The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance - Softcover

Smith, R J

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9781586485214: The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1586485210 ISBN 13: 9781586485214

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2007

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This book, like a major archaeological dig, unearths a littleknown, now vanished civilization and changes how we understand history. In the 1940s, when FDR opened up the defense industry to black workers, it inspired a massive wave of black migration to a small area of Los Angeles along Central Avenue—and cultural ferment in the arts, culture, and politics. In a neighborhood densely packed with black musicians, independent labels and after hours spots, rhythm and blues was spawned. Chester Himes fathered the black detective novel and a noir sensibility. Black comics took off minstrel blackface for the first time and addressed audiences directly with socially-tinged humor. And, Smith suggests, the civil rights movement helped get its start, as the strategy of building mass movements and giving power to ghetto dwellers gained favor in opposition to the top-down strategies of the NAACP and the Urban League. Harlem's Renaissance had been driven by the intellectual elite. In L.A., a new sense of black identity arose from street level. But when the moment was over, many hopes and lives were swept away with it. Based on original research and interviews, told through an engaging narrative, this book shows convincingly that much that we take for granted today, from hip hop and slang to modern-day street fashion, all flowed from the 1940s scene along the Great Black Way.

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About the Author:

RJ Smith is a senior editor at Los Angeles Magazine. He was a columnist for The Village Voice, a senior contributing editor at Details, and a staff writer for Spin, and has written for major magazines including The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and Rolling Stone. His research for The Great Black Way was underwritten by the Getty Research Institute and by USC's Center for Transnational and Multiethnic Studies. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Smith now lives in L.A.

From Publishers Weekly:

With stunning descriptive language (and the occasional bit of cheese), Smith paints a portrait of 1940's Central Avenue in all its glory, serving as home-away-from-home for familiar figures such as Ellington, Dandridge and DuBois, as well as more obscure L.A. figures like sidewalk fortune-teller and backroom bookie Julius Juarez, L.A.'s janitorial services chief L.G. Robinson and singer Ivie Anderson. The first chapter introduces John Kinoch, a Harlem transplant and editor of the newspaper California Eagle. Kinoch and the Eagle served as a magnet for other Harlem transplants such as DuBois and Hurston, who came looking for opportunities in Hollywood; the paper also served as a medium for those speaking out against Jim Crow. Unfortunately, Smith spends too much time rehashing the big picture-national events such as A.Philip Randolph's march on Washington connects to L.A. only through the editorial support of the Eagle-which tend to detract from Smith's search for a "lost Negro Reaissance" in the L.A. scene. Though rich in detail, this story makes a more convincing justification for Smith's own fascination with black West Coast culture and history than a meaningful comparison to Harlem's groundbreaking black arts scene.
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