From the Watts Rebellion to George Floyd, South LA Charts a New Path Toward Racial Justice
In an op-ed for Next City, Tunua Thrash-Ntuk, ED of LISC LA, and Hanna Love of the Brookings Institution trace the historical roots of community self-determination in South Los Angeles and argue that it's high time for public and private sector leaders to support the model for investment these activists have forged. They draw on the findings of their recent co-authored report on South LA's potential for equitable recovery in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Both are must-reads.
For those who grew up in South Los Angeles, the remnants of rebellion are etched in collective memory. One generation was shaped by 1965, and the next by 1992. Now we confront 2020, alongside the rest of the nation, with knowing familiarity. But this time feels different—and it is.
The Watts neighborhood of 55 years ago was a predominantly Black community in South Los Angeles, wrestling with state-sanctioned housing discrimination, government-subsidized community destruction, concentrated poverty, skyrocketing unemployment, and racist police violence. Black families migrated to South Los Angeles seeking the middle-class American dream. Instead, they were restricted by racial covenants, employment discrimination, and anti-Black violence.
Some could argue that few dents have been made against these inequities in the decades since. And on the surface, that might appear so. South Los Angeles still faces high poverty rates, high unemployment, high housing costs, and economic exclusion—making the community one of Los Angeles’ hardest hit areas amid COVID-19. Today, South Los Angeles residents are part of the nation’s broader reckoning with racial injustice, all the while fighting concurrent battles at home to preserve their Black commercial districts, businesses, and culture amid quickening economic devastation and gentrification.
Yet over the past 55 years, South Los Angeles has fostered a legacy that is just as unyielding as persistent inequity: a collective tradition of community-based organizing and neighborhood mobilization in the face of disinvestment. It is this tradition that will help make 2020 different.