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    Robin Friedman

    The breadth, energy, and diversity of American life deserves to be celebrated and should encourage Americans to appreciate their country, even when there are serious problems to be addressed. Both the vibrancy and diversity of American life, together with its issues, are at the forefront in this short photographic history, "African Americans in Los Angeles" (2010). The book is part of the Images of America Series of local American histories that has taught me a great deal about American community life. Karin Stanford, Ph.D. and the Institute for Arts and Media, California State University, Northridge, wrote this book which makes great use of photographs from the Institute's archives. Stanford is an associate professor of political science in the Pan African Studies department of Cal. State at Northridge. A photograph and annotation in the book (p. 74) describe the establishment of the Pan African Studies department in 1969 following a student protest.

    Given its short scope, the book offers an overview of the Los Angeles African American community in depth and breadth. The community's history is discussed through time beginning with the years under Spanish control, continuing through California's statehood and early migration from the South, through the Great Migration, the Civil Rights Movement and into the present. The book shows change and growth, both in the photographs and in Stanford's accompanying text. Along the way, the reader meets people including Bridger "Biddy" Mason, a slave from Mississippi, who obtained her freedom when she filed a lawsuit in California in 1856. Biddy Mason became a wealthy entrepreneur in Los Angeles and helped to found the African American Methodist Church.

    The book shows the breadth of the community over time in its many photographs and discussions of its members. Stanford shows the accomplishments of Los Angeles African Americans in all walks of life. These include government, law and medicine, religion, political activism, education, music and art, sports, business, and more. The book describes people including, for example, Tom Bradley, the city's first African American mayor, Ralph Bunche, Johnnie Cochran, the early R&B group the Flares, and many more people of great accomplishment. But equally important, the book also shows many individual private people living their lives in the context of family, friends, and careers. For example, Stanford shows a four-year old girl bedecked in cap and gown as she graduates in 1971 from Project Head Start. The same page (87) also shows two young men relaxing in their home about to enjoy an evening with family. There are photos of youngsters at birthday parties in 1954, the year of the Brown decision, of women baking donuts in 1957 in a bakery, and of a milkman delivering milk from his truck, among many other scenes of daily life.

    Stanford discusses the difficult struggle of Los Angeles African Americans to overcome discrimination. Many of the photographs show injustice from early years and the protests which arose against it. The book discusses activist groups such as the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers. It focuses on law enforcement issues involving the LAPD and its targeting of African American men. There are photographs and texts about the 1965 Watts riots and the 1992 riots that followed the acquittal of three policemen in the death of Rodney King. Several other incidents of violence are also described. Following the Watts riots, the middle class community and its businesses on Central Avenue moved away from the traditional African American part of the city, thus creating further economic difficulties and increasing the presence of gangs and crime. Most of the book focuses on the Central Avenue community but there are also many photographs of the Leimert Park area, which is the subject of its own book in the Images of America series.

    The overall tone of the book remains one of optimism and hope as African Americans in Los Angeles work towards the future. I appreciated the opportunity to join Professor Stanford in this brief photographic tour of the community through time. The book helped me think about both the large visions of American life and the sometimes halting realizations of these visions in a particular place. For those moved to do further reading on the basis of this book, a short bibliography would have been a welcome addition.

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    A bestselling memoir of a vibrant childhood spent in a thriving St. Louis African American community before “urban renewal” changed everything.

    Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek Valley, a segregated working-class neighborhood in St. Louis that was razed in 1959 to build a highway, an act of racism disguised under urban renewal as “progress.” A moving memoir of family life at a time very different from the present, The Last Children of Mill Creek chronicles the everyday lived experiences of Gibson’s large family―her seven siblings, her crafty, college-educated mother, and her hard-working father―and the friends, shop owners, church ladies, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit African American community. In Gibson’s words, “This memoir is about survival, as told from the viewpoint of a watchful young girl―a collection of decidedly universal stories that chronicle the extraordinary lives of ordinary people.”

    Winner of a Missouri Humanities award for literary achievement, The Last Children of Mill Creek is an important book for anyone interested in urban development, race, and community history―or for anyone who was once a child.

    Praise for The Last Children of Mill Creek

    2022 Missouri Author of the Year Winner

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    “This is a story borne aloft by the sheer human joy of storytelling, of memory, of tender love for a mother and a father and for a vanished time and place. It is a book that, while steadfastly refusing the American fiction of color blindness, just as steadfastly refuses to portray Black life through the single warped lens of white-induced pain.” —TheLos Angeles Review of Books
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    The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of selected North Carolina narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
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    The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who endured. Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the peculiar institution, to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. —Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress  This paperback edition of selected South Carolina narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
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    Ohio was at the heart of it all.

    During a dark time in United States history, thousands of freedom seekers traveled the Underground Railroad through Ohio. The Buckeye State hosted about half of all fugitive slave traffic of the antebellum era. A mix of Northern and Southern settlers in the state added drama to a struggle that led to major benefits for the state and the country. Unfortunately, this epic past was obscured by silence and secrecy and then distorted with misinformation and folklore—until now.

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