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Herbert G. Ruffin, Marne L. Campbell. Making Black Los Angeles: Class, Gender, and Community, 1850–1917., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1617–1618, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1617
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Marne L. Campbell’s Making Black Los Angeles: Class, Gender, and Community, 1850–1917, is an essential history within a rapidly growing list of histories about the African American experience in the City of Angels. It is a book-length survey that examines the early history of blacks in Los Angeles from the Spanish period of the late 1700s to 1917, when the United States’ entry into World War I triggered the Great Migration of African Americans to destinations in the urban North and the urban West.
Campbell writes in the tradition of black urban West scholars, who have been incorporating quantitative research into social history since the 1970s. In African American Los Angeles historiography, this lineage traces back to the work of Lawrence de Graaf, Lonnie Bunch, Kevin Allen Leonard, Josh Sides, Douglas Flamming, Ana-Christina Ramon, and Darnell Hunt, to name a few. Within this group, the chronology set within Campbell’s work most closely aligns with de Graaf’s article “The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890–1930” (Pacific Historical Review 39, no. 3 [1970]: 323–352), Bunch’s Black Angelenos: The Afro-American in Los Angeles, 1850–1950 (1988), and Flamming’s Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (2005). What they all have in common is that they examine the development of the early African American community in Los Angeles, interconnecting social science data with archival data and oral testimony. Where they differ is in emphasis. Unlike de Graaf and Flamming, whose emphasis was the emergence of the ghetto and black freedom in Jim Crow Los Angeles, respectively, Campbell found historical significance in the possibility of black freedom in the making of black Los Angeles before Central Avenue became its epicenter, especially through the experiences of women and working-class blacks.
