#COMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD FREE#

And Huntington Park? Man, a Negro couldn’t walk the streets in Huntington Park.” Signs on street corners in Huntington Park informed Black and Asian people that they were unwelcome, Laws said. hadn’t changed for decades after the Laws family arrived, according to how Law described it to The Times almost 40 years ago: “Out in Hollywood and West Los Angeles, Negros couldn’t live in those neighborhoods. Nat Laws was a babe in arms in 1910 when his parents, Henry and Anna, moved here. Restrictive covenants helped to ensure that the growing Black population was kept bottled up in many of the same neighborhoods of 1910, when the census showed that an astounding 36.1% of Black Angelenos owned their own homes. that “nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed.”Ī hundred or so California cities - among them Hawthorne and Glendale - were “sundown towns,” where Black people and sometimes other minorities dared not be found after dark, lest they be run out of town, run into jail or worse.Īlso not for Black Angelenos: some of those darling Spanish houses or Craftsman bungalows along the city’s spreading edges.

for the Advancement of Colored People here and was impressed enough to say of L.A. Still, in 1913, the Black intellectual and writer W.E.B. For a long while, the percentage of Black Angelenos was low - about 2% in the 1910 census, peaking at above 11% around 1990.

#COMPTON NEIGHBORHOOD FREE#

California entered the union in 1850 as a free state, not a slave state.

Compton neighborhood