Come to the Strategy and Soul Bookstore booth at the LA Times Festival of Books
Honor the work of Strategy Center Founder Professor Cynthia Hamilton
Apartheid in an American City
Every Cook Can Govern
Thinking Beyond Capitalism
April 26th and 27th Booth #269
University of Southern California
3551 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089
When the Strategy Center was formed in 1989, the first thing we did was publish Professor Cynthia Hamilton’s Apartheid in An American City—The Black Community in Los Angeles. Cynthia was one of the founders of the Strategy Center, teaching Black Studies at Cal State LA and a dynamic sociologist and community organizer. Her main conclusion is that under the brutal racism of corporate gentrification, South Central is a “community in the way” and “the land is valuable but the people are not”. This pamphlet will be available for sale at our Strategy and Soul Bookstore Booth. Imagine that at the time Cynthia wrote this prescient work South Central was 79 percent Black. Today, 35 years later, the Black Population in the Crenshaw/Leimert Park/View Park areas inside the 10th City Council District is 25 percent Black despite being one of the areas of highest Black population. The opening page is a lesson in fact driven, lyrical, and persuasive writing.
Excerpt from Apartheid in an American City
Southward, beyond the high-rise towers of downtown Los Angeles, a symmetrical grid pattern of streets is barely discernable through the usual dim haze. The streets stretching south to the Horizon, Crenshaw, Western, Normandie, Vermont, Hoover, Figueroa, Broadway, San Pedro, Main, Avalon, Central Hooper, Compton, Alameda and east lowest, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Vernon, Slauson, Florence, Manchester, Century, Imperial, El Segundo, Rosecrans, are unknown to most white Angelenos. These are the arteries of South-Central Los Angeles. Hundreds of thousands of Blacks move along these pathways daily. The fortunate go to places of employment in the Metropolitan area, but for most, the movement is circular, cyclical, and to nowhere. These streets have become the skeletal structure of another Bantustan in an American city—another defoliated community, manipulated and robbed of its vitality by the ever-present growth pressures of the urban economy.
Los Angeles has never been an integrated community. The restrictive racial covenants of the pre-war years saw to that. The Ku Klux Klan based in Compton and Long Beach sought to that. Old timers will tell you about the days when they couldn’t live South of Slauson or their reminisce about their teenage years when it was an adventure to transverse the taunting white neighborhoods that separated the Central/Jefferson part of the Black community from the Black outpost of Watts. Those native to South Central know that Blacks live south of downtown, Latinos to the east, and whites on the Westside or in the Valley.
In more than 40 years this fundamental pattern has not changed. Physically, we are not talking about a Bedford-Stuyvesant that looks like the Warsaw Ghetto, with buildings bombed out. Rather, there is a different sort of emptiness and starkness, once caused by what appears to be a systematic pattern of displacement and removal of all the things that contribute to a livable environment and a viable community. If one were to take the very long view, one would have to say that the larger society has denuded the community for the society’s own long-term profitable ends. Much like the 192 bulldozing of Black encampments on the fringe of Johannesburg or Durban, it can be argued South Central is inevitably slated by the historical process to be replaced by without a trace, cleared land ready for the development of more prosperous and probably whiter class of people. For the larger unspoken malady of affecting South Central stems from the idea that the land is valuable and the present residents are not. This Bantustan, like its counterparts in South Africa, serves now as a holding space for Blacks and Browns no longer of use to the larger economy.
Post script by Eric Mann
In We Cry Genocide, Ossie Davis worried what would happen to Black people now that they were not needed for the cotton/slave economy. The 800,000 Black people in U.S. prisons and the 200,000 women in U.S. prisons answers some of the questions that William L. Patterson, Ossie Davis, and Cynthia Hamilton ask.
The work of the Labor/Community Strategy Center—demanding 50 percent of all public and private sector jobs go to Black applicants, no police on the buses and trains, free public transportation, stop colonial education and get all police out of the schools, free, safe, and legal abortion and reproductive health serves for women, and an end to U.S. invasions of Third World nations builds on Cynthia Hamilton’s brilliant work.
EVERY COOK CAN GOVERN
Strategy and Soul Books will also be proudly carrying Cynthia’s Journey through Multiple Sclerosis and a Black woman’s determination in Every Cook Can Govern. It is also a profile in the dedication of a Black family and Cynthia’s indomitable will in the face of so many physical setbacks.
Thinking Beyond Capitalism
Cynthia Hamilton also wrote, with her collaborator, Robert Terrell, Thinking Beyond Capitalism, a Black anti-capitalist essay that ends with An African American Alternative. They go into detail about economic democracy, cooperatives, unions, land trusts, community development corporations, Housing and the Non-speculative market, and political empowerment. This is truly thinking beyond capitalism while building the revolution inside the structures of the system you eventually want to end.
We are building a resistance, building a bookstore, and building a community.
Please support our work and join the Strategy and Soul team at booth # 269 at the LA Times Festival of Books for a wonderful time.
There are also a gazillion other wonderful booths and we are honored to be part of their work.
