they were abandoning the bigotry and brutality of the South for Los Angeles's promise of economic opportunity and racial harmony. However, as Sides shows, though L.A. was an improvement over the South, it was no panacea: the city of Los Angeles had its own racially defined limits.

Sides begins his study by asking why so many Southern blacks decided to migrate to the West. Between 1940 and 1970, five million black people left the South (p. 2). Sides opens with the story of Mary Trimble, an African American woman from Louisiana who journeyed to Los Angeles via Texas. Trimble explained that in L.A., in contrast to the urban South, she could escape from the "'missing' and 'mistering'" of domestic labor by working in a racially integrated war plant rather than directly for whites (p. 2). But Sides argues that African Americans changed more than their own circumstances. They also substantially affected the decision-making processes and policies of Los Angeles. African Americans openly challenged such practices as labor discrimination and segregation in housing and schooling.

Critical to this activism, Sides argues, were improved prospects for African Americans during World War II and the postwar decades. Accordingly, he devotes half of the book to a discussion of precisely what this prosperity did and did not offer to African Americans. Better jobs became available, as did the possibility of home ownership. But, as Sides explains, "mere inclusion in the labor force did not guarantee equality for black workers" (p. 76). Employers often relegated African Americans to the worst jobs. Similarly, while homeownership came within the reach of black workers, residential segregation remained the norm even after the Supreme Court declared racial covenants unconstitutional in 1948. Despite these obstacles, African Americans never ceased to challenge residential segregation. Desiring better access to quality schools and other social services, many sought to relocate into integrated areas. White Angelenos opposed to the black presence sought to rebuff such attempts. Thus, as Sides explains, "this conflict between black ambitions and white ambitions ensured that residential integration would proceed very slowly or, in many places, not at all" (p. 96). Los Angeles had housed multi-racial neighborhoods earlier in the century; by the 1950s, white Angelenos were cementing new racial lines. The promise of a better life that Los Angeles held out to African Americans of the Great Migration was deeply contradicted by postwar realities.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, African Americans did not wait idly for better days. Instead, they launched a civil rights movement in Los Angeles that demanded equality on new fronts: the desegregation of the Los Angeles Fire Department and the hiring of African Americans in banks, stores, and industries. Still, the white power structure rejected many of their most important demands, such as curbing police brutality. The African American community became more disgruntled as job opportunities disappeared with the slowing of Los Angeles's economy. According to Sides, this decline was the crucial factor behind the 1965 Watts riots, which, in turn, propelled whites and middle-class blacks to leave Los Angeles in large numbers. But as White Angelenos began to understand the Watts conflagration not as a random act of violence, but as the culmination of a long history of racial inequality, long overdue financial resources finally poured into the city.

Despite the influx of social services, African Americans in Los Angeles continued to lose access to the steady, high-paying, unionized jobs that had once afforded them economic stability. In consequence, a deep economic and social divide emerged between poor urban blacks and those African Americans who could afford to move into integrated suburbs. As a result, black areas such as South Central and Compton became areas of concentrated poverty.

Sides employs a diversity of sources to sustain his argument. His use of census data, for example, is especially effective. As well, he delves deeply into local periodicals and a wide range of archival collections. This broad approach enables Sides to successfully humanize the contested evolution of these urban communities. Most impressively, Sides gives voice to migrants and native Angelenos through his use of oral histories, some of which he conducted personally. These voices enliven Sides's narrative; indeed, he might have made greater use of them. When he does draw on these oral histories, Sides amplifies them to good effect, as in his narrative of the devastating consequences of industrial plant closures for black working men. In this section, he relays two personal stories of displacement. Arvella Grigsby describes the hardships she endured when her husband was forced to take a lower-paying job, while Otis Muse tells how he could not find work and felt "less than a man" (p. 181). Muse's wife believed that this stress contributed to his subsequent fatal heart attack. By highlighting these voices, Sides reveals how personal experiences can be at once unique and illuminative of larger truths.

By focusing his study in Los Angeles, Sides widens the lens of several historiographical debates. Much of the scholarship on the migration of African Americans from the South has focused on the movement north, but Sides convincingly argues that the West, especially since the 1940s, proved an attractive destination for African American migrants. Historians must follow Sides's lead, and reconceptualize the migration of African Americans not just in terms of South to North, but South to West as well. Between 1940 and 1970, Los Angeles's black population grew faster than any other large northern or western city, growing from 63,744 to almost 763,000 (p. 2). Sides's work should also serve as a reminder to historians of postwar urban America that studies of the midwest and north, such as Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis and Ronald Formisano's Boston Against Busing, fail to capture the distinct circumstances of the urban West, and Los Angeles in particular.[1] Sides effectively argues that Los Angeles was set apart by "its diverse racial composition, its dynamic economic growth, and its dispersive spatial arrangement" (p. 6). In terms of its sprawl and car culture, Los Angeles, not Northern or Midwestern cities, best reflects the postwar American metropolitan experience.

Sides's focus on African Americans also broadens Los Angeles ethnic history, which is often Latino centered. Still, he occasionally falls into the trap of describing Los Angeles as a white and black world. This tendency is unfortunate, as some of his sharpest analysis appears when he adds Latinos to the mix. For example, African Americans and Latinos were competitors for employment, but Sides argues that Latinos, unlike African Americans, were "already considered a 'normal' part of the workforce-albeit not quite white" (p. 60). In discussing housing, Sides explains, "Mexicans gained far greater entry into Southern California suburbs than blacks did" (p. 110). Neighborhoods such as Watts became overwhelmingly African American precisely because Mexicans had the opportunity to leave. Part of Sides's argument is that African Americans faced a more multi-ethnic city in Los Angeles than in other places and as a result had a very different experience. As Sides states, "the history of urban America is inseparable from the history of race in America" and a consistently multi-ethnic perspective would have only strengthened his approach (p. 8).

Lastly, Sides's book purports to cover the entire twentieth century, but he relegates the tumultuous decades of the 1980s and 1990s to a brief epilogue. During this time, Los Angeles endured the rise of gang culture, the Rodney King beating and riots, the O. J. Simpson trial and its aftermath, and a major demographic shift that brought larger numbers of Latinos into neighborhoods and towns that were once composed of black majorities. Sides's hasty survey of these major developments truncates his story. In doing so, he denies the reader access to his keen insight and analysis, ably demonstrated throughout this thought-provoking book.

Note

[1]. Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

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Citation: Emily E. Straus. Review of Sides, Josh, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. H-California, H-Net Reviews. June, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9543

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