Los Angeles’ Multiracial Activist Legacy

Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles

By Laura Pulido

While there are several case studies and books on African American, Latino, and Asian American activism in Los Angeles, there are few appraisals of the interface between these groups and their legacy for multiracial coalition building. A former member of the multiracial Labor/Community Strategy Center, USC professor Laura Pulido attempts to capture and celebrate this history in her book Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles.

Pulido’s work assesses the rich tradition of radical organizing and coalition building that shaped communities of color in South L.A., East L.A., and Little Tokyo. Using a comparative lens that seeks to weave the activist platforms of all three groups together, Pulido underscores the centrality of territorialism to race, gender, and class oppression in Los Angeles. The violent upheaval and galvanizing political influence of the Watts rebellion plays a key role in Pulido’s analysis. Pulido examines the ways in which African American struggles against disenfranchisement in Los Angeles became a model for Japanese American and Chicano activism on issues of self-determination, educational equity and greater access to living wage jobs. Disgruntled by the more “accommodationist” orientation of the civil rights movement, African American residents of South L.A. became the vanguard of an emergent black power movement, embodied by such organizations as the Black Panther Party and US. Pulido deftly illustrates how Asian American and Latino organizations such as East Wind and the Brown Berets were influenced by the revolutionary platform of the Panthers, who in turn attempted to link (not always successfully) their struggles with those of colonized peoples in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Latin America. Pulido also explores the different ways in which each group was racialized within the L.A. cultural and political landscape: foregrounding how the intensification of residential segregation and joblessness in predominantly black South L.A. during the 1950s and 60s exemplified white perceptions that African Americans were more threatening and less assimilable than either (specifically) Mexican Americans or Asian Americans. Pulido devotes a chapter to analyzing the role that gender hierarchy and patriarchy played in the ideological and tactical struggles of radical activist organizations. Noting that some of the organizations were steeped in nationalist rhetoric that framed racial liberation as freeing men of color from the “emasculating” structures of racism, she assesses the ways women of color fought their own internal battles against sexism within the Third World Left.

In examining the internecine struggles of the Panthers, East Wind and other radical groups of the sixties and seventies, Pulido highlights how difficult it often was for them to forge and maintain cross-racial alliances in the face of L.A.’s own peculiar brand of racial segregation. Yet she also underscores how this legacy of activism informed the visionary leadership and advocacy of multiracial organizations such as the Labor/Community Strategy Center and the Community Coalition in the face of the changing demographics of L.A.’s communities.

Sikivu Hutchinson

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