One Los Angeles neighborhood that didn't make it out of the 20th century is Bronzeville. It was a name given to Little Tokyo when African Americans moved into Japanese American owned homes following President Roosevelt's executive order in 1942 to relocate people of Japanese ancestry. Jobs were booming in Southern California because of the defense and aerospace industries that were supporting World War II efforts, and this attracted all Americans to California. A major obstacle, however, for African Americans who headed west to Los Angeles was housing, because most whites would not rent or sell to them. Thus, an abandoned Little Tokyo was the destination for shunned migrants.
But not all Japanese Americans followed the order for internment.
Tim Toyama and Aaron Woolfolk's play "Bronzeville" tells the fictional story of one Japanese American holdout against the internment--a college graduate who hid in his attic. The story reveals the culture clash and understanding that develops between two different and oppressed peoples when an African American family moves into the home. The family must decide what to do with the fugitive (since, as Fred Korematsu had affirmed in his Supreme Court case against the government, resisting internment was against the law) and come to terms with who has the rightful claim to the home.
Unfortunately, tickets for the remaining performances directed by Ben Guillory at The New LATC (Los Angeles Theatre Center) are sold out. But to learn more about the real Bronzeville, and the political alliances between African Americans and Japanese Americans, check out Scott Kurashige book The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles.
The UCLA PhD now teaches urban politics and Asian and African American history at the University of Michigan. Kurashige teases out the political alliances between the two ethnic groups and details the painful struggle against racism by reminding readers that Los Angeles did not intend to become a mecca of diversity. One 1920s marketing campaign to entice residents to Eagle Rock, described by Kurashige, uses racial homogeny as an incentive: "enjoying immeasurably the ideal climate that is ours, you will observe that the residents of Eagle Rock are all of the white race."
Today, such a claim of any Los Angeles neighborhood is impossible to make, but in the era of Bronzeville, it was the hard truth.
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Thanks for highlighting this play and the critical history behind it. and thanks to the Robey Theatre Co. for bringing it to life at LATC. That whites-only advertisment for Eagle Rock reminds us very sharply that the "y'all come" L.A. boosterism had a very specific color. We got diversity now, but we should not forget that it's layered over something very opposite. Great blog.