Today, almost no one—including serious baseball fans—knows the slightest thing about Charleston, despite the fact that he arguably pieced together the best overall résumé of any figure in baseball’s storied history.

That résumé has three basic components: First, Charleston was a stupendously good player—so good that in 2001 the celebrated baseball analyst and historian Bill James rated him the fourth-greatest player of all time, behind only Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, and Willie Mays. Second, Charleston was a highly successful manager. He won three Negro Leagues championships as a manager and in one poll of ex-players was named the greatest skipper in the leagues’ history. And third, Charleston was a trailblazing scout—probably the first African American ever to be paid to scout for a Major League Baseball club.

Off the field, Charleston was cheerful, charming, and widely revered. The most famous player in black baseball until Satchel Paige rose to superstardom in 1933 (who, it warrants mention, was one of Charleston’s protégés on the Pittsburgh Crawfords), Charleston was greatly interested in the world around him (he learned to speak and write Spanish in short order, for instance, while playing winter ball in Cuba) and also cared deeply about African American history and social progress.

But these facts about Charleston, who died childless in 1954, are mostly buried in old newspaper pieces, interview transcripts, and archives. His story, as it’s remembered today, is instead often overshadowed by an inaccurate (and racially stereotyped) perception that he was a hothead and a thug. That one of the most fascinating and admirable figures in the history of American sport could become so obscure and misunderstood not only illustrates the fickleness of history; it also points to how, 73 years after Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the legacy of the black baseball tradition has yet to be fully recognized.

The first professional black baseball team was formed in 1885, and it wasn’t long before the National League, the American League, and the Minor Leagues—so-called Organized Baseball—drew a firm color line and stopped allowing black players on their teams. As segregationist policies hardened, black baseball players and owners formed more of their own teams, grew their own (quite substantial) fan bases, built their own stadiums, and created their own institutions. The first black baseball association, the Negro National League, was launched in 1920 by the indomitable Rube Foster, manager-owner of the Chicago American Giants and a one-time black baseball star.

Over the next 20 years, several other leagues were launched, most notably the Negro American League, with major black teams from New York to Kansas City. Black fans followed the action in the pages of the era’s leading black newspapers, especially the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier. As in white America, baseball was unquestionably the African American community’s favorite sport.

And, for at least 15 years, that community’s favorite player was Oscar Charleston.

Charleston was born into a large, poor Indianapolis family on October 14, 1896. Raised primarily in the city’s vibrant Indiana Avenue neighborhood, he kept busy by playing sandlot ball and serving as a batboy with Indianapolis’s leading black ballclub, the ABCs. But in 1912, with family funds desperately low, Charleston, just 15 years old, lied his way into the Army. Shipped to the Philippines, he began his professional baseball career playing for the black 24th Infantry team in the Manila League. One of his teammates was another future Hall of Famer, Charles Wilber Rogan aka “Bullet Joe.”

Charleston was honorably discharged in 1915 and returned to Indianapolis, where he was signed by the ABCs. By the time Foster formed the Negro National League in 1920, Charleston was Blackball’s best player.

That at least was the claim of his contemporaries, and it is bolstered today by the rather good Negro Leagues statistics we now have at our disposal, thanks to a small army of volunteer researchers. Playing for the ABCs, the Harrisburg Giants, the Homestead Grays, and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, among other clubs, Charleston compiled the most hits, doubles, triples, RBIs, stolen bases, and walks in Negro Leagues history. He was second all-time in runs and home runs. Combine these achievements with his superlative defense in center field and his durability (Charleston was a full-time starter for 22 years, from 1915 through 1936), and he was first all-time, by far, in the advanced statistic of Wins Above Replacement, which combines offensive and defensive contributions into one number.

Charleston also played 10 seasons of winter ball in the strong Cuban League, finishing with a career batting average of .349 and gaining lasting fame as the best player on the 1922–23 and 1923–24 Santa Clara Leopardos, the team most often nominated by baseball historians as the best in prerevolutionary Cuban history.

How might Charleston have fared in the pre-integration “majors”? Probably very well. We know that he posted even better numbers when he took on major leaguers, whom he, like virtually every other black star in his generation, encountered regularly in exhibition contests. Hall of Fame pitchers Lefty Grove and Walter Johnson both gave up memorable home runs to Charleston.

Charleston’s contemporaries, white and black, revered him. Consider the judgment of famed shortstop Honus Wagner: “I’ve seen all the great players in the many years I’ve been around and have yet to see any greater than Charleston.” Or Cardinals scout Bennie Borgmann, who called Charleston the “greatest ball player I’ve ever seen.” “When I say this,” Borgmann said, “I’m not overlooking Ruth, Cobb, Gehrig, and all of them.” Even Kansas City Monarchs co-owner Tom Baird didn’t let his membership in the Ku Klux Klan keep him from acknowledging that “Oscar Charleston was the greatest ball player that ever lived.”

More testimonies came from people like Major League Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler, who stated that Ty Cobb and Charleston were the greatest ballplayers he had ever laid eyes on. The Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean, born and bred in the Jim Crow South, captured Charleston’s greatness vividly: Charleston, he said, “didn’t have a weakness. When he came up, we just threw it and hoped like hell he wouldn’t get a hold of one and send it out of the park.”

Charleston’s striving for accomplishment was not confined to the baseball diamond. Throughout his life, he built up relationships with the powerful and famous, including Army musician and intelligence agent Walter Howard Loving; athletes like Jesse Owens and Jimmie Foxx; journalists Margaret Martin, Rollo Wilson, and Wendell Smith; and Negro Leagues owners Cumberland Posey and Gus Greenlee to name a few. Both of Charleston’s wives were accomplished women who came from prominent African American families, and the clippings about high black society that he pasted in his personal scrapbook suggest just how badly Charleston wanted membership in that rarified world.

Oscar Charleston—pictured in the top right, third from right—and his Quartermaster Depot Team. Courtesy of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, Oscar Charleston photo album.

Charleston’s greatest social victories, however, came in breaking color lines. During World War II, as Brooklyn Dodgers president and general manager Branch Rickey was concocting his plan to outmaneuver rival teams by becoming the first to sign black players, Charleston was proving he could successfully navigate potentially fraught interracial situations by playing for and managing the integrated baseball team that represented his wartime employer, the Quartermaster Depot, in Philadelphia’s semipro Industrial League.

No wonder that the black Philadelphia Tribune printed a full-page spread on Charleston’s team in which it celebrated the “democracy” it displayed. One photo captures Charleston standing in front of three other players, two of them white. The display was powerful. After all, how many African Americans had managed a racially integrated ballclub in America or a racially integrated workplace by 1942? Another 19 years would go by before Gene Baker became the first regular black manager of a team in Organized Baseball when he took the reins of the Batavia Pirates.

In 1945, Branch Rickey got involved with a new black baseball league known as the United States League—and immediately gave Charleston a chance to break another barrier, bringing him in to manage the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers squad. Rickey viewed the Brown Dodgers as a way he could scout black players for the major league Dodgers without arousing suspicion among his competitors. Having Charleston as the team’s manager gave him a way to leverage the knowledge, insight, and connections of a man who knew everyone in, and everything about, the Negro Leagues.

Lead Dodgers scout Clyde Sukeforth would later emphasize the crucial role Charleston played in backgrounding potential Dodgers signees, including future Hall of Fame catcher Roy Campanella. For example, Charleston was able to assure a skeptical Rickey that Campanella’s reported age, 23 in 1945, was accurate. And Campanella recalled Rickey telling him that Charleston had “followed [him] around.” As a result, Campanella was “astonished” to “find out how much [Rickey] knew about me.” In all likelihood, Charleston also scouted John Wright, Roy Partlow, and Dan Bankhead, African Americans who were among the first six black men signed by Rickey’s Dodgers.

The scouting Charleston did for the Dodgers in 1945 came years before the work of black scouting pioneers like John Donaldson, Judy Johnson, and Quincy Trouppe—former Negro Leagues stars who, in their post-playing careers, worked for the White Sox, Athletics, and Cardinals, respectively. That makes it fair to suggest that Charleston may have been the Major Leagues’ first African American scout.

Charleston never got his moment playing integrated ball, but he helped others get theirs, as both a manager and a scout. As he told the Pittsburgh Courier’s Wendell Smith in 1954, “I never got the chance to play in the majors because of the color-line. Because of that, he said, he was committed “to see that these kids I’m managing get their chance. Everyone who goes up compensates in some way for me.”

Charleston died in a Philadelphia hospital shortly after that interview with Smith. Though he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1976, his legacy did not get the attention it deserved in the years that followed. The decades after Charleston’s death were a fallow period for Negro Leagues history. To the rising generation of African Americans, the leagues seemed to suggest a too-ready acquiescence to Jim Crow, while, for obvious reasons, they troubled the conscience of white America. As a consequence, for two or three decades little historical work was done. Even now, in 2020, one can count on one hand the number of full biographies of players who spent their entire careers in the Negro Leagues.

Charleston, and the Negro Leagues as a whole, deserve better. Charleston put together one of the greatest careers in American athletic history—and he left an American legacy worth knowing. That few of us remember him is not his fault. It’s ours.

The post Why Was Baseball Legend Oscar Charleston Forgotten? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Francesco Capra was born in 1897 in Bisaquino, near Palermo, Sicily, the youngest of seven children. (“Capra” means goat in Italian; the town’s name is derived from the Arabic “rich in waters.”) In 1903—at the height of Italian emigration—the family booked passage for America. Millions of Italians from the Mezzogiorno (the south) emigrated just one generation after the unification of Italy in 1861. The mass migration was seen as an indictment against the way that unification was carried out as well as the increasingly desperate plight of the laboring poor in Italy.

Conditions in steerage on the steamship Germania were miserable, an experience Capra never forgot. As he explained to film historian Joseph McBride:

You’re all together—you have no privacy. You have a cot. Very few people have trunks or anything that takes up space. They have just what they can carry in their hands or in a bag. Nobody takes their clothes off. There’s no ventilation, and it stinks like hell. They’re all miserable. It’s the most degrading place you could ever be.

But as the ship passed through New York Harbor, Capra’s father admonished his son, age 6, in what could have been a scene from one of his later movies: “Ciccio, look! Look at that! That’s the greatest light since the star of Bethlehem! That’s the light of freedom! Remember that!”

It seems Capra internalized that idealistic message during his life and advanced it in his films. Capra was never one to wax nostalgic about his Italian ethnicity. Indeed, he often insisted that he was American, without any hyphen and without deep ties to Italy. That ferocious desire to become American, and erase what may have been (for Capra) an embarrassing past, came to fruition in his film work. Even with relatively positive images of Italian-Americans, as in It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra absorbed ambivalent stereotypes about Italian migrants from his adopted country, and conveyed them in his films.

As the film opens, we catch a glimpse of Martini’s, the restaurant and bar belonging to Giuseppe Martini, played by the actor William Edmunds, whose stage name was an erasure of Michele Pellegrino, born in Basilicata, Italy in 1886 and arrived in New York City in 1897. As film scholar Giuliana Muscio notes in her new magisterial study Napoli/New York/Hollywood: Film Between Italy and the United States, many Italian actors in Hollywood anglicized their names in order to secure work. Ironically, they rarely played Italians on screen and were often cast as other ethnics. Conversely, Italian characters were often portrayed by non-Italian actors.

Immigration scholars have long debated whether immigrant Italians were denied the privileges of whiteness or were considered “white on arrival.” Beyond dispute is the fact that Italians were not welcomed by earlier immigrants such as the Irish.

The pressure to assimilate was ferocious. Social workers made the rounds of Italian communities urging parents to send their children to school (where their names were often changed) and to eat oatmeal rather than Italian food for breakfast. During World War II, government posters admonished Italians in America not to “speak the enemy’s language!” even as Capra was making the film series Why We Fight for U.S. Army chief of staff George Marshall. As late as the 1950s, Mario Cuomo was urged to change his name after graduating top of his class in law school, unable to land a position at a white-shoe law firm.

The saga of the Martini family in the film partially reflects this historical reality. Giuseppe Martini is the classical, striving immigrant, desperately yearning to advance the material prospects of his family. With a loan from the Bailey Savings & Loan Company, he secures a coveted home in Bailey Park, thus acquiring a part of the American Dream. As the family prepares for the move out of the Potter slum, Mr. Martini triumphantly announces to a neighbor that he will no longer rent but be the proud owner of his own home.

George and Mary Bailey are on hand to assist with the move. George packs the numerous Martini children into his car—with the requisite goat—and off they go, with Martini singing that universal marker of Italianess, “O Sole Mio.” Martini’s accent, gestures, and prodigious brood (human and animal), are all signifiers of Capra’s internalized image of how Italian-Americans were seen through the lens of American popular culture. On the steps of their new home, Mary Bailey presents Mrs. Martini with bread “that this house may never know hunger” and salt “that life may always have flavor.” Then George presents Mr. Martini with wine “that joy and prosperity may reign forever. Enter the Martini castle!” as Mr. Martini makes the sign of the cross.

Later in the film, George Bailey is drowning his sorrows at Martini’s bar as “Voglio cantare una canzone d’amore” plays on the jukebox. Martini asks, “Why you drinka so mucha my friend?” When Bailey is assaulted by a boorish patron, Mr. Martini is swift in throwing out the offending man for breaking the code of friendship, insisting “He no come ina my place no more!” (Martini, like many immigrants, is marked by—among other things, such as the goat—his broken English.)

All this was part of a larger history. An earlier migration of Italians from northern Italy, including Filippo Mazzei (friend of Thomas Jefferson) and Lorenzo Da Ponte (Mozart’s librettist and first professor of Italian at Columbia University), had convinced political and immigration authorities that the later-arriving southern Italians were of lesser status.

Northern Italians were descendants of Dante, Galileo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Michelangelo. But Neapolitans and Sicilians, who comprised a majority of migrants between 1880 and 1924, were considered barbarians, racially and intellectually inferior. Around 1900, as Italians were disembarking at Ellis Island and New Orleans by the millions, they were required to check off “Southern Italian” rather than “White” on entry forms and were portrayed in popular culture as rats carrying disease, licentiousness, and radical political ideas. Italian anarchists loomed in the imagination of Americans much as Islamic terrorists do today. If, during the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti (1920-27), one would postulate that there would eventually be not one but two Italian-Americans on the Supreme Court, it would be as if today someone suggested a Muslim for the same position.

That bigotry is present in the film. When George Bailey, in desperation after his business partner Uncle Billy loses an $8,000 deposit, begs Mr. Potter for a loan, the evil banker sneers at the idealist Bailey for being a “nursemaid to a bunch of garlic-eaters,” a not-so-subtle dig at Martini and all Italian-Americans. They had been called worse: dagoes, guineas, wops. Italian-Americans had been despised as gangsters and mobsters, and found hanging at the ends of ropes, lynched by the Ku Klux Klan for having the audacity to befriend African Americans, and posing a libidinal threat to the purity of virginal white American women, the dark side of the Latin lover stereotype.

As the townspeople arrive at the Bailey home with baskets of cash to bail out the Savings and Loan, Mr. Martini enters shouting, “I even busted the juke-a-box!” That jukebox, as Mark Rotella notes, would have included songs by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Perry Como and—later—many other Italian-American singers such as Connie Francis and Bobby Darin. Mary Bailey calls out to Mr. Martini, “How about some wine?” again, another marker of Italianess.

Capra’s depiction of the Martini family was simplistic and already out of date by the time of the film’s release in 1946. An extraordinary shift in America’s image of Italian-Americans took place during the middle third of the twentieth century. Public figures such as New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees, and crooner Frank Sinatra (whose short film The House I Live In, espousing racial, religious and ethnic tolerance, won an Academy Award), were at the forefront in shaping new perceptions. In 1950, all three candidates for New York mayor were Italian-American. (Two were actually Italian-born). It also helped that Italian-Americans had been the largest ethnic minority serving in the armed forces during World War II.

Italian-Americans began leaving their ethnic conclaves across the country and moving to the suburbs. (See the ending of Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim, published in 1965). By 1946, the move to the suburbs was accompanied by a move rightward on the political spectrum among Italian-Americans. Why the political evolution? Perhaps it was anger at the Roosevelt Administration’s decision after Italy declared war on the U.S. to label 600,000 Italians who had never become American citizens as “enemy aliens” and intern several thousand in camps (before they were released on Columbus Day 1942 in anticipation of the presidential election). Perhaps it was an awareness that to fully be admitted to American society and enjoy its privileges, Italian-Americans had to embrace some of the darker aspects of American prejudice.

Italian-Americans felt they had proved their loyalty to America by renouncing Fascism (which many had supported in the 1920s and 1930s), and raising their children as “good Americans” only speaking English. Capra was emblematic of this evolution in real life, but the change isn’t reflected in this film—or any of his other films.

It seems both Capra and American popular culture preferred their Italians caught in amber, genial and warm-hearted but not too cerebral, or complicated.

The post Frank Capra Oversimplified the Italian-American Story appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the question that occurs after the county government made two recent decisions so stinky that it could be years before the smell wears off.

First, county supervisors voted to oppose state sanctuary laws that provide some peace of mind to the immigrants upon whom Orange County depends economically and socially. In the process, the county aligned itself with President Trump, who has targeted California in a campaign of lies and mass deportation, and against many of the county’s own families.

Second, the county abandoned a plan to house hundreds of homeless people in temporary shelters in Huntington Beach, Laguna Niguel, and Irvine, after protests from people in those cities.

Protecting its own immigrants and providing housing for its own people shouldn’t be a heavy lift for a wealthy county with 3.2 million people—more than the populations of 21 states. After all, Orange County, the sixth most populous in the United States, is one of the richest jurisdictions on earth, with a GDP greater than that of Greece or Portugal, the best shopping anywhere (from South Coast Plaza to Fashion Island), and pioneering master-planned communities. It is a headquarters for Fortune 500 firms and biotech startups. It’s also home to brands that define California style (Oakley and PacSun) and food (In-N-Out), while boasting amenities as awesome as Irvine’s schools, Huntington Beach volleyball, Crystal Cove’s sands, and two Disney parks.

But the recent decisions to abandon the local duty to protect immigrants and the homeless weren’t really news—or even a departure. Orange County has an especially bad case of a California malady: Our local governments simply can’t meet the challenges and standards of our diverse and globally oriented communities. And in no place is the gap in sophistication between government and a locality wider than in Orange County.

“We think of ourselves as Mayberry,” says my friend Fred Smoller, a Chapman University political scientist who is an expert in local government and Orange County, “when we really are closer to Gotham City.”

The Dark Knight’s hometown might seem a strange parallel for a sun-splashed county known for its religiosity, from the late Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral (now headquarters of the Roman Catholic diocese) to Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church. But the decisions on immigrants and the homeless reflect Orange County’s fundamental confusion about itself.

The protests against housing for the homeless were particularly jarring, with one organizer quoted as suggesting that the county relocate the homeless “maybe somewhere else in California.” The abandonment of the homelessness plan came the same week the county opened a new $35 million, state-of-the-art shelter for animals, complete with air-conditioned kennels. (The city of Irvine, whose residents have fought against a homeless shelter, also recently announced plans for a new animal shelter.)

Fundamentally, this is a county that is lying to itself, and twisting logic into the pretzel shape of its curviest roads. In opposing the immigrant sanctuary laws, the county supervisors portrayed themselves as patriots honoring federal supremacy—even if it means collaborating with the Trump Administration’s punitive mass deportations that are increasingly targeting non-criminals. But in the next breath, as supervisors dropped the homeless plan, they suggested that they were standing up for local sovereignty in the face of demands by the same federal government: A U.S. district judge has pushed the county to address the homeless issue.

In this and other cases, Orange County officials have portrayed themselves as weak, playing the victim. In the immigration case, they saw themselves as the targets of a state somehow bullying them to protect their own immigrants. In the homeless case, the pretense is that Orange County can’t afford to house a few thousand homeless people. In Costa Mesa, where the city council also opposed new housing for the homeless, Councilman Jim Righeimer declared that, “There’s not enough money, anywhere—anywhere—to take care of people who do not want to take care of themselves.”

Cry me a Santa Ana River.

There is another danger of the county’s Mayberry complex. By clinging to its old image as a collection of NIMBY-ish small towns, and by failing to acknowledge that it has become a sprawling, diverse, heavily urbanized region with big city headaches to match its big city amenities, Orange County has made itself profoundly vulnerable to sophisticated mismanagement and persistent corruption.

Two decades ago, local officials seemed powerless to stop treasurer Robert Citron until his bad investments had bankrupted the county. More recently, the county has been unable to build the infrastructure of a major American urban region, most notably failing to develop an international airport.

And the county has consistently failed to confront public official corruption in its law enforcement structure, even after its previous sheriff went to prison. A long-running scandal has shown that both the district attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department “secretly operated unconstitutional scams with jail snitches to win convictions, hid exculpatory evidence from defendants and juries, and, when necessary, committed perjury in hopes of masking the cheating,” as the OC Weekly put it. Judges have condemned the misconduct, which has led so far to the dismissal of 18 cases.

But the district attorney and sheriff haven’t lost their jobs. Instead, these same county law enforcement agencies now claim to be defending California from criminals by siding with the Trump administration’s mass deportation strategies. It’s right to be cynical about this. Is Orange County using the immigration issue to distract from its law enforcement’s own troubles? Or, even worse, are the sheriff and the district attorney trying to curry favor with the federal authorities, and thus blunt federal investigation into their own misconduct?

The county’s Mayberry complex doesn’t just hurt people caught up in the criminal justice system, or the homeless or immigrants. It has given Orange County a government that’s out-of-step with the desires of the people who live there. In a new Chapman University survey of 706 Orange County residents, 83 percent of respondents said they wanted to find a way for undocumented immigrants to stay, and 64 percent said immigrants “contribute more than they take” from the economy. The same poll found that assisting the poor and homeless was the second biggest issue in the county among residents (with 24 percent citing it).

California Democrats have fantasies of turning the historically Republican Orange County into a blue place that will support a statewide progressive agenda. That won’t happen, and it shouldn’t. The poll shows that Orange County’s residents are very much in the middle, disgusted with Washington, D.C., and with both parties, and worried about their kids and the cost of housing and living here.

Ideally, Orange County could pursue a moderate path that is true to its people’s real views, which embody a practical California libertarianism: skeptical of costly regulation while championing entrepreneurialism, immigrants, open government, limits on law enforcement, and preservation of its natural treasures.

But that would take a county with new leadership that thinks in ways as big and beautiful as Orange County itself.

The post Orange County Still Acts Like Mayberry R.F.D. It Needs to Get Real About Immigrants and the Homeless appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

President Trump has stormed in with talk of Muslim travel bans, plans to build a wall along the Southern border, and ambitions to deport millions. And Los Angeles County has been ground zero for immigrant flows and immigration issues for decades. In the early 1980s, roughly a fourth of all immigrants coming into the United States came in through the county, prompting the anxiety and fears that in 1994 led to Proposition 187, a ballot measure that sought to strip the undocumented of any access to education or other public services.

While the pace of immigration has dramatically slowed—in fact, the share of the population that is foreign-born has been on the decline for the last several years in L.A. County—the earlier demographic tidal wave permanently changed the shores it hit. Today, roughly one-third of all county residents are foreign-born, nearly half of the workforce is immigrant, and just over 60 percent of the county’s children have at least one immigrant parent.

Any changes with immigration policy and immigration rhetoric at the national level are bound to have a local impact here. This is particularly true of the new president’s focus on “illegal immigrants” and his promise—one of the few to be put into effect—to unleash Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a wide swath of people without legal status in the country.

In the last few years of the Obama administration, emphasis was placed—not always successfully and not always fairly—on deporting those with criminal records. What Trump has done is to essentially throw away any priorities: Anyone in the country without proper papers is fair game.

The threat of this new deportation regime is worrisome for many communities in the United States. But Los Angeles is an especially juicy target for ICE: Of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, nearly one million are in L.A. County. And while some may still think of the undocumented as recently arrived single men whose removal is regrettable but impacts them alone, that is clearly not the case in Los Angeles.

Here, people with legal standing and those without are thoroughly intertwined both personally and economically. More than 60 percent of the county’s undocumented have been in the United States for longer than 10 years, and roughly one-fifth of the county’s children have at least one undocumented parent. Families of mixed legal status are now the norm. There are about 800,000 U.S. citizens and another 250,000 lawful permanent residents who live with an undocumented family member.

That’s a lot of our neighbors—and we’re not counting all the undocumented relatives who may live nearby but in other households. We’re also not counting intimate non-family relationships: all Angelenos who rely on the undocumented to mow their lawns, take care of their kids, or clean their houses. In present-day Los Angeles, every deportation is likely to disrupt a family, damage a business, and weaken a community—and so what happens to and for immigrants really matters for everyone.

Trump has left us living in a disquieting scenario, one that Cynthia Buiza, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, describes as being “between hope and fear.”

The hope lies in the way the state’s immigrant and social movements have, in Buiza’s words, “tried to create a firewall around Trump.” Pressure has been placed on the state legislature to pass a California Values Act (SB 54) that would spread “sanctuary city” policies of non-cooperation with ICE across the state. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a combination of county, city, and philanthropic dollars have been pooled to create a $10 million L.A. Justice Fund that will provide resources for the legal defense of undocumented individuals facing the threat of deportation.

Despite such efforts, there is understandably plenty of trepidation on the part of immigrants. Local law enforcement agencies note that reports of sexual assault and domestic violence from Latino communities have fallen dramatically—not because there is less crime, but because there is less reporting. Meanwhile, county health officials are noticing a trend in which activity in local clinics is on the decline—but activity in emergency rooms, often for illnesses that should have been treated earlier, is on the upswing.

The actual scale of the deportation threat in L.A. County has been somewhat muted by several factors, including the unwillingness of local police forces, particularly the LAPD, to cooperate with ICE, as well as several effective “know your rights” campaigns by immigrant-serving organizations. But the fear is palpable and justified: There have some well-publicized cases, including the detention of an immigrant activist and student at Cal State Los Angeles, and many of us are living with the constant worry that a relative, neighbor, or co-worker will be snatched away.

There are also well-placed concerns about what might happen with DACA, the Obama-era executive action that granted temporary status and work permits to the so-called Dreamers—undocumented youth who came to the United States at an early age and basically grew up as Americans. Roughly nine percent of all those eligible for the program nationwide were county residents, and it is likely that Angelenos constituted an even larger share of those who applied, given the maturity and depth of the immigrant-serving infrastructure here in Southern California.

So far, the Trump administration has not stopped the popular program. But as Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Labor Center, puts it, “DACA seems to be hanging by a thread.” If the president finds his policies stalled by Congress and his political standing threated by a special prosecutor, it may be tempting to shore up the support of his base with polarizing actions that do not require legislative approval.

Gutting DACA would check both those boxes: It can be done by presidential fiat, and it targets a population of “illegals” despised by a base of voters who seem unaware that no DACA recipient is actually going after their jobs in, say, coal mining. Moreover, to gut DACA would be to go after some of the most vibrant immigrant youth organizers in the anti-Trump resistance: dreamers who were instrumental in securing DACA, and have benefited from the program.

So how will L.A. respond if Trump further targets immigrants?

In the immediate future, it will be all about defense. Fortunately, major political figures like L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti have spoken strongly against the presidents’ immigration policies while Los Angeles County has moved forward with a new Office of Immigrant Affairs that will work with immigrant families to protect their rights and further their futures. The landscape is not without landmines: In tiny Cudahy, for example, pro-Trump activists from out of town are seeking to strip the fiscal base of the city (via a proposed ballot measure to end a utility tax upon which local government relies) as punishment for its status as a “sanctuary city.” But the general direction is positive.

One important effort that could help more: L.A. institutions should assist those legal immigrants who can become naturalized citizens to do so. Citizens are likely in a better position to defend their relatives—and to punish those opportunistic politicians who seek to divide. In L.A. County, nearly 800,000 adults could make that passage to citizenship—and to voting—and many organizations are stepping up to this task. An innovative program in the city libraries provides information to would-be Americans.

In the longer haul, Los Angeles will need to understand what the Trump threat has revealed: So many of us are immigrants—and so many others are one generation, one relative, one neighbor, or one co-worker away from the immigrants that Trump now threatens.

Because of this, immigrant integration is everyone’s business. And that will require that Los Angeles go beyond shoring up legal protections and promoting citizenship—key as these are—and also work to provide English classes for immigrant adults, strengthen education for their children, and secure a real toehold for immigrants in the local economy.

In the current choice between hope and fear, we Angelenos cannot adopt a false optimism—people really are under threat. Nor can we be paralyzed by panic. Instead, we must choose a third path: We must show the rest of the country what the future can be if we put aside racialized anxiety, celebrate the contributions of many people and cultures, and build the economic, social, and policy platforms for communities to thrive.

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“Integration is a complex process. It’s not something that immigrants, refugees, or their host communities can achieve in isolation overnight,” said John Emerson, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, in his opening remarks to “What Does Muslim Integration Look Like?” a Zócalo Public Square event in Berlin on Thursday night, produced in partnership with the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft and NPR Berlin. His introduction kicked off a far-reaching panel discussion, moderated by Rick Stengel, the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.

Stengel, a former managing editor of Time, centered the conversation on integration in Germany, which in recent years liberalized its nationality laws to provide citizenship to the German-born kids of immigrants, with a provocative question. “The old idea of the nation state based on blood is going away. Nations have to be based on ideas,” he said. “So what’s the idea of Germany?”

Before the panelists weighed in, Riem Spielhaus, a researcher at the Erlanger Center for Islam and Law in Europe, gave a brief overview of the present state of Muslims in Germany, and spelled out three basic problems with the way people talk about them. First, she said, was the “Islamization” of immigrants; despite Muslim immigrants’ wish to be identified as German once they gain citizenship, they’re still referred to as Muslim. Meanwhile, non-Muslim immigrants from Poland or the Balkans or elsewhere who might face their own set of challenges now go ignored in a new context that equates, almost by definition, “immigrant” with “Muslim.” Second, Spielhaus said, mosques and Muslim communities themselves are only talked about as sources of alienation, instead of being recognized as facilitators of integration, despite the fact that many provide tutoring and counseling for new arrivals. And third, German law, for all its professions of equality and non-discrimination, still doesn’t treat Muslims as equals when it comes to the practice of one’s faith. The burial of the dead according to Muslim customs, for instance, is not allowed in every German state.

These are three major obstacles that keep Muslims at arm’s length in German culture, Spielhaus argued, and demonstrate the scale of change that still needs to take place: “Integration is never only about the incoming,” she concluded. “It’s also about the society.”

Özcan Mutlu, a Green Party member of the federal Bundestag, or parliament, advocated for the power of symbolic measures. Even though German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been widely criticized within Europe for sticking to open-door immigration policy, Mutlu said Merkel has yet to make welcoming gestures akin to President Obama’s trips to mosques (including to one in Baltimore this week) and his hosting of various religious celebrations at the White House. “It costs nothing to invite religious leaders to the Chancellery and say, ‘You are part of this country,’” he said. “It is not enough to say, ‘Islam is part of Germany.’ I always say walk the talk … People see the signs.”

Cemile Giousouf, also a federal legislator of Turkish ethnicity, aligned with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, argued that symbols only go so far. “This is all about structures,” she said. “We can build up our own imams [Muslim religious leaders]. And we can also have our own teachers at schools who can teach Islamic education. I think Germany is the country in all of Europe that is working most successfully on these points.” Even amid rising Islamophobia, “90 percent of very religious Muslims are saying ‘Germany is my country,’” she pointed out.

Idil Baydar, an actress and comedian, was particularly passionate on the topic of immigration. “Young [immigrants] want to be a part of this country, but it’s very confusing, because they’re always hearing you can only belong if you deny the identity of your parents,” she said. Born to Turkish immigrants, and a teacher of young immigrants herself, Baydar argued that it is essential for Germany to create a system that embraces minority perspectives. “I had a student whose grades were fantastic. Another teacher told her, ‘Well, that’s fine, now you can apply to Aldi [a discount German supermarket],’” Baydar said. “This is happening so much in German schools. We do not have institutions that will protect migrants.”

One power that’s leveling the playing field, Baydar pointed out, is social media. Baydar herself has thrived on her YouTube channel, and she believes new platforms are giving voice to otherwise voiceless groups. “It’s an advantage, an opportunity for minorities to express themselves,” she said.

Audrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, compared Germany’s immigration to America’s, noting that America now has the highest proportion of foreign-born residents in roughly a century. Overall, she praised America’s openness, but noted that achieving that openness took generations. “We have a very different starting point than Germany, in terms of the way we think about our nation,” she said, and “[w]e’ve been working on immigration for longer.” She also cautioned against generalizing about national situations when immigration is grounded in specific places, “where people live, work, go to school, shop—all in their localities. Cities and suburbs all have different histories of immigration.”

“This is a defining moment in German history,” Singer said, and added that she believes Germany is on the right track. Major shifts in attitude, and the change to laws that once stigmatized German-born kids as “guest workers” signal big changes in the country’s approach to Muslim immigrants.

Baydar, Mutlu, and Giousouf all shared this guarded optimism. Mutlu declared that integration has succeeded in Germany—but still has a lot of problems to work out. And Giousouf said she sees Germany as in an in-between state: “Being an immigrant and being German are not opposites,” she said. “But it’s also still not normal to be Turkish and in Parliament.”

During a lively question-and-answer period that engaged the standing-room only crowd, Nariman Reinke, a German soldier of Moroccan descent in her 12th year of military service, said: “I’m a German soldier, look which flag I’m wearing.” And yet, the military doesn’t offer the same religious support for Muslims as it does for Christians. “[While deployed,] I’d always ask myself, what if I get killed?” Would a Christian chaplain inform and comfort her Muslim mother?

This is one of the many subtle ways in which everyday life hasn’t caught up with Germany’s loftier aspirations, leading Reinke to wonder: “Why are we only discussing this now?”

Stengel, for his part, was careful to remind the audience that the United States had also been slow in its quest for equality before the law. The Under Secretary cited Martin Luther King Jr.’s description of our Constitution in his “I Have a Dream” speech as a promissory note that has yet to be fully honored—a metaphor German Turks can appreciate.

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Widespread protests against German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s generally welcoming policies toward refugees fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan quickly followed. Germany has taken in more than a million people in the past year, many of them raised with a religion that the Western world has come to associate with extremism and violence. And, like most countries in Europe, Germany still hasn’t figured out the best way to bring them into the mainstream of society.

For some Europeans, the only solution is xenophobia: “Islam not welcome” and “Rapefugees not welcome” have become two popular slogans. But other Europeans recognize that the vast majority of incoming Muslims are not violent extremists or criminal threats, and policies cannot be based on those assumptions. So how can countries balance a need to protect the citizens who already live there and also make newcomers feel welcome and capable of contributing to their new homes?

In advance of the February 4 Zócalo/Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft/NPR Berlin event, “What Does Muslim Integration Look Like?,” we asked experts in European politics and culture: What changes in planning, policy, and attitude does Europe need to better integrate Muslims?

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The Little Rascals, originally known as Our Gang, was created by Hal Roach in 1921. The films, which were originally shown in theaters nationwide and syndicated to television decades later, were an immediate hit—kids and adults loved the slapstick gags and the fiction of a kiddie society uniting to confound authority. Over the next 23 years, 220 films were produced. The success of Little Rascals was all the more surprising considering the racial climate of the time. It was the age of Jim Crow, a term that originated in a 19th-century caricatured minstrel song and was soon applied to racial segregation laws that lasted through the 1960s. With Woodrow Wilson as president and the return of soldiers from World War I, the years before 1921 had seen dozens of deadly attacks on blacks in American cities along with a resurgent Klu Klux Klan in rural areas.

Our Gang was a child-like, idealized vision of America, one that offered an alternative to the racial strife going on outside the theater. Critics are still debating whether the show reinforced the racial stereotyping of the time or whether it actually challenged the status quo in the guise of something familiar. Sunshine Sammy and Farina, Our Gang’s two original black members, were often depicted as comic “pickaninnies,” falling into barrels of flour and eating watermelon. Buckwheat, their 1930s successor, was best known for his incoherent speech and wild hair. Still, Our Gang was curiously ahead of its time in its celebration of diversity. The kids squabbled, sure, but they were also friends. They were a miniature melting pot, a slapstick version of democracy itself.

One of my favorite Rascals was Matthew Beard, who played Stymie, a wisecracking black kid in a natty vest and a bowler hat, reportedly a gift from comedian Stan Laurel. Stymie got his nickname (which he used the rest of his life) from his habit of getting underfoot on the set. Director Bob McGowan used to joke, “Well, boy, this kid’s beautiful, but he stymies me all the time.” On screen, Stymie was smart and resourceful, a heroic underdog able to outwit even adults.

Years later, when I tried to understand what Little Rascals meant, I read a biography of the cast. As an adult, Stymie derided the series’ racist caricatures: “It was mammy this and mammy that in those days.” I had wondered what it was like for him as a child on the set. Was he friends with the other kids in the cast? Or were they simply performing a fantasy of integration on screen that ended the minute the cameras stopped rolling?

It turns out that Stymie’s best friend on the set was Dickie Moore, who was white. They were an unlikely duo: Dickie usually played the rich kid while Stymie usually played the role of the urbane wise-guy. In real life, Dickie had started his career playing an infant John Barrymore in The Beloved Rogue. Stymie had started his career playing a nameless “pickaninny” in Hallellujah!

What they shared was precocity and talent, as well as the loneliness and burden of being child stars. Both were Depression kids, responsible for supporting their entire families at a time when one-quarter of the labor force was unemployed. They also shared onscreen chemistry in films such as Free Wheeling (1932), where Stymie cures Dickie the rich kid’s stiff neck by taking him on a wild ride.

Offscreen the two became close friends. Dickie fondly remembered being invited to Stymie’s house, where the two boys played on a tire swing and made ice cream. Their playdate required crossing Los Angeles’s strict color line of the 1930s. Stymie lived in east Los Angeles, where the “colored” neighborhoods were, while Dickie went home to the Westside, where racial covenants kept out blacks, Mexicans, Japanese, Jews, Italians, Russians—anyone who wasn’t “100 percent American.”

When it came time for the Moores to invite Stymie to their home, the boys played cops and robbers and feasted on a leg of lamb with garlic Dickie’s mom roasted in honor of their guest. After a night’s sleep, the two boys went to a vacant lot to play—just like the kids they played in Our Gang. “Stymie was the only child actor who spent the night at our house,” Dickie said. “Of all the kids in pictures, Stymie was my best friend.”

The boys’ interracial friendship seemed like something out of a Hollywood movie. But reality wasn’t far off-screen. When Stymie’s parents didn’t show up at Dickie’s house, as scheduled, at 5 o’clock to pick up their son, Dickie’s father went on a walk looking for them. He found Stymie’s parents a block away, seated in their parked car. With the boys now with him, Mr. Moore leaned in, and joked, “Mrs. Beard, what’s the big idea of parking way up here? We live down the block.”

Years later, Dickie still remembered Mrs. Beard’s response. “Oh, you know how it is, Mr. Moore,” she said. “We didn’t want your neighbors thinking you go around with colored folks.”

Neither fame nor their friendship protected the Little Rascals from the reality that awaited them. Dickie left Our Gang soon after, starred in Oliver Twist, and reportedly gave Shirley Temple her first on-screen kiss in Miss Annie Rooney. In later life, he became a PR executive. Stymie lasted a few years longer with the Gang, retiring from show business halfway through the 1935 season at the age of 10,and later serving time in prison for selling heroin. The two boys lost touch but still remembered each other fondly. When they reunited almost 50 years later, Stymie waved off Dickie’s questions about the series’ problematic racial humor, perhaps reluctant to mar the occasion.

It’s easy to see the friendship of Dickie and Stymie as a testament to childhood innocence and the transcendence of the color line. But this is a mistake. As an adult, Dickie was brutally honest about why he could be friends with Stymie: “Today, I wonder if I really felt superior or was less afraid of Stymie because we could not compete for roles,” he said. Stymie would never be considered for the title role in Oliver Twist, just as Dickie would never be considered for the “pickaninny” roles available to Stymie. The two boys weren’t friends despite their race; they were friends because of it.

In the years since, the Little Rascals’ bright vision of interracial friendship has not come to pass: We have gone through cycles of “colorblind” optimism and sometimes violent reminders that reality doesn’t conform to the dream. Los Angeles is still haunted by its racial past. When my parents purchased their first home in a neighborhood adjacent to Culver City, on L.A.’s Westside, my father was shocked to find that the house’s deed stipulated that “no person of African or Negro blood, lineage, or extraction” could buy or rent the property. By then, racial covenants had been declared unconstitutional, but there the history was, still in black and white. The unresolved issues in Los Angeles’s multicultural stew bubbled over in 1992, when I was 15, triggered by the acquittal of four white police officers in the videotaped beating of the black motorist, Rodney King. The L.A. Riots exposed new interracial tensions, too—between blacks in South L.A. and Korean storeowners. My own parents nearly lost their store. A generation later, Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was hailed as a sign that the U.S. was finally “postracial,” but seven years afterwards it’s clear that the fantasy of a multiracial America remains as elusive as ever.

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