The Golden Age of L.A.'s 'Little Harlem'

During the 1920s, Los Angeles attracted more African Americans than any other city on the West Coast. Undoubtedly the epicenter of L.A.’s jazz scene, South Central's Dunbar Hotel was built in 1928 by Drs. John and Vada Sommerville – the power couple of progressive black Los Angeles – as a place where black travelers could stay in style and comfort. The luxurious hotel soon attracted the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and Billie Holiday. During the '30s and '40s, Central Avenue was the peak of chic. The Dunbar was the sun around which the tight-knit neighborhood revolved. The black entertainment district on Central Avenue welcomed white viewers and listeners. Many racially-prejudiced middle-class whites in Los Angeles were reluctant to live amongst African Americans, but they were attracted to jazz music and African American entertainment. Indeed, the creative theft and cultural appropriation of black music by white jazz bands transformed mainstream music and pop culture in Los Angeles. Before the Dunbar stopped attracting upscale visitors and fell into disrepair it was a source of tremendous pride on Central Avenue, and the area became known by some as “Little Harlem” and “Brown Broadway.”

Lured by an expanding economy and the prospect of jobs, many black families who had come from the South during the Great Migration settled in Compton and South L.A. Before the courts struck down racially restrictive covenants--deeds that prohibited blacks and other races from living on a property--in 1948, Compton was white. By the 1950s, Compton was a largely middle-class black city. For a brief moment in time, blacks and whites coexisted quite peacefully in Compton from the early 1950s to the Watts Riots of 1965. After the riots, and again after the L.A. riots in 1992, which erupted after four police officers were acquitted of assault for the beating of Rodney King, Compton experienced a wave of violence that prompted middle-class families to leave.

Around the world, Compton is famous for producing musicians such as Kendrick Lamar and athletes like Serena and Venus Williams. But the city is also known for its history with gangs and police violence. When the crack epidemic first hit Los Angeles in 1983, it embedded itself into the city’s fabric. Ravaging neighborhoods and taking lives, crack exploited the conditions that society had allowed to fester and were unwilling to confront. Economic restructuring in the manufacturing sector and other changes in the economy had led to a decline in low-skilled and semi-skilled employment among blacks. These conditions contributed to the rise of the crack cocaine economy. Crack offered a quick fix with a high profit margin. Crack single-handedly set back African American progress 30 years; the trauma gets passed down. Whether you used it or not, it changed the dynamics of the black community forever. But before the horrors of the drug were as widely known, the day-to-day realities of the crack epidemic were mainly told through the emerging art form that we would come to know as hip-hop. In 1988, N.W.A. put the city of Compton in the national consciousness (and on the world stage) with the release of Straight Outta Compton, a chronicle of violent life on the streets and fury aimed at the police. The emerging genre of hip-hop in the mid-1980s served as a portal for mainstream America to see what was happening in the urban centers that the Reagan administration had left behind. It was stark, brutal, and unrelenting in their depiction of violence on the streets of South Central and Compton.

Crack was a scourge, but it got turned into a demon, which was then used to demonize the inner city. To discuss crack cocaine is to tackle a litany of bigger, intertwined American issues: racial and economic disparities; inner city poverty and crime; media reporting and sensationalism; political and legislative campaigning and action; mass incarceration and exploitation; and personal and communal responsibility. Many of those topics are present in Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy, Stanley Nelson’s documentary, which examines all the ways that the government and the media used the grim reality of crack, turning it against the very people who were being victimized by it.