Central Avenue Historic District

People of African ancestry were among the founding citizens of Los Angeles in 1781, and beginning in the 1850s successive waves of African Americans migrated west to form an influential community that helped shape the growing metropolis. Drawn by Southern California's climate, natural surroundings, economic opportunities, and social freedoms, they still had to battle deeply rooted bigotry and shifting racial and class structures to secure their rights as citizens, even as they actively participated in the city's development. Between 1900 and 1930, the African American population in Los Angeles rose more than eighteenfold, from 2,131 to 38,894, while the city's general population grew from 102,479 to nearly 1.2 million. In the south-of-downtown community organized around Central Avenue, African American residents bought homes, raised families, established businesses, built social and faith institutions, and fostered a rich cultural life of theaters, jazz clubs, dance halls, newspapers, and book and record stores, and Frederick Madison Roberts represented the multiethnic district in the California State Assembly from 1918 to 1934 as the first man known to be of African American descent to serve there. The district also became an important force in the national civil rights movement, as court cases and public policy changes chipped away at discrimination in housing and employment. Central Avenue flourished well into the 1950s and became the birthplace of a thriving jazz scene, with so many clubs operating from the 1920s to the 1940s that the California Eagle called it Brown Broadway. Venues including Club Alabam beside the Dunbar Hotel, Club Congo, the Downbeat Club, the Last Word, Club Memo, and Ivies Chicken Shack offered live music nightly, while in 1920 eight musicians formed the all-black Local 767 union in response to discrimination. With about 1,000 members, it became the second-largest black union in the American Federation of Musicians and used a house at 1710 Central Avenue as its office, clubhouse, and rehearsal space. Each Labor Day, the union organized a popular parade along Central Avenue featuring bands such as those of Count Basie and Duke Ellington. By the early and mid-1950s, desegregation efforts joined the city's segregated musicians' unions, the jukebox reduced demand for live bands, many middle-class African Americans moved to neighborhoods farther west and south that had previously been closed by restrictive housing covenants, rhythm and blues was overtaking jazz in popularity, and Central Avenue's influence and golden era ebbed.

Los Angeles, California · United States