Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities - Softcover

“These beautifully-written essays cover the grit of everyday life (family, gangs, gays), cultural magic (art, music, media), and political action (labor, education, and environment). The diversity of perspectives and eight-year commitment by scholars and community collaborators make this a one-of-a-kind collection. The result is a realistic and uplifting portrayal. Anyone who wants to understand Los Angeles and Black America needs to read this book―now.”
-Michael Dear,author of The Postmodern Urban Condition

“It’s a deeper, better work of scholarship that wades into the history of this city, some of that history hundreds of years old, as a way of making sense of not just the present but the future as well. This wide sweep of Los Angeles history, and the role that black Americans played in its evolution at every level, is what sets this collection of supple, trenchant essays apart.”

“The book brings together the research interests of what Hunt describes as an ‘all‒star team’ of contributors, most but not all of them academics with strong California connections. Comprising 17 short to medium‒length essays, it pivots from data‒rich analyses of how the black community’s 20th century demographic center gradually has shifted from Central Avenue to Leimert Park, to interview‒driven, anecdotal accounts of the rise and decline of Venice’s Oakwood neighborhood and a revealing chronicle of the black‒owned SOLAR (Sounds of Los Angeles Records), a late ‘70s‒early ‘80s hit‒making machine for groups including the Whispers, Shalamar and Klymaxx.”
-Reed Johnson,Los Angeles Times

Darnell Hunt is Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and Professor of Sociology at UCLA. He is the editor or author of numerous books, including Channeling Blackness: Studies on Television and Race in America and Screening the Los Angeles “Riots:“ Race, Seeing, and Resistance.

Ana-Christina Ramón is Assistant Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and a social psychologist.