I can very clearly remember in 1993 the first time I heard Robin S.’s “Show Me Love.” I felt moved.

It wasn’t just me. The infectious groove and Black gospel diva delivery filled dance havens across New York City (where I had become a studied and serious house head) and all over the country. It had us all doing our best house moves on the dance floor as we loudly sang along to the lyrics of the anthem, still considered, by many, to be the last great song of the golden age of the house and dance movement.

In the late ’80s, it seemed everyone was into this music. There was so much going on: inflation, a global AIDS pandemic, gender discrimination and racial strife, and government failure and corruption. The dance floor was a place to sweat it all out. Inflected with house music, it became a truly liberatory space that Black women and queer folks of color were the key architects of.

Now, as we’re faced with similar societal crises—rampant inflation, the COVID pandemic, racial, political, and social disunity—one of the biggest stars on the planet is bringing it back. Beyoncé’s first single, “Break My Soul,” off of her multi-part project, Renaissance, out tomorrow, heavily samples “Show Me Love,” using house and dance to speak directly and irreverently to the moment.

Beyoncé has long established herself in the tradition of what I term “Black female cool,” a historical line of Black women artists whose cultural production and social engagement have reflected both the Black woman’s unique interior self and external struggles. The singer is known for raising feminist themes and spotlighting challenges to Black life, such as police brutality and women’s inequality.

From her headlining Coachella performance, which included over 100 Black performers in the marching band military formation of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), to her homages to the South, Beyoncé draws on and salutes Black tradition. She speaks to and for Black women. She has also given queer culture its due when many artists failed to directly acknowledge its substantial popular imprint. Now, with Renaissance, she is purposefully reaching back to the unsung Black divas of dance, who, in tough times, were continuously signaling pathways to freedom in their verses.

Beyoncé is drawing not only on the sound, but also the aesthetics and ethos of liberation fostered by her dance forebearers. This legacy includes Loleatta Holloway, whose song “Love Sensation” became the foundation of vocal and musical sampling in early house; Jocelyn Brown, whose “Somebody Else’s Guy” was a blueprint for ’80s dance music formula; and gender-defying icon Sylvester, whose “Do You Wanna Funk?” was a lesson in transformative angelic funk. This says nothing of their many formidable contemporaries, such as Gwen Guthrie and Alicia Myers or the many seminal DJs of house, such as Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles who ascended from vibrant Black gay nightclubs. The starkly segregated homophobic music landscape kept the majority of these singers and DJs from true breakout success, despite the fact that they were laying the groundwork for the genre for little money or credit.

Then came ’90s pop, which got a firm stranglehold on dance. It had already killed disco and was now stalking its progeny, house. With it, the national airwaves brought the boil to an easy simmer, extracting more accessible club music from the unapologetic strongly queered and Black diva dominated genres of house and underground dance. As pop ascended, house lost its fleeting moment of commercial emergence—one of the reasons Robin S.’s song that broke through in ’93 was such a pleasant reminder of the truly liberatory space that house and dance of that era embodied.

Renaissance is taking from all these threads and transporting us all back to the spirit of house once again, while also reminding us that the production of dance music never stopped. It’s continued and multiplied in forms, such as bounce, a fusion of dance and southern Hip Hop with a strong queer base, developed out in New Orleans. “Break My Soul” has this legacy, too, with queer bounce artist Big Freedia’s song “Explode” sampled in the track. It’s all a reminder that house is still a refuge that can transport us mentally and physically away through boogie. As Beyoncé said of her new album: “my intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment. A place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, release, feel freedom.” She adds, “I hope you find joy in this music.”

Beyond labor and social discord, “Break My Soul,” is about liberty, the freedom of thought, spirit, and movement. It gives some sustenance to our souls, as it simultaneously illuminates the looming economic and political forces surrounding all of our bodies. As Beyoncé sings, “You won’t break my soul … I just fell in love, And I just quit my job, I’m gonna find new drive … I’m takin’ my new salvation … I’ma build my own foundation …”  This message of finding freedom outside the economic and political structures conjures the legacy of the house and dance movement.

Scores of people rethought their lives and the meaning of personal happiness during the COVID-19 lockdown. From spikes in break-ups and divorces to wild relocations to the Great Resignation (the high number of people who voluntarily resigned from their jobs during this pandemic), many were attempting to find or reconstruct bliss, even momentarily. This included big moves by women, people of color, and those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Inequity was made even more visible as the world concentrated the burden on their backs. Beyoncé speaks their language when she says that their soul, that spiritual core of who you are, is intact and will not be broken.

In these times, one answer to the question “where can freedom be found?” is “where we last left it”—on the dance floor. I am not talking a girls’ night out here. I’m referencing the holy state of being that pure music can illicit. Be it disco, house, bounce, or some other dance club genre. Dancing for the sake of dancing. It’s that “come as you are” crowd feeling that accompanied house and ’80s dance—eclectic club kids spanning all genders and sexual orientations from downtown mixed with those from uptown wearing baggy jeans and extra clean sneakers, and middle-aged white men in business suits from midtown—which may be just what the world needs right now.

The ‘Come As You Are’ Playlist:

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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.

is solution
to architecture

        bone and stone

conform
briefly
then fall away

        [As] the foot
exposed
seldom changes
in appearance,
physical as it is
proper,

water [will] rise
running east and west.

        the earth ruind

60 feet
of earth 50 feet
now 5

        i see your
surface
all
trim all
wall and form

features I found
in inches

        I lie

near perpendicular
and smoke
        The rose face
the inner circle

the neck
flush

        Outside

the south side I stand
upright

the compass point
coincid[ing] with the universe

pass
over these
ancient acres

the tongue

        i am able in early July
to lie down

        twenty-four rows of
        me
        and each one so
broken and weathered
as to require excavation

i found

The buried man
we found

in the presence

of conjectured occupants
trac[ed] upon the
here and now

I scatter ash
in the corner

This seems of some importance

these layers
thes
many dark layers

this drift dark
streak along the earth

i held

        a pot
top to bottom

        a stone axe
to my face

        i held out
without breaking

        back back

        I [learned
to] take meaning hard
into the cave,
judge it–

It lies.
It is thin.

I appear abruptly
then go.

        absence
and nearness to destruction is

[a] most decorative leavetaking

        I found purposes of repair
several miles west
farther west

a spring
and another
Converge
then fall

        The irregular
court rough ruin

The well dressed are
well preserved

and free

        their great concerns longer
and wider [than ours]

        before
I was not able to form an opinion

my cattle Brain selected few
broken and weathered
thoughts To Think

 
Note: This work is an erasure of “A Further Study of Prehistoric Small House Ruins in the San Juan Watershed” by T. Mitchell Prudden.

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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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The first, and larger, is made up of all those who, having come of age since the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, will greet the news by asking, “What is an assessor?” The second camp, the graying and dwindling cohort of Californians who predate that famous property tax initiative, will nod sagely and muse, “Ah, yes, the Crooked Assessor. That’s how it all began.”

Before Prop 13, county tax assessors mattered. Before a previous generation of voters locked tax policy into constitutional amber, the property tax was set community by community, in decisions of local officials elected through the ordinary tug and pull of democratic politics.

If you owned a house or business property, your property tax bill was the product of two factors: 1) the tax rates set by your city, county, and school district; and 2) the value the assessor put on your property. Even if the city council or school board raised the tax rate, your tax bill might not go up as fast if the assessor, using his discretion, held down the assessed value of your house or factory.

And that is what assessors did. In California’s great post-World War boom, assessors up and down the state used their discretion to shelter homeowners from a gale of rising home prices and property tax rates.

As 10 million Californians became 20 million, all those new people needed roads and police and parks and teachers and schools. “I don’t think that they’ve built a new schoolhouse in Brooklyn in the last 20 years,” the Los Angeles County assessor explained in 1957. “But we’ve got to build a new one every week.”

Local elected officials, needing property tax revenue to pay for those public goods, had to raise tax rates. They also pushed hard on assessors to produce higher assessments as homes and businesses climbed in value.

But assessors were elected officials, too. Their discretion to set assessments at less than full market value gave them clout. They understood they could not earn their tickets to re-election or promotion by rapidly raising assessments on voters.

So as thousands of working and middle-class families in the late ’50s and early ’60s rallied in protest meetings and trooped off to berate their elected officials for rising property taxes, assessors held back on reassessing homes at higher values. And using their political clout, they pushed back against the efforts of local officials and technocratic reformers to take away their discretion and power to benefit homeowners and favored businesses.

When Russell Wolden, the tax assessor in San Francisco and statewide leader of county officials opposing reform, was asked by state legislators how he assessed businesses, he would say, “Well, let’s illustrate with a good example–the [San Francisco] Chronicle building at Fifth and Mission.” Lawmakers did not need an interpreter to read the subtext: With discretion came the possibility of making powerful friends.

But Wolden had pushed his discretion too far. In 1965 a whistleblower revealed to the Chronicle that Wolden’s judgment was for sale. The whistleblower delivered stacks of files, stuffed with cancelled checks and bribery fee schedules, detailing how businesses that paid Wolden or his partners for “consulting” services got their assessments lowered. Investigations around the state turned up more cases of assessors handing out low-ball assessments to businesses that had contributed to their campaigns or stuffed dollars into their pockets.

Wolden, dubbed the “Crooked Assessor,” went to jail. So did several assessors in other counties. The San Diego assessor committed suicide. The Los Angeles assessor was indicted but found not guilty at trial.

The convictions cleared the way for reformers. Even before the Crooked Assessor became news, the Assembly’s tax committee had uncovered the assessment racket and put together a far-reaching plan, supported by Speaker Jesse Unruh and Assemblyman Nicholas Petris, a liberal Democrat from Oakland, to overhaul the whole state-local tax system to reduce reliance on the property tax. The plan called the system of property tax administration “outmoded, discriminatory, unfair, economically destructive, and regressive,” bad in both theory and practice.

But this comprehensive approach foundered. County tax assessors still fought to keep their power, and Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown didn’t want to kick off his upcoming reelection campaign by raising state taxes to make up the lost revenue to schools and other local governments if the property tax were reduced and reformed.

Instead, in 1966, the Legislature and Brown enacted a narrower bill, AB 80. It required assessors to set assessments at a standard level of 25 percent of market value. The assessors’ discretion was quickly replaced by computers running regression analyses of real estate data to determine how much houses were worth. And those computers churned out something entirely unexpected and unintended: soaring property taxes for homeowners.

As it turned out, the newspaper reports about crooked assessors had left out a key piece of the story: homeowners had been the biggest beneficiaries of assessors’ discretion.

Before AB 80 passed, homeowners in San Francisco were paying taxes on 9 percent of market value while commercial property owners were assessed at 35 percent of market value. Los Angeles homeowners were assessed at 21 percent of value while commercial property was at 45 percent. To protect homeowners (and their own careers), assessors had used their discretion to create an informal split roll, taxing business at a higher rate. By passing AB 80, the Legislature had inadvertently repealed that split roll and required local governments to lower taxes on business and shift the property tax burden to homeowners.

In San Francisco, cars carried bumper stickers with a plea: “Bring back the Crooked Assessor.” It was not to be.

With the economy booming and people still flocking to live in the sun, home prices by the mid-1970s were jumping by 2 or 3 percent a month. And because California had put assessment on auto-pilot, property taxes rode the same upward trajectory, with assessments more than doubling from 1975 to 1978–not just for new buyers but for people who had bought a cheap bungalow decades earlier and now found themselves owning, and paying huge taxes on, a house newly worth far more than they could ever afford to buy on their incomes.

No one ever intended for property taxes on homes to go so high. It happened inadvertently, the result of one of California’s spasms of reform, enacted in the modern faith that rules and experts were a better way to run California than politics and politicians’ discretion.

Instead of returning to the past and to democratic decision-making, with all its uncertainties and occasional frailties, as those bumper stickers in San Francisco urged, California would soon choose the path of even more rules. Prop 13 set property tax rates at a uniform 1 percent and set the assessed value at the purchase price, plus an inflation factor of no more than 2 percent a year.

It thereby removed not just the discretion of assessors (who now matter only in the rare instances, like the recent housing bust, when property prices decline, leaving houses worth less than their purchase price). It also took away or limited the taxing discretion of local elected officials and legislators–and even of majorities of voters. This lack of discretion–and democracy–is at the heart of California’s present fiscal and governance turmoil.

The Crooked Assessor has a lot to answer for.

Mark Paul, formerly deputy state treasurer of California, is co-author of California Crackup: How Reform Broke the Golden State and How We Can Fix It.

*Photo courtesy of JefferyTurner.

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