Race and Gentrification in LA - 4/25/2022

27-year Leimert Park resident Damien Goodmon has been labeled a “visionary” by the LA Times, recognized as one of the L.A.’s “100 Most Influential African-Americans” by the LA Wave Newspapers, chosen beside former LA Mayor Richard Riordan and actress Drew Barrymore for the 2009 “LA People” issue of LA Weekly, and is a lead subject of the award-winning documentary “Beyond the Echo of the Drum,” which premiered at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. As a nonprofit executive director he has led some of the Crenshaw and Black Los Angeles' most impactful community advocacy campaigns. As a political operative he has managed, led departments and advised electoral campaigns from the school board level up to the presidential. As an executive management consultant and systems thinker, he has built, reconstructed and managed multiple large companies and departments, including some with over 400 employees, and successfully guided complex projects and partnerships, featuring actors with divergent interests. In the public sector, Mr. Goodmon served as a policy assistant for Board District 1 of Los Angeles Unified School District, America’s second largest school district. In that capacity he was directly responsible for overseeing the largest school expansion project in the country on behalf of the Board Member, and reviewing hundreds of contracts and bids in the LAUSD’s multi-billion dollar procurement process. Mr. Goodmon has worked to secure public funding for large real estate projects, and advocate for additional investment in public infrastructure projects. In his most recent capacity, he served as a senior advisor and an initial thought leader for the creation of the affordable housing program of a global nonprofit.

Mr. Goodmon is a fifth-generation Angelino and descendant of Charles and L.M. Blodgett, who were successful Black builders and the founders of the first Black-owned bank on the West Coast, Liberty Savings and Loan. The Blodgett's built the first FHA financed housing for Black people in America, Blodgett Tract. He is also a relative of Colonel Allen Allensworth, the founder of Allensworth, California, the only town in the state to be founded, financed and governed by Black people. A graduate of L.A. Loyola High School, he has studied at the University of Washington and Harvard University programs

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a journalist and author who has been writing about race, politics, culture and identity since 1992. She contributes regularly to the opinion pages of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and in 2007 became the first African American weekly opinion columnist in the paper’s history. In addition to teaching literature and writing for Bridge, she has taught in Antioch’s MFA writing program (creative nonfiction). She is the author of two books, “Black Talk, Blue Thoughts and Walking the Color Line: Dispatches From a Black Journalista,” and “I Heart Obama.” She lives in Inglewood with several dogs and two cats.

Jane Paul teaches at Antioch University Los Angeles (AULA), in the undergraduate Urban Studies concentration, as well as in the Master of Arts in Urban Sustainability program.  She is teaching, researching, writing and developing curriculum on the solidarity economy and human rights. 

Prior to teaching, from 2007 until 2013, Jane was an environmental policy consultant, focused on the green economy, environmental  & economic justice. She led the green economy initiatives at the Green LA Coalition, a collaboration of organizations developing environmental policy and advocacy for the City of Los Angeles, regional institutions and agencies, housed at the Liberty Hill Foundation.  

Jane previously was a commissioner and Vice Chairperson on the City of Los Angeles Rent Adjustment Commission in the City of LA’s Housing and Community Investment Department, appointed by Mayor Eric Garcetti, from 2014 until 2020.  She was formerly the Chairperson of the City of Los Angeles Green Retrofit and Workforce Development Advisory Council, appointed by former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, as well as a member of the Apollo Alliance Steering Committee, the Good Food Economy and Academic Partnerships workgroups of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council.  She was previously chair of the university’s Sustainability Committee, co-author with the committee members of AULA’s Climate Action Plan, and was Chairperson of the Bridge Program’s Council.

Jane worked in in food relief efforts in Tijuana, Mexico in 2019, and in Northeast Los Angeles in 2020.  Additional volunteer projects include training, fundraising and event planning for California Calls, Schools and Communities First and LA mayoral candidate Karen Bass.

Jane received an Master of Arts in Urban Planning from the UCLA School of Public Affairs (now the Luskin School of Public Affairs), with an emphasis on community economic development; following twenty years in motion picture industry production - utilizing and developing organizational management skills in communication, human resources, scheduling, large scale project coordination and logistics. Jane has received a certificate of completion for leadership coursework at the Harvard John F Kennedy School of Government.  She received her BA in Liberal Studies from Antioch University Los Angeles.  Jane lives in Mar Vista, Los Angeles with her family.

https://medium.com/@janehpaul

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

ISBN: 9781631492853

Publication Date: 2017-05-02

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation?that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation?the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments?that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day. Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north. As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post?World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. ?The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book? (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.

Downtown Crenshaw
Downtown Crenshaw is a legacy-defining collaborative project and call for unity and self-determination. Together we can build a truly transformative project: a net positive urban village with just over 40 acres with quality retail, restaurants, and grocery options to serve us, beautiful housing affordable to us, professional office space to encourage collaboration among our business enterprises, a hotel, entertainment space, and green space, grounded in the principles of community-wealth building, matched with a neighborhood stabilization fund and featuring community ownership at every stage.