Customer Reviews

L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (George Gund Foundation Book in African American Studies)

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Well researched, written, accessible, and informative.
Useful to anyone interested in LA history, African-American history, and urban studies. A good book for undergrads, too.

This is a great book. A special book. Here's why:

Josh Sides has given Los Angeles the kind of racial history that Mike Davis brought to bear on our popular image of the city and the kind of countervailing narrative that Chester Himes might have appreciated. This book's detailed look at Los Angeles shows us how the city's racial texture has changed, but it is also concerned to challenge how lazy we have all become in habitually characterizing racial LA as a city that can be reduced to the Watts Riots, OJ, gang violence, and Rodney King. As Sides tells the story, Los Angeles presents with a genuinely American paradox. Its racial story is a narrative of strife and difficulty, but it is also one of success and hope that rivals any other city's in the United States.

This book is perfectly readable, and it leaves you wondering how we can all think more carefully about what is actually happening in America, beneath easy stereotypes and lazy, stock media representations of race.

_L.A. City Limits_ documents the history of black migration to Southern California, starting from the 1920's. Blacks, fleeing racism in the South and other parts of the US, believed that California would be free of these problems.

Although free from the Jim Crow of the South (people could sit anywhere they wanted to on the bus, or be served in most stores without problems), the three big problems blacks ran into in Southern California were:

1. Employment discrimination. Blacks weren't hired, or if they were, were stuck in the most menial, undesirable jobs. White co-workers, and unions were often more of an obstacle to black employment than the companies themselves.

2. Housing discrimination. With few exceptions, blacks were only allowed to move into South Central LA and Watts. A variety of legal and illegal means were used to keep them out of other parts of Los Angeles, or the suburbs. Even nearby cities like Compton and Lynwood would not see that many blacks until later....

(Related to the above was transportation availability--as the suburbs developed, jobs moved there. People in Watts without a car were at a clear disadvantage, as the bus service was inadequate for reaching these suburbs)

3. in Los Angeles, unlike the South or Midwest, Mexicans competed with blacks for the lower level jobs. The level of discrimination they faced, as compared with that faced by blacks, varied (sometimes much less, sometimes a lot more). Throughout the time scale of the book, the author compares the Mexican experience with the African-American one.

The book provides good coverage of the 1920's and 30's, the war years, and all the way up through the 1965 Watts riots and their aftermath. It tends to lose steam, though, when describing events after the mid-70's.

I didn't read this book for a class. I read it because I'm a born/raised Los Angeles resident who is interested in all things Los Angeles.

What I found was a compelling history of the native and transplanted African-American population of my city. It dispelled a lot of the myth I'd grown up hearing (from both Whites and Blacks). It put some of what I'd witnessed as a child through adulthood into context. "L.A. City Limits..." made it clear that L.A. is not a friendly city to its minorities. The city tolerates, at best, even today. While the core of L.A. success has always been to ignore one's circumstances to reinvent oneself, this book offers historical fact for why that's been nearly impossible for the city's African-Americans.

The broader information in this book trails off in the late-70's, mirroring the demise of L.A.'s manufacturing base. So, while Mr. Sides makes mention of the '92 Rodney King riots, there's no in depth study of its aftermath here. In fact, the last chapter left me wanting much more because this book provides such a powerful illustration of the African-American population prior to the 80's.

"L.A. City Limits:..." is written in a clear, informative style and shouldn't be daunting to a casual non-fiction reader. This is a no-less difficult read than a fact-based L.A. Weekly article. L.A. is a huge geographical region where residents still reside in some form of segregation, retained like "traffic memory" from a sunrise accident on the 101 affects the same location at Noon.

This book is clear, well-written and very readable. For the first time, I understand the hope my parents must have had when they migrated to Los Angeles in 1957.

Recently, I was speaking to 20-somethings about my mom's yearning to attend high school since here Louisiana hometown did not have a school for her. Slack-jawed, they marveled that someone still alive would have experienced these acts that they thought were in the distant past.

This should be required reading for all Californians.