Jennifer Mandel publishes new book on African Americans in modern Los Angeles
Jennifer Mandel, Ph.D., associate director of assessment in the University of 51СƳ’s Office of the Provost and adjunct history faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences’ School of Arts and Humanities, recently published a book, “The Coveted Westside: How the Black Homeowners’ Rights Movement Shaped Modern Los Angeles” (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2022).
Drawing on a wide range of sources, including oral histories, census records, manuscript collections, legal cases, and newspaper reports, Mandel pieces together middle-class African Americans’ challenge to discriminatory housing practices and policies in 20th Century Los Angeles at the grassroots and judicial levels to reside in some of the city’s most valuable neighborhoods.
Long before the United States claimed the West in the mid-19th Century, Mandel contends, populations from across and outside of North America settled in the region to enjoy the benefits of its land and natural resources. The nation’s Mexican American War victory in 1848, West and Southwest annexation, belief in Manifest Destiny, the Homestead Acts’ land incentives, and the Gold Rush motivated easterners and midwesterners to migrate westward. Meanwhile, following Emancipation and the Union victory in the Civil War, African Americans gained some constitutional freedoms and continued on a course fighting for equal opportunity in the South as well as the northern and western cities that they moved to in the Great Migration.
As urban populations increased, Whites tightened their grip by putting in place discriminatory housing measures that restricted their neighborhoods from everyone else. According to Mandel, Los Angeles emerged as a leader in the country, establishing the nation’s first exclusionary zoning laws in 1908 that designated its Eastside for mostly industrial use and multi-unit dwellings and its Westside for low density, single-family housing. Further, through the 1910s and 1920s, White real estate interests and homeowners signed racial restrictive covenants that prohibited, oftentimes for decades, anyone not identified generally as White and Christian from living at — except as service staff — renting or owning their properties.
Middle-class Blacks in Los Angeles in particular had the resources to challenge housing discrimination, Mandel states. Buoyed by self-determination, increasing opportunities, and federal antidiscrimination legislation, more African Americans through the twentieth century earned a living in skilled, professional, and entrepreneurial fields that gave them the capital to purchase property in middle-class neighborhoods, but they had to fight to live in those neighborhoods.
Mandel examines Los Angeles’s key middle-class neighborhoods of Black settlement and African Americans’ ensuing efforts to stay there. The book’s first half centers on West Adams Heights (also known as Sugar Hill) and a trial court case that propelled Blacks to an unprecedented victory over racial restrictive covenants three years before the U.S. Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) declared the tools unenforceable. The book’s second half then examines Black settlement in the Crenshaw area’s affluent neighborhoods. Despite the legal victory, African Americans had to enforce Shelley through their own labor. Contending with White resistance and out-migration (or “White flight”), African Americans collaborated with their neighbors across racial lines in local groups and businesses to foster racial integration and maintain their neighborhoods’ high value.