The Coveted Westside: How the Black Homeowners' Rights Movement Shaped Modern Los Angeles

by Jennifer Mandel

Overview

From the middle of the nineteenth century, as Euro-Americans moved westward, they carried with them long-held prejudices against people of color. By the time they reached the West Coast, their new settlements included African Americans and recent Asian immigrants, as well as the indigenous inhabitants and descendants of earlier Spanish and Mexican settlers. The Coveted Westside deals with the settlement and development of Los Angeles in the context of its multiracial, multiethnic population, especially African Americans.

Mandel exposes the enduring struggle between Whites determined to establish their hegemony and create residential heterogeneity in the growing city, and people of color equally determined to obtain full access to the city and the opportunities, including residential, that it offered. Not only does this book document the Black homeowners’ fight against housing discrimination, it shares personal accounts of Blacks’ efforts to settle in the highly desirable Westside of Los Angeles. Mandel explores the White-derived social and legal mechanisms that created this segregated city and the African American-led movement that challenged efforts to block access to fair housing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647790349
Publisher:	University of Nevada Press
Publication date:	03/29/2022
Series:	The Urban West Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	372
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

Jennifer Mandel, PhD, serves as associate director of assessment in the University of New England’s Office of the Provost. In addition to her administrative role, she has taught history courses at the University of New England, Granite State College, Hesser College, and the University of New Hampshire. Mandel has published work on African American journalist and activist Almena Lomax in the Southern California Quarterly. She was born and raised in Los Angeles

Table of Contents

Abbreviations ix

Introduction 3

Part I The Pioneers of Housing Integration in Los Angeles

Chapter 1 Demarcating the Westside from the Eastside 27

Chapter 2 Black Settlement in West Jefferson and West Adams Heights 58

Chapter 3 The Legal Demise of Racial Restrictive Covenants 89

Part II Post-Shelley Westward Migration and the Case for Crenshaw

Chapter 4 The Affluent Black Westside Takes Shape 125

Chapter 5 A Campaign to Build "A Balanced Community" 161

Chapter 6 Brockman Gallery and the Art of Social Change 204

Chapter 7 Black Beverly Hills Redux 240

Acknowledgments 249

Notes 253

Bibliography 311

Index 333

About the Author 351

Illustrations follow page 122

Editorial Reviews

The Coveted Westside is an extremely well-researched and clearly written manuscript that synthesizes a lot of the literature on Black Los Angeles and makes several key contributions of its own. Mandel delves into greater detail than anyone has concerning the precise mechanisms of zoning and housing restriction. The material [is] impeccably researched and novel . . . and the richest account I’ve seen.”
—Josh Sides, Whitsett Professor of California History, California State University-Northridge, director of the Center for Southern California Studies, author of L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present

“The Coveted Westside is the most comprehensive treatment of how a highly motivated population of middle-class blacks fought for housing equality, and therefore made a specific and identifiable contribution to the broader enterprise of securing basic democratic rights in postwar America. “
—Daniel Widener, associate professor of history, University of California, San Diego, author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in black Los Angeles, 1942-1992
 

From the Publisher