Los Angeles

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  2/9/2021
  

  Behind these Names, You’ll Find Stories of L.A.'S Black History

  The city of Los Angeles's early Anglo history was marked by the national conflict over slavery, and local decisions granting freedom to Black Angelenos shaped the city. Longtime LA Times columnist Patt Morrison discusses the public markers to African American history in the city. 

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• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  10/29/2020
  

  The Dossier That Destroyed Frank Wilkinson’s Dream of Public Housing in LA

  by Eric Nusbaum

  Frank Wilkinson's advocacy for racially integrated public housing in Los Angeles set off a red-baiting campaign that landed him in prison. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  10/25/2020
  

  Sanctuary Unmasked: The First Time Los Angeles (Sort of) Became a City of Refuge

  by Paul A. Kramer

  Los Angeles’s first sanctuary law grew out of the refugee wave that had brought Alicia Rivera to the city. By 1982, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 refugees from El Salvador — a country with fewer than 5,000,000 people — and tens of thousands of Guatemalans had fled to the United States to escape murder, poverty, and starvation.  

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• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  10/13/2020
  

  A Scholar of American Doom Doesn’t See How Capitalism Can Fix This Crisis

  "There are probably a billion and a half people, maybe more, maybe 2 billion, in the informal working class who have simply been triaged already in advance. So the fate of a very large minority of humanity has been determined now."

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  10/7//2020
  

  Getting to Freedom City (Review)

  by Robin D.G. Kelley

  Historian Robin Kelley reviews Mike Davis and Jon Weiner's "Set the Night on Fire," which chronicles the growth of resistance to inequality and miltarized policing in 1960s Los Angeles.

• 
• SOURCE: Associated Press
  8/23/2020
  

  Film Shows Trailblazing Black Female Editor, VP Candidate

  A new documentary short highlights the journalistic and political career of Charlotta Bass, the Progressive Party candidate for Vice President in 1952.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/20/2020
  

  For Japanese Americans, Housing Injustices Outlived Internment

  After enduring internment, Japanese Americans were forced to resettle in a changed society with a dire housing shortage. The government's response was grossly inadequate. 

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• 8/16/2020
  

  A Lost Lyrical Commemoration of the Watts Rebellion

  by Ken Lawrence

  A never-recorded song from 1955 linked the Watts rebellion to systemic injustice and a long history of police abuse. 

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• SOURCE: TIME
  8/3/2020
  

  She Played a Key Role in the Police Response to the Watts Riots. The Memory Still Haunts Her—But Black History Is Full of Haunting Memories

  by Morgan Jerkins

  Regina was a Black woman working as an LAPD dispatcher in the 77th Street Division of South Los Angeles. She sent officers to respond to another's call for aid on August 11, 1965, warning them not to escalate any situation. Today she still asks “why didn’t they listen to me?”

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• SOURCE: Forbes
  7/27/2020
  

  Celebrating the 19th Amendment and the First Safe Haven Hostel for Women

  Hotel Figueroa in Los Angeles has served as a backdrop for some of the most challenging and memorable moments in American history, a representative of both the endurance of women and the City of Angels’ entrepreneurial, creative, and resilient spirit.

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• 6/28/2020
  

  Liberal Reform Threatens to Expand the Police Power--Just as it did in the Past

  by Max Felker-Kantor

  The history of liberal law-and-order reveals that procedural reforms implemented on top of a structure of policing that has been empowered to protect property and control “disorder” are not only doomed to fail but will produce the conditions for more protest and resistance. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  6/24/2020
  

  Want to Tear Down Insidious Monuments to Racism and Segregation? Bulldoze L.A. Freeways

  Los Angeles historian Gilbert Estrada's work shows how planners in the city used federal highway funding to disrupt multiracial communities and serve whites-only suburban developments, increasing segregation and inequality in the region. 

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• SOURCE: CBS Sports
  6/7/2020
  

  Stealing Home' Author Eric Nusbaum Discusses the Secret History of Dodger Stadium

  Nusbaum's book, released in March, details the human cost of the stadium's construction.

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• SOURCE: LAist
  5/4/2020
  

  The Legacy of Bobby Lee Verdugo, A Leader Of East LA Walkouts

  Verdugo, who became one of the founders of the Chicano student movement and spent much of his life mentoring youth, died Friday. He was 69.

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• SOURCE: LA Times
  4/26/2020
  

  The Real Star of Showtime’s New Series? L.A.’S Neglected Mexican and Chicano History

  The man behind the original “Penny Dreadful,” which ran for three seasons and drew on famed figures from Gothic literature, has now taken an oft-forgotten piece of history, added the supernatural and the culturally specific iconography of Santa Muerte, and produced Showtime’s spinoff “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels."

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  4/26/2020
  

  Set the Night on Fire by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener (Review)

  Jon Weiner and Mike Davis's history of 60s Los Angeles traces the city’s turbulent era of rebellion, police brutality and rise of the counterculture.

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  4/14/2020
  

  A Review of Mike Davis and Jon Wiener's New Book "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties"

  L.A. has a rich history, and it deserves to be told.

• 
• SOURCE: Dissent Magazine
  1-6-15
  

  How Immigrant Activists Changed L.A.

  by Manuel Pastor

  Immigrant rights organizers and advocates have had their own organizations, agendas, and political battles to improve the quality of daily life in a region in which nearly one-tenth of residents are undocumented and where one in five children have at least one undocumented parent.

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  11-3-13
  

  The Long Shadow of William Mulholland

  by William Kahrl

  The LA Aqueduct continues to cast a long shadow.

• SOURCE: NYT
  8-19-13
  

  Second act for the Temple of the Stars

  LOS ANGELES — It was known as the Temple of the Stars: a soaring sanctuary capped by a 100-foot-wide Byzantine dome, built by Hollywood moguls on the eve of the Depression and splashed with the kind of pizazz one might expect at a movie palace rather than a synagogue.But over the last 80 years, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple has become a monument to neglect, its handsome murals cracked, the gold-painted dome blackened by soot, the sanctuary dark and grim. A foot-long chunk of plaster crashed to the ground one night.The congregation, too, has faded; while still vibrant and active, it has grown older, showing no signs of growth. This once proud symbol of religious life in Los Angeles seemed on the brink of becoming a victim of the steady ethnic churn of the city, as its neighborhood grew increasingly Korean and Hispanic and Jews moved to the west side.