L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

THE POLITE WORD was “Negro”—long “e,” long “o.” Bill Parker couldn’t pronounce it correctly. Try as he might, Parker kept shortening his vowels, producing (in his odd, pseudo-Bostonian accent) something more like “nigra.” The effect was jarring. When black people first heard Parker speak about race, they sometimes thought he was using the slur “nigger.” When Vivian Strange, one of the few black women in the department in the early 1950s (and a fellow Roman Catholic), pointed out the chief’s pronunciation problem, Parker was embarrassed. He did his best to correct himself, even going so far as to tape himself and play back his words: nigra, nigra, neegro. Parker’s lack of familiarity with the word pointed to a larger challenge: Like many white Angelenos, Parker simply didn’t know much about black people.

Nothing in Parker’s life had prepared him to relate to African Americans. When Parker’s paternal grandfather had first arrived in the Black Hills, Deadwood had been a polyglot mining camp, filled with adventurers from Wales to Nanjing, including a number of African Americans. But by the time Parker was born in 1905, that had changed. Deadwood’s Chinatown, once the largest between San Francisco and the Mississippi River, had vanished; even the Chinese cemetery had been emptied of its bodies. The raucous, polyglot mining camp had given way to George Hearst’s more organized Homestead Mining Company. Deadwood had become white.

The Los Angeles Parker moved to in 1922 had a similar complexion, albeit on a larger scale. Of its 520,000 residents, only about 15,000 were black. Most African American residents lived east of Main Street. The oldest black neighborhoods were near downtown, south of the rail yards along Central Avenue. By the 1920s, another sizable African American community had formed in nearby Watts. Most were drawn to the area by construction jobs building two major lines of Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric streetcar system—the north-south line from downtown L.A. to Long Beach and an east-west line from Venice to Santa Ana. When the lines were completed, they simply stayed, creating a mixed black-Latino area known as Mudtown.

As the 1920s progressed, the influx of African Americans to the Watts area accelerated. In 1926, Watts was incorporated into Los Angeles, in part to prevent the emergence of an independent, majority-black city. Three years later, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of racially restrictive housing covenants designed to keep West Slauson Avenue white. African Americans were slowly being confined to the south-central area. The upside of this concentration was political power. Unlike African Americans in the Jim Crow South, black Angelenos were never denied the right to vote. As a result, as soon as the early 1920s, black voters were seen as an important voting bloc. A handful of black Political bosses soon emerged. Unfortunately, this was not a wholly positive development. These figures weren’t just ward bosses; they were also crime lords. Instead of improving Central Avenue, many used their clout to create zones of protected vice. Said one police officer in the 1930s, “I know the payoff men, I know the go-betweens; but what can I do when it’s sanctioned by the city’s politicians?”

The situation satisfied no one. Law-abiding residents felt ignored by the police. In turn, the police came to associate Central Avenue—and African Americans in general—with crime and vice. When politics demanded a crackdown, Central Avenue was an easy target. The result was a strained relationship between African American residents and the police.

As a policeman, Parker didn’t have much firsthand experience in dealing with black people. Only about 2 percent of the force was African American, a percentage that roughly reflected that of the population as a whole. Although he’d worked in the Central Division as a young policeman, his recollections of his early days as a patrolman seem largely devoid of black people. (In contrast, his stint as a sergeant in Hollenbeck in the early 1930s clearly did affect his perception of Latinos.) Had Los Angeles remained a city with only a small African American population, this might not have mattered much. But it did not. For at the same moment that Bill Parker was shipping out to join the U.S. Army, Los Angeles was becoming a major destination for African Americans.