Many communities in Los Angeles have changed their ethnic character over time. For many decades, Los Angeles was predominantly white, American-born, and Protestant until the late 20th Century. South L.A. was mostly white until the 1950s, but then became predominantly black until the 1990s, and is now mostly Latino. While the Latino community within the City of Los Angeles was once centered on the Eastside, it now extends throughout the city. The San Fernando Valley, which represented a bastion of white flight in the 1960s and provided the votes that allowed Sam Yorty to defeat the first election run by Tom Bradley, is now as ethnically diverse as the rest of the city on the other side of the Hollywood Hills.
By the end of the 20th century, some of the annexed areas began to feel cut off from the political process of the megalopolis, leading to a particularly strong secession movement in the San Fernando Valley and weaker ones in San Pedro and Hollywood. The referendums to split the city were rejected by voters in November 2002.
Population growth
The population of Los Angeles reached more than 100,000 with the 1900 census (Los Angeles Evening Express, October 1, 1900), more than a million in 1930, more than two million in 1960, and more than 3 million in 1990.
Year Population
1790 131
1800 315
1810 365
1820 650
1830 1,300
1840 2,240
1850 1,610
1860 4,385
1870 5,730
1880 11,200
1890 50,400
1900 102,500
1910 319,200
1920 576,700
1930 1,238,048
1940 1,504,277
1950 1,970,358
1960 2,479,015
1970 2,816,061
1980 2,966,850
1990 3,485,398
2000 3,694,820
Special topics in Los Angeles history
African-Americans in Los Angeles
Despite, the fact that Los Angeles is one of only U.S. major cities founded by settlers who were predominantly of African descent, the city had 2,100 Black Americans in 1900, according to census figures, and by 1920 approximately 15,000. In 1910, the city had the highest percentage of black home ownership in the nation, with more than 36 percent of the city's African-American residents owning their own homes. Black leader W. E. B. Du Bois described L.A. in 1913 as a "wonderful place" since they were less subjected to racial discrimination due to their population being small and the ongoing tensions between Anglos and Mexicans. That changed in the 1920s when restrictive covenants that enforced segregation became widespread. Blacks were mostly confined along the South Central corridor, Watts, and small enclaves in Venice and Pacoima, which received far fewer services than other areas of the city.
After WWII, the city's black population grew in substantial numbers as many continued to flee from the South for better opportunities although they remained in segregated enclaves. Even after the Supreme Court banned the legal enforcement of race-oriented restrictive covenants in the Shelley v. Kraemer case (1948), black homeownership declined severely although the population continued to increase. The city had 63,774 blacks in 1940 and by 1950, they were approximately 170,000 of the population. By 1960, Los Angeles had the fifth largest black population in the United States, larger than any city in the South.
The Watts riots of 1965 followed a minor traffic incident and lasted four days after decades of police mistreatment and other racial injustices toward blacks. Thirty-four people were killed and 1,034 injured at a cost of $40 million in property damage and looting. So many businesses burned on 103rd Street that it became known as "Charcoal Alley."
The City did help take a few steps to deal with the lack of social services for the black community, but black unemployment was relatively high following de-industrialization that closed all of the high-paying industrial jobs that opened up to black and Latino workers. Things got worse following the Watts riot – gang warfare and the drug trade reached crisis levels by the 1980s which were disproportionately high in minority communities.
By 1990, the LAPD, which had followed a para-militaristic model since Chief Parker's regime in the 1950s, became more alienated from minority communities following accusations of racial profiling. In 1992, a jury in suburban Simi Valley acquitted white Los Angeles police officers involved in the beating of a black motorist, Rodney King, the year before. After four days of rioting, more than fifty deaths, and billions of dollars of property losses, mostly in the Central City, the National Guard and the police finally regained control.
Since the 1980s, more middle-class black families have left the central core of Los Angeles to settle in other California municipalities or out of state.[67] In 1970, blacks made up 18 percent of the city's population. That percentage has dropped to 10 percent in 2010 as many continue to leave to settle elsewhere. Los Angeles still has the largest black population of any city in the Western United States.
Latinos in Los Angeles
The anti-union, open-shop heritage of the Chandlers and the Los Angeles Times continued to assure Los Angeles of a steady supply of cheap labor from Mexico and Central America throughout the 20th century. This was met by the increasing opposition of anti-immigration forces throughout the country.
A steady migration of Mexicans to California from 1910 to 1930 expanded the Mexican and Latino population in Los Angeles to 97,116 or 7.8%. In 1930, a large repatriation of 400–500,000 Mexican immigrants and their children began after the onset of the Depression, massive unempoyment, encouragement by the government of Mexico, the threat of deportation and welfare agencies willing to pay for the tickets of those leaving (some 2 million European immigrants left as well).
At the same time, the city celebrated its 150th anniversary in 1931 with a grand "fiesta de Los Angeles" featuring a blond "reina" in historic ranchera costume. By 1940 the Latino population dropped to 7.1%, but remained at sightly over 100,000.
During World War II, hostility toward Mexican-Americans took a different form, as local newspapers portrayed Chicano youths, who sometimes called themselves "pachucos" as barely civilized gangsters. Anglo servicemen attacked young Chicanos dressed in the pachuco uniform of the day: long coats with wide shoulders and pleated, high-waisted, pegged pants, or zoot suits.
In 1943, twenty-two young Chicanos were convicted of a murder of another youth at a party held at a swimming hole southeast of Los Angeles known as the "sleepy lagoon" on a warm night in August 1942; they were eventually freed after an appeal that demonstrated both their innocence and the racism of the judge conducting the trial. Today, the event is known as the Zoot Suit Riots.
In the 1990s, redistricting led to the election of Latino members of the City Council and the first Latino members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors since its inception. In 1994, California Voters passed Proposition 187, which denied undocumented immigrants and their families in California welfare, health benefits, and education.
With the growth of the Latino community, primarily immigration from Mexico, but also from Central America and South America, it is now the largest ethnic bloc in Los Angeles. By 1998, Latinos outnumbered Anglos in the city by over a million and account for 50 percent of the County's population. The Latinos are re-establishing their position and visibility in the city's economic and political life. By anyone's account, Los Angeles is once again a Latino city.
City Council member Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor in 2005, the first Latino elected to that office since the 1872.
In 2006 anti-immigration forces supported the federal The Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act (H.R. 4437). The act would make "unlawful presence" an "aggravated felony." On 25 March, a million Latinos staged La Gran Marcha on City Hall to protest the bill. It was the largest demonstration in California history. Similar protests in other cities across the country made this a turning point in the debate on immigration reform.
Asians in Los Angeles
Less than a century after the founding of Los Angeles, Chinatown was a thriving community near the downtown railroad depot. Thousands of Chinese came to northern California in the 1850s, initially to join the Gold Rush and then taking construction jobs with the railroads. They began moving south as the transcontinental railroad linked Los Angeles with the rest of the nation. The town’s continuous Chinese presence dates from 1850, when two house servants, Ah Luce and Ah Fon, appeared in the census. The Chinese population increased to 16 in 1860 and 178 in 1870. Eighty percent of the Chinese residents then were male, and most worked as launderers, cooks and vegetable peddlers.
Later, Chinese workers who helped to build the aqueduct to the Owens River and worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley spent their winters in a segregated ethnic enclave in Los Angeles. In 1871, eleven years before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a violent anti-Chinese demonstration swept through Los Angeles' Chinatown, killing Chinese residents and plundering their dry good stores, laundries and restaurants.
The labor vacuum created by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was filled by Japanese workers and, by 1910, the settlement now known as "Little Tokyo" had risen next to Chinatown.
During the years between the two world wars, Los Angeles' Asian American community also included small clusters of Korean Americans and Filipinos, the latter filling the void which followed the exclusion of the Japanese in 1924.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government authorized the evacuation and incarceration in concentration camps of all Japanese living in California irrespective of citizenship.
Since World War II, immigration from Asia and the Pacific has increased dramatically. The influx of immigrants from the Philippines, Korea, Taiwan, the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia has led to the development of identifiable enclaves such as Koreatown in the central city and Samoans in Wilmington and a Thai neighborhood in Hollywood.
Asian-Americans are now the third largest racial-ethnic group in Los Angeles, with Latinos and non-Latino whites being first and second, respectively.
All about Los Angeles:
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