But thanks to laborious archival research and the linking of two rare and important documents, I’ve been able to shed new light on where these Africans came from and provide illuminating details about their capture and their lives in bondage. This account adds pieces to a story that is still imperfect, but—crucially—more human.

In 2008 I began tracing those 72 people—one cohort of captives—from a single slave ship in Sierra Leone to the plantations of South Carolina. At the heart of the study were two documents. The first was a tally of the captives “purchased” in 1754 by the captain of the Rhode Island sloop Hare traversing Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast from 24 different slave dealers, whose names were included in the document. The second was a list of white South Carolinians who took ownership of 55 of the captives.

The shortcomings of these lists reflect the times. The slave dealers in Africa and the white Southerners are all listed by name. The slaves are listed by category: number, gender, and age. And so, even though these 72 people have been my constant companions for eight years, I don’t know the names they carried with them from Africa to America. Still, by linking these two documents and by tracking the Hare captives from Africa to specific plantations in South Carolina, we get a closer look at the inner workings of the slave trade and also at how these Africans, mostly speakers of the interior Mande languages, with some speakers of coastal Atlantic languages, came together to cope with their circumstances in colonial America. Indeed, there is much to be gained from the simple act of recognizing that these enslaved West Africans were not a randomly selected crowd, but rather a coherent group of people with a common background on which to draw as their labors built the foundation of the colonial economy.

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was seized on the Gambia River and taken to Maryland in the 1730s.

The experience of being taken at the same time and from the same general region in Africa did create a bond. I was able to document ways in which these slaves, both on plantations and in cities, tended to live among people of similar Mande background. Those who wound up in Charleston found themselves in the largest community of African-born people in North America. The number of Mande speakers probably approached 1,000. Those who wound up in rural areas also found themselves among “countrymen.” In one rice-planting neighborhood, I was able to document at least 30 people from the same part of Africa living within walking distance of each other.

These details may not seem like much, but they are a crucial addition to our understanding of Africans in the colonies. Ethnographic and ethno-historical methods have been useful to get at African life in early America, but they tend to work better with African Americans than with pre-1808 African-born migrants. Elsewhere, such as in Portugal and Spain, the Catholic Church forced the acknowledgement of the humanity of slaves, and civil law granted them a few nominal rights. As a result, there is much we can learn from those records.

But in British North America, the most commonly available information relates to the categorization of Africans as property: in wills and probate inventories, in plantation records and runaway advertisements, and in related governmental and court records. There is little to no information about their history and culture.

There are a couple of places to look for hints—primarily slave-related advertisements that appeared in colonial newspapers. As one of the few sources in the North American archive where African cultures are acknowledged, the notices have proven indispensable to historians. Most don’t record cultural information but rather the region of the African coast from which the person’s slave ship arrived: the Gold Coast, “Calabar,” “Angola.” Sometimes just “Guinea.” Their veracity is suspect, however, since they were frequently drafted by planters whose knowledge of their slaves’ background was virtually nil, hence the prevalence of phrases like “a new negro” and “a lad from the Guiney country.”

Still, for South Carolina at least, not all newspaper ads were the same. Some were for runaways, but many others were workhouse advertisements, generated when a suspected runaway was captured away from home. Prisoners were then housed in the Charleston, South Carolina workhouse until reclaimed.

The owner was not present so the information had to come from the captive, and it tended to be more detailed. The workhouse warden would place an ad in the newspaper, providing as much information as he could. Workhouse ads contained more references to “Keeshees,” “Congoes,” and “Mandingoes” than to “new negroes.” The information needs to be handled critically, of course. Closely read, the notices suggest that many of these ethnonyms emerged as the product of conversations between captives, interpreters, and interrogators, a process which itself provides valuable insight into relations among Africans.

Advertisement for slaves from the Hare. South Carolina Gazette, June 17, 1756.

Another underutilized source is testimony by Africans. Not the dozen or so canonical slave narratives that most historians know, but the incidental (and often accidental) glimpses of autobiographical testimony by Africans that can be found in sources ranging from court records, to church records, to obscurely published reminiscences and local histories. Most of these are brief, and most are related in “as told to” fashion by whites. But given the sparsity of the record, they are invaluable sources that can help us to recover the African migrants’ humanity.

A group of scholars has collected almost a thousand such testimonies from across the Atlantic world, including many from North America, which eventually will be viewable via Studies in the History of the African Diaspora—Documents Project (SHADD) at York University in Toronto. The project, on which I’m an editor, is slated for completion in 2018.

Even without the names of the 72 captives at the center of my research, armed with these scraps of detail, the numbers themselves can tell an important story. Statistics from the the 17th and 18th centuries are notoriously spotty, but it appears that Africans probably constituted the largest group of transatlantic migrants to British North America, outnumbering even the English.

By the latest estimates, almost 279,000 people were carried directly from Africa to North America before the American Revolution. If we add those Africans and people of African descent who were brought to North America from the Caribbean, via the inter-colonial trade, the true number is probably closer to 350,000 out of a total of 800,000 Old World migrants. And that wasn’t the end of it. Another 100,000 Africans would arrive in the years between the end of the American Revolution and the end of the legal slave importations in 1808, against about 50,000 immigrants from Europe.

It is certainly fair to question comparisons between aggregated “Africans” and disaggregated English, Scots-Irish, French, and Germans. Unfortunately we’re faced with another information gap—the political identities that Africans carried to North America are mostly unrecoverable, for statistical purposes at least. But we do know what regions they came from. If we break those down, pre-revolutionary migration looks like this:

We could debate the historical and cultural coherence of such artificial designations as “Upper Guinea” and “Gold Coast”; but we could probably do much the same for “England” and “Germany.” The point is twofold: that Africans constituted a significant proportion of the early American population, and that our interpretations should take full account of their history and differences. Up to this point historical accounts generally haven’t done that.

Once historians start thinking about Africans as people and not solely as property or laborers, we will also need to engage more deeply with African history. Even so, I must admit that having undertaken that task myself has not allowed me to exorcise the ghosts of the Hare captives. I imagine scenes from their lives, working, creating, and dying. In this way, I’ve lived with them, but I’ll never know them.

The post Recovering the Stolen Histories of American Slaves appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’re scholars—Ariella is a UCLA Anderson professor of operations management, while Lance is a medical doctor with an MBA—who are deeply interested in what works, and doesn’t work, when it comes to health education.

One of our focuses has been raising awareness about causes and recognition of melanoma and other types of skin cancers. More than 3.5 million such cancers occur annually in the U.S., and one in five Americans will develop skin cancer in their lifetimes. Even more concerning is that melanoma is the second most common form of cancer in adolescents and young adults.

The prevailing misconception that only people with light skin get skin cancer, and the fact that ethnic minorities are often left out of skin cancer studies, have left young Latinos and African Americans particularly at risk. Ignorance of the risk has consequences: prognosis and survival rates among Latino and African-American populations who develop melanoma are far worse than in the population in general.

So we sought to figure out why messages about skin cancer and the need to wear sunscreen weren’t reaching everyone—and how to deliver information that would change behavior and the statistics.

With a grant from Neutrogena (which is owned by Johnson & Johnson), we developed materials for parents that explained the risks of skin cancer, the value of sunscreen to protect against skin damage from the sun, and how to apply sunscreen. First, Professor Herman piloted this health education material with Head Start agencies around the country. There, she found that parents who had received training and educational materials were more likely to use sunscreen and put protective clothing on their children when they were in the sun. We also found that because sunscreen is expensive, we achieved better results when we provided parents with complimentary sunscreen product.

Then we decided to try to reach older, middle-school-age children who could apply sunscreen themselves.

Before becoming a doctor, Lance had worked in South L.A as a teacher. He arranged to give surveys in South L.A. middle schools with predominantly African-American or Latino students. These pre-intervention surveys were administered in science classrooms, and the results confirmed there was a problem. Just 8 percent of African-American students and 24 percent of Latino students reported everyday use of sunscreen. And around 39 percent of African American students and 75 percent of Latino students reported a recent sunburn—a risk factor for skin cancer.

Lance refined the education materials that had produced results in Head Start to adapt them for middle school kids. We kept the language simple and focused on a few core messages about skin cancer, especially among ethnic minorities, and about the value and uses of sunscreen.

After we finalized the educational pamphlets, Lance arranged to visit three schools for a “Skin Teaching Day.” He spent a full day at each school offering education on skin disease and the importance of sun protection. At the end of Skin Teaching Day, he gave a 30-SPF sunblock to each student, with instructions to apply daily at home when spending time outdoors.

Three months later, we followed up with students to assess compliance with using the sun protection products and to figure out whether kids intended to continue using them as directed.

At the follow-up, 94 percent of students said they intended to wear sunscreen in the future, and confirmed greater awareness of the risks of skin damage and skin cancer than before the educational intervention. Use of sunscreen lagged behind awareness and intention, but was higher than before the education pamphlets and the visits. We found that the younger the kids were when we introduced the material, the more impact we had in changing attitudes and behavior.

We also learned that finances constitute a real barrier: 54 percent of students said sunscreen was too expensive for daily use. Public schools hand out many things—from books to parent forms and report cards—to all their students. Sunscreen, and instructions about its uses, should be among the things they offer to protect all children.

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Outterbridge was born in 1933 in Greenville, North Carolina, where he saw and felt the effects of segregation and took in from his mother the need to “press on” despite racist oppression. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1963, two years before the Watts Riots. Anne Ellegood, senior curator at the Hammer Museum, explained recently how assemblage was part of that moment. For African-American artists, a practice that made profound meaning from what society had cast off was part of a general demand for recognition of under-served communities and unrecognized histories. Assemblage has a varied history—back to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, at least, and including Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, Joseph Cornell’s boxes, and Edward Kienholz’s installations. Outterbridge is part of a prominent group of black artists—including Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, John Riddle and Senga Nengudi—who nurtured their careers in Los Angeles and remained inter-connected as they rose to prominence. They brought a modernist genre into conversation with African-American heritage, which Angelenos were reminded of in “Now Dig This!” a group show of L.A. black artists active in the 1960s and ‘70s presented at the Hammer and part of 2012’s “Pacific Standard Time,” a multi-venue exploration of Los Angeles’ art scene.

Like several in that set, Outterbridge took his creative practice into arts education and organization as well as art-making. Centering these efforts in the South Los Angeles region, he cofounded the Compton Communicative Arts Academy in 1969. He was later director of the Watts Towers Art Center, housed next to Simon Rodia’s iconic Watts Towers—a mosaiced monument meticulously embellished with salvaged shells, tile and glass—and co-founded by Purifoy after the Watts Riots. Outterbridge worked there for 17 years. He lived the belief, as Ellegood put it, that “art has a social role and can actually change society.” Outterbridge’s assemblage is uniquely suited to this kind of change—since it is open to and valuing all. “Wherever I was,” he said, “anything was available and anything could be used and was used.”

It was a lesson that connected the evolving conditions of L.A. with Outterbridge’s earliest experiences. He learned as a boy the beauty of folk art and the aesthetic wisdom of everyday practices. “The rags that hung out to dry blew in the wind like colorful tapestries,” he remembered, “and I was touched by the perfect order that those rags had.” He treasured ad-hoc assemblage in his neighborhood like “the glass bottles in the trees that made music for me and my siblings.” Outterbridge’s father worked as a so-called “junk man” who would collect and resell discarded objects, so “John really grew up with that kind of ethos,” Ellegood said. “Things could always be re-used.”

The current show—called “Rag Man”—emphasizes how Outterbridge’s recent work, especially, looks back to these childhood lessons. A series called “Rag and Bag Idiom” reuses bits of textiles discarded by L.A. manufacturers—in brightly painted, abstract sculptures that seem more organic the more one looks. Other works are drawn from a series using dolls and reflecting on the way different cultural and religious traditions employ such objects. Curated by Ellegood and Jamillah James, the exhibition opened first at Art + Practice in Los Angeles and is on view this month at the Aspen Art Museum. While it’s not a retrospective, it demonstrates the continuities of Outterbridge’s long, steady career.

Assemblage makes that longevity an especial asset. Recollections are so many bits of material, too. “I put memories … away in pockets and places,” Outterbridge said. “I wrap things up and save them for a time they might be useful. That’s the nature and the practice and the process of assemblage.”

But that’s also, he added later, “what life is. We take it all in and we push it right back out in some other form.” For Outterbridge, his art is a creativity, a philosophy, a politics, an education—and “a celebration.” It’s “an affirmation of life.”

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South L.A. is both a remaining stronghold of African Americans in Los Angeles and a place where a new narrative of immigrant integration is unfolding. There, a process of building on the past—or ethnic sedimentation—has taken hold. As a result, South L.A. is now seeing the emergence of complex new identities rooted as much in a pride of place as they are in a sense of race. The area has become home to a new sort of Latino identity and a new sort of immigrant integration, both inflected by blackness.

Understanding these changes is important not just for South L.A. but for the country as a whole. Many other urban areas have been ravaged by unemployment, riven by immigration, and riddled by the rise of gangs and the hyper-criminalization of African Americans, especially, and Latinos. The kind of positive social innovation that’s happening in South L.A. as community organizations forge a Black-Latino unity could be instructive, with the lessons stretching beyond our majority-minority region and time, and touching on the future of the nation.

These conclusions come from research done by a team of colleagues and students at USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration in South L.A. over the past few years. We’ve observed public spaces, done detailed research in and on neighborhoods, and conducted interviews with 100 Latino residents and nearly 20 local civic leaders of all backgrounds. Our research team members are publishing the results in a new report, Roots|Raíces: Latino Engagement, Place Identities, and Shared Futures in South Los Angeles, combining our analysis with specific recommendations for South L.A.’s future.
 
 
Shifting Spaces: Demographic Change in South L.A.

If there is a constant in South L.A., it is change. Once farmland, the area became the paradigm for white industrial suburbs in the 1920s through the post-war period. Black L.A., always a presence, grew dramatically in the war years, particularly along Central Avenue. After racially restrictive housing covenants fell, the black community moved south and west. By 1970, South L.A.—stretching from Interstate 10 to the north, the Alameda Corridor to the east, Imperial Highway to the south, and Baldwin Hills to the west—was 80 percent African American.

But time—and demographics—didn’t stand still. In the 1980s, job loss from deindustrialization and a toxic combination of high crime and excess policing forced many African Americans to reconsider their futures in the area. The 1992 civil unrest gave another push and as the exodus stepped up, Latinos moved into the neighborhood. Many were immigrants driven from Latin America by economic crises and civil wars, lured to the U.S. by changing labor demands, and unable to secure housing in densely packed traditional entry neighborhoods like Pico-Union. With the immigration flow also becoming more female and family-based, the search was on for affordable housing, and the single-family homes of South L.A. made for a good fit.

Non-Hispanic Black population in South L.A. in 1970 (left) and 2010 (right).
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Geolytics Inc.

Latino population in South L.A. in 1970 (left) and 2010 (right).
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Geolytics Inc.

The ethnic inflows and outflows were not balanced: More Latinos moved in than blacks moved out, and South L.A. became more crowded. Single-family homes frequently became multi-generational affairs, and Latino homeownership rates rose from 22 percent in 1980 to 33 percent in 2009-2013, nearly closing the gap with black homeownership. Now the area that has long been the beating heart of Black Los Angeles—South L.A.—is nearly two-thirds Latino.

The uptick in home ownership—as well as a steady increase in the share of South L.A. immigrants with more than 20 years in the country—signals the process of sinking roots. By contrast, other measures of “integration” or rootedness have remained low, including English-language acquisition and civic engagement. Here is evidence of a rooted but disconnected population: In 2013, while 47 percent of immigrants in Los Angeles County were naturalized citizens, just 26 percent of immigrants in South L.A. had that status.
 
 
Latinos in South L.A.: Generational Experiences

The first generation of immigrants in the neighborhood has complex attitudes towards their neighbors. In our interviews, older Latinos sometimes spoke of racial suspicion or, more commonly, simply noted relationships with African Americans that were polite but not close. But the very same individuals would later wax poetic about the African-American neighbor who guided them through the homeownership process, the black cop who set their errant hijo on the right course, and co-workers with whom they have shared struggles and triumphs.

What is clearer is that younger Latinos who grew up in South L.A.—the children of the elders—had very different experiences. The second generation has shared their lives with African-American neighbors—as classmates, teammates, and first loves. Said one Latino interviewee about interaction with African Americans, “You know, we grew up in each other’s homes, and we grew up together. So to us, it’s a similarity. They’re our people.” Another interviewee put it this way: “You are more in tune with the African-American community, you’re more mixed in.”

Strikingly, both generations are especially proud of being from South L.A.; they celebrate the neighborhood’s resilience in the face of challenges and injustice. Both older and younger Latino residents express a high degree of satisfaction with their community, seeing it as a place where they can realize their own version of the American Dream. Residents do not ignore the difficulties of life in South L.A., including household incomes for both blacks and Latinos that are far below the overall county average, but the struggle to overcome creates a tie that binds.

While the younger generation may indeed be “mixed in,” that has not necessarily translated to the public square. Latinos are dramatically underrepresented in political, non-profit, and other civic leadership roles. This is partly a consequence of the ways in which a more immigrant and younger population limits voting power; while South L.A. is nearly two-thirds Latino, Latinos comprised only 28 percent of the area’s voters in during the 2014 general election.
 
 
Bridging Race: Interdependence and Institutions

Moving forward, our analysis suggests that South L.A. needs strategies of both independence and interdependence. Independence includes leadership training for Latinos and the encouragement of naturalization and voter registration to coincide with the fight for the broader immigration reform.
Interdependence means avoiding “Latino triumphalism,” in which changing demographics yields a sort of “winner takes all, it’s our turn” kind of politics. While it may be easier for Latinos in communities where nearly everyone is Latino to pay less heed to coalition politics, such an approach is problematic in mixed South L.A., where effectively challenging racism (and, in particular, pervasive anti-blackness) and economic disparities requires the support of the whole neighborhood.

Bringing together groups while navigating differences is hard work, but some civic institutions in South L.A. are succeeding. One common thread among those doing black-brown unity work is a commitment to community organizing that is intentionally multi-racial in spirit and approach.

Organizers and civic leaders alike are especially sensitive to the palpable sense that Black Los Angeles is slipping away. To counter this, some organizations deliberately structure themselves so that blacks and Latinos have equal weight (even though the underlying populations may be more one group than another); for example, parent groups tend to be overwhelmingly Latino unless organizers make deliberate efforts to involve black parents.

Understanding personal histories, sharing stories of migration, and celebrating the struggle for civil rights in South L.A. can be key first steps. Organizers believe that such patient work pays off; for example, Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE) started a successful campaign for green jobs by first hosting a frank and far-reaching discussion on the evolution of black and brown communities in South L.A. Many organizations also find it critical to point explicitly to how pervasive racism is in our nation—how it is woven into the ways our institutions and policies are expressed in everyday life, and how this helps explain the exclusion of communities like South L.A.

Fortunately, there is much on which to build: organizations like Community Coalition (CoCo), CADRE, SCOPE, Community Development Technologies (CD Tech), and other multi-racial organizing institutions are turning out leaders who are imbued in this type of transformational civic leadership. CoCo is a particularly interesting example of leadership development and promotion: It was founded by Karen Bass and Sylvia Castillo—black-brown from the start—and recently President and CEO Marqueece Harris-Dawson, an African American who is now councilmember for District 8, has been succeeded by longtime organizer, Alberto Retana.
 
 
Facing Forward: Toward a Shared Future

There is more to do. South L.A. needs to step up civic engagement in general and Latino civic engagement in particular. This will require creating on-ramps to civic life for people with little history of participation, through activities like beautifying parks and staging community concerts. It also will require an emphasis on leadership: deepening Latino leadership for multi-racial coalitions, while strengthening black-Latino alliances, and enhancing capacity for existing black-led and other South L.A. organizations.

The public narrative also needs to change. South L.A. may be an area with many needs, but it is also a place with tremendous assets. New transit lines are bringing both greater mobility and needed economic development. New organizations are building ties between communities and ethnic groups long portrayed as at odds. New and creative strategies to realize the promise of South L.A. are emerging, with the most recent example being the successful multi-year, multi-sector, and multi-racial effort to secure the Promise Zone designation that will bring more federal resources to a large swath of South L.A.

Civic engagement of Latinos as a share of the total population in South L.A. and L.A. County. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Geolytics Inc.

There are threats ahead. Nearly all the civic leaders we spoke with are worried about gentrification, particularly as downtown development spills south. Fears of displacement are not just economic; Blacks and Latinos alike worry that the community and neighborhoods they have fought so hard to build will be erased. Resisting—or, more accurately, taking advantage of rather than being taken advantage by new economic investments—will be an opportunity for new cross-community engagement.

In the last few years, knocking around the Twittersphere has been an inspiring hashtag, #WeAreSouthLA. It is meant to evoke a sense of pride in a place of struggle; it is frequently connected to people fighting for living wages and better schools, and against police abuse and racial discrimination. And if you peruse the tag, you will notice a myriad of faces, ethnicities, and genders all sharing joy about being from an area others have written off.
It is this more nuanced and dynamic picture of South L.A.’s past, present, and future that we have sought to capture—one in which organizing and civic engagement allow residents to achieve not only their of their own piece of the American Dream, but also their shared goal of economically vibrant, socially inclusive, and environmentally healthy communities.

The post The South Los Angeles Future Will Be Shared appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The story of Robinson’s breakthrough often comes in the language and rhythms of baseball—the stuff of hits and runs, stolen bases and brushback pitches. He wrought havoc on the basepaths, demolished a racial barrier, and opened up our society.

The popular tale emphasizes Robinson’s moral courage, and rightly so. It has shaped him into a folk hero who belongs to the ages. But Robinson’s story becomes most instructive when we bring it down from the realm of the timeless epic, and connect it to the time and place in which it occurred.

The larger history—of racial struggle in Brooklyn and America after World War II—is often ugly and painful. When Robinson’s saga is placed in this context, it does not represent just a feel-good triumph for racial equality. It also reveals how the quest for freedom and democracy has coexisted with our country’s commitment to segregation and racism.

To be American is to know that we strive for freedom and at the same time we practice its opposite. We are capable of great leaps forward in terms of racial progress, including the election and re-election of the nation’s first black president. Yet our streets are not yet safe enough for unarmed black men to walk in peace. This remains our unresolved conflict: high-achieving African-Americans have been welcomed into specific realms of American life, yet such individual accomplishments have done nothing to alter the deeper patterns of black poverty, police brutality, and spatial segregation. The conflict between racial progress and racial inequality was as clear in Jackie Robinson’s day as in our own.

For many Brooklynites, an afternoon at Ebbets Field was the definition of bliss.

The aroma hit them first. The smell of bread rising from the Taystee factory, and cakes baking at the Ebingers plant, greeted the fans when they stepped out of the train station. As the throng pressed closer to the stadium, that scent mixed with roasted peanuts and hot dogs, sweat, and grass. Then came the sounds: the excited yells of children, the vendors hawking scorecards or newspapers. Many Brooklyn natives, like Joel Berger, recalled Ebbets Field as “a total sensory experience.” Nighttime made the stadium a palace, transfixing the eyes. Joe Flaherty remembered the decadent feel “of walking through Prospect Park to see a rare night game.” On a balmy evening in mid-summer, “all of a sudden the sky would be lit up,” transforming Flatbush into “the Emerald City, and as you got closer, you’d pick up your pace, and you’d give your tickets and go charging inside.” A Dodger game was the quintessential Brooklyn experience. In the age of Jackie Robinson, it became more than that. Ebbets Field was not only the borough’s cultural heart but the very seat of American democracy.

Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, almost nine years before anyone had heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Rosa Parks. His achievement armed postwar Brooklynites with a distinctive claim to progress. Dodger fans had long detected something special in their baseball team and their borough; Robinson deepened that sense. He “added another dimension to being a Dodger fan,” reflected journalist and Brooklyn native Pete Hamill. “It was about right and wrong … we became the most American place in the country.” A moral element at once mingled with the magnificent smells and sounds and sights.

If white fans looked further down the street, they would have come to entirely different conclusions about the extent of racial progress. On the same Bedford Avenue that housed Ebbets Field, they would have witnessed the grim reality of housing segregation. Discriminatory federal policies had combined with block-busting realtors and fearful white homeowners to create racially homogeneous neighborhoods. Brooklyn’s African-Americans were corralled into a few select areas. Poor blacks had little choice but to pay high rents for dilapidated apartments. In neighborhoods like Crown Heights, Brownsville, and particularly Bedford-Stuyvesant, residents found basic services sorely lacking. Their garbage was collected only sporadically in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and in such areas, the city built few recreation centers, parks, or pools. In the very same years when Robinson played for the Dodgers—1947 to 1957—black ghettoes solidified.

This is what the rhetoric about Robinson and interracial democracy so brazenly missed. Even if Robinson’s heroics in the stadium pushed baseball fans to rethink their racial attitudes, even if Ebbets Field became a crucible of integration, very little of that feeling spilled over into the city—or country—at large.

Robinson’s own family experienced the inequities first-hand. Jackie Robinson learned that it was one thing to integrate the national pastime, and quite another to desegregate white towns and neighborhoods. The Robinsons ended up enjoying polyglot Brooklyn. But white homeowners had tried to prevent African-Americans from buying property in Flatbush. The Robinsons’ black landlord had endured such discrimination. Moreover, after the Dodgers integrated, some white fans had renounced their allegiance to the team. The borough was no interracial oasis, and even for the Robinsons it was not always welcoming.

In 1953, Jackie and Rachel Robinson began to search for a house in the suburbs of Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York. It was a humiliating experience.

The Robinsons attempted to buy land in New Canaan but were rebuffed. Rachel called about one house in Greenwich and, after giving her name, the owners refused to show it. The couple settled for a property just across the state line in New York. Jackie recalled that in autumn 1953, “we finally found a piece of land in New York’s Westchester County that was just what we wanted.” The Robinsons offered the asking price, waited for weeks, and were told that the price would be raised by $5,000. This was standard practice in housing discrimination, a sure-fire way for whites in exclusive towns to claim that they had nothing against African Americans—it was just that blacks could not meet the asking price. This was purely the market at work, they would say, not racism. So the Robinsons promptly kicked in the extra $5,000. “There was another period of confused silence,” Jackie recalled. “At last, we were told that the land had been sold to somebody else. It was this way everywhere we went.” Suburban whites did not want an African-American for a neighbor, even if it was Jackie Robinson.

After the Bridgeport Herald printed an article about the Robinsons’ experience, the citizens of North Stamford, Connecticut, were moved to action. Ministers circulated non-discrimination petitions. The Robinsons finally bought a home on Cascade Road. Rachel Robinson recalled that moment: “I don’t know that I ever have felt closer to being a real American, closer to having lifted from my shoulders the nagging doubts and insecurities that are the heritage of the American Negro.” For her, the ability to buy a home was the true test of American freedom.

Their story serves as a sobering reminder about the meaning of racial progress in America. That progress isn’t really about whether we embrace famous black athletes or cultural icons, or even whether we elect an African-American as president. The true test of our progress is whether we can enact policies that combat racial inequality—to stop the rising tide of mass incarceration and police brutality—and whether we can eradicate racial inequality from our private realms, much closer to home, as well. Only then can we begin to build a country in which African-Americans are truly welcome in every neighborhood, every school, and on every street.

The post Jackie Robinson’s Life Was No Home Run for Racial Progress appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nash, somewhat surprisingly, stays in the background throughout much of the film—though an FBI field report excerpt flashed on screen does include her name. She could very well be mistaken as simply being activist James Bevel’s stunningly beautiful wife.

A film has its own narrative needs, and I understand that this one very much wants to remain focused on King. But when I saw Selma, I couldn’t help but think of the hundreds of people laying the groundwork for the demonstrations and developing the strategy months or years before the charismatic leaders and the news cameras showed up on the scene. Nash was one of those important trailblazers—she was the main reason King and his organization were there in Selma in the first place.

I first learned about Nash watching Eyes on the Prize as a college student in the late 1980s. She comes across as one of most extraordinary figures to arise in the student movement. Remarkable footage captures Nash leading a march in Nashville that culminates in a face-to-face confrontation with Mayor Ben West, who’s compelled by Nash to make a grudging admission that he felt segregation was morally wrong. I marveled at this forceful, determined woman who was about my own age, but had a will that far exceeded mine. I’ve come to know her better in recent years as she’s advised a number of civil rights history programs I have created for the Smithsonian Institution.

What strikes me about Nash as she talks about the racial problems she saw a half-century ago (and still sees today) is the powerful anger at injustice that she channeled into non-violent direct action. Hers was an anger tempered by reason, strategic practicality, and a principled belief in peaceful activism. That holds true for many of the veterans of the civil rights movement whom I’ve met: When I hosted Rosa Parks on a tour of the Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit (the eventual home of the bus on which she refused to give up her seat to a white man), she didn’t seem the quiet and composed “Mother Rosa” when talking about injustice. She seemed pissed off.

For Nash, it was the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in September 1963 that galvanized her into taking action on voting rights. The tragically famous church where four young girls died going to Sunday School had been a training facility for the Birmingham “Children’s Crusade” organized by Bevel.

Nash and her husband had been wrestling with the fact that their activism put people’s lives at risk ever since they became involved in the civil rights movement in 1960. When integrated groups of young men and women organized by the Congress of Racial Equality to ride buses into the South—the Freedom Riders—got beaten and firebombed by Klansmen in Alabama in the spring of 1961, Nash, a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, could have just decided it was too dangerous and stayed away since it was conceived by another civil rights organization. Instead, with Nashville student organizers Bernard Lafayette and (now congressman) John Lewis, she recruited volunteers to continue the rides. When news reached Washington, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who was eager to keep embarrassing racial violence off the front pages, demanded, “Who the hell is Diane Nash?” and asked his assistant to stop her. But the 23-year-old had made her calculations: The movement was more important than the lives of its organizers.

“If we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence,” she remembered.

So when the bomb exploded in Birmingham, Nash told me that she decided that “a grown man and woman with respect for themselves could not let four little girls be murdered and not do anything about it.” They discussed finding those responsible for the bombing and killing them, but decided their efforts were better directed at getting blacks in Alabama the right to vote and changing the faces of those in power. It was possible to upend the power structure in the state’s “black belt,” where a majority of the county’s population was African-American, if not yet making their presence felt in elections. Of the 15,000 or so black people of voting age in Dallas County (where Selma is located), for instance, fewer than 150 were registered to vote.

Nash and Bevel also knew there had been local activists in Selma who would be willing to protest and put their bodies on the line, and so they conceived a step-by-step plan that they presented to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Nash may not have literally driven King into town, but she did bring him there in a figurative sense. She was a leader in negotiating the tense relationship between SNCC and SCLC, addressed demonstrators at Brown Chapel AME Church (the Selma campaign’s headquarters), planned out where protesters would go and when, and organized logistics. When the tear gas and clubs rained down on the peaceful marchers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge en route to Montgomery on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday, Nash sent runners out to get the medics. As the final march reached Montgomery, Nash marched the last few blocks with King. In August, after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, King conferred on her and Bevel the SCLC Freedom Medal for conceiving of the crucial Selma campaign.

Nash’s story reminds us that the civil rights movement wasn’t just about the names in the headlines, but also about the legions of humble citizens on the ground who took action at great risk to themselves. As for Nash, now in her 70s, she is still determined to remind us that this isn’t all ancient history with a tidy beginning, middle, and end—even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“That 10 minutes that people spend in the voting booth every two years is not enough,” she told a crowd at the Smithsonian in 2011. “I think back sometimes and wonder if we in the civil rights movement had left it to elected officials to desegregate restaurants and lunch counters, to desegregate buses … I wonder how long we would have had to wait. And I think, truly, that we might still be waiting.”

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Inglewood, where I live and work, is home to 100,000 people. It is a city, not a neighborhood. Indeed, it is made up of very different places. I grew up in Morningside Park, a middle-class neighborhood that borders the Forum and the Hollywood Park property where the stadium would be built. Morningside Park has nearly 10,000 homeowners. According to City Data, the median income in the ZIP code 90305 (which includes Morningside Park) is $65,000. The median income in California is $57,000.

That proximity to familiar landmarks is one reason why my family located here in 1974, before I was born. My parents researched many communities, and after not being allowed to view a house in Santa Monica—because they were black—they had a choice between a house in Carson or Inglewood. They chose Inglewood.

“The Forum is here, they have a hotel, and it’s right by the airport,” my dad often said when asked how he and my mom came to own a home in Inglewood. There was also considerable pride: Morningside Park was one of the first black middle-class neighborhoods in L.A., a destination beginning in the ’60s for people moving out of what was then called South Central and now is known as South L.A.

Growing up, I’m not sure I appreciated what a special place Inglewood was. I didn’t realize that not all black kids in Los Angeles enjoyed my carefree life: I rode my bike, did chores for a $10 weekly allowance, and danced around to cheesy ’80s tunes on the weekend. Only after going away to college at UC Riverside did I learn the extent to which people viewed Inglewood as scary.

In the 1990s, if you were black and lived south of the 10 Freeway (whether in Inglewood, Compton, Crenshaw, or Watts), you were said to live in “South Central,” even if Central Avenue was on the other side of town. The regional term was code for “black,” and living in a black neighborhood in Los Angeles County meant you lived where all the scary black gang members lived.

There was no allowance for diversity in blackness. Blackness was considered—and still is, to many—a personality type, like being humorous or empathetic. In high school in Inglewood, I was Teka, “the weird poet girl with all kinds of fun ideas whose mom is the prettiest mom on the block.” In college, I was “the black girl from South Central.”

During my freshman year in the dorms, my roommate saw a picture of my parents and, shocked, said, “You have a dad!?” I guess black people don’t have dads. I stopped saying I was from Inglewood, and said I was from around the airport. When people assumed Westchester, I just never bothered to correct them.

“You speak very well,” people would say. I was not used to being patronized and complimented for talking like a typical L.A. kid. I did not know how to respond in any way, so I remained silent. And when I did speak, I remained vague.

That is Inglewood’s story in a way. It doesn’t matter that our community is filled with writers and artists. (I’m one of them—I came back after college and started a newspaper.) Nor does it matter that the black people in Inglewood’s Morningside Park and Century Heights—which border the Forum—are homeowners and among the most highly educated African-American populations in California. What matters is that we’re south of the 10, and so we must be in need.

The reality is that my neighbors aren’t happy about the prospect of living so close to an NFL stadium. That shouldn’t be surprising when one considers the traffic, noise, pollution, hassles, and history of communities next to big sports facilities. We’re also not happy about nonstop building in Inglewood–the stadium is part of a large redevelopment of the Hollywood Park property–with no concern for urban planning or the environment. We moved here because of the character of the community, and to live in a residential neighborhood with single-family homes where kids can ride their bikes.

We also moved to Morningside Park because it was small and our neighbors said “hello” to each other. We liked that my mom—who never learned to drive the L.A. freeways—could easily take her Datsun to get groceries, then pick me up from the local Catholic school.

My hope is that, with attention fixed on Inglewood, my neighborhood will finally be recognized as a gem, and that the assumptions people make about Inglewood will float away, and people will see it as it truly is. Inglewood is an economically diverse Latino and black city, with some good and some bad. It is also a place that reliably delivered the American dream to my parents. Here, a couple with typical jobs can afford to buy a house, raise a kid or two, and go on a few vacations.

Progress and change are not bad, but what good will come from building a football stadium that mostly sits empty? Corporatization of a city under the guise of concern for the community is neither future-minded nor progressive.

It’s the same old tale of “progress” being defined as black people being left with nothing more than the insecurity of jobs as security guards for the rich. Instead of protecting what’s here today, communities are maligned so that the city can “move forward” and bulldoze whatever must be bulldozed to create touristy entertainment. Because if it was black, it couldn’t have been much of anything, right?

It is long past time for people to stop making assumptions about Inglewood.

The post Inglewood Isn’t What You Think It Is appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The difference that December 1864? William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army had just marched across Georgia through the rice plantations of the low-country and reached the seaport of Savannah, offering it to President Abraham Lincoln as a Christmas present.

New Year’s Day 1865—and those in the two years previous—were among the most poignant and pregnant with new beginnings in American history. Ever since Lincoln had signaled his intent in September 1862 to declare slaves in rebel states emancipated as of New Year’s 1863, the possibility of freedom for African-Americans in the South had been hanging in the air, depending on the war’s progression.

I’ve long been fascinated by this transitory period of anticipation, in part because some of my ancestors were living under slavery and grappled with what it meant to be emancipated either by their own actions, or by decree. It’s also always struck me as tone deaf to argue that the Emancipation Proclamation or the Army’s earlier “contraband” policy that freed the slaves it came into contact with were merely symbolic or cynical acts. (Lincoln didn’t seek to free slaves in border states that stayed in the Union, critics are quick to point out.) As Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists contended in a rebuttal to those who posited the perfect as the enemy of the good (and a rebuttal worth repeating in the context of gradual progress on a host of landmark issues ranging from segregated schools to wartime human rights abuses): It matters where the nation officially comes down on moral issues, even if it is not ready or able to completely live up to its professed ideals.

African-American communities already held traditional church services on New Year’s Eves, but they took on a special meaning as the country welcomed in the watershed year of 1863, becoming the predecessors of today’s Watch Night services. In Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and the many free black communities in other cities and towns, African-Americans gathered to anticipate the moment the United States finally would declare itself at war with slavery and not simply disunion. Overton Bernard, a white, pro-slavery minister, described with dismay the Watch Night he witnessed in Union-held Portsmouth, Virginia, in response to what he described as Lincoln’s “unwise and unconstitutional” proclamation: Black families packed the A.M.E. church until well past midnight to pray, to sing, and to hope. In his diary, Bernard hoped that somehow emancipation would be averted as even the promise of freedom had caused the town’s blacks to become “idle and impudent” and ready to challenge their place in society.

The next day some 5,000 men, women, and children marched and rode horses, hoisting banners and flags in celebration of freedom. They celebrated despite the fact that troops from New York jeered them and disrupted their march at rifle and bayonet point and also despite the fact that Portsmouth was not covered by the proclamation, given that it was under Union control before Lincoln made his announcement. The condition of the enslaved in Union-held areas would be “left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued” because Lincoln wanted to make it clear that his emancipation order was meant to injure secessionists more than the institution of slavery.

But the significance of this decidedly imperfect decree was still electric. It is often said that the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves where the Union lacked authority to do so (and where the commander-in-chief could get away with it on his own as a wartime exigency), but to blacks in Portsmouth, the mere promise of freedom was so tantalizing that it was cause for celebration.

At the same time, abolitionists in the North were also throwing parties laden with expectation. In Medford, Massachusetts, businessman and activist George Stearns opened his vast estate for an affair he called “the John Brown party.” Unveiling a marble bust of the radical antislavery revolutionary whom he had helped to fund and arm, Stearns played host to a storied assortment of public intellectuals, including trailblazing abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips; Julia Ward Howe, whose “Battle Hymn of the Republic” had inspired northern soldier and civilian alike; and the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friend Amos Alcott, who brought his daughter Louisa May (later known as the author of Little Women). Like the free blacks at their Watch Nights, the partygoers spent New Year’s Day waiting for word that Lincoln had actually signed the document and had begun, in their minds, to redeem himself for his previous inaction and timidity on the central moral issue of the day.

But back in Georgia, on the plantation in Oconee County that held Ed McCree and his family captive, the Emancipation Proclamation was still nothing more than a theoretical abstraction that New Year’s Day of 1863. While it effectively meant the United States government no longer considered Ed the property of his owner John McCree, the proclamation was not known to any slave on the plantation. As 1863 dawned, the Union Army was too far away—two years away, to be precise—to be in a position to deliver on the proclamation’s promise to Ed, and it is one of the horrific cruelties of history to think of all the hardship slaves still endured while awaiting their promised deliverance.

When it did come, the deliverance from slavery would be experienced by most African-Americans in the South very suddenly. Sometimes men and women forced the issue by escaping slavery whenever federal armies got close enough to afford them the opportunity. Other times it came with a group of soldiers showing up at the plantation out of the blue and passing out hams and shoulders from the smokehouse as they took some for themselves.

Sherman’s March to the Sea from Atlanta in late 1864 took the Federals right through the McCree plantation before Christmas. After the troops had passed, Ed remembered his owner gathering his former property before him and beginning to state what they had longed to hear their whole lives: that they were free. The young boy didn’t actually hear what was said as he remembered bolting at the first words and running “around that place, a-shouting at the top of my voice.”

Something draws me to that moment of emancipation Ed McCree experienced 150 years ago, two years after it was initially proclaimed. Emancipation was the beginning of a host of decisions and challenges for Ed and his family. The entire world the former slaves knew and had learned to survive, especially Georgia and South Carolina’s “Kingdom of Rice,” was gone. Should the family stay where they were and try to make a new life there, or should they follow Sherman’s Army and see where it led? Even if they were slaves no more, the Emancipation Proclamation did not make African-Americans citizens, or endow them with many of the core rights enjoyed by other Americans. Even many who’d hoped for slavery’s abolition also hoped people like Ed would, once free, leave the country in which they were born, and which their sweat had helped build and make wealthy, in order to “go back to Africa.” For some members of my extended family back then, uncertainty about their situation and what their future in the United States might hold was enough for them to go to Canada.

Still, in honor of all the folks for whom emancipation suddenly marched their way as 1864 came to an end, we are putting a decidedly Savannah flavor into the traditional dish of cowpeas and rice in our household’s New Year’s celebration this year. Rather than black-eyed peas, my New Year’s hoppin’ John will go by its Gullah name, “reezy peezy,” and will feature Carolina Gold Rice and low-country red peas, a staple for slaves in the region. We will enjoy the dish as a tribute to the resilient spirit of the thousands who found themselves traveling a new road to find their way in a new, unknown America.

The post Prayers, Glittering Parties, and the Sudden Taste of Freedom appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

George takes us behind the scenes of the long-lived, iconic variety show that brought booty-shaking moves, the pairing of knickerbocker pants with striped socks, and the ballads of Al Green to living rooms across the country. It also takes us into the mind of Don Cornelius, Soul Train’s cooler-than-cool creator, who shaped the show for its entire 35-year run.

Throughout his young adult years in 1970s Brooklyn, George got his Soul Train fix every Saturday at 11 a.m. He and his friends would watch the dance moves in the morning and try them out on the dance floor at a party that night. He remembers thinking that the bright colors on the show and the audacity of the outfits felt so Southern Californian compared to his muted northeast urban landscape.

The post The L.A. TV Show That Taught America How to Groove appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But not entirely. Not until I went to South Africa.

The trip was in 2001, my third year at UCLA. I chose to go to South Africa on a study abroad program because I wanted to visit Africa—what I was always told was the “Motherland.” When I toured the townships of Cape Town, I was shocked and humbled by the sight of shanty towns: small, impoverished cities made up of crudely built dwellings. When we stopped in Langa to get water, the abject poverty was hard to reconcile with the version of poverty I experienced, and the images of American prosperity upon which we all were raised. I came face to face with my own privilege.

As we traveled to Cape Town District Six, where 60,000 residents were compulsorily removed during the apartheid regime, I saw the deplorable effects of racism and forced segregation. As I walked the stony roads, I could not help but think of my experiences moving from home to home and wondered how those South African children felt. The District Six Museum stood as a monument that taught us about the legal structure and systematic denial of life and liberty to the South African majority during apartheid. And then it was on to Robben Island, where the profound moment of standing in Nelson Mandela’s cell forced me to think about the legacy I wanted to leave the world.

Why did South Africa change me? Somehow, being there, and traveling through the country, connected my past to my future. Given all the damage apartheid caused to native South Africans, I still saw so much hope. Somehow, the challenges I experienced growing up didn’t feel so heavy anymore. As we traveled around the country, I learned more about the leadership of the African National Congress, read the works of Desmond Tutu, and visited the Transvaal where Zulu men, at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879, threw off the shackles of British rule. These experiences created a desire to evaluate the social, economic, and political conditions caused by racism. The travel made me more human. When I saw South African children, I saw myself.

By the end of my trip to South Africa that August, I decided that I would live a different life, one that would focus on loving and caring for people, because of all that was around them.

My journey from there would not be a straight line—shortly after I returned from South Africa, the U.S. was attacked on September 11, and I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Through my travels in the Navy and nearly five years I spent in the service—including a tour in Iraq—I came to see the story of South Africa in other nations. This gave me an even greater desire to become an agent of change. I returned to UCLA to fulfill the commitment I’d made to myself first in South Africa.

Concerned about the issues facing black males like me, I was selected to become a McNair research scholar, where I established my foundation as a researcher and scholar committed to addressing these issues. This trajectory took me back full circle, to Morningside High, where I conducted my research with black male youth. The need of these young men led me to develop an academic intervention program in 2006 called the Black Male Youth Academy (BMYA) where I worked with 25 African-American male youth in grades nine to 12 to mitigate gang violence, imprisonment, and recidivism. I taught students how to conduct research and also about their heritage, so they could become self-reliant, more aware of (and critical of) conditions in the communities around them, and more powerful as advocates. In our first cohort, out of the eight young men who graduated, five were accepted to a four-year university, two attended a community college, and one went to a trade school. These were young men from a high school where the graduation rate was 36 percent for black males at the time. (None of them went to UCLA or other elite institutions, which inspired me to become an advocate for higher education access, diversity, and affordability—and a University of California student regent.)

The success of the BMYA spurred me to go to graduate school, pursue a Ph.D. in education, and launch an educational nonprofit called the Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI) with the goal of spreading our success nationally. We’re now serving more than 250 boys and men of color throughout Los Angeles County, with plans to work in Sacramento this year. Although we were helping young men achieve academic success, they were still living in an environment where they could die because of unhealthy or unsafe food they ate. As a result, SJLI has developed a local food system with community gardens, a community-supported agriculture program, and five Healthy Lifestyle Centers in the communities of Inglewood and Lennox.

Every time I see lives changed because of what we’re doing at SJLI, I think of my experiences in South Africa. I am reminded that even when the world seems upside down I have the power to make it better. If change is possible in my community, it is possible in every community where people face racism, segregation, and inequality. We must remember our journey to stand in our power. This is the purpose and legacy of Black History Month.

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