When you move to a new neighborhood, you scout it out. It’s all a matter of staking out territory, getting comfortable in your new surroundings. If you’re in the city, your early forays on the streets might lead you to that perfect pastry at the corner bakery, the savory brick-oven pizza from a nearby bistro, a well-lit coffee house, or a well-stocked bookstore.

I moved to Dunsmuir, in the mountain country of far Northern California, 26 years ago. After visiting several times and finding it absolutely charming, I came here for a change, to experience small-town living and more outdoors than I had in the city, and to get away from the sprawl and traffic, noise and asphalt.

Over the past couple of decades, the move to mountain country has come to mean much more than all of that. It has been a way to connect with something primal in the landscape dominated by the natural world. I find it all around me—on every forested hillside, on every winding trail.

When I landed here, I got acquainted with my new “neighborhood” by climbing mountains and exploring trails, even making my own walking paths on the mountain sides above my home in the Sacramento River canyon. On my trips of discovery, I found deer carcasses and large round piles of scat on old logging roads, calling cards left by cougars and bears. Not as savory as your city finds, perhaps, but just as characteristic of my own home region.

My walks led me to a special sacred place, the equivalent, perhaps, to a spot in your own neighborhood—maybe a secluded, leafy glade in a nearby park—that you go to when you seek peace. Mine is a place long sacred to native Northern California tribes: The upper slopes of Mount Shasta.

It is difficult to put into words the feelings I have when I climb toward the upper reaches of the mountain. It is the experience of entering a different world. I feel a powerful spiritual presence, something that transcends all the rock and ice and snow, in the same way that a cathedral, in the eyes of a believer, is much more than a pile of bricks and stone and mortar.

Thousands of people come up here every year to climb to the 14,000-foot summit, but that particular goal doesn’t interest me. What I am seeking on its slopes is something less tangible. When I’m up above the 10,000-foot level, heading into the upper regions of snow and ice, I begin to feel the spirit of the mountain, never more powerfully so than when clouds descend from the summit and surround me in mist, in a kind of spiritual embrace made palpable.

In my previous life, I was a flatlander from the temperate climes of Sacramento. Moving to Dunsmuir I quickly gained a close acquaintance with snow and ice. Not only from my forays on the mountain, but on 22-mile bicycle trips to my part-time job as an English instructor at the college in Weed, just north of Dunsmuir.

There is nothing more enchanting than cycling through a landscape of snow-covered fir trees. There is nothing more painful than flying over your handlebars on an icy road. On my first encounter with an ice-covered road, I assumed, incorrectly, that applying the brakes on the downhill slope would help me stay in control. Instead, I got a mouthful of gravel. From then on, I walked the bike down ice-covered roads and have not had a tumble since.

Tim Holt on the Pacific Crest Trail. Courtesy of Tim Holt.

I have learned to love the change in the seasons, the beauty of a snow-blanketed town as well as a forest. And just as I’ve learned to walk my bike down icy slopes, I’ve learned to strap small chains to the bottom of my snow boots so that I can enjoy all this winter beauty from an upright position.

Pedaling along with my wife on our tandem bike, I have had the more pleasant experience of cycling through the nearby Scott Valley, one of the few flat landscapes in our region. It is a sprawling expanse of ranchland, alfalfa fields, postcard-picturesque barns, and charming little towns. One of them even has a gourmet restaurant featuring brick-oven pizzas.

This is the valley where my great-great grandparents homesteaded. They are buried on a hillside above one of those little valley towns. They established a ranch, worked hard on it, died young. My great-great grandfather Alexander Walker was only 33 years old when, one night in the stable, he got kicked in the head by a horse. He died a few days later.

I am only two generations removed from that ranch. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—grew up on it. I now live in the town where the family moved, and where my mother was born. It is nice to have these family connections to the place I live in now, but all that is in the past—all of those relatives moved out long ago, to Sacramento and cities in the Bay Area—and has little to do with why I live here now.

I am on friendly terms with many of the folks in my small hometown, and with many of the natural features of this mountain region. I have a special bond with a pine tree I’ve watched grow over the past 20 years, since it was a small sapling. Around Christmastime I worry that someone might chop it down to adorn their living room. I had an especially anxious few days recently, when timber company employees swept over the hillside where the tree lives. They were cutting down medium-sized trees as part of a wildfire-mitigation project. Fortunately, my friend was spared. I offered up heartfelt prayers of thanks.

It’s easy to see, in retrospect, where all my staking out of territory was headed. Up here I’ve come to truly understand that I’m part of a larger living world. I had to get past the cars and asphalt, all the noise and distractions, to fully realize and appreciate that connection.

Up here in mountain country, I truly feel at home. 

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The house from the old photograph. The house my mother once called home.

For a moment, the curtain seems to flutter and everything else stands still. I am not overcome with emotion or moved to tears; I simply feel this jolt, and a little voice inside shouting, “Give me back our stuff.”

The real “stuff,” of course, cannot be preserved under glass. Along with a few gold coins hidden in a jar of cold cream and a box of photographs, the beating heart of the family escaped with my mother in 1939, on Kindertransport #8.

While more than 1 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust, my mother, Anita Heufeld, was one of 10,000 rescued by the Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Relief). Just short of her 14th birthday, she became an unaccompanied minor, fleeing for safe haven in England. Her parents and most of her extended family remained behind and were killed. She never went back.

My trip to Fischach was instigated when the Jewish Museum of Augsburg launched an exhibition on what had happened to the Kindertransport children from the region after they escaped. The curators wanted to include my mother’s story, and I surprised myself by deciding to travel to the opening of the exhibition, accompanied by my husband and my nephew. I wanted to honor my bracingly intelligent mom, fondly called Ni, who had emerged from her disrupted childhood remarkably intact, running her dress-making business and our family with aplomb. I was also goaded by the resurgence of white supremacy in the U.S. and Europe, and by a president who gleefully incited hatred in a way that my immigrant parents would have recognized with horror, betraying the American ideals they had taught us to value.

While my mother did not hide the past, she also did not dwell on it. But in the mid-1980s, when she was about 60, Ni agreed to an oral history and told us about the close-knit family she had left behind. We learned that Aunt Mina loved growing strawberries; that my mother’s parents were very happy together, their twin beds were pushed together, “no space between”; that my grandmother Erna wrote skits and my grandfather Samuel grew red carnations. Samuel was the respected secular head of the Jewish community, who “was just as anxious that other people should be safe as that we should be safe,” Ni said. When her children grew up to became social justice activists, my mother claimed us as the inheritors of the values her father had embodied.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Fischach had 853 inhabitants. That included 127 Jews. Today there are none. Yet in our absence, a curious phenomenon has emerged: Small committees, comprised largely of non-Jewish older women, have made themselves guardians of Jewish history and cultural memory in towns around southern Germany. In Fischach, the local history committee of the Historical Synagogue Locations Network is headed by retired schoolteacher Anne-Marie Fendt and a deputy to the mayor, Marianne Koos. “It was my mother who told me what she remembered about the Jewish families,” Anne-Marie recalled. “I think of her as an empathetic woman … She always called your grandparents’ home the ‘Heufeld Haus,’ When I started school, I passed the house every day.”

Marianne, who moved to Fischach as a young adult, grew up as part of a new generation that held their parents accountable for being “the perpetrator generation.” Her interest in history drew her to the committee. “When you hear the stories of the families who lived here, and you know the houses where they laughed and loved, had children, and thought they would live their whole lives there because they were Germans, like everyone else in Fischach—I think that changed my way of thinking a bit, it became more personal. It was no longer just German history; it also became my history.”

As the Fischach women showed us around the village, my mother’s memories took physical shape: the former Jewish school next to the building that had once housed the synagogue; the corner bakery where the Jewish families had taken their Sabbath challah to be baked, and where each child could recognize the family loaf by how it was braided. And the awareness, too, revealed in the census maps that Anne-Marie had constructed, that this community had not been ghettoized, that the Jews had lived side by side with their non-Jewish neighbors.

The incremental rise of Nazism put an end to that existence. In May of 1932, the Nazis came to Fischach, plastered the town with anti-Jewish propaganda, and beat up a young man for tearing a poster off the synagogue wall. In 1933, the Jews were tossed off the city council and the volunteer fire department.

Even if townspeople had better angels, most fell in line. Jews were ousted from the town chorus and the garden club. Children were banned from the soccer team, and then from attending school. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, when the Nazis incited open warfare on the Jewish population, destroying synagogues and businesses, the Jews of Fischach—stripped of most livelihoods and restricted from travel—could neither feed their families nor flee. And then, all the Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 60 were arrested and hauled off to KZ Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. Among them were my mother’s father and her brother, Walter.

Through the intercession of the town mayor and my grandfather’s tenacity, or perhaps simply by happenstance, the men were released by December. But from that moment on, my mother’s mother made it her mission to get the children out. Walter left first, when relatives in Great Britain arranged for his emigration. When a neighbor told my grandmother about the planned Kindertransport, she wrote a letter requesting spaces for my mother and her cousin Rudi.

Of all the details in Ni’s story, I always linger on her departure. Her tough and smart mother prepared her for the trip: hiding pieces of jewelry in her belongings so she would have something to sell if she was hungry; trying to fill her with all the information a growing girl might need; making meringues with whipped cream for her last dinner at home—the dessert my mother would love for the rest of her life.

But in the end, it was her beloved father who saw her onto the train full of fleeing Jewish girls.

My mother didn’t come to the train station with us, she stayed outside the house and waved goodbye. I had a little navy coat and a hat with red ribbons down the back, and a navy-blue dress I had made myself, with red buttons. And on the platform in Munich my father checked me in with the leader of the transport. And he put his hands on my head gently, blessing me, and he cried, and he kissed me goodbye, and he put me on the train. And that was the last time I ever saw him. And there was a train full of children. And there was a platform full of parents, all weeping.

The End of the Road

As one of the final stops on my Fischach journey, the Fischach committee women led me up a little gravel road to the old Jewish cemetery, resting behind a locked iron gate on a tree-shaded hill above the village. The committee played a key role in restoring the cemetery and lovingly oversees its maintenance.

My great-grandfather Max Heufeld, who died in 1936, is buried here, but my great-grandmother Amalie isn’t resting beside him in the space reserved for her. Instead, at age 79, she was among the village’s last 10 Jewish elders who were rounded up in August 1942 and carted off to their deaths at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Kim at the cemetery where her great-grandfather Max Heufeld, who died in 1936, was buried. Courtesy of Kim Fellner.

Fifty-six younger people from the village, including my grandparents, had been deported earlier that year, sent to Piaski, a prison town near Lublin, Poland. As best we know, they were all taken out to Piaski’s Jewish cemetery and shot—except for my grandfather, who was sent to nearby Trawniki as part of a work detail. By winter, he too would be dead, shot in another mass murder, dumped in another unmarked grave.

Decades later, my mother’s brother would return to Fischach and, on Amalie’s side of the gravestone, carve the names of those in the family who had been killed: Amalie. Samuel and Erna. Samuel’s two brothers and their wives. His sister Mina, only 36 when she was deported, well-remembered as the proprietor of the family kiosk, from whom many villagers had purchased their spirits, cigars, chocolate, tea and coffee. And my mother’s little cousin Rolf, deported from Munich to Theresienstadt along with his parents in June 1942 and killed at Auschwitz. My mother, her brother, and their cousin Rudi, who escaped on another Kindertransport for boys, were the only immediate family to survive.

Truths and Reconciliations

My mother recalled going to the movies in England in 1945 and seeing the ghastly first newsreel footage of the concentration camps, with their mass graves and skeletal survivors. She never looked at the footage again. “I never let myself specifically think about the people I knew going through that,” Ni told us. “I always include them in with all the other people. What happened to my parents is never far removed from my consciousness. But I have never allowed myself to individualize them in the event. That would have been intolerable.”

No wonder that I too insulated myself by seeing the murder of my family as part of a grim collective. But as I returned to the place of their existence, I was able to fully reclaim them as my own, and to confront the difficult knowledge of my grandparents’ final months on earth. Standing in that graveyard, I recognized for the first time that my family had constituted the largest grouping of victims from that village, and that they had mostly been in their prime, living full and nuanced lives, and so much younger than I had imagined them.

Sifting through that past with Anne-Marie and Marianne, we acknowledged that our current moment has discomfiting echoes of the history that had brought us together. As in Nazi Germany, the bluster about national greatness, comingled with a narrative of racial supremacy, is like a magician’s sleight of hand; what we are ostensibly seeing and hearing about current emergencies distract us from the concurrent erosion of civil rights and democracy. We are always warned not to make these comparisons, that doing so always undervalues the unique evil of the Holocaust and Hitler, while overstating the evil of the event or person to which they are compared. But real parallels reside in the sneaky accretion of particulars—from propaganda and dehumanization to inciting people with fear and hatred, to bullying and punitive legal action, to the stripping of rights and freedom, to acts of brutality and murder. We can only hope that we have more success than those thinkers and journalists who opposed the onset of Nazism if we want to save our democratic values, our neighbors, the people we love, and ourselves.

But Marianne and Anne-Marie, thoughtful and willing to engage, gave me hope. They reminded me that history does not always evolve as the tormentors of the moment might wish—and that the children of the perpetrator generation and the children of the victims can find themselves on the same side of the struggle a generation or two later.

“I learned a lot, and like you, had a lot to think about,” Marianne wrote me after our visit. “What would I have done if I had lived at those times? I know for sure that I never would have been one of those Nazis! But what about being a coward? Saying nothing, doing nothing…. Maybe our generation isn’t responsible for the past, but we are responsible for the future.”

Like them, I know which side I’m on. And taking a stand is not someone else’s responsibility; it’s our own.

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Maybe that’s why more and more I find myself, as I wash the dishes or fold my son’s clothes, returning to scenes and impressions of where I once lived, trying to understand the distances of time, decoding a narrative that originates from there.

It took my parents 15 years to move about a mile from the old place. In the early ‘90s, just as I started working at a newspaper in Los Angeles, they left the three-bedroom apartment in Penasquitos Gardens where seven of us had lived for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom townhouse condo where only four of us would now be: my mother and father, and my two youngest sisters.

I rarely visited them in the new place. I worked constantly at the newspaper, through every holiday, and found myself at the condo only on special occasions, such as when family from Mexico was staying there during a vacation to the States. And when I went to work for a newspaper in San Francisco around 1995, my visits became even more infrequent. It wasn’t until my mother was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer that I started spending more time at the townhouse, flying down from SFO as often I could, trying to be as present as possible. After my mother’s death in 2001, and especially after I got married and then had a son, the visits ramped up, to at least three times a year.

When we go to visit my father, who lives alone in the condo now, we can look up from the sidewalk of the nearby four-lane road and see the fencing around my old elementary school. Across the street from the school, running up the hill, are squat beige blocks of apartments.

As if in a lucid dream, I let myself wander deep into those buildings, all of it low-income housing when I was there. I go up the slope past the park with the asphalt basketball court, past the cinder block housing for the two metal dumpsters where we tossed our trash, and past the windowless low-ceilinged laundromat evocative of a holding cell, and then go left along a dirty concrete pathway, to the place where we lived—that bottom-floor apartment, a few cardboard boxes stacked in the corner of its patio rarely used except for the one or two times my father, angered for reasons lost to me now, kicked my brother and me out there to sleep, until somebody tugged open the sliding glass door to let us back in. Once I sat in a kitchen chair there, taking my turn for my mother’s friend to cut our hair. I closed my eyes as she snipped around my ears. I listened contentedly to her and my mother talk about things I cannot recall.

The physical place would tell my wife and son nothing. They would just see a bland apartment block; it would require pointing out what can’t be seen, apparitions that would only mean something to a very few.

There was the white neighbor who got shot in the back as she kneeled in her living room in front of a balance scale, weighing the pot for the man who arrived at her door carrying a briefcase, ready to buy her product, but drawing a gun instead. In her back bedroom, two toddlers she was babysitting went on napping. She came by our place later in her new wheelchair to tell my mother what happened, beaming because though she couldn’t walk anymore she had finally found the Lord.

Or there was the boy from one of the many other Mexican families in our knot of buildings, who always elicited a withering look from my dad, because he was a kid who was obviously heading for trouble, as the songs say. He wrecked a car he was driving after partying and was left brain damaged. His sister had to escort him around, his head lolling to the side, an unreadable smile on his placid face.

We would go quiet whenever they walked by. Nobody ever said, I’m sorry, or How are you doing? The sister’s flat eyes filled us with dread and resignation; this is how you can end up, it was understood.

Everybody worked hourly, if they had a job at all. Kids were alone, unsupervised once they were out of school, because their parents were at work, night and day, or their parents were just somewhere else. We would stay out late, shooting basketball or playing two-hand touch football until it got too dark to see what we were doing. One night, when the darkness forced us to stop playing, an older kid got us to run a bunch of drills in the park: pushups, wind sprints, crawling on our bellies across the grass, whatever came to his mind. What the Gardens needed was a gang, he said; we needed to form up. This didn’t seem at all unreasonable. But the longer we drilled, the more fierce he became, until he seemed to be only talking to himself, envisioning a greatness that only he could behold. We begged him to let us go home or we’d be in trouble, and he relented, but we were to come back to this part of the park again tomorrow night. We were going to be bad-ass, we were going to be some real motherfuckers.

Nobody went back, but he followed his vision to some degree, eventually joining a gang many miles to the south of us.

Years later, he was in another neighborhood, pushing open the window to a stranger’s house, his leg hooked over the sill, when he caught a shotgun blast to the chest. That’s how it was told to us, anyway. He never came around again, though all the proof we needed to know it was true was the inconsolability of his baby cousin (a slender, curly-haired boy who tried to become as hard as his dead primo, though nobody took him seriously).

I find it poignant if distressing that among all the kids he was the only one who ever articulated an ambition, declared a desire that wasn’t limited to where we wish we could go eat or who we’d want to fuck or what car we’d want to buy if we could have afforded it.

But you don’t make plans, not in the Gardens, anyway. You just see what openings life affords you and you take them. And those decisions, like tributaries off a wide and mysterious river, paths that will take you who knows where, aren’t really choices. They’re just what happens to be available. Open the door, or not. It may make no difference, or it might mean everything. Like the man said, things happen to you.

I find it a small miracle I am where I am. I picked the right waters to follow, or if not the right ones, the ones that led to more streams, more options. But I had no idea what I was doing, beyond knowing I couldn’t stay in the Gardens.

Like everybody there looking to get out, I was working without a compass, taking guesses. Whenever I despair at what could be considered the shortcomings of my life—still renting an apartment, not much money in the bank, opportunities never seized because of obliviousness or ignorance or simply marginalization—I think of when we lived in the Gardens. My life could’ve been mean, my joys minimal, if at all.

I have done, I think, all that I could to improve the lot that was given me, and I should take comfort in that. But I’m also aware this is a line we all must believe.

There are one or two families that I knew as a kid still living in the Gardens, or so I’m told. People who have abided. I think of them sometimes, and wonder if they remember those of us who left. Do they also tell themselves that things could’ve been much worse? Can we respect that they did all they could, too?

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When I became a historian in the 1960s, I gravitated to a man on the move and through him achieved mobility myself. I wrote a book about Daniel Webster, the greatest orator of his day, who progressed from New Hampshire farm boy in the 1790s, to Massachusetts Senator in the 1830s, to U.S. Secretary of State in the 1840s. Riding his coattails, I moved from merchant’s son in Texas to college professor in North Carolina.

So nothing in my experience prepared me for what I found when I ventured to Alabama in 1978 on a very different project—namely, to see if I could locate descendants of enslaved African Americans who had been sent to work a plantation in western Alabama in 1844. I wanted to learn if they had an oral tradition that might shed light on the Great Migration of the 19th century. Termed by historians as the Second Middle Passage, that disruptive event, which took place between 1815 and 1860, forcibly moved a million enslaved persons from the eastern part of the South, where none of the mainstay crops—tobacco, wheat, corn—paid as handsomely as cotton, which grew bountifully to the west. By the thousands, black workers were relocated to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, where they would toil on the rich, cotton-growing soils of those newly settled states.

I found many descendants of these dislocated workers, who told me stories from the vivid oral tradition about the forced migration. But, to my amazement, I also came upon the incredible story of one family whose first freed generation bought the 1,600-acre plantation of their former owner, a distressed property known as the Cameron plantation in Hale County, Alabama, where cotton had once grown. Their descendants shared with me the history of subsequent generations, who remained on the land throughout the 20th century and into the second decade of our own time.

Many of us are familiar with the dramatic story of the Great Migration of the 20th century, the saga of millions of rural black Southerners who left the poverty and Jim Crow shackles of the region for the cities of the North, Midwest, and West, a tale most recently chronicled in Isabel Wilkerson’s magnificent oral history, The Warmth of Other Suns. But as historian Eric Foner has noted, many more African Americans stayed in the South than left—albeit most on land different from the plantations where they’d been held in bondage.

The descendants of Alice Hargress. Photo courtesy of Sydney Nathans.

What happened at the Cameron plantation was historically unusual. As a research subject, it was unusual as well. Generations anchored on a single stretch of land, documented in a white planter’s archives and black families’ oral histories, allowed me to trace a narrative of black life in a single community from 1814, three decades before the migration to the west, forward to 2014.

It took me some time to realize that this history of continuity was emblematic of a much bigger story—that of the millions of African Americans who remained in the rural South, for a century and a half after Emancipation. It is the story of when and why black-owned land mattered, and matters still.

No one knew the history of the black people who bought the Cameron plantation better than one man. Louie Rainey, I came to find out, was the oral historian of the community. Born in 1906, he grew up in the household of his grandmother, who shared stories of slavery and freedom with her inquisitive grandson. Gifted with a prodigious memory, Louie Rainey became a collector of narratives for the entire settlement. For decades, his porch was the place where everyone came to visit, the old to share stories of the past, the young to hear him retell the tales. On that porch, starting in 1978 and until his death in 1986, he shared those vivid accounts with me.

“You can go where you want to go, can do what you want to do!”

That’s what Louie Rainey’s grandmother told him that she heard at the “speakin’” at nearby Greensboro, Alabama in June 1865, where the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau told her and thousands assembled in town, “You’re free, you’re free!” Many newly emancipated men and women of that first generation collected their spare belongings and moved, eager to leave behind planters, overseers, and places where they’d been held captive. But on the Cameron plantation, Louie Rainey and others told me, emancipated people found ways—already in place—to achieve their foothold in freedom.

Louie Rainey. Photo courtesy of Sydney Nathans.

Paul Hargis, his two brothers and their wives, who had been enslaved on the property, bided their time after Emancipation, staying put “against all comers” despite crop failures and better prospects elsewhere that led others to depart. The Hargis brothers knew from the plantation overseer that the planter wanted to sell out; if they remained, they might be among the buyers.

The chance they had been waiting for came in the 1870s, when they bought 100 acres from their former master, a man named Paul Cameron, who by 1873 was indebted and ready to sell. The Hargis family made a deal with the hard-pressed planter on the only terms they could afford and he could get—no money down, and five years to pay their debt in cotton. Their gain was not only self-supervision. Acquiring the land also allowed them to keep their family intact. For the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th, family members made a living off their land by staying and farming together.

Paul Cameron sold the rest of his plantation in parcels to eight other families who had worked his land. For Eli Williams, land ownership provided liberty undreamed of in bondage. He hired others to work his crop, and spent his days riding round the settlement high on a horse, sporting a wide-brimmed hat, wearing a blue chamois shirt with a high “city-lawyer collar.” Slavery had been on his master’s terms. Freedom would be on his own.

For severely bow-legged freedman Tom Ruffin, farming and riding were out. Instead, he learned how to manage oxen, and parlayed his skill into hauling timber, hiring hands, and earning enough to become the largest black landowner in the county. Asked often by baffled whites how he’d acquired 2,000 acres, he cagily replied, “I worked while you slept—and if you’d slept another wink, I’d a got it all!”

For the second generation, the children of those who bought the plantation, the primary goal shifted to holding on to the land. Overuse and land division made their farms less productive than places worked by sharecroppers and renters on adjacent white-owned properties, which had richer soil. But from their vantage point, land ownership still gave them sanctuary from pressures to which their landless neighbors had to bow: deference to white owners, demands always to yassir and yes-ma’am white bosses, silent acceptance of year-end settlements where they always seemed to come out in debt. Worst of all, second-generation landowner Alice Hargress told me, many renters came to think that they simply couldn’t get along without “cap’n bossman.” Then, she said, “they were truly lost.”

Alice Hargress. Photo courtesy of Sydney Nathans.

Land meant even more during the Great Depression, which descendant James Lyles called “that Thirties wreck.” The New Deal agricultural policy of controlling “overproduction” led to massive evictions of sharecroppers and renters, turning dispossessed tenants into tramps. However depleted their soils, landowners didn’t “have to git!” After World War II, the third generation of landowners watched its sons and daughters leave farming for “the warmth of other suns,” as Richard Wright poetically termed hopes pinned on the North and West. Nonetheless, those who remained held on to the land for new reasons. Some hoped, vainly it turned out, that changing to different crops and joining in cooperative credit and marketing ventures could allow them to make a living even after cotton was replaced by cattle and catfish.

Others like Alice Hargress and James Lyles chose to keep even unremunerative land intact—for those who left to come back to, if they ever wished to return. They called it “heir land,” property held in common and undivided for “all the heirs.” If those who left fell short in their new lines of work, they wouldn’t have to become late-20th-century tramps.

Realistically, though, would those who fled ever wish to return to a South where, outside the bounds of their settlement, blacks “had to bend?” In 1965, the 51-year-old Alice Hargress and 69-year-old James Lyles faced up to that question, and marched to make Greensboro—and Alabama—a place to which their children want might to come home. They joined Civil Rights demonstrations that summer, endured tear gas, and went to jail. They gained voter rights for themselves and their children and grandchildren.

Fulfillment came, starting in the 1970s. Four of Alice Hargress’ eight children did move back to Alabama after working in California. They headed home to retire, look after their mother, and reconnect with relatives and friends who never left. Thousands more also decided to come back to the rural and small-town South at that time, an unexpected return-migration beautifully depicted by anthropologist Carol Stack in her 1996 book, Call to Home. Today, passing by the black-owned enclave of the former Cameron plantation, you can see a few older dwellings and a number of newer trailers, homes of those who have returned to “heir land.” Their return—and that of others to the rural South—has vindicated the striving of generations before them and replenished the community that landowning anchored and made possible.

By the early 1980s, I realized that I too had become an heir—not to property but to the family heritage which Alice Hargress and Louie Rainey and so many others generously shared with me. Alice Hargress died in August 2014, 18 days shy of her 100th birthday. For more than 30 years, she made her home my home, and her history my history. Her family’s story and example taught me not only why black land mattered. It taught me the transcendent importance of a home place: for them, for African Americans, and—no longer a tumbleweed—for myself.

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I have been living in America’s second Gilded Age—our current era that began in the 1980s and took off in the 1990s—while writing about the first, which began in the 1870s and continued into the early 20th century. The two periods sometimes seem like doppelgängers: worsening inequality, deep cultural divisions, heavy immigration, fractious politics, attempts to restrict suffrage and civil liberties, rapid technological change, and the reaping of private profit from public governance.

In each, people debate what it means to be an American. In the first Gilded Age, the debate centered on a concept so encompassing that its very ubiquity can cause us to miss what is hiding in plain sight. That concept was the home, the core social concept of the age. If we grasp what 19th century Americans meant by home, then we can understand what they meant by manhood, womanhood, and citizenship.

I am not sure if we have, for better or worse, a similar center to our debates today. Our meanings of central terms will not, and should not, replicate those of the 19th century. But if our meanings do not center on an equivalent of the home, then they will be unanchored in a common social reality. Instead of coherent arguments, we will have a cacophony.

A Currier & Ives print called “Home Sweet Home.” Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

When reduced to the “Home Sweet Home” of Currier and Ives lithographs, the idea of “home” can seem sentimental. Handle it, and you discover its edges. Those who grasped “home” as a weapon caused blood, quite literally, to flow. And if you take the ubiquity of “home” seriously, much of what we presume about 19th century America moves from the center to the margins. Some core “truths” of what American has traditionally meant become less certain.

It’s a cliché, for example, that 19th century Americans were individualists who believed in inalienable rights. Individualism is not a fiction, but Horatio Alger and Andrew Carnegie no more encapsulated the dominant social view of the first Gilded Age than Ayn Rand does our second one. In fact, the basic unit of the republic was not the individual but the home, not so much isolated rights-bearing-citizen as collectives—families, churches, communities, and volunteer organizations. These collectives forged American identities in the late-19th century, and all of them orbited the home. The United States was a collection of homes.

Evidence of the power of the home lurks in places rarely visited anymore. Mugbooks, the illustrated county histories sold door to door by subscription agents, constituted one of the most popular literary genres of the late 19th century. The books became monuments to the home. If you subscribed for a volume, you would be included in it. Subscribers summarized the trajectories of their lives, illustrated on the page. The stories of these American lives told of progress from small beginnings—symbolized by a log cabin—to a prosperous home.

A picture from a late 19th century “mugbook”: Ira and Susan Warren of Calhoun County, Michigan represented millions of Americans who saw the meaning of their lives in establishing, sustaining, and protecting homes. Image courtesy of History of Calhoun County, Michigan by H. B. Pierce, L.H. Everts & Co, 1877.

The concept of the home complicated American ideas of citizenship. Legally and constitutionally, Reconstruction proclaimed a homogenous American citizenry, with every white and black man endowed with identical rights guaranteed by the federal government.

In practice, the Gilded Age mediated those rights through the home. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments established black freedom, citizenship, civil rights, and suffrage, but they did not automatically produce homes for black citizens. And as Thomas Nast recognized in one of his most famous cartoons, the home was the culmination and proof of freedom.

“Emancipation,” an illustration by Thomas Nast from around 1865. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Thus the bloodiest battles of Reconstruction were waged over the home. The Klan attacked the black home. Through murder, arson, and rape, Southern terrorists aimed to impart a lesson: Black men could not protect their homes. They were not men and not worthy of the full rights of citizenship.

In attacking freedpeople, terrorists sought to make them cultural equivalents of Chinese immigrants and Indians—those who, purportedly, failed to establish homes, could not sustain homes, or attacked white homes. Their lack of true homes underlined their supposed unsuitability for full rights of citizenship. Sinophobes repeated this caricature endlessly.

An 1878 lithograph panel called “While they can live on 40 cents a day, and they can’t.” Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

In the iconography of the period, both so-called “friends” of the Indian and Indian haters portrayed Indians as lacking true homes and preventing whites from establishing homes. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West had Indians attacking cabins and wagon trains full of families seeking to establish homes. They were male and violent, but they were not men. Americans decided who were true men and women by who had a home. Metaphorically, Indians became savages and animals.

A poster for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World in the late 1890s. Image courtesy od Library of Congress.

Even among whites, a category itself constantly changing during this and other eras, the home determined which people were respectable or fully American. You could get away with a lot in the Gilded Age, but you could neither desert the home nor threaten it. Horatio Alger was a pedophile, but this is not what ultimately cost him his popularity. His great fault, as women reformers emphasized, was that his heroes lived outside the home.

Position people outside the home and rights as well as respectability slip away. Tramps were the epitome of the era’s dangerous classes. Vagrancy—homelessness—became a crime. Single working women were called “women adrift” because they had broken free of the home and, like Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, threatened families. (Carrie broke up homes but she, rather than the men who thought they could exploit her, survived.) European immigrants, too, found their political rights under attack when they supposedly could not sustain true homes. Tenements were, in the words of Jacob Riis, “the death of the home.”

As the great democratic advances of Reconstruction came under attack, many of the attempts to restrict suffrage centered on the home. Small “l” liberal reformers—people who embraced market freedom, small government, and individualism but grew wary of political freedom—sought to reinstitute property requirements. Failing that, they policed voting, demanding addresses for voter registration, a seemingly simple requirement, but one that required permanent residences and punished the transience that accompanied poverty. Home became the filter that justified the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, Indian peoples, eventually African Americans, transients, and large numbers of the working poor.

The home always remained a two-edged sword. American belief in the republic as a collection of homes could and did become an instrument for exclusion, but it could also be a vehicle for inclusion. Gilded Age social reformers embraced the home. The Homestead Act sought to expand the creation of homes by both citizens and non-citizens. When labor reformers demanded a living wage, they defined it in terms of the money needed to support a home and family. Freedpeople’s demands for 40 acres and a mule were demands for a home. Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union made “home protection” the basis of their push for political power and the vote for women. Cities and states pushed restrictions on the rights of private landholders to seek wealth at the expense of homes. In these cases, the home could be a weapon for enfranchisement and redistribution. But whether it was used to include or exclude, the idea of home remained at the center of Gilded Age politics. To lose the cultural battle for the home was to lose, in some cases, virtually everything.

The idea of home has not vanished. Today a housing crisis places homes beyond the reach of many, and the homeless have been exiled to a place beyond the polity. But still, the cultural power of the home has waned.

A new equivalent of home—complete with its transformative powers for good and ill—might be hiding in plain sight, or it could be coming into being. When I ask students, teachers, and public audiences about a modern equivalent to the Gilded Age home, some suggest family, a concept increasingly deployed in different ways by different people. But I have found no consensus.

If we cannot locate a central collective concept which, for better or worse, organizes our sense of being American, then this second Gilded Age has become a unique period in American history. We will have finally evolved into the atomized individuals that 19th century liberals and modern libertarians always imagined us to be.

The alternative is not a single set of values, a kind of catechism for Americans, but rather a site where we define ourselves around our relationships to each other rather than by our autonomy. We would quarrel less over what we want for ourselves individually than over what we want collectively. Articulating a central concept that is the equivalent of the 19th century idea of home would not end our discussions and controversies, but it would center them on something larger than ourselves.

I wish I could announce the modern equivalent of home, but I am not perceptive enough to recognize it yet. I do know that, once identified, the concept will become the ground that anyone seeking to define what it is to be an American must seize.

The post When the Idea of Home Was Key to American Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The four most prominent characteristics of the Trump penthouse—its phenomenal size, ornamental gaudiness, aping of the European royalty and affinity with classical European artistic traditions, and public conspicuousness—are also how earlier generations of upper-class New Yorkers used their homes to display their wealth and power and convey their distinction. This pattern was at its height during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, during the reign of famous uber-capitalists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, with whom Trump seems to identify. Prior to the late 19th century, the houses of elite New Yorkers were decidedly more modest than they became in the Gilded Age; afterwards, the wealthy generally chose to shield their residences from public scrutiny and their tastes shifted away from the classical and neo-classical.

Among the handful of upper-class homes built in Manhattan during the colonial period that survive today is the Morris-Jumel Mansion in the present-day Washington Heights section of the upper part of the island, which was constructed in 1765 as a country house for Roger and Mary Morris. Roger Morris had been a colonel in the British Army and was a member of the royal governor’s executive council; Mary Morris was the daughter of Frederick Philipse, one of the wealthiest men in New York colony. Their country estate covered 130 acres of woodlots, orchards, and pastures and offered sweeping views of both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, lower Manhattan, and what is now the Bronx. The Morrises’ primary residence stood at the corner of Whitehall Street and Stone Street in lower Manhattan, close to the Bowling Green neighborhood that stood as the most exclusive enclave in the colonial city.

Another example of an upper-class New York City home from this same period was the six-room, two-story brick house where Abraham Lodge, a prosperous attorney, and his family resided during the 1750s. The Lodge mansion employed superior building materials such as brick and glass which had been previously unavailable in the colonies in either quantity or quality, and its interior boasted fine furnishings—many of them imported from Europe—that displayed the refinement and gentility of its owners.

Few images of the Morris country mansion appear to exist, but contemporaries remarked on its large size (for its time) and its elegant Palladian architecture. The Morrises were Tories who fled the United States following the American Revolution, and their country estate was seized under forfeiture laws and fell into disrepair. In 1810, the house was purchased by Stephen Jumel, a wealthy French merchant, and his wife Eliza, who remodeled it in the Federalist style that was then the height of architectural elegance, adding a columned portico and overhauling the interior. Today, it is a historic house museum.

By the 1830s, the city’s prime upper-class residential area was the Lafayette Place-Bond Street neighborhood in what is now Greenwich Village. As the economy of New York City took off after the War of 1812 and the merchants’ offices, warehouses, shops, and rooming house that were the products of this urban economic boom began to encroach on old elite neighborhoods (like Bowling Green) in lower Manhattan, upper-class New Yorkers relocated to new neighborhoods like Lafayette Place-Bond Street that were emerging on the periphery of the built-up area. There, merchants, lawyers, bankers, and physicians settled in newly fashionable row houses and mansions. In 1835, Seabury Tredwell, a prosperous hardware importer, and his wife Eliza bought a red brick and marble row house on a block of Fourth Street in the Lafayette Place-Bond Street enclave for $18,000 (which would be equal to $460,000 today). While many similar dwellings that went up in this vicinity before the Civil War were subsequently demolished or transformed beyond recognition, this house and its furnishings have been preserved almost completely intact because the youngest Tredwell daughter continued to live there until her death at age 93 in 1933. Three years later, the building became the site of what is now the Merchant’s House Museum.

Able to live well, if not as extravagantly as their nouveau riches neighbors the Astors and the Vanderbilts, the Tredwells made use of their city house (and their country estate in Rumson, New Jersey) to corroborate their wealth, prestige, and taste. The front and rear parlors that occupied most of its first floor had wooden Ionic columns and plaster moldings inspired by the fashionable Greek Revival design. New household technologies like the Tredwells’ modern bell system and cookstove became status symbols for elites.

In the late 1860s and the 1870s, upper-class residences resumed their progression up the east side of Manhattan. They were displaced from the pre-Civil War elite neighborhoods (like Lafayette Place-Bond Street) as retail shops, stables, warehouses, and middle- and working-class inhabitants overtook those areas, while also being pulled further uptown by the open space and larger lots available there. In the 1880s the finest upper-class neighborhood in the city was Murray Hill, which occupied a corridor that ran up Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue starting at around 23rd Street. Extravagant mansions occupied the corner lots in Murray Hill, including Alexander T. Stewart’s at Fifth Avenue and Broadway, Leonard Jerome’s at Madison and 26th Street, and Collis P. Huntington’s at 57th and Fifth Avenue. Stewart was an Irish-born entrepreneur who opened the first department store in the United States, the famed Marble Palace at 280 Broadway in New York City in 1848, and who went on to make a fortune from retailing; Jerome was a stock speculator as well as a sports aficionado who participated in yachting and thoroughbred horse racing; and Huntington was one of the promoters who constructed the Central Pacific portion of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad.

Many of the architects who built these Gilded Age mansions had trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and their designs mimicked Georgian town houses, Venetian palazzos, and French chateaus. Richard Morris Hunt created the mansion of William K. and Alva Vanderbilt at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street in the style of a French Renaissance chateau. It was built primarily by craftsmen brought over from Europe, and decorated with stone and wood carvings, stained glass, and embroidered textiles imported from the continent. Even grander was the 130-room palace of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, which occupied an entire block front on the west side of Fifth Avenue from 57th Street to 58th Street, and to this day is the largest single-family house ever built in New York City. Seabury and Eliza Tredwell’s row house (which had 17 rooms and 7,100 square feet of inhabitable space) could fit inside this Vanderbilt colossus 10 or 12 times over.

By the end of the 19th century, New York City guidebooks were lavishing 10 or 15 pages apiece on Murray Hill, with some laying out stage coach or pedestrian tours that let tourists “pass miles of the most magnificent and costly residences in America.” They supplied the home addresses of grandees such as Cornelius Vanderbilt II, John Jacob Astor IV, and John D. Rockefeller, along with descriptions of their mansions that estimated their construction costs. Like tourist maps that show the location of the homes of celebrities in Los Angeles today, these guides encouraged visitors to gawk at the fairytale mansions in Murray Hill. With their showmanship, ostentation and huge expense, these mansions advertised the achievements of their robber baron owners.

Since the Gilded Age, the homes of upper-class New Yorkers have gone in divergent directions. Many elites became concerned about their privacy and security and either moved their primary residences out of the city altogether or lived in apartment buildings, like the River House, at 435 East 52nd Street. After World War I and World War II devastated European societies and brought about the political and financial eclipse of their hereditary peerages, the European aristocracy lost most of its allure for rich New Yorkers. While the stuffy European traditions and the over-the-top displays of ornamental splendor of the Gilded Age never entirely faded away, in the 1950s elite New Yorkers with fashionable tastes began to adopt a modernist aesthetic, and by the 1970s they preferred more vernacular styles as they went about gentrifying brownstone neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and former industrial areas like Soho and Tribeca. For the most part, wealthy New Yorkers who were alert to contemporary design tastes and social values no longer modeled their residences on the palaces and manor houses of the European royalty; once au courant, those styles now seemed dull and passé. Donald J. Trump’s Manhattan high-rise home is a throwback to the time when the New York upper class was at the pinnacle of its power and wealth, and did not shrink from commanding others to do its bidding.

The post The Gilded Age Lives on in Manhattan’s Mansions appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

of gray beach sand, a pier house selling hairy muscles
each second, then one long hour of bike rentals riding

a mile of fresh gravel laid to rest beside the docks.
On the street, a song plays about mermaids kissing

whales whose underwater tears transform into pearls
after twenty-seven years—plus, today, I am one whole

pearl and the first dusty form of a second sinking into
the ocean they call home. Car roofs roped with cases:

bookcase, pillowcase, suitcase. This town writes all
lowercase across its paper signs and copper plates,

whipping at the suggestion of wind. This place fits zero
room for excitement. It calls forth nothing but restful

silence and ease. The doorways are hubs decorated
with string lights. Through one door, a man approaches

as casual as a bird sailing into its fullest wingspan
towards me, as if he’d been there since the beginning.

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I’m a real estate agent in South L.A. The scarcity of inventory has created a seller’s market and left a lot of buyers wondering how they can get their offers accepted among the frenzy. In this market, buyers have to move fast and bid above the asking price to win the bidding war. I can’t remember the last time a client bid below asking price and got an acceptance. Such is life in today’s South L.A. housing market.

If you live in South L.A., as I do, it’s obvious why so many people are trying to buy here. The inventory is low for a reason—not too many people want to leave, and where else could they go that is equally fabulous and affordable? This is especially true for the seniors who’ve been living in the community for many years. On the other end of the spectrum, there are many buyers coming over this way who have been priced out of the West Side, Silver Lake, and Echo Park. South L.A. is an ideal alternative for them because it’s close to Culver City, LAX, downtown, USC, and the 10, 110, 405, and 105 freeways.

Many of the neighborhoods where I do business—like Windsor Hills, Baldwin Hills, View Park, and Park Hills Heights—are located on a hill, so you get magnificent views. The houses are gorgeous, spacious, and stylish—buyers are really getting a bang for their buck. And there is so much soul on our blocks. There are generations of folks who have upheld the community with tender loving care and the utmost pride. There are still block clubs and block parties—there is a distinct community here. I should know, I’ve lived in Leimert Park for many years and now Windsor Hills.

I love the ease and convenience of living here, the vitality of Leimert Park Village during a festival, and the beauty of Kenneth Hahn State Park, the prettiest place in the city, with its 360-degree view of the city I love the most. I used to think, “Why aren’t more people coming to buy these beautiful homes in the Crenshaw District and across South L.A.?” It used to feel like I was in on a big secret—not any more. Open houses are packed every weekend and there are multiple offers on everything!

The high housing prices just about everywhere, and the improved safety and growth in South L.A., have brought many Angelenos to the area. The downside to the new interest is that I see many people who grew up in South L.A. and want to buy here, but can’t afford it. One of my missions is to help people like that figure things out—too many people don’t even try to pursue the idea of purchasing a home because of prices and competition. A lot of prospective homeowners are still under the impression you need a 20 percent down payment and a perfect credit score. You don’t— 3.5 percent down, a 620 score, a winning mindset, and a well-connected agent will get you there. You just have to be brave, and willing to stick it out.

It’s so nerve-wracking for these new buyers. I’ve made a habit of investing an hour (or two) to explain the market and answer questions on what to expect in the escrow process. I have a “to do” list with 12 key items covering basics from preparing an offer, what escrow is, looking out for important deadlines, how to make an offer, how to protect your earnest money deposit, and what the home inspection is going to be like. My sessions tend to have a special emphasis on how to cope with the emotional aspect of the transaction, something I can empathize with after having bought and sold my own home. I even do a few check-in calls throughout the process to see how they’re feeling about it all. A great deal of psychology is involved here. Positive encouragement is a must.

Of course, in this area once you’ve got the keys, you’re getting some headaches too. The big question in South L.A. is: When are the public services going to catch up with the needs and lifestyles of community? I live here too and have small kids, and so I, like my clients, need to see South L.A. fulfill more of its potential. The need for more affordable housing is obvious, we need more parks (especially parks tucked away from major traffic), and we’re desperate for better roads and more sidewalks. There are people who live in Baldwin Hills who would like to walk down La Brea to the grocery store, without dealing with 40-mile-per-hour traffic. But there’s no sidewalk on that stretch of street.

Another grave issue is that the schools have been a huge disappointment. We have some pretty good preschools, but elementary and junior high schools could be better. Crenshaw and Dorsey High Schools are OK, and View Park Prep is strong but many parents believe it should be better organized.

While there are some retail and grocery options, South L.A. still has a long way to go. The produce selection at many of our major grocery chain outlets here would be totally unacceptable in Beverly Hills or Brentwood. I’d love to be able to do all my shopping and spend all my dollars in the community, but it’s tough. So I do what I can, including attending neighborhood council and stakeholders meetings. I’ve even made cash donations for special improvement projects in Leimert Park. I have also made a commitment to order books by calling Eso Won Books (in Leimert Park Village) instead of clicking Amazon, and I can usually pick them up the next day.

I am a big believer that there are no new problems in the universe—all these issues have remedies! The keys to progress will be collective effort and pooled resources. I think a lot about the late Lark Galloway-Gilliam, who lived in Leimert Park—she would always say that we all need to “slow down, be present, and listen (to each other).” I would love to see neighbors old and new talk to each other more, even if it’s about ethnicity or race. It’s hard to get your neighborhood together if you don’t really know each other. Nothing can be resolved without true and honest dialogue from the community. Hopefully after conversing, folks will see that the most significant commonality is the desire to build a better community for the sake of our children. Raw dialogue can be uncomfortable but it is often where brilliant ideas and strategies for change can emerge.

The post The Secret Is Out, South L.A. Is One of the City’s Hottest Housing Markets appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

By 2010 this ethnic change in South L.A. had continued such that people of Mexican ethnicity outnumbered blacks everywhere east of Interstate 110, from Watts north to Interstate 10.

The two of us have long studied the ethnic quilt of Southern California, and recently updated our 1997 book on the subject. For us, the story of South L.A. is part of a larger, shifting story of segregation and desegregation. This second change—of blacks shifting and being replaced by Latinos— is not special to South L.A.; it has occurred in other once-segregated ghettos in Altadena-Pasadena, Monrovia, Pacoima, Long Beach, and San Bernardino.

Housing and home ownership are at the center of this story.

From roughly 1920 through the 1960s, white society generally did not permit blacks to own or rent housing outside certain areas. Restrictions on the future sale of a home to only whites were widely found on property deeds, and mortgage lenders usually restricted tightly the area within which they would provide a loan to a black family (a practice known as redlining).

Between discrimination in the job market and
low levels of educational attainment, even blacks who owned houses in these areas often did not have the money to maintain the housing very well. These difficulties in homeownership and maintenance resulted in increasingly poor and crowded housing in the ghettos. South Central (now South LA.), named because it focused along Central Avenue, was the largest such ghetto in the region.

When segregation began weakening during the 1960s, some middle-class blacks left behind the oldest and poorest housing east of I-110. They moved westward into other South L.A. neighborhoods or to Inglewood or southward into small cities like Compton, Gardena, and Carson.

While the public often associates the 1980s and 1990s in South L.A. with crime, the 1992 riots, and related challenges, there was another reality: housing prices were rising along with home ownership. In the 1990s, in fact, professor James Craine of Cal State Northridge has shown that housing prices in the South L.A. area increased faster than those in Los Angeles County as a whole. By the 2000 census, 40 percent of black households in South L.A. were owner-occupied, according to USC Professor Dowell Myers.

Behind those rapidly rising prices was strong demand on the part of Latinos, especially young Mexican and Mexican-American families. That demand, and the price trend, have mostly continued, with the exception of the Great Recession, which began in 2008.

One result: many black families in South L.A. have built substantial equity in their homes from earlier decades, giving them much more choice about where to live. And people have taken advantage of that choice, with former residents of South L.A. dispersing across other areas of Southern California.

Blacks in the San Fernando Valley, for example, have become widely distributed, though primarily in neighborhoods where housing costs are relatively low or average. In more distant places like Lancaster, Palmdale, Victorville, and Moreno Valley, some blacks were able to purchase inexpensive new homes, priced low because those locations meant long commutes to jobs.

Population numbers can disguise this dispersal. Between 1990 and 2010 the number of blacks in the five-county area increased by 1 percent. That small change hides the fact that blacks in Los Angeles County decreased by 6 percent during this period. But the number of blacks in Orange County grew by 43 percent during the same period, with even faster growth in other outlying counties.

Within the cities of L.A. County, a similar dispersal pattern emerges. Blacks now comprise just 9.6 percent of Los Angeles City’s population while blacks represent a quarter of the residents of Gardena and Carson. But the place with the highest percentage of blacks in the five counties of Southern California is a prosperous and unincorporated neighborhood bordering South L.A., View Park-Windsor Hills, where 85 percent of the population is black.

View Park is a reminder that the broader dispersal of blacks across the region is not the whole story. There is still a large area of South L.A. in which blacks comprise at least 45 percent of the total population. This includes View Park-Windsor Hills and the mostly middle-class black populations of Baldwin Hills and Inglewood.

Many blacks who could afford to move far from South L.A. prefer to stay more closely connected with community there, and some who have lived in neighborhoods with very few blacks have moved back to South L.A. for reasons of cultural comfort—to be closer to the institutions, services, and retailers that serve that large black population. Middle-class blacks have developed a strong social, cultural, and commercial focus in Leimert Park.

Despite the recent dispersal, Los Angeles remains quite segregated between blacks and whites. The level of residential segregation can be measured by what demographers call “the index of dissimilarity,” the most widely used statistic for this purpose. John Logan and colleagues at Brown University have calculated that L.A. is the 14th most highly segregated of the 50 U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest black populations.

But such a ranking represents an improvement. Our calculations for 1960 show Los Angeles as the second most segregated metropolitan area in the country; in that year, only Chicago was more segregated.

We have found the segregation that still lingers is no higher between whites and blacks than between whites and Mexicans, or Chinese, or Salvadorans, to name a few of the many new immigrant groups creating their own communities among friends and family who have also made the journey to Los Angeles County.

Those communities may too disperse in time. L.A.’s desegregation since 1960 was most directly the result of blacks moving slowly but steadily out of their segregated ghettos into what had been mostly white suburban neighborhoods. Our mapping shows that the major sources of the diminished numbers of blacks in L.A. County are still those leaving old black concentrations that had been built up in the days of segregated housing.

So South L.A., as now constituted, represents a legacy of both segregation and desegregation. Or to put it another way: South L.A. and its people, through their movement, have reshaped not only their region but also communities throughout Southern California.

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