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african american history month
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They work in Watts, Chicago, Oakland, and Harlem, go on vacation in Provincetown, MA, and return home to Otis, South Carolina (pop. 5,000). They include an Ivy League professor, an ex-CIA agent, a volatile ex-cop, a journalist, a domestic worker, an attorney, a Ph.D.
The Liberator is an early 20th-century Los Angeles African American newspaper, whose owner and editor, Jefferson Lewis Edmonds, was formerly enslaved and spent twenty years in bondage before Emancipation.
In 1920s Los Angeles, insurance companies considered black Americans to be either uninsurable or extremely high risk. As a result, black people were routinely denied coverage or charged exorbitant premiums.
Los Angeles has always been a city of rich cultural diversity, often serving as a beacon of prosperity for migrants and immigrants around the globe.
February is African American Heritage Month at the Los Angeles Public Library.
“The people from Texas took Juneteenth Day to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and other places they went.”—Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns
“You do what you think is right and let the law catch up”—Thurgood Marshall
2017 marks the hundredth anniversary of the death, at the age of 49, of Scott Joplin, one of America's first great composers, and the composer of arguably the first important American opera: Treemonisha.
In 1995, after playing in Southern California for nearly 50 years, the Los Angeles Rams left the West Coast for the Midwest, to become the St. Louis Rams. They would stay there for 21 years, winning one Super Bowl title and losing in a second, before coming back to the Southland last year.
The 1960s were a transformative period for the country with Civil Rights at the forefront. African Americans gained traction in political positions both at the state and local level, and Los Angeles was no exception. Fortunately, Rolland Curtis was around to document many of these leaders.