| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America. By Douglas Flamming. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xviii, 467 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-520-23919-9.)

L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. By Josh Sides. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xiv, 288 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-520-23841-9.)

To many, the idea of "black Los Angeles" conjures a set of disturbing images of burning buildings, drive-by shootings, and police brutality. Two recent monographs, however, challenge these violent stereotypes, illuminating the history of a restless and diverse black community in twentieth-century Los Angeles.

Bound for Freedom, by Douglas Flamming, excavates the "local and concrete" history of black Los Angeles before World War II, recounting the effort to escape a deeply segregated and impoverished South after Reconstruction (Flamming, p. 1). Flamming conveys the profound sense of optimism that black southerners brought to Los Angeles and the conceptual dichotomy between southern tyranny and western freedom. Though Los Angeles was not the racial paradise that many sought, it did provide a "half free" environment that enabled the creation of a vital community that anchored black newcomers to the rapidly developing region (ibid., p. 13).

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