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South Los Angeles

Coordinates: 33°55′39″N 118°16′38″W / 33.9275°N 118.27722°W / 33.9275; -118.27722
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Los Angeles from the air
South Los Angeles

South Los Angeles, often abbreviated as South L.A. is a large geographic and cultural portion lying to the southwest and southeast of downtown Los Angeles, California.

The area was formerly called South Central, and is still widely known as such by its residents. It borders the Westside on the northwest, and Downtown LA on the northeast.[1]

In 2003, the city of Los Angeles changed the area's name to South Los Angeles in hopes of removing the associations of urban decay and street crime with which the name South Central had become associated.[2] The Los Angeles Times uses both the old and new names to describe the area. Some residents of the Los Angeles area (including residents of South Los Angeles) still use the old name. Prominent figures from South L.A., such as Ice Cube, also continue to refer to the area as South Central.[citation needed]

It is home to the University of Southern California, founded in 1880, as well as the Doheny Campus of Mount St. Mary's College, which was founded in 1920. The 1932 and 1984 Olympic Games took place near the USC campus at neighboring Exposition Park, which hosts the Los Angeles Coliseum. Until the 1920s, West Adams was one of the most desirable areas of the city. Then development of the Wilshire Boulevard corridor drew Los Angeles' development to the west of downtown.

As the wealthy were building stately mansions in West Adams and Jefferson Park, the white working class was establishing itself in Crenshaw and Hyde Park. Affluent blacks gradually moved into West Adams and Jefferson Park as the decades passed.[citation needed]

At the same time, the area of modest bungalows and low-rise commercial buildings along Central Avenue emerged as the heart of the black community in southern California. It had one of the first jazz scenes in the western U.S., with trombonist Kid Ory a prominent resident.[citation needed] Under racially restrictive covenants, blacks were allowed to own property only within the Main-Slauson-Alameda-Washington box and in Watts, as well as in small enclaves elsewhere in the city.[citation needed] The working- and middle-class blacks who poured into Los Angeles during the Great Depression and in search of jobs during World War II found themselves penned into what was becoming a severely overcrowded neighborhood. During the war, blacks faced such dire housing shortages that the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles built the virtually all-black Pueblo Del Rio project, which ran against its previous policy of integrating all of its housing projects.[citation needed]

History

1948-1960s

When the Supreme Court banned the legal enforcement of race-oriented restrictive covenants in 1948's Shelley v. Kraemer, blacks began to move into areas outside the increasingly overcrowded Slauson-Alameda-Washington-Main settlement area. For a time in the early 1950s, southern Los Angeles became the site of significant racial violence, with whites bombing, firing into, and burning crosses on the lawns of homes purchased by black families south of Slauson. In an escalation of behavior that began in the 1920s, white gangs in nearby cities such as South Gate and Huntington Park routinely accosted blacks who traveled through white areas. The black mutual protection clubs that formed in response to these assaults became the basis of the region's fearsome street gangs.[3]

As in most urban areas, 1950s freeway construction radically altered the geography of southern Los Angeles. Freeway routes tended to reinforce traditional segregation lines.[3] The Harbor Freeway ran just to the west of Main Street, and the Santa Monica Freeway just to the north of Washington Boulevard. The Marina Freeway was originally to run near Slauson Avenue all the way to the Orange County line, but was deemed redundant and went unbuilt except for its westernmost portions.

However well the freeways worked in moving cars around, they were decidedly unsuccessful as instruments of integration. The explosive growth of suburbs, most of which barred blacks by a variety of methods, provided the opportunity for whites in neighborhoods bordering black districts to leave en masse. The spread of blacks throughout the area was achieved in large part through "blockbusting," a technique whereby real estate speculators would buy a home on an all-white street, sell or rent it to a black family, and then buy up the remaining homes from whites at cut-rate prices and sell them at a hefty profit to housing-hungry blacks.

This process accelerated after the Watts Riots of 1965. The riots resulted in an abandonment of southern Los Angeles by white residents and merchants. Middle-class blacks also left the area, moving to the north and west. By the late 1960s most of Los Angeles south of Pico Boulevard and east of La Brea Avenue had become overwhelmingly black. Areas wealthy (Baldwin Hills, West Adams) and impoverished (Watts) alike were referred to by the media as "South Central," even if they were 10 miles from the intersection of Vernon and Central Avenues. The Santa Monica Freeway formed the northern boundary of the "new" South Central, primarily dividing the middle-class blacks of Mid-Wilshire from the poor and working-class blacks to the south.

1970s-1990s

Beginning in the 1970s, the precipitous decline of the area's manufacturing base resulted in a loss of the jobs that had allowed skilled union workers to have a middle class life. The downtown Los Angeles' service sector, which had long been dominated by unionized African Americans earning relatively high wages, replaced most black workers with newly arrived Central American immigrants.[3]

Widespread unemployment, poverty and street crime contributed to the rise of street gangs in South Central, such as the Crips and Bloods. They became even more powerful with money from drugs, especially the crack cocaine trade, dominated by gangs in the 1980s.[3]

By the time of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which began in South Central and spread throughout the city, South Central had become a national byword for urban decay. Its bad reputation was broadcast by movies such as Colors, South Central, Menace II Society, Friday, South Central native John Singleton's Boyz n the Hood and in music by the rap group N.W.A.'s album Straight Outta Compton.

One of the most inspiring stories to help improve the notorious area's bad reputation is that of a group of ex gang members joining together to create the first American born cricket team, the Compton Cricket Club.

2000s-present

By the 2000s, South Los Angeles was still known for its gangs.[4]

Geographic definition

The name "South Central" originally referred to an area bounded roughly by Main Street on the west and Washington Boulevard on the north, and sharply by Slauson Avenue (which had Santa Fe Railroad track running alongside it) on the south and Alameda Street (including Southern Pacific Railroad track) on the east. The area lies directly south of downtown Los Angeles with Central Avenue bisecting it from north to south. Interstate 110 also known as the Harbor Freeway, runs right through the heart of South Central.

After WWII, police, fire and city officials coined the term "South Central" because of its southern proximity from downtown on Central Avenue.

Since the 1950s, the definition of "South Central" has gradually expanded to include all of the areas of the city of Los Angeles, small unincorporated pockets of Los Angeles County), and several cities lying south of the Santa Monica Freeway, east of La Cienega Blvd and north of State Route 91, excluding South Bay cities Hawthorne, Gardena, and Lawndale. Some incorporated cities outside of L.A. city limits lying west of the Long Beach Freeway are considered identifiable with South L.A. to some extent by their urban or "inner city" characteristics (Most notably Compton). From the time of the Watts riots of 1965 to the L.A. riots of 1992, South Central was perceived to be the heart of black Los Angeles and among the largest African-American communities in the nation.

More recently[when?] "South Los Angeles" has adopted the acronym SoLA.[citation needed]

Demographics

The demography of South Los Angeles had been changing rapidly throughout the 20th Century. Up until the early 1960s, most of the region was predominantly white. In that same time period, African Americans were arriving to South Central in droves. Due to the Watts Riots and subsequent White flight, South Los Angeles shifted from a predominately White area to one of the largest Black neighborhoods in the United States, a status it maintained until the mid-2000s. In the 1980s, middle class black families left the region for other communities in the city of Los Angeles or other California municipalities (especially to Palmdale, Lancaster and the Inland Empire). By the end of the 1980s, South Los Angeles had an increasing amount of Belizeans, Hispanics and Latinos, but it was not until the 1990s when Belizean & Hispanic immigrants from Central America began arriving in substantial numbers to buy or rent apartments and houses, most of which were vacated by African American renters. The region's black population halved between 1990 and 2010.[citation needed]. However, South Los Angeles remains home to the largest Black community in the Western United States.

In the 2000 census, the designate area of South Los Angeles had a population of 520,461. Roughly 55% of the residents were Belizean, Hispanic or Latino, while 40% were African American.[citation needed] A large percentage of small stores and shops are owned by Asian American immigrants, especially Koreans and Indians. Filipinos have also had a visible presence in the area and Native Americans are a sizable percentage of apartment rental tenants.[citation needed]

Landmarks

Communities

South Los Angeles also refers to a district under the same name of city of Los Angeles southeast of South Park. Communities in South Los Angeles include:

People from South Los Angeles

Music and entertainment

Sports and athletes

Politicians

Clergy

Government and infrastructure

The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services operates the South Health Center in Watts, Los Angeles, serving South Los Angeles.[5]

Media and fiction

See also

People

  • James G. McAllister, president of the South Los Angeles Property Owners' Protective League and City Council member
  • Robert C. Farrell (born 1936), journalist and member of the Los Angeles City Council, 1974–91, prepared report on unemployment in Watts

References

  1. ^ "Map of South Los Angeles". Google. Retrieved 2009-05-28.
  2. ^ Matea Gold and Greg Braxton, "Considering South-Central by Another Name," Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2003, page 3
  3. ^ a b c d Dunn, William. 2007 The Gangs of Los Angeles. ISBN 978-0-595-44357-4 Cite error: The named reference "ReferenceA" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  4. ^ "Gangs of Los Angeles (map)". Google. 2007-05-07. Retrieved 2009-05-28.
  5. ^ "South Health Center." Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. Retrieved on March 18, 2010.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to South Los Angeles.

33°55′39″N 118°16′38″W / 33.9275°N 118.27722°W / 33.9275; -118.27722

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