As far as the relationship with the police went, his neighborhood had a no-snitch code. Law enforcement added nothing of value to the community and therefore was to be ignored at all times, even regarding crimes against innocent people in the neighborhood. Cameron himself was a victim of police violence three or four times. Once he was beaten with a flashlight. On another occasion, after a high-speed chase, he was pulled over and assaulted. If police knew you were in a gang, sometimes they would drop you off in enemy territory, announce your presence over a loudspeaker, and let the gang deal with you. I wondered, if my aunt Sharene hadn’t taken off her bandana when she was in South Central, would officers have done that to her, or would they have beaten her themselves?
The Rodney King beating video reaffirmed for Cameron what he and his community, gang and civilian alike, were experiencing. “Society did not have value for us,” Cameron says. Cameron tells me that, at the moment the verdict came back from the Rodney King trial declaring the officers not guilty, “Somehow, everybody knew that this is what we was about to do.” What they were about to do was riot and loot.
The police preyed on whomever they chose, beating, paralyzing, even killing folks Cameron knew around his neighborhood. As he continued speaking to me about how much profiling the police had done of black Angelenos, I thought about how much police behavior resembled that of the Spookhunters. When I asked him about this, he said, “They’re one and the same.” If that were true, then in Los Angeles at least, the gangs were a reaction to black people’s exclusion from mainstream society. The gangs were formed in reaction to white people uprooting black migrants and their children once more. Even when blacks stayed put in their designated areas, the police continued the centuries of systematic brutality whether or not their victims were gang members.
When I ask Cameron more questions about this violence, he admits, like Regina Jones, that he has blocked many instances out of his mind. I realized once again the extent of the collective trauma that black people endured in what was supposed to be the promised land. Through Cameron’s story, I learned that gang membership was less a channel for one’s aggression than an opportunity for black people to commune with one another while so many mainstream social settings were reserved for whites only. Nevertheless, the gangs made the neighborhoods even worse, causing those like Cameron to fail in school and get caught up in the system that had laid the foundation for gang culture in the first place by redlining, police assaults, civilian white violence, and the biased criminal justice system. Yes, gang life is violent, but it did give those like Cameron a network where they felt accepted and supported. In a city as segregated as Los Angeles, having people who can strengthen one’s place, even from the margins, is important.
In response to all the trauma, one man tried to provide a safe haven for black Los Angeles youth before he found himself an eyewitness to the 1992 Rodney King Riots. I met this man through an underground rapper named James “Nocando” McCall, who was showing me around South Central. The man’s name was Ben Caldwell, an independent filmmaker and arts educator, who created a studio for video production and experimentation called KAOS Network in Leimert Park. Eazy-E, Lebo M, Ava DuVernay, and many others have passed through his building, which was a neutral zone for all the youth who had to deal with gang culture out on the streets.
In 1990, there were whispers around the neighborhood that the police were going to infiltrate the studio because they believed that Ben was running a drug club. One evening, Ben was working upstairs on a switchboard with a few of his teenage students when someone alerted him to a bunch of cops swarming the studio outside. He peeped through the window and remarked that the scene outside reminded him of SS troops in Nazi Germany. The officers wore black hats and boots and got into position. Ben and everyone else in the studio stepped outside, where they found that cop cars were parked on both sides of the street leading to his building so no one could leave. Arrests were made, but those detained were soon released. Fortunately, no one was murdered. However, Ben says such intimidation tactics catalyzed the riots.
Daryl Gates, former LAPD police chief who began his tenure in 1978, was notorious for his racism. As reporter Joe Domanick put it in the Los Angeles Times in 2010, “His troops were arrogant and aggressive in their policing, and the cost was catastrophic.” Many unarmed suspects were killed during his reign. In an attempt to control the Bloods and Crips, he sanctioned sweeps throughout Los Angeles County in which many black men were indiscriminately arrested. One of his divisions specialized in framing innocent people for beating and shootings. Ben says of Gates’s time, “They were breaking heads and necks just one after another.”
When the officers who beat Rodney King were put on trial and the jury found them not guilty, the riots started almost immediately. In six days, there were over fifty deaths and sixteen thousand reported crimes, over 2,300 injuries, seven thousand fires, over twelve thousand arrests, and $1 billion in property damage, surpassing the damage total of the 1965 Watts Riots, which had been the city’s biggest uprising by far. Ben told me that all the looting and burning he saw was the closest thing to complete anarchy that he’d seen in his entire life.
James McCall took me over to the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues so I could see where the riots started. It was eerie. I stepped outside of the car to take a picture of the street, and there was this thick energy in the air, as if what had happened there was unfinished. Demographically, the neighborhood is different now than it was in the early nineties. This part of town has become more Latinx-heavy, while black people have once again migrated—to the Inland Empire (Southern California east of Los Angeles) or back to the Midwest or East Coast. James made it emphatically clear to me that he is pro-uprising, so I asked him, “Do you think another riot will happen?”
He told me that if people continue to inform themselves about the mistreatment and discrimination still happening in their communities, then it will. “Because of social media, we see so many people getting killed by police officers. People who are no threat to the police officers are getting killed. People are told to march, write somebody, make a hashtag, and get that energy out—whatever the fuck it is. It’s constructive. But there ain’t nothing like a good spanking. Ain’t nothing like it. We’re wrong because we riot because they beat and kill us and don’t get punished? Naw, we’re not. You beat and you kill people, and you just walk off free? We commit a crime, with the way that society is structured for us, where we have to deal with your [white people’s] violence—crime that’s caused by poverty, lack of education, and all that shit—and we get extra penalized, you know what I’m saying? Like fuck that. Burn everything.”
Everything from the racial barriers to the police brutality began to connect in a more current and urgent way than before. Black displacement and migration are indelibly a part of our lives. Our presence has always been a “threat” to whites, no matter where we lived or fled. All we wanted was to find safety, and we never gave up in moving to new terrain for that dream. But once there was no place else to go, we got tired of not being treated humanely. Black Angelenos decided that if they couldn’t move freely on the land, then the land would have to burn.
I was much more involved in Los Angeles black history than I originally thought, not only because I had once lived in that city, but because everything that the black people in those communities had gone through reverberated throughout the country. I marched to protest the murder of Eric Garner by NYPD officer Joe Pantaleo. I recalled the late nights I spent with my mother watching tear gas being fired at protestors and journalists in Ferguson by the police. I remembered some of the countless names of black people who’d been killed without cause by police officers: Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Aiyana Jones, Korryn Gaines, Philando Castile, Laquan McDonald, Ezell Ford, Eleanor Bumpurs. . . . The names and bodies kept piling up, and I realized that all these deaths and my understanding of them were connected to the uprisings in Los Angeles, which were caused by th
e racist systems and institutions used to contain black people and keep us from living freely and autonomously.
When black people first set foot on American soil, their shackles indicated their status as slaves and served as a physical restraint to ensure that we could not move, grow, and achieve as white people could do. When those shackles were removed and we were “free,” we were constantly reminded to “know our place,” whether through intimidation by the KKK or the police, or by impoverishment and denial of history (the Creole’s fate), or by land theft in Oklahoma or corporate land purchase in the Lowcountry. Once we became human in the eyes of the law, we did everything we could to preserve our right to exist and to move. Movement was as much an individual dream as a collective means of survival. We had to move to save our families, move to get better jobs and earn money, or move because we had this unwavering belief, despite endless oppression, that there was a different kind of beauty to be found in another zip code.
On the way back to my hotel, I realized that Los Angeles may have been the end of my trip but that there was no spiritual end to what I’d done. Whatever happened in one place, like the riots or the police beatings, was bound to happen in another. Los Angeles was the emblem of what happens when white people don’t leave us alone. Outbursts have proliferated throughout the country. The past and present exist on a continuum, and as I’d learned, there was nothing new under the sun. For black people and their desire for independence, for a true sense of home, everything is cyclical.
Now that I realized that Los Angeles was not the dream for black migrants, what was left to be done? Did everyone, like Regina and Geraldine, choose to stay, or did they, like those before them, move again? This was the last part of my investigation, and as my research pulled me closer to the present, I wanted to pose this question not to the elders but to those as young as me.
4
LOS ANGELES WASN’T the place for my own dreams. I don’t remember ever saying this to my mother, but apparently one of the reasons we decided to move back to New Jersey is because I told her that I wanted to go home. I wasn’t interested in being a child actress anymore, though I was getting steady work on commercials and had auditioned to guest-star in a television show. I had already done read-throughs and everything, but none of that mattered to me. I was tired. California was too far away from New Jersey, and I wanted to be closer to more of my family. My Uncle Freddie, who was married and had children, decided to move back because he wanted to be closer to his own family as well, though he kept on producing records once he returned home. My Uncle Rodney still lives in the Los Angeles area with his family. Though Los Angeles was everything that my mother thought it would be, the scene was not for her. She wanted to be more connected to what she knew. And she is not alone. Nowadays, the new migrants are those around my age group who are ready to take flight for new opportunities but also wish to connect with their Southern roots.
One of the youngest people I spoke with was Tyree Boyd-Pates, who is a history curator at the California African-American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles. “You can’t have black history without black people,” he tells me. In Los Angeles and many Northern cities, the black population is dwindling quickly in what many commentators have called a reverse migration. Since 1990, the Los Angeles black population has dropped by 150,000. Now black Angelenos only make up 8 percent of the city’s population, down from 13 percent.1 According to a UCLA analysis, during the 2007–09 recession, black workers in Los Angeles county lost jobs at the same rate as white workers but were less likely to find replacement work.
Black people are also getting priced out of their homes and are left with no choice but to move out. As a result, white people are returning to the black neighborhoods that they fled from during the Great Migration. Erin Aubry Kaplan of the Los Angeles Times writes, “It’s an enduring American truth: Whatever black people have can be taken away. . . . Fifty years ago, Inglewood’s white residents saw black newcomers not as neighbors but invaders, existential threats to their property values and to an ironclad social order. . . . The fact that whites are coming back . . . is a warning that my black community is, once again, irretrievably at risk.”
Because of these demographic shifts, Tyree finds it important—now more than ever—to document black people’s place in Los Angeles history. He said to me, “I think that if you look after ’92, there’s been a slip in Los Angeles’s black population because the promise of opportunity for us was unfulfilled. Black people have been unfulfilled, so we are moving to the Inland Empire, we’re moving back down to the South, we’re moving to DC, we’re moving to all of these areas where we initially fled from.” Tyree even admitted that his time in Los Angeles is running out as well.
For others, however, returning home is a family affair full of the renewal and promise that Los Angeles never provided. Misty Broady is the thirty-seven-year-old daughter of a woman from Greenville, Alabama, and a father from New Orleans. Both of her parents came to Los Angeles looking for opportunity and did find work. Her mother worked as a registered nurse, and her stepfather—whom her mother married after her former husband passed away—currently works as an attorney. Unlike many of the other people I interviewed, Misty did not grow up in South Central but rather in the affluent Pacific Palisades neighborhood. During the summers, Misty would travel to Greenville to visit family, and she observed that neighbors were more racist in Los Angeles than they were in the Deep South. The Broady family was one of the few black families in Pacific Palisades, and often their white neighbors would barely speak to her.
As an adult, Misty lived in the San Fernando Valley and worked for the City of Los Angeles in code enforcement. It was in this position where she saw firsthand the displacement problem, and the desire to leave began to take root. Homelessness was rampant. Furthermore, the rising rent prices for Misty’s apartment motivated her to seek better stability for her son. Misty’s mother was already back in Greenville, and Misty and her son soon followed her to a two-acre property that’s been in the family name for decades. Misty says of her place now, “I don’t have a lot of anxiety, and my health is in better shape.”
Others are moving back to the South, but to cities where they have no family ties, like Atlanta. Thirty-two-year-old Crys Watson has been living in Atlanta for two years as a content writer and founder of a nonprofit organization for women of color. Like Misty, Crys lived in the Valley, but her parents grew up in Compton. Crys’s paternal grandmother, a Creole woman, was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, but raised in the Compton/Long Beach area. Crys’s maternal grandfather was from Tulsa, and her maternal grandmother, a woman of Cherokee and Chickasaw heritage, was from Clearview, one of Oklahoma’s last remaining all-black towns. It was in 2015 when Crys came to Atlanta for a business trip and discovered that, unlike her family members and peers in Los Angeles, black people there were thriving instead of simply surviving. “Black people are coming by the dozens out here from California. There is no glass ceiling, because black people are creating their own way. There are people who are younger than me who have properties—black people who are about ownership so they can retire as early as possible.”
That last sentence struck me. Ownership—that’s all black people have really wanted since they gained their freedom. That desire is what unites us from region to region and coast to coast. No matter whether we fled or remained in our original lands, all we wanted was to be able to have complete autonomy in our lives and the economic power to have a decent life, and we were willing to risk death to achieve this. Ever since black people were brought to this country, we have been devising, revising, and improvising ways to nestle our families into new spaces. Movement characterizes African American life. Our communities are scattered throughout the country; they are the by-products of movement. But no matter how scattered we are, we are entangled with one another, for we took the same railroads and the same highways, chasing the same dreams. In spite of our different phenotypes, languages and dialects, and lifestyles, we were ina
dvertently united in our rebellion to strive for better.
I am the physical embodiment of that quest—the daughter of a New Jersey woman and a North Carolina man, whose roots extend to Georgia and Louisiana respectively. My own journey as laid out in this book is an homage to the family members I’ve never met, a way of saying thanks to their arduous commitment to our survival. In the end, I not only found a fuller version of myself and my family, but also my extensive links to other black families in this beautiful, terrible country that is ours. I followed black people across state lines and rivers throughout the United States with nothing more than a notebook, recorder, and a wild curiosity for the stories that echo and reverberate within our borders.
Epilogue
I WROTE THIS epilogue after thirty-one people had been massacred in two separate shootings within twenty-four hours. The second one, on August 4, 2019, happened in Dayton, Ohio; six of the nine victims were black.1 The previous day, a white man had opened fire in a Walmart in El Paso. Twenty-two people died and twenty-four were injured. John Bash, the US Attorney for the Western District of Texas, announced that his office would be treating this tragedy as a “domestic terrorism case” after the country learned that the shooter posted online that his slaughter was justified as a response to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”2
I am exhausted. I don’t know whether to tune in and risk becoming desensitized to the constant racist violence, or tune out for the sake of my mental health. The phrase “Hispanic invasion of Texas” reminds me that this is how history gets distorted in the view of the white man. It reminds me that white people think of those of us who are black and brown as invaders, rather than Americans. I think about the thousands of men, women, and children from Latin American countries who banded together into caravans and made makeshift camps along the way to make it to America, just so they could give their families a better chance in life. I thought about the families who are being separated, the children being abducted from their families by government agents, the random ICE raids, and constant reports of people dying while under the “care” of the Border Patrol, and I ask myself why people continue to migrate here when they are met with so much hardship, not to mention all the derision from President Trump. But then I remember that they move northward just as black Americans have done: to flee violence, to get better jobs, to finally be at ease—in other words, to escape conditions largely created by the United States by its export of the drug war, its deportation of gang leaders to their home countries in the early 1990s, and its century-long support of corrupt tyrants throughout Latin America to prevent revolutions and enforce neocolonialist economics.
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