Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities

Black Los Angeles is the culmination of a groundbreaking research project from the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles that presents an in-depth analysis of the historical and contemporary contours of Black life in Los Angeles. Based on innovative research, the original essays are multi-disciplinary in approach and comprehensive in scope, connecting the dots between the city's racial past, present, and future. Through historical and contemporary stories, oral histories, maps, photographs, illustrations, and demographic data, we see that Black L.A. is and has always been a space of profound contradictions. Just as L.A. has come to symbolize the complexities of the early 21st century city, so too has Black L.A. come to embody the complex realities of race in so-called "colorblind" times.