UC Berkeley

Blacks from Louisiana and its surrounding areas constituted the majority of black migrants to California in the postwar era, but the scholarship on their historical experiences as well as their influence on California’s political economy is scanty at best. Their experiences with the Great Flood of 1927, the Huey Long and New Deal eras, white land monopolies, as well as their wealth-building strategies in Protestant denominations, masonic lodges, and farming collectives — all of which helped shape their Louisiana lives — were integral to their economic expectations and strategies in the West. With a keen sense of state and municipal operations building upon their Louisiana experiences, blacks in California mobilized government resources to improve land in the municipal and economic periphery at greater speeds than these neighborhoods’ previous residents. In their quest for economic independence, they caused $40 million in damage in the Watts Uprising of 1965, built educational and health institutions, modeled social democratic programs to deliver essential services to their community, and ultimately used their southern proletarian experiences to build economically cooperative communities. Grounded in an original microanalysis of black political economies in Louisiana, I argue, also originally, that black experiences in Louisiana from 1927 – 1945 were integral to black political organizing, cooperative economics, and government partnerships in California from 1945 – 1975.