Helen Bernstein High School from Sunset boulevard, East Hollywood

A Generation of Leadership That Has Failed the City of Los Angeles Is Now Unraveling

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(Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 82)

In her motion to consider withdrawing support for the LAPD’s $100 – 150 million raise last week, L.A. City Council President Nury Martinez stunned both activists as well as the LAPD police union and its supporters with a statement accompanying the motion which can read like a page out of Michelle Alexander’s famous magnum opus from 2010:

We need a vision for our city that says ‘there is going to be justice.’ American society is founded on a racial hierarchy, one that is born out of slavery followed by Jim Crow segregation and corporate abuse of labor. As such, police departments are asked to enforce a system of laws that are designed to reinforce and maintain economic and racial inequality.”

– Nury Martinez, L.A. City Council, June 3rd, 2019

One can thank the activists, including Black Lives Matter – Los Angeles, as well as the People’s Budget for Los Angeles, for stirring the L.A. City Council out of slumbering obsequiousness or deference to the police union’s raises amid the threat of COVID-19, even if we forget for a moment that Mayor Garcetti’s added $150 million for LAPD was agreed to before the coronavirus slammed the brakes on the economy.

Coronavirus or not, and the police raises aside, the $1.7 billion of taxpayer dollars that LAPD was set to receive while Housing & Community Investment were to get less than 4.8% of that sum, was all any resident of Los Angeles needed to know to be concerned. But if not for the BLM movement’s years of work in relative silence, or years of activism in what might be said to be a vacuum, L.A. would be in a completely different political environment right now, one far less equipped to deal with our representatives accordingly.

Shortly after Ms. Martinez’s motion, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, or L.A.’s police union, released a blistering statement in retaliation:

“Los Angeles Council President Nury Martinez has failed the true test of leadership; the ability to bring Angelenos together to problem solve and heal after the tragic killing of George Floyd. Rather than creating a space to come together and have the necessary and difficult dialogue on how best to move our city and nation forward, all we got was a Tweet aimed at creating a deeper division between our police officers and the community we serve. To declare that the work police officers perform, that we’ve been directed to do, is designed to harm people of color while Ms. Martinez repeatedly sends us into harm’s way is divisive, disrespectful, and certainly is no profile in courage.”

The police union’s statement is a text-book case of the lengths that powerful interests go to in order to maintain control, even as they lose control. Be honest with yourself: In what fundamental way is the statement different from a press release out of the Trump White House?

The statement attacks personal character, claims the union has been “disrespected,” and implies that police bear all the weight of “the real work” while Ms. Martinez “tweets.” Perhaps most importantly, the statement doesn’t even try explaining its argument that the LAPD losing its raise “creates division” between police and the communities it’s supposed to serve. Newsflash: police violence and incarceration are what create division. Since 2013 alone, the LAPD has shot and killed more than 600 civilians in Los Angeles, overwhelmingly unarmed Black and Latino males.

Moreover, instead of the police union accounting for its role in jailing, fining, and fatally shooting predominantly Black & Latino bodies in Los Angeles, or releasing a statement accepting those extra $150 million going towards other city services right now, or offering to work with activists to end all police violence against citizens, the union simply defends itself. It laments over a salary issue. Never-mind the scores of protesters the LAPD injured during their peaceful protests this past summer, and never-mind 600 fatal shootings since 2013.

Those hundreds of millions of dollars, though.‘

Towards the end of the union’s statement, there’s even a veiled threat to answer the phone “a little late” next time Council Member Martinez calls their number.

This only makes more sense when readers consider that the Los Angeles Police Protective League Political Action Committee (PAC) has donated finances to Nury Martinez’s tenure at L.A. City Hall since at least 2013, according to the L.A. Ethics Commission website, not to mention virtually every other City Council member, too. Remember: the Center for Responsive Politics defines a PAC as “a political committee organized for the purpose of raising and spending money to elect and defeat candidates.” Clearly, the “investments” the police union made in Ms. Martinez’s campaigns was not working out according to their plan.

In any case, at the L.A. City Hall Budget & Finance committee this Monday, activists learned that the motion regarding the police raises–which was originally set to be approved or disapproved by the committee this week–would have its meeting postponed to the following week on June 15th, 2020 in order for the council to “hear from more stakeholders,” as in, apart from the tens of thousands of marchers standing outside city hall over the last few weeks.

But what the postponement did make clear was that after two weeks of protest against the police state all across Los Angeles, the council did, in fact, hear the demands far more clearly than it has in some time.

If you’re in East Hollywood, Los Angeles, which is known at L.A. City Hall as the 13th district, here’s the contact information for Mitch O’Farrell’s office, your City Council representative, to facilitate some of that additional feedback from stakeholders:

DISTRICT 13 — MITCH O’FARRELL:

City Hall: (213) 473-7013

District Office: (213) 207-3015

Email: councilmember.ofarrell@lacity.org 

Twitter: @MitchOFarrell

J.T.

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Jose Huizar Proves How L.A. City Hall Serves Foreign Millionaires While Jailing and Displacing its Poorest Residents

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(Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 59)

After nearly two months of the city’s great slow-down, the past week might almost seem like a forgettable one, another shot down the drain of the lurid whirlpool of days and nights the pandemic will become in our memories.

For a handful of the city’s voters and observers, however, this week will mark one of the most explosive in history for Los Angeles’s political leadership. Mike Davis is affirmed.

On Wednesday, L.A. City Council had one of its former consultants, George Chiang, plead guilty to charges of racketeering for buying his way into the city’s favor to advance his clients’ investments in the Luxe Hotel downtown. Two days later, L.A. City Council’s board president, Nury Martinez, stopped short of demanding a resignation from Jose Huizar, the council-member for the 14th district, for being the main figure in the FBI bribery case related to George Chiang’s plea.

This Friday also saw the entire city council team & L.A. county board mandated by federal judge David Carter to move hastily toward sheltering its nearly 60,000 unhoused, the order arriving only after a lawsuit from downtown residents and advocates charged the city with failing to sufficiently respond to the needs of its residents in Skid Row, even despite the pandemic. Now, one can’t help but wonder:

If Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi had “Russiagate” for the president’s pro-Russian heart, and if Tom Brady could have “Deflategate” for lighter-than-usual footballs, can Los Angeles have “Huizargate,” or maybe “Luxegate,” for how the latter expose city hall’s loyalty to millions of dollars, instead of its 4 million residents, workers and families?

“SkidRowgate” might also work because it’s a part of Huizar’s 14th district. Now, somewhere out there this weekend, the councilman is at a true crossroads, having to choose between showing himself out of City Hall’s doors, or waiting until he’s escorted by police officers and federal agents. It almost reminds me of Robert De Niro’s Heat (1995).

But more importantly, the scandal is about more than just Huizar’s avarice, even if we forget for a moment that the FBI’s probe against him also involves looking at other current council-members. The truth is that if Huizar’s fealty to foreign real estate developers hurt only himself, it would be one thing. But his crimes during almost 15 years on the council after Antonio Villaraigosa left the seat to become mayor have not hurt just Huizar. Drawing once again from the United Nations report from Professor Philip Alston:

“In Skid Row, L.A., (again, a part of Huizar’s district) 6,696 arrests of homeless persons were reported to have been made between 2011 and 2016.”

The scandal proves that those nearly 7,000 residents didn’t have to be punked in such a way. It’s just that they were collateral, to say nothing of the far greater number of bodies also forcibly taken to L.A.’s jail cells beyond the interval cited, which, to be sure, were dragged in as such during Mayor Villaraigosa’s and police chief William Braton’s tenure as well. Even back in the early 2000’s, advocates were calling for those residents to be helped off the street and placed into transitional housing, which, if done, could have made for a very different downtown Los Angeles today.

As professor Alston points out:

“Rather than responding to homeless persons as affronts to the senses and to their neighborhoods, citizens and local authorities should see in their presence a tragic indictment of community and government policies.”

We just may be edging towards the other side of that coin, finally; for one, there are now certainly indictments on the table. At the same time, so is Mayor Garcetti’s 2020-2021 budget, which proposes rewarding billions to the LAPD while slashing millions from Housing and Community Investment. The truth is crueler than fiction.

Here’s a proposal from yours truly, however: we can only use the “gate” suffix for Huizar’s story if we start to see some good eventually coming from the darkness it’s now exposed.

Yearning for more light all across Los Angeles,

J.T.

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Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (2010)

J.T.4 Comments

The first time we analyzed an election in California was in 2017, when we reviewed data from a Special Election in Los Angeles. Data for that election showed a yawning gap between the voting rates for white and non-white voters; at the close of the special election, in a city where less than 50% of the population identified as white, over 64% of mail-in ballots turned in belonged to white voters. As we noted in that article:

“Although non-white registered voters make for a combined total of 52% of votes eligible to be cast in L.A., post-election day, only 36% of ballots turned in belonged to non-white voters.”

As it turns out, the rate of return for that Special Election in L.A. was not an anomaly, or some new and strange phenomenon, but actually consistent with the history of voting in ‘liberal’ California as a whole.

In Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California, Daniel HoSang takes an analysis of California’s voting patterns one step further, exploring the way the predominantly white electorate of the state has voted negatively or against a handful of ballot issues dealing closely with racial or progressive issues in the state during a sixty year period from just after 1945 to the early 2000s.

And why should we care about a handful of ‘old’ voting issues in California? HoSang explains that ballot measures are especially useful for thinking about the state’s role in the inequalities found between its housing, public schools, healthcare, employment and other areas ‘separating’ people of color from wealthier whites due to the way that voting publicizes a particular type of conversation on these issues:

“Ballot measures…especially those that receive widespread public attention, create public spectacles where competing political interests necessarily seek to shape public consciousness and meaning.”

Put another way: materials like campaign rhetoric, opinion articles, television commercials and other instruments which are used to support the passage of certain ballot issues, or used to defeat them, show that campaign or policy battles don’t ‘just express’ the will of an electorate, but even go as far as to create and develop certain ideals about what the state of California is, who California is, and who it belongs to.

“Because the instruments of direct democracy by definition are intended to advance the will of “the people,”…organized groups and interests must always make their claim in populist rather than partisan terms, thereby defining the very meaning of the common good.”

In other words, for HoSang, as anyone familiar with the 2016 Presidential Election should be able to recall, voting issues have a very particular–at times even “nasty”–way of telling voters about “who we are,” what our values are–or what they should be–and how we should act on such values with our votes.

HoSang further contends that the “sensibilities” or logic which the voting issues of Racial Propositions make their appeals to are voters’ “political whiteness.” The phrase “political whiteness” has layered meanings, but essentially, throughout his book it means a degree of privilege and status for white voters that’s not only maintained but also expounded on by voting issues.

From the outset, HoSang claims that “whiteness” in the United States isn’t simply a “fixed” identity, where if you’re white, you view yourself as such in a “static” or “unchanging” way; instead, he argues, “whiteness” is highly impressionable, or capable of transforming due to external factors like advertising, propagandizing, and finally, voting.

As HoSang takes readers through the first dozen or so pages of Racial Propositions, then, rather than simply restating the term, the author arrests and interrogates scores of materials left by different voting issues in California. The campaigns for Fair Employment, Fair Housing, or the effort to Desegregate Public Schools in California are just a few of the voting issues he discusses, in which he exposes the logic of “political whiteness” at play in efforts by organizations like the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Realtors Association (CREA), the Parents Associations and other groups that come together to defeat policies aimed at “leveling the playing field” between white and non-white people in the Golden State.

That’s right. Did you know that in 1946, voters in California decided against protections for workers facing discrimination in hiring? Or, did you know that in 1964, voters in California decided against protections for non-white residents looking for a home in the state? Did you know that in 1979, California voters decided against racial integration at our schools when they canceled the state’s busing program?

In Los Angeles alone, a mass of white parents voted by a margin of 73% to put an end to school busing in the city, which was only instituted in 1977 and thus not even off the ground yet.

The vote against desegregating schools was passed through an ordinance known as Proposition 1, and put an end to “mandatory” busing in 1980 (which, of course, was just a few years before my parents would arrive from Latin-America alongside many other Central-American and Asian communities. Can anyone say, awkward?).

On the issue of school integration, HoSang points out that it wasn’t easy placing an end to a program whose stated goal was the integration of the races in the state’s public classrooms in accordance with Brown vs Board of Education; the formula to defeat integration required a sophisticated deployment of a language of “racial innocence,” which sought to ‘pass the buck’ or responsibility for “fixing” racism onto the desks of the state and away from the homes of ‘innocent’ [white] parents:

“[Supporters of Proposition 1] held that because white parents and students did not intentionally create the second-class schools to which most racial minorities were consigned nor explicitly support segregated schools as a matter of principle, they could not be compelled to participate in the schools’ improvement.”

In other words, in the same way that today the Trump administration likes to argue that the refugee crisis in Central-America should be some other state’s–perhaps Mexico’s–problem, opponents of the school-busing program in late seventies California argued that mixing their white children with Black and Brown kids was unfairly burdening them with a job that was supposed to be the state or federal government’s to do. That is, whenever the state or federal government would get to it. Perhaps never, even, but the point being the same: it was not the parents’ responsibility to account for or address inequality at public schools. They were “just caught in the crosshairs.”

But the gift of Racial Propositions is that no matter what the reader may make of the author’s argument on political whiteness, the book is an exhilarating page-turner for anyone interested in a political history of “The Golden State.” This is due in no small part to HoSang’s unsparingly sharp, saber-like writing skills. For his part, the author recognizes none other than James Baldwin as a key influence on his analytical framework:

“Whiteness was for Baldwin “absolutely, a moral choice,” an identity derived from and constructed through a set of political convictions. It was by inhabiting a particular political subjectivity—one that rested upon a series of destructive assumptions—that one became white. To embrace the myth of whiteness, he argued, was to ‘believe, as no child believes, in the dream of safety’; that one could insist on an inalienable and permanent protection from vulnerability.”

By the closing pages of Racial Propositions, HoSang’s analysis also makes clear why our political discussions today need to abate a conception of ‘liberal’ California which still dominates the vox populi leading up to 2020: that because California is already a “minority majority” state, it offers a glimpse into the “progressive” future of America, since the U.S.’s “browning” is asumed to lead towards ‘liberalizing’ it.

HoSang notes that if such “majority minority” or “browning” scenarios are the last frontiers for the hope of liberalism, which became the case in California nearly two decades ago, than they better take a closer look at the numbers:

“…in 2000, as California became the first large “majority minority” state in the nation, white voters still constituted 72 percent of the electorate.”

And so, as one blogger put it to his fellow readers and historians following another election where that same “majority minority” was hardly seen during election day:

“The current disparities throughout California between white voter rates and those of people of color when considering the larger voter eligibility pool of the latter is not just unfortunate, it’s something of a public safety concern.”

So let’s get on it, Los Angeles. Find and read Daniel HoSang’s book, which has full approval from The L.A. Storyteller.

J.T.

i voted sticker spool on white surface

Voting in Los Angeles: Municipal and Special Elections 2017

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Out of nearly 5.2 Million registered voters in L.A. County for the 2017 year, less than 900,000 of them, or 17% cast ballots for the Municipal and Special Elections on Tuesday, March 07, 2017. In the election postmortem, when the L.A. County Voting Registrar, Dean Logan, was asked by a KPCC reporter one reason why so few registered voters turned out, Logan said:

“I do think we have to make the voting process more adaptive and responsive to the way people live their lives day to day. Our current model of voting is– arguably –outdated.”

While it’s true that the current model of voting is “outdated,” it’s also true that we cannot have an honest conversation on voting without talking about racial inequality’s impact on turnout. Yet conspicuously absent from the KPCC discussion is any mention of the demographics of Los Angeles and how disaffected non-white communities in L.A. turn out to vote at much lower rates than white communities.

Logan’s discussion of “the voters” in purely abstract terms is therefore not helpful. We have information at our fingertips, and it’s meant to be used; below, for example, is a telling info-graphic on registered voters and mail-in-voters identified by race or ethnic group, as well as in terms of age groups, leading up to the election. The information is provided by Tableau Public, an open-source data website, which counted 454,971 returned ballots out of 2.2 million ballots held by registered voters across Los Angeles by election day on March 07, 2017.

L.A. County Voter Registration, according to Tableau Public

While the histogram does not account for people who identify as mixed, Native American, or Pacific Islander such as the 2013 Census does, it still proves extremely helpful in identifying “the voters.” Based on the data, we can see that in terms of registered voters in L.A., whites outnumber their non-white counterparts by considerable margins at 47%, or nearly half of all registrations. Asian-Americans took up 10.5% of voter registrations, while Blacks accounted for 8.4%. Meanwhile, Latinos accounted for 33.6% of voter registrations. Together, the combined population of Asian-American, Latino, and Black registered voters accounted for 52% of all voter registration before election day.

We can also see that in terms of age, the age group with the lowest voter registration rate is the 18 – 24 year olds in Los Angeles. At the same time, 35 – 44 year olds, 45 – 54 year olds, and 55 – 64 year olds have more or less similar registration rates at 16.6%, 16.4%, and 16.3% respectively.

The group with the second highest registration rate before the election was the 65+ category at 20.4%; while the group with the highest number of registrations was the 25 – 34 year olds in Los Angeles, at 20.7%.

Assuming that each of these groups receive ballots by mail not long after they register–which is standard procedure– the potential for at least half of registrations to turn into 2.6 million votes cast is definitely there. But when we take a look at data for the number of returned ballots, we start to see catastrophic level “drop-off” or “disappearance” rates across racial and age lines, for starters.

L.A. County Voter Turnout, according to Tableau Public

First, let’s consider the age demographics for returned ballots from voters by election day. Based on the data, we can see that the number of returned ballots from 18 – 24 year olds is exceptionally low at 3.4%, while the number of returned ballots from 25 – 34, 35 – 44, and 45 – 54 year olds is more or less the same across the board at 10%, 10.4%, and 12.9%, respectively. A significantly higher number of returned ballots comes from 55 – 64 year olds at 19.3% of returned ballots counted.

But by far, the highest number of returned ballots, a whopping 44%, come from voters 65+ and older.

Inversely, the age group with the greatest drop-off or “disappearance” after registration was the 25 – 34 year old category, with less than half of folks registered in this age range returning ballots by election day. Now, let’s consider the racial differences for returned ballots.

When it comes to the racial makeup of ballots returned after election day, white voters made up for a super-majority of all returned ballots at 64.1%. The Asian-American, Latino, and Black populations, on the other hand, made up for a combined total of less than 36% of returns.

Remember that combined non-white registration of 52%? It falls apart by the time of election day. While Asian-American voter turnout for returned ballots actually increased by 1.6% points come election day relative to their registration, for Black voters the rate of returned ballots fell slightly by 1.3% with respect to their share of registration.

However, the group which saw the greatest “disappearance”of voters was Latinos, with a 16.9% “loss” of ballots, or more than half of ballots with Latino voters going “unsent” after registration. Whites, by contrast, increased their share returned ballots from their share of voter registration by about 17% come the day of the election.

Is there a way to be more specific, however, or to see more about L.A. voters besides their age and racial category? Below, the numbers in each column show: age group, the “living situation” of voters in terms of whether they own homes or rent apartments, and some additional data.

L.A. County Voter Turnout in more detail, according to Tableau Public

This latter graphic shows that homeowners accounted for 61% of the 454,971 ballots turned in by election day, while apartment renters accounted for less than 28% of those same ballots. Additionally, we can also see that a sizable portion of vote-by-mailers were registered for November’s general election in 2016, while in 2017 less than 5,000 newly registered voters of a total of 24,519 actually cast their votes by election day.

With all of this data combined, we can say with confidence that 6 out of every 10 vote-by-mail voters for this last election were white, and that about the same share owned a home in L.A. County. At the same time, one voter was Latino, one was Black, and one was Asian-American, with apartment sharing or renting likely concentrated among these non-white groups.

In effect, what’s clear about politics in Los Angeles is that while most of its constituents are probably stuck in traffic somewhere, that is, in terms of that 52% non-white registration rate, it is mostly Senior, white, and home-owning L.A. County voters who are electing the city’s officials and policy-making decisions.

At a time when the 2011 Texas legislative session has just been indicted for drawing district lines discriminating against Black and Latino voters in favor of Republican Anglos, we might say that L.A. is a 2011 Texan Republican’s perfect empty canvas, a dreamland of political opportunity for white identity politics given the disaffection of so many non-white voters.

Isn’t that something?! But of course there’s more the story; until the next time.

J.T.

Los Angeles: Coming to Terms with Mike Davis

J.T.4 Comments

Reading and learning about Los Angeles has been a privilege, but I heard once that the more you know, the more you owe.

In the third chapter of City of Quartz, Davis introduces readers to a more ‘modern’ kind of power-player in The City’s shape and politics: the Homeowner’s Associations.

The first Homeowner’s Associations in Los Angeles, beginning with the Los Felix Improvement Association in 1916, were the children of deed restrictions in a new kind of planned subdivision. As Marc Weiss has pointed out in The Rise of Community Builders, early twentieth-century Los Angeles established the national legal precedent for zoning districts exclusively for upscale, single-family residences…

At first, it’s no major news to find out The City was the first to institutionalize certain restrictions to develop particular types of neighborhoods. After all, how else could places like Beverly Hills, Silver Lake, or Los Feliz come to form if not by some kind of ordinance?!

On closer look, however, it turns out that the zoning restrictions weren’t just aesthetic regulations, as the Homeowner’s Associations weren’t just a band of fellas looking for a book club.

“Although deed restrictions also specified details of lot and home design, their overriding purpose was to ensure social and racial homogeneity.”

Here, I think it’s useful to point out how with any law or restriction, while there might be a totally fair or logical effect for it on paper, there’s a way in which these things are applied that makes for a much different story. To see how, one just has to ask why certain laws or restrictions or –in this case– associations are formed.

“Homeowners’ associations first appeared on the political scene in the 1920s as instruments of white mobilization against attempts by Blacks to buy homes outside the ghetto.”

At the time, many Black workers and families presumably made it to Los Angeles in hopes of better lives from those of the Jim Crow South. But as Davis points out, while Los Angeles in the 1920s didn’t have official segregation laws like the former confederate states, it didn’t account for them either.

This left room for many Homeowners Associations to take matters into their own hands.

“Where tracts were not already legally bound by subdivision deeds, white homeowners banded together as ‘protective associations’ to create racially specified ‘block restrictions’. In this fashion 95 per cent of the city’s housing stock in the 1920s was effectively put off limits to Blacks and Asians.”

At this point in the author’s analysis, history feels so close by, like a ghost from only yesterday. It’s strange; even for those of us who hail from the “losing side” of history, which any immigrant family can finds itself in at some point, there’s a way in which the experience of history tends to be inconceivable.

Moreover, in an age where history is made every time another photo or video from just the other day is streamed, the stories of our predecessors from nearly 100 years ago have never seemed more far away; it’s like they’re from completely different contexts.

In fact, they’re very much the same contexts we’re still (trying) work our way out of.

This is how the city of Los Angeles today came to form, not far removed from the segregation and exploitation throughout so much of the rest of America. Of course, things had to change eventually. Otherwise, how else could we have gotten here?

“Until the US Supreme Court finally ruled against restrictive covenants in 1948, white homeowner groups in Los Angeles had ample sanction in the law. The California Supreme Court first established the doctrine in the Gary case of 1919, and continued to reaffirm it as late as 1947. Thus Harry Burker, the erstwhile president of the White Home Owners Protective Association (covering a vast residential area bounded by Santa Barbara, Main, Manchester and Vermont) ran for various municipal offices on a platform of Black and Mexican exclusion.”

Lest I digress from this post and join in on the circus surrounding another certain candidate running for office on xenophobic terms, I’ll just leave it to the readers to draw parallels between Burker and our current political contests.

But even beyond Burker and the Associations, there are still so many more parallels to discover between our time and the past. While City of Quartz is an extraordinary vision with a masterful analysis, it’s still only one part of the picture, i.e. there’s still so much more reading (and writing) to do.

For now, however, the book is far more than a great start to understanding Los Angeles beyond the sunshine and palm trees. 165 pages in, it’s clear that calling attention to power-players is a battle-cry, but that author Mike Davis knows where he stands, like a great fighter who respects the great battles and their warriors before him.

“Veteran Black newspaper publisher Charlotta Bass recalled some of these now forgotten battles in her memoirs. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, for example, whites in the West Jefferson area sued to evict five Black homeowners, while the local Klan burnt ‘Keep Slauson White!’ crosses a few blocks away. The gradually increasing Black presence in the old railroad town of Watts was contested by the virulent South Los Angeles Home Owners Association, whose spores later became the core of white resistance in Willowbrook and Compton further south. A Black home was blown up (presumably by the Klan) on 30th Street, crosses were burnt in Crenshaw and on the USC campus, and white homeowners rioted against sales to Blacks on East 71st Street…”

With more soon,

J.T.