Making Black Los Angeles

“A rich and innovative portrayal of pre-Great Migration Los Angeles’s working-class and female black community.”—Western Historical Quarterly

“A compelling and finely-grained history of African American Los Angeles over the long nineteenth century.”—Pacific Historical Review

“An essential history within a rapidly growing list of histories about the African American experience in the City of Angels.”—American Historical Review

“A rich, complex portrait of Black Los Angeles as home to both property-owning black professionals and economically marginalized working- class residents, a city of both opportunity and oppression. . . . A succinct book, Making Black Los Angeles dovetails with several larger issues that could be a good fit for an American survey course, or courses in African American, urban, or western history.”—History Teacher

“Enriched by copious demographic data and extensive biographic content . . . Campbell’s history of LA’s early black community underscores the city’s multiracial, multiethnic roots. Recommended.”—CHOICE

“Making Black Los Angeles is a vital contribution to the histories of Los Angeles. This book ties together the city’s formation through the morphs and shifts of American racial hierarchy from the Civil War to the entry of the United States in the First World War. Additionally, Campbell powerfully analyzes how women of color and black women attempted to make the City of Angels a more democratic space even at the nadir of American racial apartheid. She also effectively narrates how African American Angelinos creatively used religious faith, political activism, and entrepreneurial efforts to carve out space in their attempts to keep democracy and democratic institutions alive to the city’s African American citizens. Her book will challenge both historians and general readers alike to rethink both the complexity and complexion of Los Angeles’s formative history.”—Randal Maurice Jelks, author of Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography

“In Making Black Los Angeles, Marne L. Campbell carefully documents the central role of African American urban community building in the early creation of the American West. Through close attention to the inner workings of gender, class, and even race, she complicates easy assumptions about black ‘community.’ Emerging from Campbell’s painstaking research is a dense portrait of the galvanizing influences of women, the working class, and religious culture in creating a people. Scholars of black urban history and labor must add this work to their lists of required readings.”-—Clarence Lang, author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75