What if you made it to an urban "promised land" and had nowhere decent to live? For African Americans in 1940s Los Angeles, housing was a major problem and focus of political activity. WWII caused the African American population in Los Angeles to surge throughout the 1940s, placing severe stress on a restricted housing market. This study investigates black housing politics in the 1940s in South Los Angeles, along with the ideological formation of race restrictive covenants. It was observed that black women played a central role in the mobilization of community resources to combat segregation and poor housing conditions. Black activism around housing issues was shared between a cross-section of civic, religious, and labor groups, with particular focus on black news media. Furthermore, residential segregation was identified not as an inherent pathology of racism, but as a deliberate practice to construct white ideals of residential space, and hence white identity itself.

Urban histories of race and housing currently ignore the daily conflicts over debt, occupancy, and autonomy that characterized the private market for shelter and home in the United States. The historical literature, instead, has concentrated on the role of government policy, economic restructuring, real estate professionals, white homeowners, and black activists in constructing and resisting racially segregated metropolitan real estate and mortgage markets, resulting in discriminatory access to homeownership and credit for black Americans. This study aims to construct a history not of the contested role of race in housing, but the contested role of private property in shaping the black experience of housing. Specifically, this dissertation examines seminal moments of property conflict in Black Los Angeles between 1920 and 1950, arguing that the everyday conflicts over debt, rent, eviction, and autonomy comprised the central substance of the history of black home struggle in the city. Property conflicts were the complaints, jokes, gossip, lawsuits, deals, compromises, and regular violence that parties, often of unequal power, engaged in to claim contested entitlements over land, housing, and revenue, of which contests over segregation were but one aspect of conflict. Thus, the focus on struggle in this study is both broadened and made more intimate. For working-class black Angelenos, the goal of property conflict was to make and to keep home amid urban growth and contraction, not to make a city or to enter the vaunted status of homeowner. By centering the contentious intersection of home and private property, this study consolidates the struggles of both working-class property owners and tenants into a more holistic history of black land struggle.

To uncover the history of black property conflict in Los Angeles between 1920 and 1950, this study tracked a variety of scattered records that documented such conflict: black newspapers, manuscript collections, Los Angeles City Council minutes and petitions, Los Angeles Board of Supervisors minutes, Superior Court criminal and civil lawsuits, and other city, state, and federal records. Unearthing these records reveals that the history of black land struggle in Los Angeles is the history of conflict over the terms of private property. The findings of this study force urban historians, and anyone concerned with housing policy, to rethink the central problem of race and housing in the United States. The problem is not the discriminatory access to the private property rights and neighborhoods of white America, it is instead, the inadequate structure of private property governance that forces people of unequal power to fight over the contracts stipulating the terms of home for profit.