The African American West in 20th and 21st Century History and Culture

For Black professionals and their children, the democratization of the U.S. West was closely connected to affirmative action and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. These gains in higher education and in employment have been challenged in high courts since (1978) and Reagan’s presidential administration (1981)—an era that saw a conservative realignment of the U.S. political economy by reversing the growth of civil rights legislation, and rerouting federal grants from central cities, public education, and social welfare programs to corporations, the Pentagon, plutocrats, and the prison-industrial complex.

Most African American westerners that thrived during this realignment were college trained, worked in predominantly white professional environments, and lived in communities where the black poor were absent. Following the Fair Housing Act of 1968, African Americans contributed to a demographic revolution within American communities as their migration saw the Black population in the suburbs grow from 13 percent in 1960 to 34 percent in 2000. The nation’s African American population increased from 2.5 million people in 1960 to 11.9 million people by 2000.

A large percentage of this activity occurred in the Southwest and along the West Coast. To Blacks such as San Antonio’s Rae Lowry, a retired AT&T customer service manager, this movement of African Americans into the middle class and the suburbs symbolized the transformation of the U.S. into a democratic nation, because “I have my own home. Have money in the bank. I live comfortably… I am not poverty stricken. I have a car. I’m okay, [because] my dream could be what I want it to be.” Many Black westerners felt this way because for the first time they were able to exercise the choice to move into suburban communities like Converse, Live Oak and Windcrest (in San Antonio), and socialize with people with whom they felt comfortable. For Lowry, this was in her former neighborhood, adjacent to inner city East San Antonio.[1]

In booming metropolises such as San Antonio, African Americans like Rae Lowry and family came from working families that had modest middle-class aspirations and consciously looked to supplant race with class as the determinant of their life chances. This resulted in Black residents dispersing throughout western communities such as Tarrant County (Texas) and Orange County (California) as part of an intraregional urban-suburban migration from communities like South Dallas and Northwest Santa Ana to nearby Fort Worth and Fullerton, respectively.

Similar to earlier migrations, African Americans continued to have an immeasurable impact on the region’s suburban culture through education, entertainment, foodways, music, political expression, and worship. However, within western suburbs this impact has been achieved in relative isolation without Blacks forming a single Black community, except for neighborhood institutions that served the greater population. As always, these included the Black church, Black chamber of commerce, Black clubs, Black restaurants, etc.

Common was the movement of African Americans away from ghettos undergoing the gentrification process like Northwest Santa Ana, which had a Black student population peaking in the mid-1970s at almost 10 percent, only to drop to 1.5 percent in 1994. Most Black westerners, such as Santa Clara County educator Charles Gary, migrated to the region’s suburbs for education, employment opportunities in strong economies that matched their job training, lower living costs, and to live in so-called crime free and environmentally clean societies where black individuals and interculturalism were accepted by the majority population.[2]

The community economies that Black suburbanites like Gary penetrated were the quickest growing places in the postwar U.S. They rapidly became accidental suburban metropolises that survived the post-1970s deindustrialization in communities like greater San Jose, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Portland—places with postindustrial economies that had intersected suburban-industrial development with the industries of amusement, private corporations, entertainment, finance, high technology, medicine, military, petroleum, retirement, and university research. These were also places where the Black population grew much faster than general postsuburban populations, with population percentage increases that ranged from 113 in Moreno Valley to 4,315,300 persons in North Las Vegas.

Prior to the 1970s, the small population of Blacks given the opportunity to live in the suburbs, such as Inglewood’s first Black police officer, Harold P. Moret, were often steered into “ring suburbs,” or transitional housing in older declining suburbs within a particular region that extended the ghetto by artificially creating one. After the 1970s, Black migration into western suburbs such as Federal Way (Seattle) has been decided by both structural racism and the high cost of living. This Black settlement pattern was anchored by an increasingly expensive housing market, the lack of low-cost housing, high inflation, and gentrification.[3]

One of the most unfortunate and misunderstood western developments involved the physical and cultural bifurcation of formerly centralized Black communities. For the African American West post-1980s, Black flight, or the exodus of potential African American leaders and role models into the suburbs from central cities, has heightened the gulf between the Black middle class and the Black working poor and has been a major contributor to the rise of perpetually poor populations.

Black business owners in many cases had moved out, taking jobs with them. So had many Blacks whose educational and professional successes might have led others to aspire to the same. This outmigration of so many high-achievers like San Jose’s TJ Owens family often took with them the heart of their inner city communities, and in places like suburban South San Jose went from being part of a Black community to simply representing a Black community everywhere they went. The people left behind dealt with the loss as best they could, even with Blacks like the Owens continuing their race work in central city San Jose.

The street culture that developed after the deindustrialization of the inner city in the 1950s, often dissolved into “destructive survival strategies” in the 1980s, in response to generations of poverty, the void in organizing for Black empowerment, and the rise of conservatism, neoliberalism, the War on Drugs, and the military-industrial complex. In communities excluded from dynamic postsuburban growth, such as Houston's Third Ward, the ghetto was not a thing of the past—it was becoming more concentrated with poor people of color as addressed by Houston rap legends, The Geto Boys, in songs like “City Under Siege.”[4]

In the twenty-first century, African American westerners continue to work diligently towards making the region live up to their expectations of equality. Their individual pursuits for the American Dream continue to be rooted in their internal conflict of being an American citizen and not being able to entirely pursue whatever they wanted that dream to be.

Black westerners like West Las Vegas’s Ruby Duncan sometimes overcame their peculiar status by understanding who they were and forming a collective with like-minded people to turn potential destructive-survival-strategies and complacency into empowerment politics. In 1972, this led to Davis and Black welfare mothers leading the welfare rights struggle against the devitalization of Las Vegas’s poorer communities with the antipoverty program Operation Life. Under the banner that “We can do it and do it better [than the government, because we lived it]” as lobbyists they brought millions of dollars into Nevada and revitalized West Las Vegas with the community’s first daycare center, job training center, library, medical center, and senior citizen housing. This lasted until 1986, when community groups linked to the War on Poverty of the 1960s systemically went into decline due to drastic austerity cuts to social welfare programs and the systematic transfer of poverty program funds from community groups to professional organizations and elected officials.[5]

In other Black western communities their expectations of equality reminded locals of the significance of the Black western presence through annual events that were created through struggle such as Black History Month ceremonies and forums, Freedom Train, Juneteenth, and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. parade. Others empowered themselves by forming local organizations such as barber/beauty shops, Black churches, Black studies departments/programs, civil rights, professional, social, and voting coalitions.

The post-civil rights ascendance of middle-class African Americans and multiracial liberalism resulted in Los Angeles electing its first African American Mayor Tom Bradley. During his twenty years in office (1973-1993) liberal coalition politics dominated with the promise not to leave Black, Brown, and working poor South-Central and East Los Angelino’s behind during the city’s booming redevelopment—a development that was occurring throughout western cities from Honolulu to San Antonio.

By the 1980s it became apparent that western municipal governments like Los Angeles were rebuilding their downtowns in a controversial manner in which economic resources were being redistributed downward from corporate sources in hope that those on top would spark socioeconomic growth for those on the bottom—which it usually did not, especially in neighborhood economic development.

Similar to President Reagan’s trickle-down economics, neoliberal economic reforms such as Bradley’s produced a false sense of economic prosperity for most westerners and, in this example, culturally diversified Los Angeles through immigration, structural discrimination, and a highly diversified labor market that was designed to create “sharply uneven outcomes for different segments of the population.” For African American westerners those uneven outcomes also included being the main targets of War on Drugs policy, unfair prison sentencing, police chokeholds, and police shootings.[6]

For African Americans the neoliberal/neoconservative realignment of western societies, and persistent police brutality and abuse has resulted in Black youth taking their cues from the 1960s Black Arts movement to form their own “art as politics” movement through hip hop and grassroots activism.

In the West, artists such as Los Angeles’ Ice-T, NWA, Yo-Yo, Oakland's Too Short and Digital Underground, Port Arthur’s UGK (a.k.a. Underground Kingz), and Seattle’s Sir Mix-a-Lot, were in the forefront of the formation of a regional identity and business model centered on hyper-masculine authenticity and being true to the streets. This included pioneering music that entertained and addressed the lives of post-baby boomers to their communities and to an international audience, with messages centered on infrapolitics, community/”the streets,” drug trafficking/drug use, gangs, hooking up, hustling, pimping, political-economy, police abuse, and prison industrial complex.

These sounds, which came from Compton to South Dallas matched the conversations and open-air soundscapes that broke from the James Brown beat-breaks that dominated the New York hip hop scene to funk music from artists like Curtis Mayfield and Parliament-Funkadelic that dominated western radio airwaves and thus the sound of its hip hop. This movement of artists seeking empowerment, fame, wealth, and respect from the New York rap industry produced the sharpest social commentaries on the state of African America in the work-up of social crises like the Los Angeles Riots/Uprisings in albums such as Ice Cube’s Death Certificate (1991).[7]

In 2018, the peculiar paradise that is the African American West continues to intrude onto our consciousness in conflicting ways. Today’s events are reminiscent of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising that was triggered by the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers in the video recorded beating of motorist Rodney King.

Our current time is a U.S. West world heavily impacted by ethnocentrism, explosive Asian and Latino/a descendant growth, globalization, politics of fear, police violence, reality television, and borderline stagflation. In spite of this, through social media and grassroots activism black westerners are once again leading the way in creating models as to how the lives of African Americans and their allies could matter in the face of growing police harassment, economic discrimination, and white voter backlash.

They are doing this through groups that combine social media, grassroots activism and intersectional causes, such as the Black Lives Matter movement which simultaneously fights structural racism-classism-sexism-heterosexism in cyberspace, peace marches, and in the political arena. Other groups include #LaughingWhileBlack, which is a website that eleven women used to successfully settle an eleven million dollar lawsuit for being racially-and-wrongfully ejected from a wine train; and Silicon Valley DeBug, a multiracial organization led by legal workers, activists, families and friends such as San Francisco 49er Colin Kaepernick, that fight social injustice in the courts through education, community empowerment, and court watching.

Finally, similar to the New Negro, Black Arts, and Hip Hop movements of the 1920s, ‘60s, and ‘80s, Black westerners have also been fighting de facto racial discrimination through social consciousness entertainment that range from Kaepernick’s national anthem protests to Beyoncé’s “Formation” being performed at Super Bowl 50. This is the tip of a very long list of people and groups throughout the U.S. West fighting to make their idea of freedom live up to their expectations of equality. Their West is a region in which freedom is still a frontier for most African Americans.[8]

NOTES

[1] Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2012), 1-19, 59-96; Blackpast.org, “University of California Regents v. Bakke, 1978” (URL: http://www.blackpast.org/primary/university-california-regents-v-bakke-1978); Broussard, Expectations of Equality, 167-194; Flamming, African Americans in the West (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 273-283; Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 38-87; Darlene Clark Hines, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, African Americans: A Concise History—Vol. Two (New York: Pearson, 2014), 537-546, 571-586; Ray Kiely, Empire in the Age of Globalisation: US Hegemony and Neo-Liberal Disorder (London: Pluto Press, 88-119); Mack, Black Spokane, 141; Carl Husemoller Nightingale, “The Global Inner City” in Michael B. Katz, and Thomas J. Sugrue (eds.), W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 217-258; Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 201-228; and "The Forging of an African American Community on the Outskirts of Alamo City: African American Suburbanization in San Antonio, 1980-2000,” in M. Scott Sosebee, and Paul Sandul (et.al) Lone Star Suburbs: The Suburban Process in a Super-State (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 2017); Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 3-16; Whitaker, Race Work, 225-262.; Andrew Weise, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 255; Robert E. Lang, and Patrick A. Simmons, “’Boomburbs’: The Emergence of Large, Fast-Growing Suburban Cities in the United States,” Fannie Mae Foundation Census Note 06 (June 2001), 1; and “’Boomburbs’: Fast-Growing Suburban Cities,” in Bruce Katz, and Robert E. Lang (eds.), Redefining Urban and Suburban America: Evidence from Census 2000 (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 106; and Social Explorer, Census Tracts, 1970-2010; and Lawrence B. De Graaf, “African American Suburbanization in California, 1960 through 1990,” 405-449.

[2] Doreen Carvajal, “Bittersweet Nostalgia : Housing Gains Disbanded Much of Santa Ana's Black Community,” Los Angeles Times (January 30, 1994) (URL: http://articles.latimes.com/1994-01-30/local/me-17103_1_santa-ana); Selwyn Crawford and Michael E. Young, “Census Shows Black Population Expanding in Dallas-Fort Worth Suburbs,” The Dallas Morning News (February 27, 2011) (URL: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-news/20110227-census-shows-black-population-expanding-in-dallas-fort-worth-suburbs.ece); Carvajal, “Bittersweet Nostalgia; and Robert Johnson, and Charlene Riggins, “Introduction—Black Orange County, 1930-1980” in Santa Ana Preservation Society, Santa Ana History (URL: http://www.santaanahistory.com/articles/Intro-BlackOrangeCounty.html); Flamming, African Americans in the West, 299-301; and Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 207-208, 222-223.

[3] Bullard, Invisible Houston: The Black Experience in Boom and Bust (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 3-14; Sig Christenson, “S.A., Texas could gain in wake of troop cuts, BRAC,” San Antonio Express News (March 3, 2014) (URL: http://www.expressnews.com/news/local/military/article/S-A-Texas-could-gain-in-wake-of-troop-cuts-BRAC-5285609.php); John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 1-13; Mike Gallagher, “S.A. must preserve ‘Military City, USA’,” My San Antonio (July 9, 2015) (URL: http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/commentary/article/S-A-must-preserve-Military-City-USA-6376357.php); Lang and Simmons, Redefining Urban and Suburban America, 106; Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 141-199, 202-205, 212-226; and John Virtue, The Black Soldiers Who Built the Alaska Highway: A History of Four U.S. Army Regiments in the North, 1942-1943 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 6-17, 185-194. Rings suburbs are discussed in De Graaf, Seeking El Dorado, 407; Bruce D. Haynes, Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 60; Mark Gottdiener, and Ray Hutchison, The New Urban Sociology (New York: Westview Press, 2006), 205; and Sheryll Cashin, The Failures Of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005), 43. Harold P. Moret is mentioned in World Heritage Encyclopedia, “Inglewood, CA” (under “African American Influence”) (http://www.worldlibrary.org/articles/inglewood,_ca). Also see Tyrone Beason, “Seattle’s Vanishing Black Community,” The Seattle Times, May 28, 2016 (URL: http://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/seattles-vanishing-black-community/); U.S. Census Bureau, “Quickfacts: Federal Way city, Washington” (URL: http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/RHI125215/5323515); Census Viewer, “Federal Way, Washington Population: Census 2010 and 2000 Interactive Map, Demographics, Statistics, Quick Facts (URL: http://censusviewer.com/city/WA/Federal%20Way); and Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community, 208-209.

[4] For more information on bifurcation in the Black community, see Karyn R. Lacy, Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 43-71; San Francisco Chronicle, “Prosperity Still Out of Reach for Many Blacks,” March 28, 1998; and San Jose Mercury News, “Urban Racial Isolation Persists,” April 9, 1991; William Julius Wilson, The Ghetto Underclass: Social Science Perspectives (London: Sage Publications, 1993); Nightingale, “The Global Inner City,” 217-258; WGBH Educational Foundation, The Two Nations of Black America (URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/economics/; and URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/interviews/wilson.html); Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 107, 194; and Whitaker, Race Work, 267-283; and Baldassare (ed.), The Los Angeles Riot, 1-13; Lawrence Bobo, Melvin L. Oliver, James H. Johnson Jr., and Abel Jr. Valenzuela (eds.), Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000); Broussard, Expectations of Equality, 185-194; Bullard, Invisible Houston, 3-14; Carvajal, “Bittersweet Nostalgia”; Maco L. Faniel, Hip Hop in Houston: Origin & Legacy (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013), 97-130; Hunt (ed.), Black Los Angeles; The Geto Boys, "City Under Siege” in The Geto Boys (Def American/Warner Bros., 1990); Robin D.G. Kelly, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, And The Black Working Class (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 183-228; Brad “Scarface” Jordan, and Benjamin Meadows Ingram, Diary of a Madman: The Geto Boys, Life, Death, and the Roots of Southern Rap (New York: Dey Street Books, 2015)

Nightingale, “The Global Inner City,” 217-258; Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 1-8, 105-138; and Sides, L.A. City Limits, 199-205.

[5] See Broussard, Expectations of Equality, xi-xvi; and Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon, 2005), 1-6, 208-244.

[6] France Davis, Light in the Midst of Zion: A History of Black Baptists in Utah, 1892-1996 (Las Vegas, NV: Empire Publishing, 1997); Jasmine Johnson and Shaun Ossei-Owusu, “’From Fillmore to No More’: Black-Owned Business in a Transforming San Francisco” in Ingrid Banks, Gaye Johnson, George Lipsitz, Ula Taylor, Daniel Widener, and Clyde Woods (eds.), Black California Dreamin': The Crises of California’s African-American Communities (Santa Barbara, CA: UC Santa Barbara Center for Black Studies Research, 2012), 75-92; Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies; Ruffin, Uninvited Neighbors, 1-3, 201-228; “The Forging of an African American Community on the Outskirts of Alamo City”; and Whittaker, Race Work, 256-260, 278, 282; Raphael J. Sonenshein, “Coalition Building in Los Angeles: The Bradley Years and Beyond“ in De Graaf (et. al.) Seeking El Dorado, 450-474; Baldassare (ed.), The Los Angeles Riot, 1-13; Bobo (eds.), Prismatic Metropolis, 3-50. Also see Dennis Branch, “The Lack of Economic Development on the Eastside of San Antonio” (Masters Thesis: Trinity University, 1983); Tommy Calvert Jr., “Look to the Eastside for San Antonio’s Revitalization” in Rivard Report (August 23rd, 2012) (URL: http://therivardreport.com/look-to-the-eastside-for-san-antonios-revitalization/); Beverely Creamer, “Kakaako’s Building Boom,” Hawaii Business Magazine (September 2012) (URL: http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/kakaakos-building-boom/); and Bob Wise, San Antonio Express-News, “Building San Antonio; It takes a village to revitalize a community,” November 28, 2010. Quote is in Bobo (eds.), Prismatic Metropolis, 3, 3-50. Sonenshein, “Coalition Building in Los Angeles,” 450-474; and Baldassare (ed.), The Los Angeles Riot, 1-13. Laslty see Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 53-139; Baldassare (ed.), The Los Angeles Riot, 1-13; Herbert G. Ruffin, “Black Lives Matter: The Growth of a New Social Justice Movement” in Blackpast.org (URL: http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-lives-matter-growth-new-social-justice-movement); and “Welcome Back to Claremont: The Professor Who Was Almost Another Dead Black Person Because He ‘Fit the Profile’” in Conscious (March 5, 2016) (URL: http://theclaremontconscious.altervista.org/articles/campus/bienvenido-claremont-el-profesor-que-casi-se-convierte-en-otro-negro-muerto-por-que-se-parecia-un-sospecho/?doing_wp_cron=1465406952.7763149738311767578125); Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, Jamiles Lartey and Ciara McCarthy, “Young black men killed by US police at highest rate in year of 1,134 deaths” in The Guardian (URL: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/31/the-counted-police-killings-2015-young-black-men); Sonenshein, “Coalition Building in Los Angeles,” 450-474.

[7] Faniel, Hip Hop in Houston, 20-26, 97-98, 115, 137-139; Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Penguin, 129-141); Ice-T, Rhyme Pays (Hollywood, CA: Sire/Warner Bros., 1987); Ice-T and Douglas Century, Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption-from South Central to Hollywood (New York: One World/Ballantine, 2012); NWA, Straight Outta Compton (Los Angeles: Ruthless Records/Priority Records, 1988); Ogbar, Hip-Hop Revolution; Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars (New York: Basic Books, 2008); Too Short, Born to Mack (New York: Jive/RCA Records, 1987); Digital Underground, Sex Packets (New York: Tommy Boy/Eurobond Records, 1990); UGK, Too Hard to Swallow (New York: Jive Records, 1992); Sir Mix-a-Lot, Swass (Los Angeles: Def American Recordings, 1988); Harris Rosen, N.W.A—The Aftermath: Exclusive Interviews with Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, Jerry Heller, Yella & Westside Connection (Toronto, ONT: Peace! Carving, 2015); and Ice Cube, Death Certificate (Los Angeles: Priority/EMI Records, 1991).

[8] Gerald Horne, “Black Fire: ‘Riot’ and “Revolt’ in Los Angeles, 1965 and 1992” in De Graaf (et.al.), Seeking El Dorado, 380-381; and Herbert G. Ruffin II, “Black Lives Matter: The Growth of a New Social Justice Movement” in Blackpast.org (URL: http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/black-lives-matter-growth-new-social-justice-movement); Katie Rogers, “#LaughingWhileBlack Wine Train Lawsuit Is Settled” in New York Times (April 20, 2016) (URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/us/women-settle-11-million-lawsuit-with-napa-valley-wine-train.html?_r=0); Silicon Valley DeBug, “About Silicon Valley De-Bug” (URL: http://www.siliconvalleydebug.org/about/); and “Respect to Colin Kaepernick for Investing His Time, Resources, and Spirit to Communities Fighting for Justice” (November 22, 2016) (URL: http://www.siliconvalleydebug.org/articles/2016/11/22/respect-colin-kaepernick-investing-his-time-resources-and-spirit-movement); Alicia Garza, “Black Lives Matter Co-Founder to Beyonce: ‘Welcome to the Movement”” in Rolling Stone (February 11, 2016) (URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/black-lives-matter-co-founder-to-beyonce-welcome-to-the-movement-20160211); and Steve Wyche, “Colin Kaepernick explains why he sat during national anthem” in NFL.com (August 27, 2016) (URL: http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000691077/article/colin-kaepernick-explains-why-he-sat-during-national-anthem).

Black Suburbanization

Bifurcation

Black Youth Culture

Notes