Black-Owned Los Angeles

The Founders

Los Angeles was founded on September 4, 1781, by a group of settlers known as the pobladores, and more than half of them had African ancestry. Black Angelenos have been part of the city since its first day.

Biddy Mason

Biddy Mason was brought to California enslaved. In 1856 a Los Angeles judge ruled that she and her family could not be held in bondage in a free state. She worked as a nurse and midwife, delivering hundreds of babies, saved enough to buy property on Spring Street and became one of the first Black women in Los Angeles to own real estate. In 1872 the congregation that became First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles was organized in her living room, on land she later gave it. Biddy Mason Park downtown tells her story in a wall of embedded objects.

Central Avenue

From about 1920 to 1955, Central Avenue was the heart of Black Los Angeles, with jazz and rhythm and blues pouring out of its clubs. Wynton Marsalis has called it the 52nd Street of Los Angeles. The Dunbar Hotel, built in 1928, gave Black travelers a place to stay when the city's big hotels shut them out, and it became the epicenter of the city's jazz scene in the 1940s and 1950s. The Central Avenue Jazz Festival keeps that history alive.

Tom Bradley

In 1973 Tom Bradley was elected the first Black mayor of Los Angeles. He served for twenty years, until 1993, and presided over the 1984 Summer Olympics, the first to turn a profit.

Black Los Angeles Today

Leimert Park Village, with its shops on 43rd Street and Degnan Boulevard next to the Crenshaw District, is the center of historical and contemporary African American art, music and culture in Los Angeles. Black-owned restaurants, galleries, salons and brands are part of everyday Los Angeles.

Shop Black-owned businesses in Los Angeles on CashBlack.

Photo Credits

The Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue. Photo: Los Angeles, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons Leimert Plaza Park. Photo: Jengod, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons