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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