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The geography of Black commerce and culture: Los Angeles, California, and beyond

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The geography of Black commerce and culture: Los Angeles, California, and beyond

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1

The Geography of
Black Commerce and Culture:
Los Angeles, California, and Beyond.

Matthew Jordan Miller

B.A. in Urban Studies with Honors,
Minor in African & African-American Studies,
Stanford University
Stanford, California (2012)

Master in City Planning,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts (2014)

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy to the Graduate School
at the

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

August 2018

© 2018 Matthew Jordan Miller. All Rights Reserved.

Acknowledgements

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ABSTRACT

The Geography of Black Commerce and Culture:
Los Angeles, California, and Beyond

Matthew Jordan Miller

Few works explore the geography of Black entrepreneurs with attention to how they
claim, make, and keep spaces. This dissertation maps the spatial practices of the Black creative
class (BCC), particularly within local scenes for music, visual art, food, and fashion in Los
Angeles, by asking and answering three research questions.
1) Where do Black-owned businesses (BOBs) locate and cluster in California compared to
non-Black firms?
2) How does the Black creative class (BCC) claim and make places? What limits them?
3) How does the BCC engage with planning and urban design through creative
placemaking? Can Afro-futurism play a role in engaging them in those processes?
Mixed methods help suggest answers in three parts that correspond to the findings: foundations,
flows, and futures.
In Part I: Foundations, I specify a theoretical framework to expand our understanding of
belongingness in the city called Black urbanism: a post-disciplinary, assets-oriented approach to
studying the civics, stories, and spaces of Black life. By reframing ethnoracial identity as a multi-
dimensional resource that communities draw upon to foster value(s), Black urbanism provides a
style sheet to balance deficit-driven narratives with attention to the belongingness active in
everyday and spectacular Black lives.
In Part II: Flows, I show the four forms of belongingness that Black commerce and culture
facilitates: spatial belonging, civic belonging, cultural belonging, and cultural dis-belonging. For
spatial belonging, I re-examine agglomeration with critical attention to race using location
quotients, correlation coefficients, demography, and hot spot analysis on two secondary datasets.
Using the 2012 U.S. Survey of Business Owners, the location quotients attest that BOBs cluster
within California in statistically significant, but selective ways, particularly in the Los Angeles
region.
For the qualitative mechanisms behind Black agglomeration, I use linguistic analysis at a
regional scale and spatial/visual ethnography at a neighborhood scale to develop a case study
about a historic artistic-merchant community in South Los Angeles called Leimert Park Village.
The linguistic analysis shows how Black business signage bears witness to five naming approaches
the Black creative class marshals to communicate their cultural and spatial value proposition to
consumers and communities: 1) beauty, 2) access and belonging, 2) history and heritage, 4)
humor and creativity, and 5) sociality.
The case study adds further context in three ways. First, Leimert’s merchant community
has forged civic belonging through, over the course of fifteen years, self-organizing in a property
owner-run, nonprofit-managed Business Improvement District (BID). Together, they use this
public-private BID power to infuse African-American and artistic identity in the Village’s
vernacular landscape; thus, providing infrastructural and political benefits.
Second, the stories of Leimert’s BCC and their multi-generational efforts to foster cultural
belonging exposes four social mechanisms motivating Black agglomeration: 1) refuge from
racism, 2) congregation over segregation, 3) countering desertification, 4) preserving legacies.

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However, attempting to claim and keep space in a rapidly gentrifying district faced with multiple
forms of neighborhood change comes with risks. I lay bare five areas of dis-belonging threatening
their “Black living room” model of placemaking/place-keeping: 1) socio-spatial stratification, 2)
aversion to commercialization and branding, 3) food and retail desertification, 4) civil unrest, 5)
intergenerational lack of access to debt financing (i.e., credit, loans).
Third, in Part III: Futures, I observe how the Black property-owning entrepreneurs are
shaping transit-oriented revitalization in the district with two visioning tools: 1) film co-
production through community world-building, 2) public art planning. Together, their film
draws on four Black placemaking modes to inspire alternative living and their future outdoor
museum curates their stories along the corridor to cement their legacies for visitors and residents.
Their Afrofuturist methods practically and meaningfully honors the assets and agency that
people of color have exercised. They exemplify the normative heart of Black urbanism in a post-
integration age: facilitating ‘concrete acts of reclamation’ that demand positive differences for
their communities.

Acknowledgements

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Index of Equations, Figures, and Tables 7
Acknowledgements 10
Introduction 14
Black Cooperative Economics: A Sleeping Cultural Giant to Urban, Cultural, and American Studies 18
My Positionality in the Black Creative Class: Who Am I To Tell This Story? 23
Black Business Research: Academic, Civic, and Cultural Challenges 25
Towards Valuing Black Genius Loci: Keeping the Spirit of Black Places 28
PART I: FOUNDATIONS. 31
Chapter 1 – Black Urbanism and the Black Creative Class: 32
Gap #1: Urban Planning and Design Theories Lack Criticality on Race and Culture 33
Gap #2: Critical Race Theories Miss Space 43
Expanding Social Constructivism, Spatial Imaginaries, and the “Blues Epistemology” 45
Gap #3: Policy Studies are Too Formal, Macro, and Transactional 49
Gap #4: Economic Development Theory Misses Black Creativity and Race Consciousness 52
The Challenge of Belonging, not Tolerance 52
The Spatial Importance of Black Commerce 57
Identifying Black Creative Space: Distinct, Under-Studied Logics of Belonging 59
What This Film Demands of Urbanists 67
Defining Black urbanism: theory and practices toward Black belonging 67
Black Belonging: The Core of Black Urbanism 72
Research Questions and Methods 75
Conclusion 81
PART II: FLOWS. 82
Chapter 2: Black Urbanism as Spatial Belonging - A Critical Race Analysis of Regional Economic Cluster Theory 83
The Geography of Ethnic Entrepreneurship: An Intellectual History of Color-Blind Elitism 84
Clusters and Industrial Districts: A Missed Opportunity for People-Based Place Economic Strategy 88
Mapping from the Margins: A Critical, Asset-Driven Spatial Framework for Black American Economies 93
Redefining Ethnic Entrepreneurial Success: Incorporating Context 95
Research Question and Approach 100
Analysis 102
1. Agglomeration via Location Quotients 102
2. Descriptive Statistics on Productivity: Sales, Jobs, Pay 103
3. Statistical Tests 104
Findings 106
Finding #1: Non-White and Minority-Owned Firms Cluster Selectively 107
Finding #2: Black-Owned Firm Clusters Correlate With Benefit Other Groups 110
Finding #3: White-Owned Firms Cluster with Mixed Effects 116
Finding #4: Non-White Firm Owners Tend to Co-Cluster with Economic Productivity 125
Finding #5: Black-owned businesses cluster in majority non-Black neighborhood commercial corridors 127
Discussion 129
Interpretation and Limitations 131
Considerations for Policy and Practice: Toward Spatial-Economic Belonging 132
Future Study 135
Conclusions 136
Chapter 3 - Black Urbanism as Civic Belonging 137

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Summary 137
Overview 138
Black economic development, self-help, and BIDs: a brief neoliberal primer 139
The Greater Leimert Park Village Crenshaw Corridor Business Improvement District (BID) 141
Background: Policy and Governance 142
The BID’s Role in Spatializing Black Aesthetics 144
Discussion and Interpretations 153
Conclusion 154
Chapter 4 - Black Urbanism as Cultural Belonging 156
Summary 156
Overview 157
Part 1: Broadcasting Blackness through Business Names - Vernacular Landscapes in Los Angeles 159
Motivations: Black Cultural Capital and Authenticity in Business 159
Analytical Results 162
Interpretation 165
Theoretical Contributions: Black Business Names as Indicators of Black Placemaking 171
Limitations and Future Study 172
Part 2: Constructing and Keeping a Cluster for Black Culture in Leimert Park Village 174
The Socio-spatial Factors Driving Black Business Agglomeration in the Greater Leimert Corridor 174
What Black Agglomeration Produces: Narrating a Black Sense of Place in Leimert Park 190
Black Place-Keeping in Action 193
Conclusion 241
Chapter 5 – Dis-Belonging and the Flight of the Black Creative Class: 243
Summary 243
Overview 244
Delimiter #1: Socio-Spatial Stratification 245
“The Hills versus the Heights”: Space Framed as a Symbol of Territorial Status 246
Loyalty to Leimert Versus Hollywood: Patronage as Politics 252
Delimiter #2: Aversion to advertising, marketing, and commercialization 258
Word-of-Mouth Woes 258
Sense of Entitlement to Black Consumer Market 259
Lack of Standard Operating Procedures 262
Delimiter #3: Food and retail desertification 265
Food inaccessibility 265
Retail desertification: the slow beginnings of Art + Practice 268
Delimiter #4: Crime, unrest, and informality 274
Trauma on Display: Daily Civil Unrest at Forums 274
Defiant Informality 279
Crime for Profit 281
Gang-Related Activity 284
Delimiter #5: Credit and Capital Access 286
Redlining and Disinvestment as Economic Trauma 286
Discussion: Defining Black Economies in the Wake of Neoliberal Capitalism 291
Towards a Spectrum of Black Economies: Closing the Gap Between Everyday versus Spectacular 294
The Need for Building a New Spatial Typology 296
Conclusion 298
PART III: FUTURES. 300
Chapter 6: Black Futurism, Innovation and the Black Spatial Imagination 301
Summary 301
Overview 303
Blindness to Black Tastes in the Creative Economy 305
Acknowledgements

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A Community World-Building Intervention using Afro-futurism: Leimert Park Village’s Sankofa City 309
Imagining Destination Crenshaw: ‘Unapologetic’ Civic, Storied, and Spatial Blackness on Public Display 313
Conclusion: Towards More Colors in the Sky 321
Chapter 7: Conclusion 325
Black Urbanism as Concrete Acts of Reclamation 325
The Contributions of this Dissertation 326
Implications for Future Discourses 330
Appendices 332
Appendix A: Demographic Groups by U.S. Survey of Business Owners 332
Appendix B: Summary Table of Field Work 332
Appendix C: Select Interview Transcriptions for Chapter 4 on Cultural Belonging 334
Interview C1: Ben Caldwell, 01.25.2018. 334
Interview C2: Fred Calloway, DATE, 335
Interview C3: Sherri Franklin 336
Interview C4: James Fugate 336
Interview C5, Justin Jackson 337
Interview C6, Eric Moore 338
Interview C7, Nzingha Camara 339
Appendix D: Select Interview Transcriptions for Chapter 5 on Black Dis-Belonging 340
Interview D1: Sherri Franklin 340
Interview D2: Ben Caldwell 340
Interview D3: Kim Ramsey 340
References 342
Introduction 342
Chapter 1: Black Urbanism and the Black Creative Class 342
Chapter 2: Black Urbanism as Spatial Belonging 351
Chapter 3: Black Urbanism as Civic Belonging 357
Chapter 4: Black Urbanism as Cultural Belonging 358
Chapter 5: Dis-Belonging and the Flight of the Black Creative Class 362
Chapter 6: Black Futurism, Innovation, and Spatial Imagination 364
Conclusion 365
Endnotes 365

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Index of Equations, Figures, and Tables

Equations
Equation 1: Location Quotient Formula (U.S. Economic Development Administration) 103
Equation 2: Racially-Specific Location Quotient Formula (U.S. Economic Development Administration) 103
Equation 3: Getis-Ord Gi* Formula (ESRI, 2005) 105

Figures
Figure 1: Georgette Powell speaking about history of her father’s business in the short film “Healthy Soul Food in
West Adams” (author 2015) 15
Figure 2: Digital Memes for the “Not One Dime” Economic Boycott on Black Friday 2015 (Courtesy of Urban
Cusp) 19
Figure 3: Digital Memes for "Black December" campaign in 2015 (Courtesy of Urban Cusp) 21
Figure 4: Race, Arts, and Placemaking (RAP) Collaborative Logo Designed by Author, from RAP Newsletter No.
005 28
Figure 5: A Map of the Black Share of Occupations in the Creative Class Across the U.S. (Published by CityLab,
Data from Martin Prosperity Institute, 2016) 55
Figure 6: The Three Spheres of Black Urbanism: Civics, Stories, Space 71
Figure 7: Theorized Factors of Business Success (Ahiarah, 1993) 97
Figure 8: Distribution Histograms of Location Quotients of Black- and White-Owned Firms in California 104
Figure 9: Histogram of the Density Distribution of Minority-Owned Firms’ Location Quotients in California (U.S.
SBO 2012, author calculations) 108
Figure 10: Map of the top 5 places with Black-owned business clusters in California, all in the Los Angeles region,
with View Park-Windsor Hills highlighted in yellow as the highest in the state (U.S. SBO 2012) 111
Figure 11: Spearman's rho correlation coefficient test of Black firm clustering with Black firm economic productivity
(U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) 114
Figure 12: Spearman's rho correlation coefficient results for Black firm clusters’ relationship to non-Black firms’
economic productivity (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) 115
Figure 13: Spearman's rho correlation coefficient results for Black firm clusters’ relationship to non-Black firms’
clusters (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) 116
Figure 14: Map of Bonny Doon CDP in Santa Cruz MSA, the fourth-most clustered place for White firm owners in
California (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) 117
Figure 15: Map of Auburn Lake Trails CDP in Sacramento MSA, ranked tenth-most clustered place for White firm
owners in California (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) 118
Figure 16: A map of Lake Wildwood CDP in Truckee-Grass Valley MSA, the second-most clustered place for White
firm owners in California (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) 118
Figure 17: A map of Magalia CDP in Chico MSA, the third-most clustered place for White firm owners in
California (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) 119
Figure 18: Map of East Oakdale CDP in Modesto, the most clustered place for White firm owners in California
(U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations). 119
Figure 19: Spearman's rho correlation coefficients on White firm clustering's relationship to White firm productivity
(U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) 123
Figure 20: Spearman rho correlation coefficients for White firm clustering on non-White firm clustering (U.S. SBO
2012, author calculations) 124
Figure 21: Spearman rho's correlation coefficient for White firm clustering on non-White firm economic productivity
(U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) 125
Figure 22: Spearman rho's correlation coefficient for non-White firm clustering on non-White firm economic
productivity (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) 126
Figure 23: Getis-Ord Gi* Hot Spot Analysis of Black-Owned Businesses in Los Angeles (2016) 128
Figure 24: Mural on Alley Wall of Hot and Cool Cafe with quote by former longstanding business Venusian 144
Figure 25: The Community Invitation for the Dedication of the Sankofa Passage 146
Figure 26: Close-up of Sankofa Passage placard (Author, 2018) 147
Acknowledgements

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Figure 27: Close-up of Pan- African-themed planter on Degnan Blvd in Leimert Park as pedestrian walks (Author,
2018) 148
Figure 28: Sankofa-themed gate on entrance to Hair Studio on Leimert Blvd (Author, 2018) 149
Figure 29: Adinkra Symbol Chart and Sankofa mural on storage unit (Author, 2018) 150
Figure 30: Portrait of Black male employee of Chrysalis during mid-day (Author, 2018) 152
Figure 31: Close-up of Pan-African, tri-colored tile planter (Author, 2018) 156
Figure 32: Code Network for Beauty Category 166
Figure 33: Code Network for Belonging and Access Category 167
Figure 34: Code Network for History and Heritage Category 168
Figure 35: Code Network for Humor and Creativity Category 170
Figure 36: Code Network for Sociality Category of Business Names 171
Figure 37: Painting of African American Male Leaders Hanging in Window of framing store Gallery Plus in Leimert
Park 188
Figure 38: Picture of Barbershop with sign commemorating the passing of business owner Rodney Brimberry in
Leimert (Author, 2017) 189
Figure 39: Mid-day photoshoot with Mark the Barber on Degnan Blvd (Author, 2018) 192
Figure 40: Classical Painting of Black Jazz Players in Lobby of Regency West in Leimert (Author, August 2017) 195
Figure 41: Early evening view of the Regency West (Author, 2017) 197
Figure 42: Photograph of Vintage Car in Parking Lot Across from Regency West (Author, 2018) 200
Figure 43: The Facade of the World Stage Performance Gallery on Horace Tapscott Birthday Tribute (Author,
2018) 202
Figure 44: Pianist Bobby West Playing for Horace Tapscott Tribute 205
Figure 45: Vocalist Maia from Chicago Performing on Harp 207
Figure 46: Vocalist Dwight Trible, the Executive Director of World Stage, performing with Mekala Session and
Michael Session 208
Figure 47: Kah's Grill Fusion Menu on Night of Horace Tapscot Birthday Tribute 209
Figure 48: Annual Group Photo in front of Barbara Morrison’s Performing Arts Center for Babe and Ricky’s
Reunion (2018) 212
Figure 49: Drum Circle in Leimert Park on Martin Luther King Day 2018 for Freedom Festival 214
Figure 50: Children Drummers Practicing Their Performance (Author, December 2017) 216
Figure 51: Black Father Carrying His Sleeping Daughter Through Leimert Park During 2018 Freedom Festival 219
Figure 52: Black Woman in Dashiki Hugging Her Friend in Wheelchair as Red-headed Twin Sons Play in
Background 220
Figure 53: A Black couple carries Pan-African flags as they walk in Festival 221
Figure 54: An older Black woman dances in the middle of the Drum Circle during Freedom Festival 222
Figure 55: Anonymous, All-Black Performer Named NoFacE performing behind piano for Freedom Festival 222
Figure 56: Black Man Selling T-Shirts with Martin Luther King on the Corner of Degnan and 43
rd
Street 223
Figure 57: Kah's Grill Attracting a Crowd in front of the World Stage’s Façade during Freedom Festival 224
Figure 58: Tony of Hot and Cool Café Serving Coffee in front of Shop for Freedom Festival 224
Figure 59: Handwritten Menu of Cajun Food Truck with Lemonades Foregrounded 225
Figure 60: Black male merchant playing trumpet under his tent while selling hand-painted plates with African
women 225
Figure 61: Grey-haired Black couple recording Ben Caldwell's presentation of Film “Sankofa City” in Regency West
226
Figure 62: Black toddler hugging the leg of older brother at the Billionaire Burger Boyz Block Party 229
Figure 63: Young Black couple posing for a portrait during Block Party 230
Figure 64: Picture of KAOS Network Neon Sign on Leimert Blvd in Late Afternoon 231
Figure 65: Portrait of Ben Caldwell in Office (Author, January 2018) 232
Figure 66: Two portraits of Black creatives at the KAOS Party (Courtesy Kyle Guy – Instagram) 234
Figure 67: Leimert Park Apparel Sold at Kaos Network (Author, 2018) 235
Figure 68: A View of the Vision Theatre from a Hill in View Park (Author, 2018) 236
Figure 69: Original Logo for James Burks’ African Cultural Fair and Marketplace Framed and Preserved as a Quilt
241
Figure 70: A mansion in the predominantly upper-middle-class Black neighborhood of View Park (Author, 2018) 246
Figure 71: Selfie by DeMille Halliburton during jogging club run (Courtesy of Los angeles Times) 248

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Figure 72: The Spectacular Black Economy vis-à-vis Black Book LA Events Advertised from June 2016 to June 2017
254
Figure 73: The Facade of the Retail Spot Formerly Known as Zambezi (Author, 2018) 256
Figure 74: Closed Sign on a Monday Afternoon for Restaurant in Leimert Park 263
Figure 75: A Post-It Note Announcing for Late Opening Time for Gallery Plus 264
Figure 76: Grocery Give-Away from Simon Foundation with Commuinty Build, Inc. (Courtesy of Simon
Foundation) 266
Figure 77: Map of A+P Arts Colony and Campus Vision (Courtesy of Art + Practice) 268
Figure 78: The gate leading to the Vision Theatre that Art + Practice Wants the City of Los Angeles to Pay $37,000
to Push to the Curb 272
Figure 79: Security Guard Standing in Front of Vision Theatre in the shade (Author, 2017) 274
Figure 80: Nzika showing an older Black man her book sales in front of A+P on Sunday ArtWalk 277
Figure 81: Police cars monitoring the Freedom Festival in Leimert 281
Figure 82: Black female minister praying over South Central with the Peace Riders 285
Figure 83: A Proposed Spatial Typology for Mapping Black Commerce by Strata, Traits, and Business Types 296
Figure 84: Futuristic artistic rendering of public autonomous vehicles shuttling people around Leimert Park Village
in 2050 (Courtesy of Karl Baumann, 2016) 303
Figure 85: Collage of the Sankofa City actors, scenes, and products 309
Figure 86: Filmmaker Darol Kae presenting the Garden Leimert drawing from Author 311
Figure 87: Group Building Dioramas for Sankofa City in Kaos Network 312
Figure 88: Photo Roster of the Black Architects/Designers of Destination Crenshaw (Courtesy of Destination
Crenshaw) 316
Figure 89: Perkins+Will rendering of the Motown Museum façade designed by Zena Howard and inspired by
Marvin Gaye 317
Figure 90: Ben Caldwell reading to author a copy of the Destination Crenshaw vision as of January 2018 in Kaos
Network 318
Figure 91: Picture of a behind-the-scenes moment in producing Sankofa City film 322
Figure 92: Women in South Side of Chicago practicing community world-building with Sankofa City team 324
Figure 93: Sun-baked Leimert Park Sign Hanging Between Trees in the Village (Author, 2018) 330

Tables
Table 1: Six Human Dimensions of Place-Belongingness According to Literature .................................................. 73
Table 2: Auditing Tool for Measuring Social Influence on Built Environment ....................................................... 78
Table 3: Black Business Ownership Factors and Associated Success Indices: Individual Factors ............................. 98
Table 4: Black Business Ownership Factors and Success Indices: Group Specific and Environment-Consequent .... 99
Table 5: Top 20 places for minority firm clusters in California (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations) ................... 108
Table 6: Racial Demographics of Top 20 Places for Black Clusters in California ................................................. 112
Table 7: Top 20 places for Black firm owners in California by location quotients (U.S. SBO 2012, author
calculations)............................................................................................................................................... 113
Table 8: Top 20 Most Clustered Places of White Employer Firm Owners in California (U.S. SBO 2012, author
calculations)............................................................................................................................................... 120
Table 9: Racial Demographics of Top White Firm Clusters in California ............................................................ 121
Acknowledgements

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Acknowledgements
This dissertation, like a child, required a village to help rear it. First, I am thankful to my
committee for their world-class feedback and mentorship in various ways. Lisa Schweitzer, my
chair and academic advisor, gave golden wisdom at every stage of my program and my creative
process. No idea was too outlandish, but every idea was worth subjecting to the limits of time in
your office hours, whiteboarding out concepts. I am grateful for your patience with my
(sometimes overly) independent spirit and being able to provide some intellectual guard rails as I
pursue these post-disciplinary approaches to research. You nagged me to take full advantage of
your time while I can, as the benefit of quality feedback becomes increasingly rare as I age. To
wit, you have invested in me finding additional human resources by helping hire an editor, the
incomparable Ariel C. Jacobs, to polish and refine my thoughts.
I thank Annette Kim for being a dynamic example of finding and elevating clear,
compassionate, and data-driven narratives around cities and ethnicity at so many scales. While I
was your student back at MIT, I did not have the benefit of experiencing one-on-one research
with you until USC. This doctoral program would not have been the same had it not been for
your culture of inclusion and innovation within the Spatial Analysis Lab (SLAB). You allowed me
to be the floating SLAB-ber who had his hands in other research to round out my intellectual
capacities, especially during the early years. This floating became an asset with the collaborative,
inaugural Forward LA conference, which was influential in showing me that there is an apt
audience who want to engage with race, arts, and inclusive placemaking. You were the first
person who introduced me to Leimert Park as a potential research site at Ciclavia 2014. Our
conversations with François Bar while biking through Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd from Central

11
Avenue Historic District to land at KAOS in Leimert Park. You encouraged me to teach about
race and placemaking. When I was discouraged, you lifted me up with examples of faith and
courage that I still carry with me in this work.
I thank Elizabeth Currid-Halkett for taking time while writing your venerable book and
raising two spritely young lads to go on coffee dates. You encouraged me to be fearless, focused,
and relentless on my contribution to the academic and cultural discourse around Black creativity.
I stand on the shoulders of your contributions to the intersection of arts, culture, and
consumption in the city. You helped me, as Pierre Bourdieu would say, develop a habitus or “feel
for the game” when it comes to talking about cultural geography and economic development.
When I experienced the tragedy of losing my friend, a fellow doctoral candidate Devon Tyrone
Wade, you were a call away and read my thoughts about his loss meant.
I also thank Taj Frazier for being an academic leader with his feet to the ground in so
many ways in Los Angeles. While not on my committee at the time, your presence in Leimert
Park with filmmakers helped validate that my case selection was right-headed. I also appreciated
you connecting me to local artists and cultural entrepreneurs while providing the big picture
stories that helped me contextualize what it is I witnessed over these two-three years. Working
with you on the RAP initiative was a real lesson in how to serve a dynamic initiative that faces
outward to the community. Your thoughts on this dissertation were rooted in that empathic
empiricism.
I must also thank the invisible fifth chair in the committee: my partner, Malcolm
Kenyatta. You always listened to and helped wade through my woes, even when you did not
fully understand the nuances. At times, you were the only person pestering me to share my
nascent, novice thoughts and seek public opportunities. When I got told “no” for various
funding, you helped make sure I could go to my conference trips. While it challenging writing
Acknowledgements

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parts of this manuscript, the brownstone homes on your lively, Black, working-class block in
North Philadelphia became my both base and retreat, where I could reflect on what I had and
return to the field with renewed focus. The “Papi stores” that provided food and community let
me know that everyday Black entrepreneurs outside of Los Angeles would appreciate what I am
perfecting here. Your political campaign also taught me that having a robust economy has
implications beyond meeting daily needs. To participate fully in a democracy, our Black artists
need to succeed and shape policy and equitable governance in the city. I thank you for
connecting me to the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce’s Art and Business Council,
who connected me to Richard Florida.
Second, outside of the dissertation committee, various faculty have helped invest in my
intellectual capital by serving on my exam committees and my course assignments that funneled
into this project. I would like to thank Tridib Banerjee for his early, enthusiastic conversations
with me about how to use Los Angeles’ Black creative class as my guide for working through the
big questions I came into USC for. You gave me the space to ruminate about how development,
particularly the Amartya Sen’ configuration of it as freedom, might benefit from a critical race
analysis. You also gave me the confidence to assert my views on planning theory and urban
design, which are still developing, especially as it relates to the perception of Blackness and place
identity in media. I appreciate the openness and unpretentious advice of Paul Adler at the
Marshall School of Business, who had the intellectual curiosity and spirit of collaboration when
he decided to serve on my exam committee with mostly urban planners. Our conversations
about economic democracy and co-operatives let me know that neighborhoods and equity also
have currency in management schools. I hope your first experience with an urban planning
student was as valuable an interdisciplinary exchange as it was for me.

13
To my folks at the USC Visual Anthropology program, I would not have had the insight
to see that what I was exploring was something fundamentally humanistic about Black
businesses. Jenny Cool, you helped me develop the ability to go beyond saying “Like” or
“Dislike” an image, rather what works and does not work about it. Lanita Jacobs, in my earliest
attempts at documentary photography and filmmaking, you identified an underlying question of
what it means to be Black in business. I am continually inspired by the fullness of your presence
in faculty meetings and how you use the study of language to empower us all. Michael Bodie, I
thank you for sitting with me and geeking out about equipment purchases that still inform my
practice today!
To friends and family, I bring pieces of you with me here and everywhere. My siblings
were everyday yet spectacular voices that sharpened my critiques: verbally and visually. My
brother Aaron inspired me with an eye for being pro-Black holistically. My youngest brother
Gabriel embarked on creating a visual aesthetic for Black urbanism that will live beyond these
pages. My good friend since high school, Michael Tubbs, checked in on me and helping me
reframe what I am doing from his perspective civically. I can more clearly see how the findings
here have potential extensions in our home region, the Central Valley/Bay Area, and beyond.
Last but not least, to my community collaborators, many of whom must remain
anonymous and unnamed: I thank you for unpacking your complex lives, even the unsettling
parts. Even if you did not make the pages that follow, you allowed me to generate meaning from
your lives for the rest of the world to benefit from your triumphs and trials. I hope this
dissertation and the future studies that emerge from it reshape and reclaim the dynamics of
economic and cultural power for generations living now and to come.
Introduction
Introduction
For some, membership in the Black creative class is a choice toward economic
independence. For others, it is a calling that one fulfills. For Georgette Powell, it is a mix of both.
Georgette is a second-generation business owner of a small, three-decade-old restaurant called
Mel’s Fish Shack. It is largely a Grubhub- and takeout order-driven restaurant on the corner of
Jefferson Boulevard and Farmdale Avenue in the West Adams district of South Los Angeles.
Georgette inherited the restaurant from her late father Mel Powell, the namesake of the business,
right out of graduating from UCLA. She thought she might want to become a psychologist and
do her Ph.D., but her father fell ill, and she wanted to keep his legacy alive. Georgette had been
doing so with great resilience and success since 1997, despite being snaked out of nearly $300,000
by a shark contractor when she attempted to take over the original location (called Mel’s Fish
Market). Her business was featured in LA Weekly in 2013 and she was fortunate enough to be a

15
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part of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program. That being said, she was very
clear-eyed with me about the challenges of living and working in her location.

Figure 1: Georgette Powell speaking about history of her father’s business in the short film “Healthy Soul Food in West Adams” (author
2015)
“I know I could afford to move the business to a more profitable location,” she confessed,
“I’ve been offered spots in Venice or Culver. But I refuse to leave this community.” Georgette is
an annual participant in the Taste of Soul festival, the largest Black-run and centered festival in
Los Angeles. She makes it a point to provides jobs to the youth from the local Dorsey High
School for the day; passionate about teaching them what business ownership is about. But as a
multigenerational business, she has older residents who are now taking their grandchildren to the
store. I spent my first Thanksgiving in Los Angeles with Georgette, along with her mother in
their family’s Mid-City home. She took me on grocery store runs with her to see where she got
her tortilla wraps for my favorite menu item. She eventually showed me the original location, in
its in-limbo state, waiting to be realized.
Introduction

16
These relatively early potent experiences with her and other successful, striving Black
creative entrepreneurs gave me the determination to pursue research on how culture is a vehicle
to understand race and place. Admittedly, I thought I would explore the idea of “bootstrapping”
based off Georgette’s story: the paradox of being Black and under-resourced in business, a
supposed route to toward economic uplift. However, this idea quickly became exhausting,
limited, and felt trite as a way to frame Blackness and the cultural economy that was not true to
the diversity of Black experiences in business. In Los Angeles in particular, bootstrapping did not
seem to capture the full range of Black creatives – some of whom are not under-resourced – and
how they survive in the city.
Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles, a popular Los Angeles-based Southern
restaurant franchise founded in 1975 by Herb Hudson, is one of those businesses that has thrived
off Black culture. When I started doing filmmaking of customers at Black-owned businesses in the
USC Visual Anthropology program, I and a fellow Ph.D. student thought Roscoe’s would be a
perfect set of places to survey about why they shopped there. However, upon going to the West
Los Angeles location, that idealism was quickly undercut. Initially, a hostile security guard would
not let us talk to customers leaving or waiting and told us to go up to the Hollywood location
instead. “That would be a better crowd,” he waved off while we stood on the public sidewalk.
To our fortune, the owner of the entire Roscoe’s franchise happened to be sitting on the
bench. As we waited and talked amongst ourselves strategizing, his brother called us over after
witnessing the interaction with the security guard. After we explained our project exploring Black
business consumerism, he revealed to us that the older Black man who was on the phone next to
him – named JJ Keno – was the owner and his brother. He was open to talking about the value
of Black businesses, but his brother JJ was not so gregarious.

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“Why you wanna know why they shoppin’ here for?” JJ curtly asked, looking puzzled,
after his brother introduced us. My classmate, a white woman, looked uncomfortable answering.
I jumped in, given the fact that I suggested we film there.
“Well we want to understand how Black people consume and whether your business is
viewed as an act of community support or not,” I responded while smiling, trying to keep an
upbeat tone.
“Why can’t they just be eating here ‘cause it’s food? It ain’t ‘Black’ food. Roscoe’s food
tastes good to anybody!” he retorted defensively. He misunderstood our line of questioning, but I
completely understood his. My research premise was an intrusion on his brand.
“Well can’t it be both? I didn’t even know if you all were still Black-owned,” I retorted.
“You should ask them first if they like the food. Don’t even bring up race, man. This is an
L.A. institution? Okay. We’ve been covered by the news for years now. A destination!”
His brother felt differently and tried to coax his nerves over, a seemingly familiar reflex.
“Well JJ, come on. This is a Black-owned institution and you know, it is rare thing when anything
Black lasts.” With this heartfelt defense, Keno finally agreed to talk more, but only allowed us to
film outside.
This incident added complexity to the assumption that external structures were the sole
factors limiting Black cultural economic development. I couldn’t help but think that the shying
away from Blackness from Black people is part of why the institutions struggle to last. As I
pursued more stories through this dissertation, I uncovered more evidence of what sociologists
Michele Lamont and Karyn Lacy “boundary-work” wherein Black middle-class people find
distancing themselves from these labels beneficial for assimilation; more than I am proud to
admit. In this dissertation, Los Angeles serves as a classroom for showing that, with the proper
Introduction

18
resources, a ‘Shack’ like Georgette’s or ‘House’ like Roscoe’s can use their culture to become an
anchoring space for Black and non-Black communities, far and wide.
This argument is increasingly becoming salient as Black sociologists and cultural scholars
Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria Robinson call for a “chocolate cities approach” to
understanding Black geographies. An approach like this draws from the “wisdom of everyday
Black folk” like these neighborhood entrepreneurs and community artists, which are often
“scientific and under-utilized” (Hunter & Robinson, 2018, p. xiii). While my methodology was
not directly based on their approach, I draw on their interpretive language of ‘chocolate’ here as
a supplemental interpretive intervention with ‘Black’ because we share a commitment to forging
“new glasses for those unable to see or blinded by the lenses of ‘ghetto,’ ‘slum,’ ‘hood,’ and
‘concrete jungle’” when formalizing the “insights born from predominantly Black
neighborhoods, communities, zones, towns, cities, districts, and wards” and “the sites and sounds
Black people make when they occupy place and form communities” (Hunter & Robinson, 2018,
p.xiii). Prior attempts to map the Black creative class often illustrate their marginality in an
ongoing “urban crisis” rather than their livelihoods (Florida, 2016), which makes ‘chocolate’ an
apt pivot toward their power. I honor these subjugated chocolate voices – from the driver’s seat
of Diddy’s security detail to the chef’s Chevy pickup truck – for providing the inspiration to
persist with this dissertation, which would present many challenges in the years lying ahead.
Black Cooperative Economics: A Sleeping Cultural Giant to Urban,
Cultural, and American Studies
Though I had been exposed to urban cooperative economics at MIT through the
Economic Democracy Project at the Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), race and business

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took on extra political urgency in the early days of birthing this dissertation. On Friday,
November 27, 2015, activists from around the country had led the second year of an economic
boycott called “Blackout Black Friday” to register with corporations their frustration with police
brutality and complicity against state violence. It was dubbed #NotOneDime on social media
and memes explaining the direct action were offered on a website called Urban Cusp.

Figure 2: Digital Memes for the “Not One Dime” Economic Boycott on Black Friday 2015 (Courtesy of Urban Cusp)
Though no conclusive linkages were made to their efforts, the New York Times openly surmised
that the 2014 protests were contributing to “elusive” corporate losses (Sommer, 2014). Using
Nielsen data showing an unexplained 11% decrease in shopping, it was the biggest dip in Black
Friday shopping the country had seen in years. With Black dollars being a major source of the
consumer economy, the writing was on the wall. As a student of urban economic development at
USC, these mantras were becoming familiar. After all, Los Angeles was the birthplace of Black
Lives Matter, which had just begun in earnest the year before in reaction to Michael Brown’s
slaying in Ferguson.
Introduction

20
However, new, high-powered cultural elites were also joining in their own ways. The
collective called Blackout for Human Rights (BHR) represented this shifting mentality. The
group of artists ranged from the co-founders and directors Ryan Coogler of Marvel’s Black Panther
and Ava DuVernay of Selma to singer-actress Janelle Monae (Moonlight), John Legend and
Michael B. Jordan to talent executive-turned-production studio Charles King of Macro
(Mudbound). Black Hollywood seemed to be taking an increasingly public stance on inequality and
I wanted to understand it.
The evening of the protest, I went to a film screening that BHR hosted, as an alternative
to shopping, at the Downtown Independent. The year before, DuVernay, Coogler, and actor
David Oyelowo had given impassioned speeches about why they formed the collective. This
year, instead, it was the brains behind the operation – a young, Jewish, soft-spoken social media
guru behind the sleek marketing of the campaign and Faheem Muhammad, the college
roommate, best friend and guardian of Ryan Coogler – taking the lead on the stage. They
explained why each film was chosen and thanked the audience of about 50 people for coming.
What struck me about the #NotOneDime boycott was not simply that it shifted the
frustration of Black Americans toward an everyday act of resistance. It was how they capitalized on
it, shifting attention to the plight of Black-owned businesses through proactive behaviors. At this
film screening, BHR announced that following this weekend of Black Friday and Cyber Monday
protests, they would be launching the #BlackDecember campaign. Beyond simply refusing to
shop, they were intent to promote the alternative: shopping Black. On the website, they featured
locally curated lists of the top 50 Black-owned businesses in various major cities.

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Figure 3: Digital Memes for "Black December" campaign in 2015 (Courtesy of Urban Cusp)
However, as I attempted to participate in this campaign, I quickly realized the challenge
that has plagued many startups, nonprofits and chambers of commerce attempting to shift Black
consumerism: Black business data. The options they promoted were very limited choices. I began
to form a relationship with Faheem, whose positionality was fascinating to explore related to this
challenge. Not only was he the best friend of a famed director and co-founder, but he was very
close to a long-time advocate of Black economic independence and spiritual mentor: the
controversial Minister Louis Farrakhan. In fact, Faheem was one of the Nation of Islam’s (NOI)
most respected organizers, who helped organize the 2015 Million Man March in Washington.
He confided in me about the attempts they had been making to spur more cooperative
economics: through making their own logistic service connecting Black-owned businesses to
consumers, by making their own website. But this is hardly just an issue the NOI cared about.
Since college, Faheem had owned a private security company, which protected elite, high
net-worth individuals. For example, Faheem’s first and most enduring asset was the late Michael
Jackson; Faheem was one of those who called the hospital when the ‘King of Pop’ passed away at
his mansion and he also had to testify in support of imprisoning Jackson’s doctor. These days, his
Introduction

22
top client who he travels with and guards like a friend is Sean “P.Diddy” Combs, but Faheem
just calls him by earlier monikers “Puff.” According to Faheem, Puff is someone who, behind the
scenes, has been an advocate for Black collective economics. “Puff puts on for his people,” he
said smilingly when I interviewed him, “…and he’s been pushing Shawn to do the same.” This is
Shawn Carter aka JAY-Z he is referring to, another client that Faheem’s team services when they
come to Los Angeles, prior to their residence here now.
One way that Faheem has served as a linkage between culture and politics is brokering a
partnership between NOI and Comb’s Revolt TV to broadcast the 2015 Million Man March.
More recently, in his interview with GQ Magazine (Sullivan and Kobielski, 2018), Combs
acknowledged that he and Carter are partnering up to create an application to address the issue
of Black-owned business marketing. According to GQ, he shared:
“This is not about taking away from any other community…We’ll still go to Chinatown. We’ll still buy
Gucci!” He laughed. “But the application will make it possible for us to have an economic community. It’s
about blacks gaining economic power.” He and Jay-Z have been talking about this, he said, about moving
the race forward actively, by means of: making a lot of money and putting it back into the community… I
feel like we’ve done a lot of marching. It’s time to start charging.”
Faheem opened my mind up to this Ujamaa ethic surfacing through these boycotts,
counter-protests and, now, social ventures with superstars like Diddy. These groundtruths made
me feel that the studies I had read about Black-owned businesses were missing something
fundamentally about the nature of Black commerce and its relationship to arts and culture. The
contemporary political urgency and landscape of Black commerce was missing these voices, too.
I read articles in sociology talking about the pressure that the Black middle class tend to feel
about giving back and lend money to their own – whether familial or community. But what if
their form of “giving back” simply meant doing business where we lived and with their own
people? If so, what stops them from doing so, spatially, psychologically and socio-politically? In

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the absence of quantitative, accessible consumer data (or so it appeared to me at the time), stories
seemed the best option to understand these phenomena and craft a research question.
My Positionality in the Black Creative Class: Who Am I To Tell This
Story?
Any reflective practitioner must critically consider their relationship to those who they
study and seek to serve. Thus, I have tried to answer as fully as possible the question that
anthropologists began to pose in the 1980s: who am I to do this work? I submit to you that this
dissertation is a reflection of my positionality, even when I am not making that explicit. My
multitude of identities strategically positioned me to provide the data, analysis, and discoveries
that follow.
1. African-American/Black
2. Cis-gendered male
3. Able-bodied (i.e., mentally stable, skilled)
4. Queer
5. Highly educated
6. First-generation college student
7. Young adult
8. Middle-class
9. Visual artist
10. Judeo-Christian
All of these identities helped a wide-variety of subjects become convinced to talk to me as I
collected stories through interviews and photography.
Throughout this process, because of my relative lack of sustained professional experience
as a then-24-year old embarking on this doctoral project, I questioned one particular identity: Am
I a member of the creative class? It is clearer now that I very much am. However, when I first heard
the idea, it sounded like something a title I would grow into, which I have. I can say more
confidently today than ever before that I am a third-generation photographer, a creative gene
Introduction

24
that my paternal grandfather and my maternal grandmother inculcated into my habitus in ways I
am only just beginning to appreciate.
This dissertation certainly benefitted from that sensibility. While I began learning
filmmaking as a hobby back at the Cambridge Community Television Center during my time at
MIT for my master’s degree, I did not begin to learn how to craft lasting images until I got USC.
Specifically, I was able to deconstruct the language of photography through coursework at the
Visual Anthropology Program, a partnership at USC School of Cinematic Arts and Department
of Anthropology.
However, I still struggled with the term “creative.” Innovation was talked about in circles
I grew up in – mainly my undergraduate years at Stanford, the heart of Silicon Valley, and
graduate years at MIT, the fictive alma mater of Tony Stark aka Iron Man – as primarily White
and Asian “tech bros.” Oddly, it did not help when I interned for Van Jones’ nonprofit Yes We
Code! in the summer before starting at USC. Thus, as I settled into LA, I felt the insecurity of my
identity crises and imposter syndrome setting in. But I took it on head first by deciding to put my
camera to use and practice the art of photography and storytelling. While I was not able to get an
additional certification, the act of taking classes and being in a filmic community through the
Visual Anthropology program helped give me the language, exposure, and validation I needed to
orient my creative identity.
Further, as I read more about the creative class, I realized that it was actually much more
about human capital in general and it was fairly agnostic about which ones. Thus, doctors and
lawyers and engineers could also share this identity with designers and artists and performers. I
happen to occupy multiple of those ‘creative’ checkboxes, which enable me to access a wide
variety of participants willing to share their experiences. However, these assets did not spare me
from the variety of challenges endemic to this work.

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Black Business Research: Academic, Civic, and Cultural Challenges
As a budding critical race theorist, I believe in the power of testimony to shape our
understanding of how race and racism shape everyday life. Undoubtedly, Los Angeles has been a
surreal place to ask questions around race, culture, and place. No other place could have allowed
me to produce what follows in this dissertation. Thus, I must practice what I profess and apply
that to how I discuss what went into translating this project to the winding pages that lie before
you now. Throughout the four years of my doctoral career, my commitment to exploring how
softer powers like art, culture, and design function alongside harder powers like land, capital, and
labor was riddled with challenges. These challenges were both external and internal to the
academic, civic, and artistic communities I have worked in. My positionality saved me from
succumbing to many of the pitfalls, but some of them still linger and must be addressed.
Academically, the research was firstly challenged by a lack of local, affordable, verified
data or publications on this subject at the level of geography necessary to move the discourse
forward. Few professors or policy wonks could point me to comprehensive data. As you read, you
will see how I have creatively garnered appropriate data sources, but the scope of the work could
have been much larger if I had the resources to use more universal, definitive sources such as
Dun and Bradstreet’s Database. I cannot count how many dead-end attempts I made at that.
Ironically, toward the end of my dissertation process, I learned that one such effort has
been brewing. One of my former students invited me to be a part of the Milken Institute’s
Partnership for Lending to Underserved Minorities (PLUM). PLUM is a national effort by the
Milken Institute, with its global reach and influence on public-private thought leaders, to harness
both local and cross-sectoral resources toward the issue of Black and Hispanic business success.
Apparently, they had been doing this in private since 2016. This lack of academic synergy with
Introduction

26
civic leaders had consequences on my ability to collect more cross-ethnic data. Certain partners
have purchased data in bulk and are currently deliberating on how best to deploy for supporting
under-served businesses. Both I and the businesses I have studied would have benefitted from
that.
Another academic challenge was when I requested more funding to amplify my strategies,
this dissertation’s premise and approach was challenged by funding bodies about the importance
of this work, despite my empirical defense. You cannot defend what you cannot measure, but
what about when someone does not want to measure it? While admirable and audacious,
mapping the geography of Black cultural economies could only lead to “stylized facts,” as one
reviewer called my research design. As I recalibrated my value proposition in different years,
other funding bodies would critique the scope, calling it too much of a reach and not strategically
in line with their diversity-oriented agenda.
More locally, it was challenged by my inability to garner financial support from working
in a university whose research funding sources did not allow me to dive as deeply as I initially
dreamed into this subject. I am grateful for the leadership of Annette Kim and her mentorship in
finessing my work around spatial ethnography, but it has taken years to even accomplish that.
Doing this work outside of a management or business school required me to creatively massage
the economic development scholarship to assert that this work belonged within an urban
planning and development program. Again, the structure of the discipline has much to do with
this. It tends to better support housing and transportation research, which I struggled to anchor
this topic around. Thus, much of this dissertation had to be done in addition to working on
projects for other people. One could only imagine if the political economy had aligned sooner
what I could have found.

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Within the subset of Black academia, I thought I would find others who claimed to care
theoretically. In October 2017, when I presented at the Black Geographies Symposium at UC
Berkeley, I had the pleasure to be on a panel about the “capaciousness” of Black liberation. I
thought this was a safe space to envision a new path forward to explore the power of Black
culture in space. I advocated for exploring the Black imagination through resident-driven
placemaking – which manifests in valuable ways from murals, to Black businesses, to community
designs and films. Yet, I was met with off-hand questions about bombings that happened in
1985, before I was even born, and the specter of gentrification due to artists locating in inner-city
neighborhoods. This fear-mongering was emotionally paralyzing and, frankly, embittering. In
fact, the only person who asked me a question about how to manifest these approaches was a
white teacher based in Savannah, Georgia, who wanted to help her students do murals.
When I gently confronted fellow panelists about their odd indifference to hopeful
alternatives, I was met with relativist shoulder-shrugging and falsely equivocations. The
difference in our approaches, they said, were unimportant, but my “Afro-optimist” approach was
less resonant than “Afro-pessimist” ones. In other words, Black pain was more useful than Black
hope. You know it’s a dangerous time when people call you an optimist as an insult.
Last, certain cultural barriers stood in the way of arriving at a credible research agenda
for this project and the larger vision that it launches. Like JJ Keno of Roscoe’s, the potential
subjects I wanted to study were either: 1) skeptical of being studied, especially if they were a
struggling small business and knew I was from USC, 2) disinterested in being labeled as a “Black”
business, especially if they were a successful medium enterprise with a large non-Black customer
base, or 3) unconvinced that Black businesses can do anything to anchor their communities.
These were probably the most painful to resist.
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28
Towards Valuing Black Genius Loci: Keeping the Spirit of Black Places
As you can imagine, this journey has led me to be very guarded about who I shared this
work with. However, I believe now is the time to assume collective responsibility for this dearth
and dysfunction within the urban planning, studies, and design disciplines when it comes to the
phenomenology of Black places. Thankfully, I got a sense of this marginality turning a corner
when, in late 2016, the USC Office of the Provost’s Collaborative Fund awarded a three-year
grant to lead more work on Race, Arts, and Urban Placemaking. We now call this RAP.

Figure 4: Race, Arts, and Placemaking (RAP) Collaborative Logo Designed by Author, from RAP Newsletter No. 005
The Co-Principal Investigators François Bar, Annette Kim, Robeson Taj Frazier, Josh
Kun, and Holly Willis all welcomed my contributions in shaping how USC RAP could feel and
function. To my great pleasure, I am not alone in feeling as though there is a great need to
understand how race and ethnicity should (and do) shape the flavor of placemaking efforts.
Mapping and narrating Black businesses fits squarely within this nexus.

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However, I know this need goes beyond the walls of USC. While writing this dissertation,
I had the chance to participate and serve my country as a Panelist for the National Endowment
for the Arts (NEA). I joined a host of reviewers from the around the country evaluating the
nature and potential fundability of creative placemaking proposals for Our Town 2018-19. They
ranged from cities to local nonprofits to advocacy organizations putting forward their best take at
what a vibrant place could look like. Naturally, the places that seemed to be in socioeconomically
precarious and non-White dominant demographics fascinated me the most. Negotiating the
scores of NEA Our Town applicants felt like a national test case in what people’s conceptions of
racial equity meant (i.e., Would cultural equity be more involvement from people of color? What does
meaningful involvement look like? Services oriented toward those populations? Co-signs from organizations that
represent those groups?).
I was fortunate to have leaders in public art who had realistic notions about what creative
equitable development requires. Yet, a few times, I had to urge them to re-evaluate the urgency
of arts organizations that centered quality artists (regardless of their local attachment) versus
placemakers who genuinely saw art as a means and an end to greater community cohesion and
pride. While I am not allowed to talk explicitly about these cases, I can say that there were not
very many Black-led arts organizations that made it to this round in my panel who ranked highly
on artistic excellence and livability contributions. At the time I write this, I am not sure which, if
any, will ultimately receive funding by the NEA’s Arts Council.
Simultaneously, internationally, there is a conversation happening about how “social
practice” artists like Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, and Rick Lowe can facilitate racially-
conscious urban beautification. With two being MacArthur “Genius” Fellows and one the U.S.
selection for the Whitney Biennial in Venice, Italy, they are reaching international acclaim doing
this kind of work. Yet, it seems that the broader ecosystem of thought leadership has not caught
Introduction

30
up yet to its value, despite decades-long work making a difference in Black communities without
the spotlight. This resistance must be broken down.
With this local and national backdrop, this dissertation aims to carve out new intellectual
spaces with a different meaning and set of aims than just emphasizing Black pain, which most of
social science and civic leadership does. It aims to understand the essence and spirit of Black
places, through the eyes of Black creative entrepreneurs, heretofore dubbed the “Black creative
class,” that can be tapped into for its self-determined empowerment. This asset-based approach
challenges our dominant modes of seeing Black space, not just in the United States, but globally.
In coming chapters, I will outline how research on the role of Black creatives in
community economic development – as both community builders and conscious capitalists –
could hit a productive reset on neighborhood studies. There is a burning need to disrupt the
hegemonic politics of taste, which has placed Black space and sensibilities at the bottom of the
hierarchy in the art worlds for too long. While hard powers like credit and loans are important,
there is need to de-stigmatize Black cultural assets to shift the logic that undergirds industries like
tourism, which could provide necessary foot traffic to Black business owners. Shifting these
narratives while reconstructing the institutionalized perceptions of Black places will better root
our notions of cultural vitality and ultimately create more durable neighborhoods. That faith in a
prosperous, enduring future for Black geographies, as evidenced by this dissertation, cannot
shake.

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PART I: FOUNDATIONS.

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Chapter 1 – Black Urbanism and the Black
Creative Class:
A Theoretical Framework for Mapping Geographies of Culture,
Commerce, and Belonging

In the middle of Los Angeles, the Black creative class has forged historic roots in Leimert
Park Village since the late 1960s. For the past 50 years, it has offered what I label (and explain in
later chapters) a model of placemaking as ‘the Black living room of Los Angeles’ – a gracious
host, offering a plurality of purposes and potentialities that it shows depending on what time of
day, which day of the week, and who is coming. This Black creative world in Leimert Park is a
multi-faceted set of scenes: anchored, constructed, and guarded by distinct individuals,
collections of people, people types, and social climates. Yet, places like these are often not in the
dominant imaginary of a “cool city” or a “creative district” strategy. With exception to recent
works such as Kellie Jones’ historical account in South of Pico (2017), Leimert Park Village does
not penetrate the literature on what a creative space could or should look like.
Black communities with vibrant, yet under-invested hubs of cultural entrepreneurs (i.e.,
Harlem, Atlanta, Detroit) also rarely figure into the discourse or academic literature on how to
cultivate a creative economy from the ground up. We must step back and understand how these
places get lost in the intellectual and political milieu of creative and cultural economic
development. To do that and reset our lenses, I argue that a theory of Black urbanism needs to
exist because of four gaps and weaknesses in the literature and popular understanding of Black
creativity, Black life, and Black futures. In this chapter, I make the case for the need of this theory
based on four critiques.
1. Urban planning and design theory is 1) too color-blind and 2) too top-down.
2. Critical race theory is not applied enough to space and place.
3. Policy studies are too macro in scale.

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4. Economic development theory is too deficit-driven on Black creative economies, if
addressed at all.
Black urbanism is the post-disciplinary response required to not only see Black space, creativity,
and life anew, but offer potential for other non-dominant groups to measure and appreciate their
multifaceted assets in the city.
Overall, there are several theoretical precedents in urban studies and design for Black
urbanism that help calibrate its philosophical and pragmatic aims, particularly around belonging.
Black urbanism integrates and reconfigures theories in four areas: 1) critical legal studies (critical
race theory, intersectionality), 2) human geography (Black feminist geography, critical
cartography), 3) planning (advocacy planning), and 4) urban design (creative placemaking,
everyday urbanism). Black urbanism, through centering the lens of the Black urban experience,
offers a theoretical framework to explore several themes that traverse these knowledge centers,
including how:
1. Everyday and spectacular Black lives reflect a convergence of law, race, and spatial
power,
2. Everyday and spectacular Black peoples channel their own processes to create unique
places worth preserving and keeping, and
3. Everyday and spectacular Black spaces are assets that matter to the urban economy,
environment, and quality of life.
I arrive at these themes through the interlocution of specific theories with an eye for how they
miss these themes, and thus, under-explore a politics of and a place for Black belonging.
Gap #1: Urban Planning and Design Theories Lack Criticality on Race
and Culture
Black urbanism is a theoretical framework that centers Black creative space to better
render cities that reflect and preserve the distinctive desires, needs, histories, and legacies of
populations often erased in planning. To their credit, many planners, designers, and urbanists

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understand the economic challenge of racism, especially at the federal level. Due to the legal
battles of the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent economic activism of the Black Power
Movements, planners and policymakers have responded with federal programs and policies that
have occupied much of the historical and contemporary literature. This bipartisan tradition
includes the Lyndon Johnson’s HUD Model Cities Program and Economic Opportunity Act of
1968 to create Community Development Corporations (CDCs), Nixon’s Minority Business
Development Agency (MBDA) and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), Clinton’s US
Treasury Department's Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund, the
Obama Administration’s Promise Neighborhoods and Promise Zones, and even Trump’s
Investment Opportunity Zones in 2017. This has created policy incentives for local planners to
align their development priorities around, should they decide to.
Arguably, antipoverty Marxian scholars have influenced urban theory and practice more
than antiracism for the last 50 years, though some have pushed hard for sociocultural
considerations. The work of French philosopher and “critic of everyday life” sociologist Henri
Lefebvre (1996) on the production of social space and “right to the city” has rooted this tradition
since the late 1960s. It has greatly impacted the next generation of spatial justice scholars (i.e.,
Edward Soja, David Harvey). Specifically, Lefebvre recalibrated Marx’s idea of alienation –
putting forth dis-alienation as a goal of urban studies to aid the social realm that is routinely
fragmented according to a capitalist logic (Harvey, 1991). Alienation is at once a set of
disembodiments – economic, social, political, ideological, philosophical (Lefebvre, 1991). He saw
capitalism, not racism, as the force that has facilitated alienation in all forms of social life, from
conceptualization of money to metaphysics.
Critiques of these Lefebvrean interpretations of the city are too reflective of systemic
disempowerment without regard for human agency. Manuel Castells, proponent of a “network

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society” (2011), argued for considering the resistance of oppressed groups within their class,
which can affect the “spatial structure.” He writes:
“…space is not, contrary to what others may say, a reflection of society but one of society’s fundamental
material dimensions… Therefore spatial forms…will be produced by human action...[It] will express and
perform the interest of the dominant class…[but] At the same time, spatial forms will also be marked by
resistance from exploited classes, oppressed subjects, and abused women….Finally from time to time social
movements will arise, challenging the meaning of spatial structure and therefore attempting new functions
and forms.” (Castells, 1983, p. 312).
His social productivist critique, while valuable, still omits culture as a variable motivating action.
Race (and the grotesque -isms that emerge from it) is a cultural lens, not just a social class. This
color-blind, side stepping of race has consequences that we need to deconstruct.
One major consequence is that professions driven by analyzing space (i.e., geography,
urban studies, planning, architecture) are tinged with shallow, incomplete considerations of race
– both within their ranks and within their studies. Despite a fervent interest in combating the ills
of neoliberal capitalism and a consistently subtle interest in racial diversity, urban and city
planning scholarship has never fully engaged with how they are related. I argue that “racial
capitalism” is that connection, a mature but missing idea debated in political science and legal
theory (Kelley, 2017; Leong, 2013; Robinson, 1983; Robinson, 2000). Racial capitalism has
evolved over time from being an idea referring to the way in which South Africa structured its
apartheid economy to, thanks to the late political economist Cedric Robinson, a general view of
the capitalism. Robinson’s Black Marxism (1983) helped us see that capitalist economies flowered
in tandem with racism because its success became dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism,
and genocide. Currently, critical race thinkers like legal scholar Nancy Leong who argues in the
Harvard Law Review that racial capitalism is “the process of deriving social and economic value
from the racial identity of another person” which “is a longstanding, common, and deeply
problematic practice” (2013, p. 2152). For instance, Leong’s thinking around “fake diversity” in
branding Photoshopped faces of color in promotional materials (2014) is useful to planners and

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spatial theorists as a form of racial capitalism and to the theoretical project of Black urbanism. It
exposes the tokenism that phenotypical “numerical diversity” efforts, which planning institutions
invoke when they engage with their histories of excluding communities of color. Leong’s starting
place is that of “a world obsessed with diversity” which has grown to see racial diversity as a
“social good.” She contrasts the work of older CRT ideas like “whiteness as property” (Harris,
1993) to the present-day, where non-whiteness is “valued differently and more ambiguously”
through a variety of mechanisms. A CRT-informed urbanism must work to engage with the
cultures of non-white people themselves, not just their cultural identity.
Placemaking is Ahistorical, Depoliticized, and Short-Term: Toward Place-Keeping
As a planner with geographic training, I see the nexus of Black culture and urban design
and planning as underdeveloped, especially as the profession increasingly turns community and
economic development toward “creative placemaking” interventions that have the potential to
address the needs for the arts. Economic geographer Ann Markusen and arts consultant Anne
Gadwa characterize creative placemaking as a process wherein “partners… shape the physical
and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities”
with the goal being to “bring diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired”
(Markusen & Gadwa, 2010a; Markusen & Gadwa, 2010b). Creative placemaking also aims to
“animate public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, (and) improves local
business viability and public safety,” but with arts and culture at its core. Creative placemaking
might confront what Roberto Bedoya called the “politics of dis-belonging” that critical race
theory shows us is mundanely plaguing our cities. The spaces where Black people highly
concentrate, by circumstance or by choice, are regularly either stigmatized as ghettos or
demeaned as self-segregated balkanization (Sampson & Raudenbush, 2004).

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But the idea of ‘making’ has cultural baggage. With the enduring normality of racial
stigma in view, it can sound like a euphemism for attempts to “revitalize” places with non-White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) peoples. While these terms are benign without this historical
context, they can still function as gateways for rendering a place as missing existing value, a “no
there there” as one writer wrote infamously about Oakland (Rhomberg, 2004). But value is a
matter of taste and power.
The term ‘keeping’ gets closer to what we should mean in terms of building on existing
spatial-cultural assets. Place-keeping is a newer term that has been used in the land management
context to buttress what short-term placemaking projects offer. Nicola Dempsey and Harry
Smith define it as:
“long-term and responsive management which ensures that the social, environmental, and economic quality
and benefits a place brings can be enjoyed by present and future generations” (Dempsey & Smith,
2014).
They recognize there are six dimensions that need to be marshalled for place-keeping to
work: politics, governance, partnerships, funding, connecting design and management, and
evaluation. Thus, place-keeping is a locally-felt but multi-scalar exercise in public and private
property rights oriented toward preserving space for present users.
Place-keeping has grown in its usage in the social context, particularly in pro-resistance
and anti-gentrification discourses, not simply the environmental preservation context. Roberto
Bedoya is one of the most salient voices about how this relates to creative placemaking. On a
national call with the nonprofit U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (UDAC), Bedoya adds:
“‘Creative Placekeeping’ has come into usage as a counter to Placemaking. Placekeeping has been described
as the active care and maintenance of a place and its social fabric by the people who live and work there. It
is not just preserving buildings but keeping the cultural memories associated with a locale alive, while
supporting the ability of local people to maintain their way of life as they choose.”
Bedoya, thus, joins a lineage of artists calling for consideration of the everyday, quotidian
character of a place. However, Bedoya is primarily a practitioner, not a scholar. Therefore, he

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may fail to realize that some of the ways he advocates pushing for greater racial and ethnic
consideration does this on the backs of others who came before him.
First, Bedoya’s concept of Latino improvisation - rasquachification - is a Chicano version of
a scholarly idea also found in African American studies. In his article for Creative Time
advocating for creative place-keeping, the only written work from him on the concept, Bedoya
(2014) writes:
“Rasquachification messes with the white spatial imaginary and offers up another symbolic culture—
combinatory, used and reused…Tomás Ybarra-Frausto describes Rasquache as a Chicano aesthetic with
an ‘attitude rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability yet mindful of stance and style.’
Evoking rasquachismo from an artist’s perspective, Amalia Mesa-Bains calls it ‘the capacity to hold life
together with bits of string, old coffee cans, and broken mirrors in a dazzling gesture of aesthetic bravado.”
While he acknowledges George Lipsitz’ work on spatial imaginaries, Bedoya’s positioning of a
unique Chicano tradition fails to see how similar they are to Black aesthetic traditions. For
example, it smudges on the work of Black scholar Fred Moten. His classic In The Break: The
Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003) argued, using examples from avant-garde music
(especially jazz) and literature in the 1950s and 60s. Ironically, this is the same period that
Chicano scholar Ybarra-Frausto, the author Bedoya cites, wrote about. In fairness, Ybarra-
Frausto’s theory of “rasquache” was put forward in 1989 while Moten came in 2003.
Nonetheless, this lack of solidarity and awareness in the field of ethnic studies about how
improvisation is a shared cultural logic among people of color leaves room for Bedoya and the
cited authors to coalesce more. Outside of this intellectual territorialism, the similarity is actually
heartening because it shows that Blackness is a resource that knows no racial bounds in terms of
its underlying logics. While the cultural outputs are unique, the norms are transmutable and
shared among people of color.
Second, Bedoya has not integrated the work of James Rojas, a longtime advocate for
“Latino urbanism.” As an architect and urban designer, he has done more to articulate the

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specific ways that Latinos use space in valuable ways than any other urbanist in recent memory.
From his MIT thesis on “enacted environments,”
1
where he describes his predominantly Latino
hometown of East Los Angeles’ use of space, Rojas has articulated specific spatial formats that
are culturally responsive and ubiquitous for the planning community to respect. These include
specific, one might say rasquache-inspired ways, of using fences, front porches, front yards,
murals, shrines, store signs, and street vendors. It is befuddling why Bedoya’s conceptualization
of placekeeping did not point to these examples. More systematically is the work of David R.
Diaz and Rodolfo D. Torres with their edited volume Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning,
Policy, and Redevelopment (2012), which curates work on “aesthetic belonging” such as the case
study on the “Latinization” of Union City, New Jersey by Johana Londoño.
This is where my contribution via Black urbanism must be strategic, intersectional, and
allied across identity groups, unlike the previous generation of intellectuals. There are many types
of belongingness in cities. Because there are Black people in every continent and nationality,
black identities span across and interface with multiple types of urbanisms and spaces: Afro-Asian
urbanism, Afro-Native American urbanism, Afro-Polynesian urbanism, Afro-Hawaiian
urbanism, and the list could go on for the specific domains of ethnicities that make up these
broad racial categories. In Black urbanism, we argue that Black place-keeping efforts look to
specific and shared forms of Black contributions to augment the futures of people of color. This
would require designers and planners around Black space to either become fluent in African &
African-American Studies and/or partnering with organizations fluent in the cultural history of
Black peoples broadly and situationally.
Urbanism Often Misses Color and Culture
“Culture is the software of cities just as the built environment is its hardware.”

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– Peter Calthorpe, American Planning Association (April 2014)

Urbanism is a word widely-used in city planning and design. Though defined as early as
1938 as simply “a way of life” by sociologist Louis Wirth, planning still suffers from a narrow
application of urbanism to the logics of space (zones, codes, boundaries, districts), rather than
fluid, human interactions with spaces. Thus, urbanism is often the word of choice to unite
planning theories around place-based assets (i.e., designs, amenities, architectures). Landscape
architects and designers have produced the most widely-cited models for urban and regional
development. These include ecological and landscape urbanism (Spirn, 1984; Spirn, 2011;
Waldheim & Waldheim, 2016), new urbanism (Katz, 2003), everyday urbanism (Crawford, 2008)
and most recently “plural urbanism” (Ryan, 2017). Urbanism from these perspectives often take
a Gods-eye view of the entirety of a city-region over long periods of time.
Black urbanism draws its emphasis on the cultural urbanism, which was defined in the 2014
issue of the American Planning Association as “celebrating our regional differences and building
environments that foster community interaction” (Meyer, 2014). The cultural approach to
urbanism draws much of its critique of the dominant mode of urban design and economic
development – i.e., hiring external consultants to produce a rather inauthentic, globally
homogenous place identities. Thus, not only is the ethnoracial subjectivity of urban life in need of
focus but also the general local culture. Thankfully, organizations like the Project for Public
Spaces and other smaller nonprofits are re-localizing the way in which the built environment is
programmed.

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Expanding Everyday Urbanism’s Focus on the Quotidian
Margaret Crawford, the ostensible leader of everyday urbanists, frames “urbanism” as a
broader “discursive” term that is encompassing of the professionalized disciplines of “urban
design, urban planning, urban studies, urban theory… as well as others into a multidimensional
consideration of the city” in the “aesthetic, intellectual, physical, social, political, economic, and
experiential” domains (Crawford, 2008, p. 6). In doing this, she asserts a quotidian-focused
urbanism – one that values the “timeless, humble, repetitive natural rhythms of life.” Thus,
everyday urbanism escapes one of the twin downfalls of most urban design (lack of localism). Yet,
it is important that we do not fall into the other trap of abstracting too much that we lose the
specificity of human users. Much of architecture proliferates (usually Eurocentric “traditional”)
plug-and-go models of space. As Crawford pointed out about Raymond Ledrut’s observations
about the problems with urbanism: if we are too focused on the life “of” cities and not the life
“in” cities, we risk trying to coax the city into becoming some modernist abstraction of beautiful
or efficient, rather than a “work of life” (Crawford, 2008, p. 8; Ledrut, 1986, p. 133).
In the extant design literature, difference is seen as an inconvenience at best and, at worst,
a threat to a spatial universalism that CRT teaches us has never truly existed for all racial groups
in America. Crawford acknowledges a “social geography” of the city according to the different
peoples in it might reveal the multiplicities within cities. Ideally, this complexity should increase
our appreciation of the sophistication of an organic city.
However, this calls into question: what is everyday space, really? We can understand these
spaces in multiple ways. “The intersections between an individual or defined group and the rest
of the city” is one way to understand everyday space, but also “the site of multiple social and
economic transactions, where multiple experiences accumulate in a single location” (Crawford,

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2008, p. 8). Everyday space needs to respected, if nothing else because of its utility in bringing
individuals and groups together in the mundanity of city life.
Michel De Certeau and Henri Lefebvre also provide some helpful perspective on this.
They distinguish between “strategies” and “tactics”, the former being a rationalist political,
economic, spatial focus on proper urbanisms often exerted by the powerful and the latter being
an emotive, creative, “cleverly chosen” fleeting “incursion” as part of the everyday “art of the
weak” (Crawford, 2008, p. 9). Tactical practices have been taken up with a curious level of
awareness by so-called “guerilla urbanists” who seek to rapidly intervene in the quality of a place
with interventions like parklets, pop-up dinners and retail, among other interventions. I think this
well-meaning guerilla urbanism often misses how people do these tactics with varying
consequences (i.e., the perception of disorder or vagrancy for Black and Brown bodies). But we
can refine these communicative issues later; the premise is in the right direction about the art of
city living.
If everyday urbanism is such a transformative way to approach urban studies, why Black
urbanism? It is important to note that in the seminal Everyday Urbanism book, only four chapters
dealt with individual ethnic groups’ everyday urbanisms. Only a single article – Walter Hood’s
“Urban Diaries” which derives from his 21-year old book – dealt with how Black Americans
practice their daily lives in West Oakland. The other three dealt with Latino urbanism. Perhaps
this is because of the Californian focus of the book, which rightfully skews it toward the Latinx
population. Hood’s contributions with advocating for a new “improvisational” method of design
practice based on acknowledging the “indigenous patterns and issues visible to the neighborhood
and to outsiders” builds on other Black and Latinx/Chicano scholars who center that tradition
(Hood, 2008, p.153). Regardless, this lone voice is problematic. Black urbanism is more than the
20-year old observations of a single (prescient) professor and practitioner. We need a wider

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assortment of eyes and voices focused on the everyday and articulating what Black urbanism is,
has, should and could be. If not, we risk a myopic view of what Blackness means in space.
Lastly, the self-proclaimed goal of everyday urbanism is to shift power by engaging in a
“dialogic” way with design and planning practices, a mode of textual analysis that Mikhail
Bakhtin characterized as a “constant interaction between meanings, all of which can potentially
influence the others” (Crawford, 2008, p. 8). Black urbanism can contribute to that goal. It is
critical to achieving “dialogization” wherein we can relativize, de-privilege, and make aware the
users of unitary words, discourses, languages, or cultures. Professional experts, usually middle-
class and white, who acquire abstract meanings for the city and its people run the risk of
becoming disconnected from the organic differences and distinctions that make those cities
valuable and meaningful to the users. Black urbanism is an attempt to help facilitate that shift of
power toward those that Henri Lefebvre often saw as “victims of everyday life” – women, people
of color, youth, elderly, and any other vulnerable group. Blackness is a helpful frame for helping
everyday urbanism achieve more cultural liberation. What could the productive links between them be?
That is a question that will constantly be relevant.
Gap #2: Critical Race Theories Miss Space
Critical race theory (CRT) is a sub-field of critical legal studies that focuses on how law
upholds racial hierarchies through different mechanisms and pathways. Yet, CRT has not been
fully weaved into the fabric of urban studies and city planning. I argue that CRT is overly
dominant on focusing on people without fully considering place. This limits its analytical power
to policy domains where space is not the explicit subject of racialized inquiry (i.e., affirmative

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action in higher education), which prevents urban studies of highly racialized spatial injustices
(i.e., housing covenants, bank lending) from taking advantage of its perspective.
Emerging in the mid-1970s with scholars like Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Alan
Freeman, and Richard Delgado, CRT holds together set of sociological theories informed by
critical legal theory, feminism, and civil rights movements within six principles.
1. Racism is “ordinary, not aberrational” and thus, when we adopt color-blind
conceptions of equality, it can only treat the most blatant forms of racism (Delgado &
Stefanic, 2001, p. 2).
2. Material determinism and “interest convergence” allow a system of white-
over-color ascendancy to serve both psychic and material purposes. In other words,
racism advances the interest of both white elites materially and working-class white
people psychologically (Bell, 1980; Delgado, 2006; Alemán & Alemán, 2010).
3. Social construction: race is a product of social thought and relations. Our
physiological similarities only account for a small portion of genetic endowment;
higher-order traits (personality, intelligence, etc.) are the larger vehicles of differences
within the narrower categories of color-based differences.
4. The phenomena of “differential racialization” has many consequences: society
racializes different minority groups at different times. One way to see this is how
society treats certain immigrant groups according to labor market needs (for ex: the
Japanese).
5. “Intersectionality” and anti-essentialism: no person has a single, easily stated
unitary identity. Delgado (2001) gives the example of a white feminist who may be
Jewish, working class or a single mother. Everyone has potentially conflicting,
overlapping identities, loyalties and allegiances. Thus, some of us experience race
differently (Crenshaw, 1991).
6. Stories and “counter-stories” matter in illustrating how these complex dynamics
manifest themselves (and can be un-manifested as well). CRT scholars call this the
“voice of color thesis” – the experiences with oppression by people of color who are
writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counter-parts things
whites are unlikely to know (Delgado & Stefanic, 2001, p. 6). The “legal storytelling”
movement spawns from this presumption of the competence of minorities to recount
and apply their experiences with law’s “master narratives” over their lives.
CRT covers a great deal of ground to understand how racism is prevalent, sophisticated, and
embodied.
However, it does not benefit from the recent work of political scientist Clarissa Rile
Hayward who finds that race is more than identity-driven stories in her book How Americans Make
Race: Stories, Institutions, and Space (2013). Throughout the 20
th
century, she finds that racial identity

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(and racism) is not just produced through stories, but institutionalized “by building them into
norms, laws…that give social actors incentives to perform their identities” and “objectifying
identity stories: by quite literally building them into material forms…that social actors experience
with their bodies” (Hayward, 2013, p. 2).
With this understanding, it is imperative that CRT gains a place-driven grasp on how
racial identity is reproduced in the landscape of everyday life, not just in people-driven
institutional decisions. Black urbanism aims to provide that by arguing that neighborhoods are
the containers of everyday life upon which all of the CRT principles can be observed, resisted,
and transformed. They are the unit of analysis through which the principle of racial realism can
be realized through police patrolling, for instance (Wickes, 2013). Neighborhoods are where
“interest-convergence” takes place through gentrification of Black and brown communities that
may have wanted amenities and upgrading, but now can no longer afford to pay what their new
elite, hipster white neighbors can. They contain the spaces where people express their public
identities and construct their realities through culture.
Expanding Social Constructivism, Spatial Imaginaries, and the “Blues
Epistemology”
Understanding what space means as it is converted into place requires that we include
more than social productivist views of space, which over-privilege the historical-structural factors
of land, labor, capital, and means of production. Black urbanism urges its disciplinary
components to engage with Black geographies as a field of study and practice that goes beyond
detailing processes of Black death, but sincerely evaluates and validates the assets within these
communities. Clyde A. Woods provides much-needed praxis for this with his method of “blues
epistemology” put forth in his seminal text Development Arrested: Race, Power and the Blues in the

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Mississippi Delta (1998). Blues epistemology is Woods way of helping us discover the
counternarratives in space by leaning into the spaces where music that documented these terrors
were voiced.
Woods questioned the social productivist ways of depicting and declaring
disempowerment over Black life. He noted that even well-intentioned researchers, equipped with
a well-formed critical analysis about race and power, can play a role in declaring the death of
communities and people: “Have we become academic coroners?” he asked before going:
“Have the tools of theory, method, instruction, and social responsibility become so rusted that they can only
be used for autopsies? Does our research in any way reflect the experiences, viewpoints, and needs of the
residents of these dying communities? On the other hand, is the patient really dead? What role are scholars
playing in this social triage?” (Woods, 2002, p. 63).
Using a blues epistemology, CRT and Black urbanism could engage more meaningfully with
social constructivism (how spatial realities are perceived and constructed) as well as the affective
and emotive qualities of places. Cultural anthropologist Setha Low’s recent book Spatializing
Culture (2016) helps outline ways in which we can frame, track, and understand how space is
converted to places. Black geography and urbanism would benefit from this type of cultural
focus, especially at neighborhood scales.
Most urban theory, for example, ignores that race is more than racism. Yet, race has
become an embodied practice than sustains various valuable cultural identities, depending on
how they are applied (Rose-Markus & Moya, 2011). That paradox partly explains why whiteness
can maintain itself despite economic disincentives for most white people. Nonetheless, race is
often reduced to these economic disinvestment terms and is not well-understood culturally in
urban professions. But what if race and ethnicity can also be understood as a resource that can be
used to shape space productively for people of color, in either benign or baneful ways?
This is an internal struggle as much as it is external, which creates room for scholars to help
clarify the intent behind Black placemaking efforts. Bell hooks challenges Black Americans and

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their allies with piercing questions such as: Are these spaces “breaking through the walls of denial
which hide the depth of black self-hatred, inner anguish, and unreconciled pain?” We can measure
the character of Black placemaking according to a few principles hooks imparts such as historical
reverence (i.e., “relearn the past, understand her culture and history, affirm her ancestors”) and
collectivism (i.e., “assume responsibility for helping other black folks to decolonize their minds”)
(hooks, 1992, p. 19).
The unequal, segregated conditions that have produced Blackness has created marginalities
that stratify the American experience. It has also generated limitless alternative realities that
produce valuable distinctions. Hooks writes that “the politics of racial domination have necessarily
created a black reality that is distinctly different from that of whites, and from that location has
emerged a distinct black culture” (hooks, 1992, p. 12). For economic development purposes, the
growing consumer interest by white, non-Black, and even non-American people in participating
in Black American culture is heartening. The following chapter will expound on ways to continue
building aesthetic-cultural forms that could generate spatial value. However, capitalist interests can
curtail the full discursive power of Black people by curtailing their expressions to make the
dominant owner class (white Americans) feel comfortable. That is the danger of centering cultural
value on cosmopolitanism
2
rather than Blackness itself.
What if placemakers embraced Black marginality as an invitation to innovate beyond the
bounds of the white gaze, even incrementally? In the edited book Out There (Ferguson, 1990),
hooks argues for “marginality as a site of resistance”, not simply suffering and painting Black
space as lacking integration into often white-controlled centers. Like urban theorists, she also
conceives of space as a social product, but uses the idea of the margins to invoke a more
emancipatory stance. She conceives of the “margins as a homeplace, a place of radical openness”
wherein neglected peoples can forge their own definition of freedom and “much more than a site

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of deprivation” (Wilkins, 2007, p. 101; hooks, 1990). Indeed, the center is defined by there being
a margin. hooks argues that we should accept the binary center/margin metaphor because the
margins have emancipatory potentialities that resist spatial-cultural domination. It is important to
note that this hooksian configuration is different from Lefebvre. hooks is the one to provide us
with a sense that maybe Black people should build right where they are because the city includes
the margins, not just the center.
The idea of Black belonging turns the field of Black geographies toward constructivist-
affective realities, not just material-class based ones. This would enable us to understand a couple
of aspects relevant for transforming urban design and planning processes. First, the constructivist-
affective lens could elevate the idea and the role of “the spatial imaginary,” a geographical
application of the longstanding philosophical idea. However, the American studies scholar
George Lipsitz has used it to theorize how space is racialized and race is spatialized (Lipsitz,
2006; Lipsitz, 2011).
Racialized space works differently among different cultural groups who are socialized
around different “spatial imaginaries”, a term in social constructs of reality. Using case studies,
Lipsitz contrasts the white “spatial imaginary” with the Black spatial imaginary, with attention to
Black women’s plights. The white spatial imaginary privileges exclusivity, selfishness, and
homogeneity through capitalist logics of exchange-value. According to his work, it has the
unintended consequence of both producing and distinguishing the Black spatial imaginations:
Yet in response, [Black people] have developed innovative ways of augmenting the use values of the spaces
they inhabit. They pool resources, exchange services, and appropriate private and public spaces for novel
purposes. These practices have been vital to the survival of Black people and Black communities, but they
also offer a model of democratic citizenship to everyone. Relegated to neighborhoods where zoning, policing,
and investment practices make it impossible for them to control the exchange value of their property, ghetto
residents have learned how to turn segregation into congregation. They have augmented the use value of their
neighborhoods by relying on each other for bartered services and goods, by mobilizing collectively for better
city services, by establishing businesses geared to a local ethnic clientele, and by using the commonalities of
race and class as a basis for building pan-neighborhood alliances with residents of similar neighborhoods to

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increase the responsibility, power, and accountability of local government. Black neighborhoods generate a
spatial imaginary that favors public cooperation in solving public problems” (Lipsitz, 2011, p. 56).
African Americans have adapted to white supremacy by acting according to the exact opposite
logics to survive it. Black places (especially ghettos) channel use-value through inclusivity,
sociality, and public problem-solving should be protected. However, I question the causality
within Lipsitz’ Black spatial imaginary concept: is it really a reaction to whiteness? Or is it a more
deeply rooted spatial culture that survived hostile colonization? The next chapter addresses these
questions as well.
Gap #3: Policy Studies are Too Formal, Macro, and Transactional
Advocacy planning is a precedent for Black urbanism and its discontents and related
terms (i.e., inclusive urbanism, equitable development, social planning). However, I question how
much it focuses on the culture before attempting to fix its politics. Advocacy planners have
operated on mostly the regional and city scale and mostly focus on collaboration, “(principled)
conflict,” and community building in order facilitate and accomplish the political, economic, and
spatial aims of equity. The range of policies are well-documented on the websites of organizations
like PolicyLink with its program for “All-In Cities”, which publish a toolkit that include: ban the
box hiring, financial empowerment centers, housing trust funds, joint use, living wage, quality
preschool for low-income children, subsidy accountability, cradle-to-career systems, health in all
policies, incentivized savings accounts, legal assistance to prevent evictions, local and targeted
hiring, racial equity impact assessments, summer youth employment, equitable contracting and
procurement, healthy food business development, inclusionary zoning, limiting police use of
force, minimum wage, reforming inequitable court fines and fees, worker-owned cooperatives

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(PolicyLink, accessed 2017). These policies are aimed to create “racial economic inclusion and
economic growth.”
However, in my view, equitable development is a strategy-oriented form of inclusive
urbanism. It is a complementary way of thinking about similar issues of inclusion and prosperity
that Black/inclusive urbanists do, but at a different scale. Scale is something that is much
different with most equitable development thinkers compared to what we aim to do with
Black/inclusive urbanism. They think about broader patterns and structures that affect lives and
national, replicable regional approaches to facilitating equity, which is helpful. However, by
speaking to the political, economic, and spatial rationality actors in our federal and state
governments, it lacks a clear articulation of the role of planning/urbanism with culture.
This is where Everyday Urbanism helps us bridge the gap with equitable development
toward Black urbanism. You could say Black urbanism is aimed toward everyday equities and
intimate revolutions. By focusing on tactics of the micro-scale of homes, blocks, districts, corridors,
and neighborhoods, Black/inclusive urbanism complements the macro-scales (i.e., cities, regions,
mega-regions, states, nations) that the equitable development advocates in the PolicyLink variety
work on.
To be clear, we need both. Black inclusive urbanism is the fine-toothed comb that uses
tactics that prevent the knotting often endemic to wide-toothed comb strategies of equitable
development. Both are needed to fashion and braid together the organic, natural needs of people
of color. But I am arguing that the everyday life – the mundane and quotidian – should be the
starting place from which we calibrate what people in certain places need from it. Coming to
enforce an equitable development policy, while it might advance the precautionary principle,
might be an inefficient use of human resources.

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Black urbanism, with its ethnographic and environmental focus, could facilitate a set of
ranked preferences, should the users of spaces desire some political interventions. The general
patterns probably point toward yes, but you want to know why and you need to know when and
how. There might be a need not addressed by these set of “all-in cities” toolkit that an
unintended consequence is that we actually create blind spots and self-satisfaction with an
imported definition of equity. Each place deserves to be seen and heard before being touched.
This touches on a missing link in the equitable development literature: what is the quality
of Black places? How do we as planners, developers, designers, and urbanists guide that
redevelopment with grace? I guarantee you that it won’t come from simply providing people
more money. We need a fundamental shift in our moral compass to examine the humanity of
Black people. While this argument might come off as kumbaya to policy wonks, to humanists, the
regional equity/advocacy planning approach often comes off as shallow and utilitarian. It sends a
message of Black life is valuable because growth and prosperity, not because of inherent value.
Black everyday urbanism challenges us to expect more of our civics, stories, and spaces.
We risk being too heavy-handed, intrusive, and overly engineered by relying on policy to
shape Black social fabrics. There are internal dynamics that stand examination, surely, that
would not need policy to protect or change but preserve. Consider an example from the
experiences of my advisor Professor Annette Kim. She studied street vending in Ho Chi Minh
City (HCMC) for nearly a decade from 1999 to 2010, which was published in her 2015 book
Sidewalk City. She saw the culture of policing around street vending and how that mis-aligned with
the culture of the people who wanted to experience an informal economy. HCMC officials
wanted the culture to be more hospitable to tourists and have been cracking down on them.
Kim proposed a simple intervention: draw a tourist-oriented pedestrian path that guides
them along this organized, organic chaos (Kredell, 2015). It initially received great fanfare

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because it effectively diffused the false choice of tourism vs informal economy. This type of
solution might not have come from simply using a check-list definition of equity. This is not to
say that the list is not based on voluminous quantitative research and vetted by aggregated
individual experiences; yet, it still is a principle violation. Of course, at this point, however, the
relapse of the HCMC government away from the initial agreement probably requires the skills of
an advocacy planner in enacting political pressure and eventually negotiation. But do you see
how much more strategic it is when you do it after being armed with cultural knowledge?
“Groundtruths” are better excavated first.
Storytellers and creatives are experts as capturing ground-truths about the everyday
human experience. Everydayness provides a rich canvas to explore the multi-scalar institutional
factors that advocacy planners seek to influence. Black urbanism posits that stories are also a civic
tool that can and does change policies of dis-belonging without falling into the trappings of over-
generalizations based on aggregated analyses.
Gap #4: Economic Development Theory Misses Black Creativity and
Race Consciousness
The Challenge of Belonging, not Tolerance
In the economic development classic, The Rise of The Creative Class (2002; 2015), Richard
Florida popularized one of the most important dynamics to reinvigorate global cities: the
emergence of the creative class as a social and economic human asset for and attraction to cities.
At the time, to his estimates, around 40 million Americans are part of this new class of workers
who are “paid to use their minds – the full scope of their cognitive and social skills” which
included many kinds of cross-industry professionals. “I define the core of the Creative Class to
include people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music, and

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entertainment whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and new creative
content,” Florida writes. Beyond this, Florida also considered the Creative Class to includes a
broader group of creative professionals around this core group who are in business and finance,
law, health care, and related fields because “these people engage in complex problem solving that
involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human
capital.” Essentially, Florida provided a sense of what he called “class consciousness” to this
group, which previously had been itemized as knowledge workers, symbolic analysts (Reich,
1991), or technical workers.
The greatest accomplishment of Florida’s creative class theory was his ability to not only
persuasively argue that an entire class of untapped talent was necessary for renewed economic
development, but that urban spaces themselves needed to be socially amenable for this group.
Remnants of this argument can be found in Michael Porter’s thinking around the health of a
place being important for local clusters, but that was too focused on firms, not individuals.
Furthermore, even Porter had not spelled it out so clearly, excitingly, and progressively. With his
‘3 T’s of Economic Development’ – talent, technology, and tolerance – Florida provided
indicators like “music scenes” and the presence of gays and lesbians to measure a city’s potential
for creativity. For example, he writes, “Seattle was the home of Jimi Hendrix and later Nirvana
and Pearl Jam as well as Microsoft and Amazon. Austin was home to Willie Nelson and its
fabulous Sixth Street music scene before Michael Dell ever stepped into his now famous
University of Texas fraternity house.” This led to increased efforts to create “cool cities” from
places like Michigan.
Unfortunately, the first 15 years of promoting this ‘class consciousness’ with creative class
theory seemed to come at the expense of racial and historical consciousness. While Florida was
able to best his critics on most measurement challenges, these two flaws have been persistent and

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widely refuted. Politically, Enrico Moretti is one of the first urban economists to argue
persuasively against this symbolic approach in his book The New Geography of Jobs (2012). With his
“poor but sexy” characterization of the cities wherein these “cool cities” strategies began taking
root, Moretti provides evidence that jobs have not accrued to the cities wherein these “cool”
strategies were fashioned. From Berlin to Seattle, Moretti challenges the notion that glamorizing
a local environment can attract innovative job-generating institutions; he argues that it is the
other way around, where professional jobs provide the capital to improve the environment to
lure late-comers. Quality of life alone is not the catalyst for economic development and the
retention of talent; there must be opportunities to harness them.
On a critical race note, gentrification and displacement has been the core criticism of the
way in which creative class theory has been translated into development and planning strategies.
Cities have decided that, to make spaces amenable for creativity, the older stock of housing (and
the people in them) are worth sacrificing. It is not clear that Florida, with his Creative Class
Group (CCG) consulting arm, encouraged cities to do so. In February 2017, I actually had the
opportunity to meet him and explain what I have been doing. I let him know that he was the
advisor of my advisor, which made him smile and elate with great joy. However, I quickly
pivoted to let him know my dissertation’s subject matter: race and culture in economic
development. “I’m so glad you told me,” he spoke with great seriousness, as I shook his hand in
the private VIP reception at a theatre in Center City district of Philadelphia. “You know, I’ve
been waiting to work with someone about this. Please give me your feedback on the book.” He
nodded his head as if there was a specific idea he was meditating on. Prior to our meeting,
Florida had written about “racial divide” in the creative economy (Florida, 2016), as mapped in
Figure 5. Later on, he continued to write articles in CityLab mapping the way race plays out in
the creative class and in patchwork metropolises.

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Figure 5: A Map of the Black Share of Occupations in the Creative Class Across the U.S. (Published by CityLab, Data from Martin
Prosperity Institute, 2016)
Despite his early pronouncements of “tolerance” being one of the core economic
development values in creative cities, oddly enough, creative class theory and strategies have not
made racial inclusion an explicit priority until recently when Florida concluded that white
creatives and Black creatives need “creative class equality.” Until now, the CCG’s Gay and
Lesbian and Bohemian Indices were getting much more of the media attention. You would think
that Blackness (or at least racial diversity) would be named as an index of tolerance, especially
when you’re talking about urban creativity. However, as evidenced by cities like West

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Hollywood, which brands itself as a Creative City, the idea of tolerance has translated much
more clearly to gay and lesbian-focused economic development than Black and brown.
I argue that the time has come to end that color-blindness: Richard Florida seems to also
agree. In his latest book, The Urban Crisis (2016), he provides a sobering analysis of how we have
now entered a time where cities are engaging in a “winner-takes-all urbanism” that has created a
set of “patchwork metropolises” which have created islands of privilege surrounded by economic
and racial disadvantage. Florida is now in lock-step with social thinkers like Robert Sampson and
Patrick Sharkey, who also map how urban places create durable, multi-generational
disadvantage.
Moving forward, Black urbanists and supporters of them must emphasize two things.
First, focusing on race should never be all bad news, especially in a cultural conversation.
Florida’s Urban Crisis reprise shored up the lack of race, but then only focuses on how Black
creatives are excluded quantitatively. Therefore, I take it a step further. Building on Florida’s
findings and my own critical review of the literature and the research that follows in this
dissertation, I argue that cities specifically need Black creatives and their stories if they want their
innovation economies to develop to their fullest potential. We have often separated the
conversation about the restructuring, redistribution, and reshuffling of Black talent into the
hinterlands of our city-regions. In Flight of the Creative Class, Florida rightly argues that this talent
reshuffling is not just happening within our country, but the talent is also fleeing and competing
globally, due to a complex gridlocking of economic and urban policies which have made it more
attractive and profitable for talent to leak out of the country. But again, it lacked a consideration
of how people have stayed and who these people are ethnoracially.
Second, tolerance, while a good first step, is a tepid form of economic and cultural
inclusion. It is also unsupported by other data about the creative economy, both the core and the

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broader occupations. The UCLA-driven and entertainment industry-funded annual Hollywood
Diversity Report, for example, regularly lays bare the “missed opportunities” to correct for the
systemic underrepresentation in every kind of role in the entertainment industry (Hunt et al.,
2018). But even for places in the broader creative economy where there might be phenotypical
representation (i.e., bankers, lawyers, consultants, etc.), there lacks tolerance for Black culture as
evidenced by dress code policies that limit natural hair styles. On the consumer side, bars and
clubs that offer creative exchange still enact arbitrary dress codes (i.e., no jeans, hoodies,
sneakers) that are often the staple of Black urban fashion. The tech industry, which has
notoriously hidden their diversity data for years despite political pressure and legal requirements,
is highly skewed toward White- and Asian-males (Evans & Rangarajan, 2017). While Florida
writes that he “caught a lot of flak for proposing that diversity—an openness to all kinds of
people, no matter their gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, or just plain geekiness” was
essential, cities still lack these basic respects for Blackness.
Tolerance appears to be a mere ideal and a disposition, not a decision to be inclusive.
Black urbanism demands equity and belonging. The conversation must not be centered purely
around how to better integrate Black people into existing White-dominated systems. But how can
we support Black creative economies where they already exist? We must map and understand
Black creative spaces in the city to unleash those possibilities.
The Spatial Importance of Black Commerce
The geography of Black-owned businesses (BOBs) and entrepreneurship matters both to
communities and entrepreneurs. BOBs are often employers for Black workers, an important
factor for addressing unemployment crises in Black communities. The 2012 U.S. Survey of
Business Owners (SBO) reports that only 4% of the 2.6 million BOBs are employer firms; 96%

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employ none. Yet, these BOBs generate $150 billion in annual revenue and employ 3.56 million
people (Association for Enterprise Opportunity [AEO], 2017: 8). Currently, those 3.56 million
jobs equate to one-fifth of the employed Black workforce. The Association for Enterprise
Opportunity (AEO) calculations show that if BOBs were able to reach employment parity with
all privately held U.S. firms (i.e., hiring Blacks workers at the same ratios as all U.S. firms), close
to 600,000 new jobs would be created and $55 billion would be added to the economy (AEO,
2017, p. 5). Achieving parity would require 15% of non-employer BOBs to hire at least one
person and for employer BOBs to hire two more people. If that happened, the rate of
unemployment in the Black community, currently at 7.7 percent nationally could be reduced to
around 5%, much closer to equality with white unemployment at 4.4 percent. However, a suite
of spatial challenges must be addressed to make that possible.
Research on Black entrepreneurs has so far neglected geography as a defining factor in
entrepreneurship and economic development, as most scholarship examines the industries Black
entrepreneurs compete in, their business expenses, and the cognitive abilities of the entrepreneur
(Fairlie & Robb, 2008). Whenever scholars examine how location and geography influence Black
entrepreneurs, they have been limited to using data aggregated at the state or national level,
without a small enough spatial analysis unit (i.e., cities, neighborhoods) to be helpful for local
practitioners and advocates (Fairlie & Robb, 2008). Yet, the spatial components of recent
findings help motivate my study:
“…geographic location plays a role in this revenue discrepancy for Black-owned firms, as one-third of
firms owned by U.S.-born Blacks are located in the south, and the southern states have the highest poverty
rates in the country. Customer bases in low-income areas will affect potential revenues and therefore also
the size of a firm and its ability to hire” (AEO, 2017: 11).
The AEO map of BOBs in the U.S. by county begins to illuminate the role of place. Using SBO
data, they found that the top 12 metropolitan regions for Black-owned businesses are urbanized
areas with major cities in the region such as New York-Newark-Jersey City MSA (#1), Houston-

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The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX MSA (#6), and Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington MSA
(#12). However, research has not discovered the exact neighborhoods wherein the Black
entrepreneurs thrive. This creates more room for exploration from a spatial perspective on not
only where BOBs end up, but how they make decisions about where to locate; the study of Black
agglomeration espoused in the following chapter begins to do this.
Because place is not central to prior research, it is not clear if and how Black communities
provide the milieus supportive for BOBs to grow. From the consumer standpoint, commercial
spaces are often less developed, diverse, and vibrant in Black communities. In a recent landmark
study, Duke University sociologists found that Black households face unique constraints to
consumption of goods and services compared to white counterparts, which leads to overall lower
levels of spending (Charron-Chenier, et al., 2016). These constraints include three factors: 1)
access to financial credit, 2) retail and service desertification, and 3) consumer discrimination.
Nearly all of these factors depend on neighborhood location and environments in some way, but
desertification describes a specific spatial problem for Black consumers: not enough businesses
willing to locate near their neighborhoods. This is a problem that urban planning and business
development can help address together. Locating where BOBs are would make visible the
consumption opportunities for Black communities, as well as contribute to potential employment
effects.
Identifying Black Creative Space: Distinct, Under-Studied Logics of
Belonging
How to make cities more culturally vibrant has been a central concern for the urban
professions in the post-industrial age, especially for attracting creatives and “Bohemians” back
after generations of economic and social flight (Lloyd, 2006; Currid, 2007). As aforementioned,

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Richard Florida popularized the idea of the creative class, which centered on the economic value
of having creative workers in the city. Florida's theories, however, do address how Black
creativity has influenced Black urbanism and vice versa. Furthermore, cultural critics like
Rodney Carmichael of NPR have noted how places like Atlanta (2017) continue to overlook their
greatest cultural asset and export as cities change to become more conducive for the return of the
white and upper-middle-class to their cities: Black musicians.
However, because of the lack of literature on Black creatives and space, we lack a clear
definition of who belongs in the Black creative class and where they generate spaces of belonging.
Therefore, I turn to popular media to help generate hypotheses and themes for exploration in
this dissertation and beyond to define these logics. I use the work of Black filmmaker Artemus
Jenkins in an online documentary, If You Know the Words, Feel Free (2015),
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who follows the lives of
Atlanta-based Black creatives navigating “the various ways [life] tests, molds and prepares us to
live it” in the arts worlds. Narrator Sean Fahie leads the inquiry in front of Jenkins’ lens, which
was filmed around the time the traveling festival AFROPUNK was deciding to come to Atlanta.
The 50-minute docufilm illuminates how unmapped, informal scenes support the Black creative
class. The film allows us to see not only how a creative 'scene' develops in Atlanta for high art
(beyond the music it is known for), but also creatives' motivations for practicing art. These
relatively unmapped and informal spaces can act as a glue for the Black community, artistic or
not. This glue or social cohesion represents what I call throughout "Belongingness." Even though
spaces can foster ties, they can also function as a contested zone, wherein issues of the politics of
empowerment, gender, and wealth creation play out. Belongingness, thus, has many contours
that drum up different the role of place to the Black creative class. A close examination of this
film provides a starting point for theory. I generate four kinds of hypotheses from this film.

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Discursive Theme #1: Paternalist Profit vs Feminist Reciprocity
“Atlanta is such a great community and there’s so many dope things going on, especially
with the influx of so many people coming in,” Aleshea Triplett of Werc Crew professed to Fahie.
“To solidify the culture that is here that is really being taken out in so many different ways
through gentrification, I think that’s why events like [Simmer Down] are that much more
important… Having been from Atlanta, being born and raised here, it was always one of my
goals to be involved in these types of events and this type of community.” Simmer Down’s
creator and event organizer, Quianah Upton of the company Arbitrary Living, created the scene
with specific ethnic inspiration: “It was the right vibe, which was chill. Sort of Caribbean, you
know? I mean…that’s where the name ‘Simmer Down’ came from. The Bob Marley song. Just
chill.” Creating a sense of community, a sense of belonging, is not just a nicety in fostering
entrepreneurship of any kind.
Over the years, scholars have established the economic function of this connectivity
(Currid & Connolly 2008; Becker 1982), but few have heard it in terms that most Black people
relate to. Upton explains:
“You know our brand, our motto is ‘Come together.’ So I think it has a lot to do with the sense of home,
and that feeling that you get when you get comfortable and familiar with people. And for me that has
always been a huge source of creative inspiration because I’m comfortable. A lot of ideas can float
because the conversation flows freely when you’re more comfortable [author
emphasis added]. So everything I do is always trying to bring people together because it enhances
communication which is a HUGE thing for me because a lot of folks are afraid to talk to people or they
don’t really know the essence beyond networking, which it sort of feels like using each other. Instead of with
your family you aren’t using people, you’re just stuck together…regardless…Coming together and sort of
having that family feeling, to me, makes communication and networking that much more, that much
deeper.”
The Black creative economy exhibits a particular commitment to sociality, to some, because of
West African philosophies. “I definitely believe in the philosophy of Ubuntu,” Deavin of Well
Pressed Juice describes, with a smile: “which means ‘I am because we all are.’ So definitely
community events like [Simmer Down] help in terms of giving back and just supporting each

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other and helping each other to become more visible and show each other what we’re offering.”
In a growing context of urban displacement – whether cultural or economic – understanding
how Black creatives live and express community is critical to figuring out how to advance their
economic prospects.
Black entrepreneurs in this context, thus, face unique challenges that require tailored
solutions and enduring collaborations. Therefore, the sub-cultures in the Black economy may not
take on the same social format as their non-Black counterparts, who increasingly compete for
clients as Black culture moves into the mainstream of the cultural economy.
This problem challenges mainstream views about the purpose of an economy. One
interviewee, Shanna of Cupcake Hero Bakery, described Black entrepreneurship in terms of
individual and social identity:
“It’s nice to see young entrepreneurs in the city who like to think outside of the box and aren’t dependent on
a 9 to 5 to define them. They choose their talents to show who they are, not their job at McDonald’s or
whatever. They’re not afraid to take that leap of faith and believe in themselves when someone else might
not.” (Jenkins 2015: 25:16).
In this film, Black creatives' motivations are not solely economic independence through
the creative industries, which is an assumption many pro-Black business advocates make. Rather,
personal health and self-expression are what motivates them, not solely profit. Thus, some Black
creative may keep that 9-to-5 job regardless for the social stability it offers. Other benefits of
Black creative entrepreneurship in Black social spaces include being able to get over the fear of
presenting creative work, self-care and celebrating accomplishments.
Individual identity may be one factor, but the film also highlights how the communal
work of keeping the Black art world networked is an unfairly gendered task. Black women either
take on that role willingly or, they do so to fulfill social expectations in Atlanta because women
are perceived as offering hospitality much better than men. Women like Upton accept this
challenge with mixed feelings:

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“In the beginning when I first started this business, it wasn’t like ‘oh I have to do this work because I am
a woman.’ Honestly, people sort of put me in these positions and I don’t know if it’s because I’m sort of
demanding or whatever, but again it goes back to communication. Men and women have such a different
style of communication and I think that people respect that difference. So there’s a lot of men who have
different leadership positions, especially in the creative community. A lot of men in leadership positions in
that role, but you need that foil. But you need that balance to keep things growing.”
Her fellow female creator and friend, Theodore McLee, a co-director of The Low Museum,
seems to appreciate that this caring work has, fortunately, led to greater connectivity between the
women.
I think in the creative scene we are pretty lucky to have a strong base of women in leadership. People who
are continually involved in a lot of different projects. I think that it is important to have a spread of people
who not just have their hand in a lot of different projects but in a different way. I think it’s cool that most
of us work together on different projects. All of us collaborate a lot on different projects.
Upton adds, “All of my friends are bosses…we try to bring people together and work together as
much as possible. You know, keep the culture moving forward!”
However, some are not so optimistic and inclusive about how to move the culture
forward in a community. People like Fahie, a Black male filmmaker, are trying to figure out the
“business of art” while also trying to figure out the business of community. Later, he has a frank
conversation about the economics of the art world from a Black male perspective. The sage he
seeks advice from, an established male artist named Meko, who emphasizes individualism as the
path forward for reaching success:
“at some point, you’re going to have to become super selfish about your art …Sure, you got to cut your
friends off. Sure, you got to cut your chick off. Apologize to her early or apologize to him early…They’ll
know that you’ve got this goal or you’re on this mission. It’s like those great stories where a man has to go
off into the wilderness and then you come back. Moses went to the mountaintop and he came back. Buddha
went off and came back with the wisdom. So if you gotta lock yourself in your studio or in your zone or
wherever it is and wait for the wisdom to come and that’s when you start to feel your ‘Super Saiyan’ stuff
because it becomes automatic.” (Jenkins 2015: 36:02 – 37:37).
But what are the consequences of these isolationist tactics for Black men versus Black women?
This theory (and consequent dissertation) acknowledges that the challenge of Black belonging
works differently for Black (cis-gendered) men versus Black (cis-gendered) women. Whenever
possible, it will acknowledge these networked and spatial contours, which feature prominently in

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the feminist theorists from whence Black urbanism owes much of its configuration (i.e., bell
hooks, Katherine McKittrick) feminism. An intersectional Black urbanism is required to sort out
these divergent, gendered logics, which, if nothing else, might help explain why Black women are
leading the Black economy as the fastest growing segment of entrepreneurs.
Discursive Theme #2: Socio-spiritual vs Financial Motivations
Black creativity assumes a religious function, a special type of community building, to the
subjects in the film. In another scene in the parking lot of a Black-owned gallery called Notch8, a
middle-aged Black artist, Kevin “Mr. Soul” Harp, proclaimed to the younger artists:
“You gotta do art for art first. Because as artists, we the closest thing to God. God was a creator, right?
We create, right? So it’s a responsibility that come with that! We gotta make sure that we honor that
FIRST.”
This raises questions for the narrator, who clearly aims to chart a path that balances his needs
with the public(s) he serves. “So, is it better to get self right first then community or build the
community and work on self while building the community?” Fahie asks the group, earnestly and
provocatively, towards the end of the film at 43:52.
Mr. Soul reassures him. “It’s a balance. You gotta work on both. Because you gotta work
on yo’ self, but as yo’ self, you part of a community. So you gotta give yourself to that community
and be a part of that…productively.” Again, sociality is framed as a healthy engine for
productivity, not a drag like his friend Meko framed it earlier, on Black cultural production
through the mechanism of work-life balance. Community is the ‘life’ part of that equation.
Black sociality is a tool of cultural innovation, but it is also a tool of survival. One artist,
Miya Bailey, confessed, “It’s some shit going on man. They killin’ black males. Straight out,
point, blank, period. And so we can’t fight em back in a physical way. The best way is
opportunity, nawImsayin’? Opportunity get ‘em out the way!” (40:37-41:00). Economic

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opportunity is a way to stave off vulnerability, but it requires balancing a sense of community.
Spirituality is tied to community in a way that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. popularized as the
idea of the “beloved community.” The Beloved Community idea originated from the 20th
Century work of the philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce, who founded the Fellowship of
Reconciliation to which Dr. King belonged to. King believed that nonviolence protests through
boycotts advanced the actualization of The Beloved Community. In Black spaces, in which love
for King looms large, this precept matters. It especially matters in spaces of creative
entrepreneurship, where relationships provide inspiration, ideas, and ultimately work. The
agnostic views of the economy need not conflict with the idea of The Beloved Community, but it
can. To the extent that it does, Black urbanism must attend to it.
Discursive Theme #3: Commercial Rent vs Community Respect
In the film, various artists comment on the role that gentrification plays in the Black
creative entrepreneurs’ quality of life (i.e., the Hop and Shop store now including wine instead of
just malt liquor). They also challenge each other on how the economic restructuring happening
to Atlanta changes how Black artists maintain their practice in places they have long inhabited,
despite disinvestment. Mr. Soul chimed in again.
“Like to me, personally, this shit is bigger than creating art. This is about creating a movement that people
will talk about 20 years from now. Like a Harlem Renaissance. We ARE that right NOW for Atlanta
and the world.” (41:00-41:17).
The allusions to the Harlem Renaissance and New York as an inspiration continued throughout
the comments from other artists. “[Atlanta] reminds me of the Lower East Side in the ‘80s and
shit. You had all these [f*king] great people hanging out, from Basquiat to Warhol to Madonna,
and it’s the same thing,” argued Corey Davis, a visual and tattoo artist, to the group.

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Their Black creative community appears to believe in using a larger spatial unit than a
firm to measure success. That is, if select individuals succeed, but the hub or “mecca” is lost, then
they lose a sense of progress. The narrator steps in with a critical perspective on the changing
role of and relationship the artists have with cities.
“I feel like sometimes in Atlanta is the Wild Wild West. Like a couple of years ago, it was REALLY the
Wild Wild West but now it’s getting a little infrastructure, whether it’s us creating it or the city creating
it. But I feel like the way the city is creating it is like, ‘Oh here’s all this cool shit, let’s move in here and
destroy all this cool shit!’” (41:37-41:56).
Artists can often see value in spaces that are undervalued, and Black artists are no
different in this film. But with the specter of gentrification, all of their work on place can be lost
with consequences for the creative community:
“What I don’t want to happen is for all of the hard labor and work and shit that we put in for mufuckas
who don’t respect the art but who see it as an opportunity to take greater advantage of it than we can. We
setting the ground work but the benefit that we have is that we been through a period where we’ve seen our
ancestors lay down ground work that they don’t take advantage of. We in a position to control this
shit…And that is what Notch 8 represents. This is our epicenter. This is our home to create an LA, New
York style epicenter here in Atlanta and that’s what about to f*cking happen” (41:59-42:42).
Some individuals in the film experienced this tension between their progress and the
larger creative community. “FIVE TIMES I’ve been crossed with the opportunity to sell my soul.
My soul, the business, the culture, and nobody would’ve got SHIT! And I would’ve been
straight!” one yelled out in the parking lot. But he recognizes how that would have affected his
sense of alienation. “I wouldn’t have been f*cking with him, or you, or him no mo’, nobody! I
would’ve been good.” This led the protagonist to ask a long-standing question but in a culturally-
pointed way:
Fahie: Is there a difference between selling out versus selling in?
Bystander: If you sell your soul, you can only pay rent for like five years. (laughter)
Mr. Soul: There’s something about respect. And its done with no money. We ain’t got no money…for
eight years! Eight years we been doing this, but 20 years collectively. They been – Maya and Tookey –
sitting here for 20 years. C of Inc. Institution in Castlebury Hills been providing jobs, opportunities, and
creating a vehicle for young Black artists to survive. No money. We don’t need the money. We can use it,
but the thing is they want to give us money so they can have access to what we’ve created. If we can respect
what we create then we can command what we want fo’ that money.” (Jenkins 2015: 47:16)

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The cultural economy appears to pose an unfair choice to Black creatives: commercial
viability versus community vitality. The choice they make can lead to authentic respect
through street credibility, but it is uncertain how the artistic community cluster supports them for
opting against the short-sightedness of “selling out.” What does “selling in” to the Black cultural
economy really look like? We need new frameworks to explore this act of resistance.
What This Film Demands of Urbanists
With these discourse-driven themes raised in the film, we see many tensions that
underlying Blackness and creativity and space. I argue that we have little intellectual tools to
define who is a Black creative is and what their spaces mean to cities. Unlike the well-known
filmmakers (i.e., Tyler Perry, Donald Glover), music executives (Jermaine Dupri, T.I., Kandy
Burress, LA Reid, Organized Noize, LaFace Records, Pebbles Reid), reality television producers
(i.e., NeNe Leakes, Quality Control Management, etc.) who bring national recognition and fame
to Atlanta using highly fabricated images, the film focuses on the low-profile, community-based,
and the nearly subterranean peoples and places of Atlanta. Even its choice to begin the film at
night and to color it in black and white indicates an intention to give a less bombastic, serious
tone. I argue that we need a new framework that is nimble enough to capture these stories and
confront the issues they raise for the future of Black creative economies.
Defining Black urbanism: theory and practices toward Black belonging
Black urbanism was posited earliest and most in earnest by Paul Goodwin, a professor at
the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) at Goldsmiths College in London.
From the very beginning in 2006 with his four-year exhibition and curatorial project Re-visioning

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Black Urbanism, the idea was more oriented around reflective practice than theoretical innovation.
As Goodwin put it in his 2010 talk, he confronted “the paradox of Black urbanism” - how Black
culture and identity shape the vibrancy of cities like Paris and New Orleans, yet Black people are
rendered invisible by intentionally ignoring them in placemaking. In this same talk, he describes
how he was invited to a talk at Columbia University by the Jazz Department, not the famed
Graduate School of Architecture and Planning School, about how to incorporate the indigenous
Black cultural innovations like jazz and blues into the revitalization strategies of New Orleans.
While Goodwin wanted to re-frame Black life “as a kind of resource for thinking about
urbanism”, how can we do that in a significant and sustained way without a carefully articulated
theory to re-shape the (mal)practice of placemaking? This absence is largely where I would like to
interact with and define the norms.
In this conceptual synthesis, I define the field of practicing Black urbanism as the
(un)disciplined study of the intersections, incursions, and inclusions between developing freedom
for urban Black civics, stories, and spaces (CSS). As shown in Figure 4, this post-disciplinary
framework I am articulating here is geared mostly toward the ends over means, but does not
preclude.
4
The CSS are the ends around which we need to expand understanding and vision.
Each of these areas deserves and has received reams of studies as they relate to race, but rarely in
tandem with all three oriented toward changes in the built environment of cities. I will briefly
introduce what each has to offer regarding operationalizing a new theory of Black urbanism.
In short, my normative theory of Black urbanism is that Blackness is a cultural,
ecological, political, spiritual, and economic resource for improving the self-determination,
wellness, and empowerment for and within urbanized places (i.e., towns, cities, neighborhoods).
Blackness here is defined as more than a phenotypical racial identity, but an African-diasporic
way of seeing the world that privileges traits found in what is called the Black spatial imaginary

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(Lipsitz, 2011): inclusivity, sociality, and use-value. Blackness resists the definitions hoisted upon it
by decades of scholarship that privilege death and violence. Katherine McKittrick rightly points
out that these practices perpetuates the “circularities of anti-Blackness” in academic and popular
media by forcing Black thinkers to accept sub-humanity of the Black experience (Hudson &
McKittrick, 2014). I argue that Black people are not the only ones who need more access to
Black/African-American-derived resources, but should be the first to access them. It sounds
simple and obvious, but through generations of mis-education and re-appropriation, Blackness
has been reframed as aberrational and disorderly when in fact it is the essence of freedom. By
reframing Blackness as a resource for urban social theory, I re-introduce several higher-order
principles elaborated on in this paper that scholars have uncovered in disciplinary silos that have
not informed placemaking and design nor the study of those practices. These ideas include
“linked fate” (Dawson, 1995), just growth (Pastor & Benner, 2012), Black spatial imaginary
(Lipsitz, 2011), and improvisational design (Hood, 2008; Moten, 2003).
CSS: a style sheet for studying Black spatial empowerment
Three dimensions encompass an exploration of Black urbanism as new intellectual code
for studying the software and hardware of cities. First, civics, unlike strategies, is a more
grassroots and everyday practice. It is a divergence from the top-down, rationalist view of
democracy (Mouffe, 2000), which is influenced by what is called Robert’s Rules of Order. Like
deliberative democracy proponents (Susskind et al., 1999; Susskind & Cruikshank, 2006), I think
an overemphasis on paternalistic, parliamentary procedures that has poisoned our democracy
through convincing each other that only certain people can speak for the direction of our shared
existence. Civics humbles, nuances, refines, and most importantly scales down that lofty, often
elitist and narrow enterprise of strategy to a conversation amongst equals seeking to chart a

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shared future based on consensus (an agreement-seeking process), facilitation (a way of helping
groups work together in meetings), and many more soft skills (Susskind et al., 1999).
Second, space is a social product created through the historical-structural factors of land,
labor, capital, and means of production. Black urbanism explores this through designs,
architectures, lands, properties, and mobility. In here, I draw primarily on a social productivist
view of space – that is one that focuses on the historical-structural factors of land, labor, capital,
and means of production. As Setha Low (2016) summarized, socially produced space has been an
interdisciplinary endeavor with work by Marxist and cultural geographers (Smith, 1990, Harvey,
2003, Mitchell & Heynen, 2009), urban sociologists (Zukin, 1991; Logan & Molotch, 1987;
Brenner & Theodore, 2002), architectural and urban historians (Blackmar, 1979; Hayden, 2002;
Hayden, 2003) and anthropologists (Peattie, 1970; Kuper, 1972; Holston, 1989; Rotenberg,
1995; Low, 2000). They help us see that, as a capitalist society, money shapes culture and civics
through space. Thus, I believe the economy is marbled through all three elements and motivates
my focus on economic development. Within Black urbanism, race is an apt place to talk about
space through the idea of “whiteness as property” (Harris, 1993), which is an idea that applies to
intangible but materially significant areas of intellectual property and digital spaces, which have
spatial components too.

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Figure 6: The Three Spheres of Black Urbanism: Civics, Stories, Space

Third, stories are defined as narrative-based vehicles for communicating worldviews
and systems of meaning; often socially produced through art, media, religion, and culture. Art is
taken to be both a product, but also as a way of living, which is interrelated with culture. Culture
encompasses traditions, myths, values, beliefs, and practices of socialized desire (Bourdieu, 1993).
Media are forms of material or digital communication oriented, especially around narratives.
Again, all of these could stand on their own, and often do, in the work to preserve and improve
the status of Black life. But I believe the time has come for us to consider them together for the
good of Black placemaking. Social constructivist views of space that consider the affective,
Civics
Space Stories
Art
Media
Culture
Policy
Politics
Governance
Designs
Architectures
Land/Property
Mobility
Place
identity
Planning
Activism
Black
Belonging

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emotive, and cultural meanings of geographies – dubbed “place” – are privileged here, especially
when considering place identity.
My proposed intersections are debatable, but still persuasive. Activism is a primary and
primordial intersection between storytelling and civic engagement (Ganz, 2007), but perhaps
there are additional and alternative ways of thinking about the intersectional activities (ideology,
organizing, etc.). Place identity is a primary intersection between stories and space because it
involves branding, heritage preservation, placemaking, and the like for spaces. Place identity is
also a significant intersection for race/ethnicity as it engages nationality and heritage, which are
linked to the body (i.e., African American = from Africa and/or Americas). Lastly, planning is a
primary intersectional activity between developing civics for space, the normative ordering of
space at multiple scales.
Black Belonging: The Core of Black Urbanism
Given these inputs of CSS as an ends-oriented approach to urban development, what is the
ultimate goal of Black urbanism? I propose belonging. Urbanists have generated their own
concepts for belonging: rootedness, sense of place, place attachment, and place identity, for
examples (Antonsich, 2010, pp. 6-7). City of Oakland cultural official, poet, and longtime arts
funder Roberto Bedoya (2013; 2014) has called for a greater focus on how to make “belonging
strategies” for cities to counter the current state of ‘dis-belonging’ that people of color face.
Communication scholars like Sandra Ball-Rokeach of the USC Metamorphosis Research
Project has also written about “the challenge of belonging” as a preeminent one for the 21
st

century while measuring its pathways in certain ethno-racial enclaves in Los Angeles. However,
researchers in communications seldom rigorously define belonging, but rather relate storytelling’s
importance to greater place attachment. For instance, Ball-Rokeach et al. (2001) define

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belonging as “an attachment to a residential area as evidenced by everyday exchange behaviors.”
They frame the idea as a Robert Putnam-esque type of place-based social capital – “networks,
norms, and trust” (Putnam, 1995a, p. 664). Social-structural factors merely impact how people
communicate in this configuration: “higher levels of belonging should be positively associated
with economic wealth (household income), social wealth (education), area stability (residential
tenure and home ownership), being older, being married, and having children in the home”
(Ball-Rokeach et al., 2001, p. 5). While these individual parts and narrower applications of
belonging allow us to spot potential to advance residential life, the sum must be greater than the
whole. We must have definitions that take into other applications than the stories side of CSS.
The Italian human geographer Marco Antonsich (2010) critically summarized and
defined the larger concept of belonging, which is weaved into my concept of Black urbanism:
“…Belonging should be analyzed both as a personal, intimate, feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place
(place-belongingness) and as a discursive resource which constructs, claims, justifies, or resists
forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion (politics of belonging) (Antonsich, 2010, p. 1)
Black urbanism that centers belonging in this dyadic way creates both a physical sense of place
and phenomenological sense of “home.” It is worth noting how we can operationalize the
concept along a series of dimensions.
Table 1: Six Human Dimensions of Place-Belongingness According to Literature
Human Dimensions of
Place-Belonging
Definition References
auto-biographical one’s past history – personal
experiences,
relations, and memories
which attach a particular
person to a given place.
Dixon & Durrheim, 2004, p.
459; Fenster, 2005, pp. 247-
248
relational the personal and social ties
which enrich the life and
spiritual health of an
individual in a given place
Ager & Strang, 2004, p. iv;
Chow, 2007, p. 514;
Buonfino & Thomson, 2007,
p. 16; Baumeister & Leary,
1995; hooks, 2009

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cultural language is usually considered
as the most important; forms
of cultural expressions,
traditions and habits; religion,
the materiality of cultural
practices, food
production/consumption.
Buonfino & Thomson, 2007,
p. 17; Therborn, 1991, pp.
182-183; Duruz, 2002;
Fenster, 2005, p. 252
economic a safe and stable material
condition for the individual
and her/his family; the
condition of being fully and
successfully integrated into a
given economy (i.e.,
embeddedness)
Yuval-Davis, 2011; Chow,
2007; Threadgold et al., 2008
legal citizenship and resident
permits), protection against
violence, citizen or a subject
entitled with rights (to stay, to
work, to obtain social
benefits, etc.)
Loader, 2006; Yuval-Davis, et
al., 2006; Buonfino &
Thomson, 2007, p. 20;
Nelson, 2007; Sporton &
Valentine, 2007, p. 12;
Alexander, 2008
Spatio-temporal Length of residence in a place Antonsich, 2010
In the table above, I bolded “spiritual health” for a reason: it was not included in
Antonsich’s sweeping literature review of the idea. If we are to apply a Black feminist lens to
place-belongingness, spirituality and care is important to emphasize as an aspect of this
belongingness, which gets left out. Thus, it does not address the traumas that being Black and
female can engender. Black Americans have understood this for quite some time, which how
faith-based institutions still plays a major role in local community development (Botchwey, 2007).
Once again, bell hooks provides this intersectional view of belongingness in her novel Belonging: A
Culture of Place (2009). In Chapter 13, she posits a socio-spiritual view of space that ties in what
was hinted at earlier. In this partly autobiographical book, she writes about her home in
Kentucky and how certain spaces perform specific functions for her soul. The porch, for instance,
is not where you would host meetings or social functions. The porch is “a place where the soul
can rest” and invites “one to be still – to hear divine voices” (hooks, 2008, p. 152).

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From the very beginning, Black sociologists have been concerned with the “souls of Black
folk” (Du Bois, 1903) but it seems to have been lost in translation in favor of focusing on how
blackness has been displaced and dis-belonged (Hunter & Robinson, 2016). Yet, a feminist,
hooksian Black belongingness must concern itself with the architecture and “habits of the heart”
such as opportunities to heal and engage with processes of self-reclamation (hooks, 2009, p. 220).
If Black urbanism has any hope of ushering in The Beloved Community, these communities of
care must value “economies of gratitude” where people can express “affection, attention, delight,
kindness, praise, conviviality, and repentance” to make enduring places.
Research Questions and Methods
This dissertation maps the spatial practices of the Black creative class (BCC) by asking
and answering three primary research questions related to agglomeration and placemaking.
1) Where do Black-owned businesses (BOBs) locate and cluster in California compared
to non-Black firms? What are the economic relationships between them?
2) How does the Black creative class (BCC) claim and make places? What spatial factors
affect and/or limit their ability to do so?
3) How does the BCC engage with planning and urban design through creative
placemaking? And what role(s) can Afro-futurism play in engaging them in those
processes?
The dissertation marshals mixed-methods to answer these questions rigorously and creatively.
Organized in three parts, it corresponds to the findings: foundations, flows, and futures. In Part I:
Foundations, to which this current chapter belongs, I have laid out an approach to viewing Black
creativity that I carry out through the remaining five chapters.
In Part II: Flows, I use aggregated and micro-data to show where Black-owned businesses
(BOBs) cluster and how locational factors correlate to answer the first question. I take three
quantitative approaches (location quotient, correlation coefficients, and hotspot analysis) to
measure this clustering at multiple spatial levels, which has not been attempted in prior research

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on Black businesses. In Chapter 2, for the location quotient analysis, I use U.S. Survey of
Business Owner (2012) data to map the geography of entrepreneurship by race and place in
California. By performing a correlation coefficient analysis, I can to suggest possible relationships
that between the race of the business owner with three available economic productivity measures
in the U.S. Survey of Business Owners: annual sales/revenue, jobs at firms, and annual pay. For
the hotspot analysis, I use a list of over 3,500 Black-owned businesses in the Los Angeles County
region, mined from the InfoGroup ReferenceUSA database, to explore statistically significant
hotspots in the region. Together, they challenge prevailing assumptions about how
agglomeration works for non-white, non-corporate institutions while also leaving much room for
future quantitative studies to continue this tradition.
This chapter’s findings dovetailed neatly onto my qualitative explorations and helped
justify my focus on South Los Angeles. As Chapter 2 will show, the top five census-designated
places (CDPs) for Black entrepreneurs in California are in South Los Angeles neighborhoods and
cities. Thus, I could generate theoretical contributions at multiple scales by centering how Black
cultural entrepreneurs in Los Angeles claim and shape space to try to produce a sense of
belonging while also paying the bills, with varying levels of success.
In Part II, Chapters 3 through 6, I take three qualitative methods (linguistic analysis,
ethnography, photography) at both regional and neighborhood scales to describe how Black
urbanism works and for whom. I decided to use ethnography and qualitative mapping – also
known as “spatial ethnography” – to profile cases of the BCC in a single commercial district in
the Los Angeles region: Leimert Park Village, a place well-researched in previous studies on
music, dance, visual art, and race in Los Angeles (Isodardi, 2006; Rosenberg, 2016; Khan, 2011;
Arefi, 2000; Hester, 2017; Washington, 2013; Naranghi, 2007; Lee, 2009). However, these
chapters focus on how these function as a cultural-commercial district beyond these individual

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art forms. For example, Chapter 3 looks at how the Black creative class has marshalled the power
of taxation vis-à-vis the public-private governance tool of choice, the Business Improvement
District, to partner with governmental entities and private contractors to shape and maintain the
landscape within what they call the “Greater Leimert Park Village Crenshaw Corridor.”
In Chapter 4, I observe two scales of cultural belonging: regional and local. For the
regional scale, I employ a multi-stage, pragmatic linguistic analysis of Black business names. By
coding a sub-sample of 800 Black-owned business in Los Angeles County, as verified by the
InfoGroup ReferenceUSA database, using Atlas.ti software, I create a typology for black business
nomenclature and vernacular. Thankfully,
At the local level, I draw on spatial-ethnographic methods to uncover how Black cultural
entrepreneurs (sometimes struggle to) claim space. I received Institutional Review Board (IRB)
approval for my spatial-ethnographic methods, Study ID: UP-17-00917 originally titled “The
Geography of Black Placemaking and Black Urbanism in Los Angeles.” It included various
experimental approaches. To observe the human-environment interactions, I used an applied
conceptual tool from environmental psychologists and designers like Fritz Steele to sense and
follow Black placemaking and place-keeping efforts, illustrated in Table 2. This simple tool for
auditing the built environment for signs of Black placemaking and place-keeping builds on Fritz’s
Steele spatial-phenomenological approach to describing the “sense of place” and vernacular
landscapes within neighborhoods. This tool also allowed for me to sense, as covered in Chapter
5, the various ways in which Black creative class experiences dis-belonging, which I detail in five
inter-related dimensions.

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Table 2: Auditing Tool for Measuring Social Influence on Built Environment
Kind of Social
Influence
Physical Elements Social Elements
Individuals*
Tinkering signage
Names/ images of
individuals
Star-centric buildings
Dependent people on
stars
Collections of People
People management
signage (i.e., tourist
pathways)
Density
Weather and climate
Mutual help
“a sense of security”
Fullness
Spontaneity
(“unplanned natural
festivals”)
Watchers
Doers
People Types and
Styles
Cultural amenities and
topology: homes, work-
spaces (i.e., studios/
galleries), businesses
“narrowly focused
activities”
the location of the
place (urban vs
suburban)
Institutional climate
Residential stock,
physical boundaries,
building and furniture,
public art and signage,
workplace layouts,
personal memorabilia

“norms, rules, policies,
expectations, and
management style”
For the purely ethnographic component of my research design, the findings are the result
of nearly 70 interviews, both informal and formal, with primarily business owners and managers.
Subjects had to meet at least five criteria for enrollment in the study:
1) they are an African American/Black business owner,
2) their business is located in the commercial spaces in the study areas (i.e., Leimert
Park, Inglewood),
3) they are operating a business in the cultural industries of food, music/performance,
and visual arts (film, fine arts),
4) they have a property-based stake in the economic success of the Black business owners
(i.e., building owner, workers, trade association, etc.), and/or
5) they participate in shaping the spatial factors around the Black businesses being
studied (i.e., neighborhood council, nonprofit development corporation, etc.).
This led to an amalgamation of interviewees that form the entrepreneurial ecosystem the Black
creative class navigates: elected officials, city employees, property owners, nonprofit leaders (i.e.,
Business Improvement District), financial consultants, economic development advocates (i.e.,

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Urban Design Center), and influential community residents. While the interview styles were both
informal and formal, they spawned from an empirically-driven set of interview questions using
snowball sampling in that place until I reach what social scientists call “saturation” (Glaser &
Strauss, 1967). Ideally, I wanted to lead with interviews instead of observation because the
prevailing anthropological wisdom is that an observer may not understand the meaning of what
is going on and these conversations help focus the eye (Agar, 1999). However, trust must be
earned through participation and “skin in the game”, which meant showing up as often as
possible. In Leimert Park, my acceptance came as a result my direct involvement as participant
observer, volunteer, invited guest, forum speaker, and teacher beginning in September 2016 and
lasting through May 2017. I became a familiar presence through these genuine touch points over
the years, providing value where I could.
Once I earned interviews with them, topically, my questions for fell into four categories:
1) personal history with the place and business, 2) daily business operations, 3) business
relationship with neighborhood and city-region, 4) their assessment of local cultural offerings.
Upon establishing a general sense, usually after at least 2 hours of interviews (not all at once), I
could follow-up about how finance, security, consumer perception, and real estate impact these
four dimensions of their lives. Specifically, they included the following questions, placed in order
of “experience-near” to “experience-far”, to gain a sense of the “typifications.”
1. Would you identify as a Black creative entrepreneur?
2. What brought you to creative/cultural/artistic work?
3. What is your typical daily routine in operating your business?
4. What is the role of place and local community in your business?
5. How connected do you feel your business is to other Black-owned businesses? How
important is geographical proximity to your supplier chain?
6. Who participates in making your events happen?
7. What kinds of art/culture do you prioritize for your business?
8. Is there a peer review system in place to filter what art and cultural products and
experiences are offered?
9. Do you notice informal business (i.e., networking) happening within your business?

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10. How do your participants use particular venues for creative exchange – if at all?
11. Why did you pick this location for your business?
12. What aspects of the city’s milieu/environment inspires your work? Why Los Angeles?

Ultimately, over 100 interviews took place in the South Los Angeles region over the
course of over three years, from May 2015 to April 2018, especially when the City of Inglewood
was included as part of a comparative research design. Thus, many are not included in this
dissertation and are still being processed for future studies. However, during fieldwork, I learned
that even within Inglewood, Leimert Park Village was cited as a birthplace for their cultural
endeavors, which created extra rationale to study this place and gain insights that could be later
applied to these future studies. Regardless, my sample size for Leimert alone is enough to
contribute theoretically. Ethnographic scholars recommend aiming for saturation of the varied
perspectives (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) which can range from 20 to 50 interviews, depending on
time and resources available (Creswell, 1988; Morse, 1994). The stories that follow emerged from
ethnographic work with an equitable, balanced attention to place and people. I observed the
social influences on Black cultural scenes through documenting the physical and human
indicators and activities oriented toward increasing belonging.
As indicated in Appendix B, weaved throughout the chapters are examples of how I both
generated and analyzed content in social media and photography. Concerning photography,
overall, I took 800 usable images of 43 individuals and groups of subjects. While these are not all
included as part of the dissertation, they illustrate how photography can be a useful method of
data collection. Additionally, I recorded over 50 hours of audio of meetings, interviews, and
events that I attended (i.e., concerts, speeches, rallies, town halls). Altogether, they create a very
vivid sense of place as well as act as a time capsule for a community in transition.
Lastly, in Part III: Futures, I demonstrate some of the innovative placemaking methods
being deployed through two methods in community design. The first is a process called

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community world-building, which Leimert Park and USC-based filmmakers use to create
visionary alternatives based around the idea of Afrofuturism. The second is public art creation
through an outdoor museum that would be the largest of its kind in the United States, along the
Crenshaw corridor where a new subway line is in the process of being constructed in South Los
Angeles. They illustrate the power of the Black spatial imagination coupled with civic
engagement to forge new futures in Black communities. By exploring how the BCC claim space,
this dissertation generates and tests theory about how race and commerce make spaces into
places with unique cultural value.
Conclusion
Even in a post-Civil Rights era, race still structures space in ways that are problematic for
Black Americans across a variety of quality-of-life dimensions. However, there are gaps in the
way that we talk about race and space that fail to appreciate identities from the perspective of
Black Americans; thus, neither concepts have been put into comprehensive conversation despite
being arguably co-constituted with each other. While heavily rooted in social constructivism, my
dissertation shows how the Black urbanism framework can help advance a more balanced
conversation that is not limited to qualitative, phenomenological, interpretive work. This
dissertation illustrates some of the possibilities of reframing Blackness as an under-spatialized
resource for economic development and urban design. However, Black Urbanism is an ongoing,
constructive conversation with critical race theory, black feminism and planning theory that
requires much to be tested. This dissertation begins that journey in earnest.

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PART II: FLOWS.

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Chapter 2: Black Urbanism as Spatial Belonging - A
Critical Race Analysis of Regional Economic Cluster
Theory
Black urbanism views how Black Americans use space as critical to understanding their
relationship to the civics and stories generated in cities. Given that businesses owned by Black
Americans (i.e., Black-owned businesses) employ one-fifth of the Black labor force and generate
$150 billion annually (even though only 4% of them have employees), studying Black
entrepreneurs provides a spatial-economic unit of analysis for uncovering the role of Black
urbanism in cities. Prevailing knowledge and practice in economic development point toward
clusters and agglomeration to produce the place-based effects we want. Clusters have been cited
since the 1990s as the new unit of competitive advantage (Porter 1996; Porter 1998; Porter 2000).
Clusters have become a proxy for many desirable outcomes for cities, such as firm agglomeration
(Marshall 1890), regional innovation systems (i.e., product creation, knowledge spillovers),
neighborhood interaction, and more.
Therefore, in this chapter, I answer the question: How do Black entrepreneurs cluster in
California compared to non-Black entrepreneurs – spatially and economically? How does that
phenomena relate to the demographics of the places where these clusters exist? We need to ask
this question because firm agglomeration is one of the most studied aspects of economic
geography, but it has rarely taken on an explicit focus on the racial backgrounds of the
entrepreneurs in those clusters. Thus, location theory has little interaction with critical race
theory and lacks an appreciation for the way in which race structures entrepreneurial fates within
spaces.
My answer to this question is based on the following evidence and findings. First, non-
white and minority-owned firms cluster selectively. Minority entrepreneurs are located in most

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places within the state of California (93%), but they are not necessarily clustered in all locations.
Second, Black-owned firm clusters benefit other groups. Black business clustering is positively
associated with economic productivity (i.e., increased average sales, annual pay, and jobs), both
for their businesses and other non-White firm owners. Third, non-White firm owners tend to co-
cluster with economic productivity. Co-clustering is mostly happening in places among non-
White firm owners and it tends be associated with higher sales, pay, and jobs on average.
However, fourth, White-owned firms cluster with mixed effects. White-owned business clustering
is on average negatively associated with economic productivity and clustering for non-White
businesses in California. Last, within Los Angeles, Black entrepreneurs are clustering at
statistically significant levels in commercial corridors in racially-mixed neighborhoods, not just
Black ones. Altogether, these make a compelling case to focus on Black entrepreneurs’ fates for
the good of cities, writ-large.
The Geography of Ethnic Entrepreneurship: An Intellectual History of
Color-Blind Elitism
Discussions of business success fall into four categories usually corresponding to
economics, business management, psychology, and sociology; geography and demography are
usually weaved into those. Race and ethnicity are constantly discussed in economics, psychology,
sociology, demography, and increasingly in geography. It is not talked about in a business
management context with necessary nuance. According to economic geographers (Wang, 2012,
p. 228), a major reason for such neglect is the traditional ‘‘elite’’ perspective of
entrepreneurship…which emphasize the venture-creation functions that ‘generate development
through the innovation’” (Malizia & Feser, 1999, p. 196; Schumpeter & Backhause, 1934). Much
of these studies are driven by a “concept of entrepreneurship [that] is largely focused on

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technological changes and high-tech industries” (Casson, 1990; Florida, 1995; Kenney, 2000;
Malecki, 1994; Sorenson & Baum, 2003; Blake & Hanson, 2005). Thus, traditional economic
geography focuses on a narrower set of activities, “especially those concerned with economic
impacts on place, have focused mainly on technologically innovative, high-growth, export-
oriented businesses’’ (Hanson, 2009, p. 251).
To the extent entrepreneurship scholarship addresses human factors, it tends to study
business venture success along personality-driven, individualistic, and non-structural terms. As
the leading research repository and funding agency on entrepreneurship, the Kauffman
Foundation’s “Topic Map” is a telling example as to how entrepreneurship is conceived absent
an integrated, critical view of race’s effects on the economy and space. When the role of
geography is discussed in the “entrepreneurial communities” section (Drucker, 2016), the author
does not discuss it in the context of neighborhoods and residential segregation, a leading factor in
how American communities (and their commercial assets) are constructed (Hackler & Mayer,
2008; Thomas & Darnton, 2006; Massey, 2001; Massey, 1985; Fischer & Massey, 2000). Instead
of including how race and ethnicity shapes space and the economy, he privileges economic and
geospatial factors like urban morphology and levels of marketing by local trade associations. This
is a consequential blind spot. Additionally, in the “Institutions and Environment” review (Louie,
Nguyen-Chyung, Paik, & Venancio, 2016), the authors only mention ethnicity once. The word
race is not mentioned at all. Ethnicity is regarded as a factor of “informal institutions” that shape
the culture and norms of a place, which is true. But this is too narrow of a take on the role that
race and ethnicity play. Instead, the Kauffman Topic Map makes “Race” a separate, sub-nested
variable in the Kauffman repository, on par with the other traits like age, gender, and
immigration status.

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Within this review, the authors take a trifecta view of how race plays out: 1) money, 2)
management, and 3) markets. There are a few issues with this review that motivate my study.
First, geography is haphazardly weaved into these literature reviews and the spatial unit still too
large. Markets is the domain under which they acknowledge a “growing interest among
researchers” on “the geographic (re)distribution of minority firms on the sub-metropolitan level,
i.e., their evolving spatial pattern between central cities and the suburbs in a restructured urban
economy” (Bradford & Mijid, 2016). However, the debates about the inner-city as an
environment for ethnic enterprises versus the suburbs is a long-standing, not a ‘growing’ interest,
debate as they frame it. Furthermore, the urban morphology (urban vs suburb) of the region is an
inadequate stand-in variable for addressing its consumer demography and their mobility to
support Black businesses – which is more important to their customer base. While they cite an
article about how residential segregation might affect self-employment (Fairchild, 2008), they do
not discuss it. Segregation is not discussed as to how that might affect business-to-business
relationships – the core tie that binds industrial clusters together – nor fit with consumer demand.
Ethnicity’s influence is muted in this way.
Second, much of the studies they reference are no older than 2002. This omits a large
majority of the aforementioned intellectual history that Black political economists contributed
around the time that regional cluster theory a la Porter emerged. This misses connections that
could better advance the field, as it relates to race. The views I highlight in later sections show
how.
Third, the vast majority of how they view business success is behavioral determinants,
even in the context of money. With management, Bradford and Mijid promote a heavily traits-
driven discourse as an uncritical summary of the literature to date: the importance of
“entrepreneurial team” [i.e., the management team of the new venture (Timmons & Spinelli,

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2004)], “human capital” (i.e., education) and “experience” (i.e., family business backgrounds).
Within the money, they privilege the rates in which the business owners apply for capital and
credit and the levels of family wealth, with scant attention to how the banks maintain these
dynamics. They acknowledge one issue with characterizing these bank-to-Black business
relationships is a lack of updated data: “Unfortunately, the latest quality data are the 2003
Survey of Small Business Finances (SSBF). None of the current, available, nationally
representative data sets provide as much detailed information about lending decisions.”
Sadly, this is in line with a majority of the scholarship on the determinants of
entrepreneurship. Management authors summarized traits-driven discourse around the “Big Five
(or Six)” distal predisposition factors: 1) achievement motivation, 2) self-efficacy, 3)
entrepreneurial intentions, 4) opportunity recognition, 5) execution of entrepreneurial intent, and
6) honesty/humility (Pollack, Louie, Renko & Shaver, 2016). Yet, we know that personality is just
one element of an entrepreneurs’ background. Even within this article, they divided behavior
into characteristics and cognitions, wherein “characteristics include demographics (e.g., gender, race,
education, experiences).” The fact that race can be linked and correlated to their major
categories of behavior and determinants, institutions and environments, and entrepreneurial
communities makes a strong case for considering race in concert with the economic geography of
entrepreneurship.
A socio-structural and environmental view might be more apt for understanding Black
entrepreneurship. Later on, they acknowledge that “Blacks and Hispanics do not lag behind
Whites in their rates of self-employment entry nearly as dramatically as they lag behind Whites in
their self-employment business size, profitability, and survival rates (Ahn, 2011)” (Bradford &
Mijid, 2016). This reinforces the idea that the Association for Enterprise Opportunity summed
up from their research (2016): we do not have a pilot problem, we have a runway problem.

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Individualistic notions of the fates of Black businesses built on behavioral determinants have
served their purpose, but we need to pivot to a different view that emphasizes institutions,
structures, groups, and networks.
Clusters and Industrial Districts: A Missed Opportunity for People-
Based Place Economic Strategy
Local economic development (ED) theory has undergone multiple cycles and ‘waves’ of
thinking and practice around clusters (Leigh & Blakely, 2016; Bradshaw & Blakely, 1999). While
cluster theory had roots in earlier theory (i.e., cumulative causation and agglomeration), Harvard
Business School Professor Michael Porter, initially known for his work on the idea of national
competitive advantage, brought regions into focus for ED practitioners with his article on
regional clusters as the “a new unit of competitive analysis” (Porter, 1998; Porter, 2000). He
argued that while globalization had wiped out the old reasons for clusters to be useful, firms had
new reasons to find clustering indispensable:
Clusters, broader than traditional industry categorizations, capture important linkages, complementarities,
and spillovers in terms of technology, skills, information, marketing, and customer needs that cut across
firms and industries. These externalities create a possible rationale for collective action and a role for
government (Porter, 2000, p. 18).
Furthermore, Porter also put forth that there is a need to thinking about the entire ecosystem and
quality of the local environment:
Cluster thinking suggests that companies have a tangible and important stake in the business environments
where they are located in ways that go far beyond taxes, electricity costs, and wage rates. The health of the
cluster is important to the health of the company (Porter, 2000).
Porter’s work complimented many related theories. Michael Storper’s research on the
value of the region hinges on what he called “untraded interdependencies” where the region was
the site of a Post-Fordist, ‘flexible’, ‘learning-based’, production system (Storper, 1997). For
Storper and other regionalists, economic growth comes from building institutions, industrial
organization and transactions, and technological change and learning. Around this time, as high-

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tech regions such as Route 128 in Boston metropolitan area and Silicon Valley in the Santa
Clara region were booming, scholars were grappling with how firms co-operated to create the
“regional advantage” (Saxenian, 1994). The findings of this research would later influence others
in the Fifth Wave of ED. Regional scientists like Philip Cooke began doing work on “regional
innovation systems” as a localization of the national innovation system, but with a focus on
“financial capacity, institutionalised learning and productive culture to systemic innovation”
(Cooke, Uranga, & Extebarria, 1997).
As these theories developed, states and localities were being asked to do more with less by
the federal government. In response, states became providers of “soft infrastructure” institutions
that help maintain “multifunctional and multijurisdictional networks” (Blakely, 1994; Bradshaw,
1993). Blakely and Bradshaw found that success was being measured by how well states
performed three functions: 1) brokering, 2) leadership, and 3) providing information. Most states
were characterized by being “entrepreneurial” with their localities. They adopted industrial
policies in the 1980s to pursue an “activist, interventionist, entrepreneurial” role in the economy
to counter the free-market ideology/stance of the federal government in the Reagan presidency
(Elsinger, 1988).
While this effort prompted some increased industrial attraction in some states (Elsinger
1995), cities began to interpret their role as reducing market imperfections and expanding
markets by doing the “investment and risk-taking roles” to spur “generative development,”
“enterprise development” and “entrepreneurial strategies” (Clarke & Gaile, 1989; Committee for
Economic Development, 1986, p. 20). Cities also viewed and evaluated success by “market
criteria” such as rates of return on investment. For example, Clarke and Gaile evaluated the
Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) program to uncover how some cities generated the
financial management skills through “entrepreneurial financing techniques” and tools such as

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“strategic planning, marketing strategy, and venture capital programs” (Bowman, 1987b, p. 8;
Clarke & Gaile, 1989, pp. 587-589). Cities found these necessary to weather the 1990s climate of
entrepreneurialism.
The intellectual links between agglomeration, entrepreneurship, and race still appear
under-explored and fraught with unaddressed concerns. Though it rarely makes the
bibliographies of regional economists today, during the 1990s, Black economists were rather
concerned about cluster theory as a spatial model for inner-city redevelopment. Yet, since 1970,
the Review of Black Political Economy (RBPE) has served as a depository for theories about
successful what Black American business ownership might look like. However, when Porter’s
theory about the “competitive advantage of the inner-city” focused on regional clusters began to
gain traction with the public, the RBPE dedicated their Fall/Winter 1996 issue to critically
engage with him about the social implications of his formulae.
Some RBPE authors questioned whether this approach to clustering was “exploitation or
empowerment” of the inner-city environment for corporations looking for depressed real estate
to speculate (Johnson, Farrell, & Henderson, 1996, p. 259), thus acting as a “gilder of ghettos”
(Blakely & Small, 1996). Others found his exclusively place-based approach to be ahistorical in its
ignorance of longstanding, extant public-private efforts to deal with unemployment alongside
anti-social issues like crime and drug abuse (Sawicki & Moody, 1996, p. 75). Scholars even
questioned the methodological and empirical basis upon which Porter began advocating for
clusters, as evidenced by the lack of “functional, quantifiable criteria” for clusters (Sawicki &
Moody, 1996, p. 89). Thus, it was difficult for economic developers in certain settings without the
ability to commission his services to translate Porter’s industrial cluster identification techniques
into practice (Doeringer & Terkla, 1995).

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An enduring finding of the critical race analysis offered by Black political economists is
how they helped articulate why Porter’s place-based approach appealed to states and local
officials, possibly at the expense of disadvantaged groups:
There are many reasons these [place-based] strategies are preferred in practice. The most important
reason is that places are represented by elected officials, and elected officials do not want their places to
deteriorate. Short terms of office make it essential to achieve tangible results that voters can see with their
eyes; thus physical projects are preferred. In addition, place-based strategies keep blacks contained in the
center city. This result is favored by many black elected officials who do not wish to see their power base
eroded, and by some whites who do not want to integrate the suburbs. However, the result is often that
those in the city who own the land and capital, not poor (renting) residents, are the beneficiaries. Probably
the most disturbing aspect of the acceptance of place-based strategies is the de-facto acquiescence to racial
segregation (Sawicki & Moody, 1995, p. 78).
Purely place-based cluster strategies could ignore – or even worsen – the developmental needs of
poor, Black communities and economies. Evidence was increasingly mounting from international
cases of how place-based approaches could: 1) fail to attract jobs, 2) transfer jobs from other poor
areas, 3) fail to hire poor residents for new jobs (i.e., spatial mismatch), 4) ignore the power of
social and ethnic networks (Kasinitz & Rosenberg, 1993).
Thus, the political expediency of Porter’s approach says little about the effectiveness of a
place-based strategy in further people-centered economic development. They contrast his cluster
approach to the Clinton administration’s “people-based place strategy” (Ladd, 1994, pp. 193-
218) employed for enterprise zones (EZs), which was different than how England did EZs. They
argue that a people-based business strategy should address the issues of spatial mismatch, job
discrimination, and housing discrimination that belie urban deterioration. Cluster strategies
should be formulated less on international trade remedies derived from Europe, North America,
and East Asia and more from the Global South, with whom poor, urban Black communities have
more in common with in terms of social conditions.
Porter wrote a thoughtful response in this issue to address “the controversy” around his
dismissal of social services in favor of private sector-led redevelopment. He clarified that his

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theory meant to supplement the social service provision model. But in the same breath, he
doubles down on stereotypical views of Black space as valuable insofar as it can be harnessed for
the needs of capitalists. He continued to emphasize the inadequacy of community-based
organizations in facilitating business development alone, which might be fair. Community
development corporations (CDCs) have been better at housing provision (Stoecker, 1997).
However, Porter also defends his stances on deficiencies in human capital and work ethic from
inner-city laborers that his survey respondents (likely executives) cited as issues. The Black
economists’ views helped shift his tune toward ultimately concluding that “working together, we
can unlock” the “genuine economic opportunity in inner cities” (Porter, 1996, p. 333). This is
one of the only published instances where a regional economist would tease out how an industrial
strategy might overlay with racially-informed economic development strategies. It still leaves
much to be desired.
Times have changed, but there is still a need to successfully develop local economies while
easing Black unemployment and poverty. Arguably, Porter has since addressed the question of
how to measure clusters by opening up his data to the public in the U.S. Economic Development
Administration’s Cluster Mapping Project. U.S. EDA now provides over 50 million open data
records on industry clusters and regional business environments in the U.S. to promote economic
growth and national competitiveness. But why did it take nearly 20 years? And why aren’t there
any demographic features included about the race and ethnicity of the business owners? This is
dire within the economic development discourse.
Sadly, even 20 years into promoting this growth approach, Michael Porter has not
accepted that a people-driven place strategy is the best way to combat economic inequality in
predominantly Black and Hispanic business environments. After all the collective criticism he
faced, he offers contradictory comments:

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“The regional tide does not lift all neighborhood boats equally. What is needed is a place-based economic
development approach focused on inner cities, not just one focused on individuals or groups defined by race
or gender that may or may not have the greatest need” (Porter, 2016, p. 106).
I argue that we should be focusing on groups that have the greatest need, which would address
the problem of regional inequities, not a one-dimensional, spatially-driven upgrading of the inner
city because of its geographic assets. For all of his touted successes with the Initiative for a
Competitive Inner City (ICIC), there is a harrowing absence of consideration of who benefits
from these strategies. Furthermore, the way he backtracks on the focus on people calls into
question the sincerity of his concessions in prior literature.
Economic development must turn a new page by taking a focused look at the soft,
enduring, paradoxical infrastructure of prejudice that shapes Black and Brown possibilities in the
economy, which views them as too risky for investment while also pushing them to take more
risks. Therefore, I ask: Do Black-owned businesses (BOBs) cluster differently than White-owned
businesses (WOBs)? Is there a dynamic of racial discrimination that affects the way the capitalist
economy spatializes, which needs to be observed? These questions motivate new approaches.
Mapping from the Margins: A Critical, Asset-Driven Spatial Framework
for Black American Economies
Racial and spatial justice is a muted conversation in economic geography. Therefore, in
this paper, I accept the challenge from Anne Bonds in “Racing Economic Geography” where she
points out:
While economic geographers have long engaged with race, analyses often emphasize the way that capitalism
produces racially unequal outcomes rather than focusing on race as essential to organizing the economy. I
argue that economic geographers can more fully interrogate dimensions of racialized economic difference by
emphasizing race, not just as an effect or product of capital accumulation but rather as a systemic presence
that is thoroughly embedded in economic paradigms, institutions, practices, and actors (Bonds, 2013, p.
399).
That historic (dis)stance in economic geography is antithetical to progress. It is also
ambivalent toward the knowledge that legal and cultural scholars tell us in critical race theory

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(CRT). CRT relies on several legal, cultural, and economic tenets (reviewed in , but the two that
dominate regarding the economy are 1) material determinism (or “interest-convergence”) and 2)
normalcy (or “racial realism”). On interest-convergence, CRT studies such as the theoretical
work of Derrick A. Bell (1980) show us that racism is attractive to institutions as a way of being,
for both psychic reasons (a white sense of superiority) and resource-driven reasons (a white way to
climb the socioeconomic ladder through structural violence). The only time when it is not is
when the interests of Black people have aligned with powerful whites, thus another layer to the
“convergence.” Second, on normalcy, CRT studies illustrate how racism is not an aberration or
a simple externality in an economic process, but in fact the way of doing business for many
capitalists for centuries. With racial realism, CRT studies argued that, due to the way the law
defines racism from the perspective of the perpetrators as “conscious” acts (Freeman, 1978; Bell,
1992) rather than from the victims who may be hurt by unconscious acts of racist violence (i.e.,
fear-based police shootings), it may even be a permanent feature of American society.
Thus, race often does burden the entrepreneur with additional stigmas that affect their
ability to take on additional risks financially (or otherwise). Not being able to take risks while also
being viewed as risky is the paradox of doing business while Black. It stunts their development
and ability to gain ground economically – especially in terms of space. Because how racial groups
use and experience space is so different (Lipsitz, 2011), I hypothesize that the clustering should
and will look different by racial group. Studies of Black entrepreneurship do not critically engage
with the geographically-specific risks of law enforcement, criminality, housing and land use
policy, employment discrimination, and the entire prison-industrial complex as they relate to
property rights and entrepreneurial fates.

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Redefining Ethnic Entrepreneurial Success: Incorporating Context
A critical spatial framework for analyzing the economic geography of race and ethnicity
must move away from foci on the founder’s personal dispositions in the face of risk.
Entrepreneurship and management scholars that glorify the prudent risk-taker without a deeper
appreciation for the sociocultural and spatial applications of risk unfairly malign ethnic minorities
doing (small) business. They position individualism as the starting point for innovation and
economic success, without adequately considering how the differential exposure to risk that
institutions (i.e., banks, police, courts, etc.) enact on peoples and places through racism and
socialization. Therefore, we never grapple with the fact that certain peoples and places are
already seen and treated as inherently risky. These sociocultural factors limit the eligible pool of
places and peoples who can engage as business owners and entrepreneurs with the host of
institutions required (i.e., banks, insurance agencies, foundations, real estate firms, technology
companies, marketing firms, planning departments, neighborhood governance, consumers).
Instead, it engages productively with the institutional and social environments as harbingers of
possibility that are essential to the development of successful ventures. Mapping them is one step
in that direction.
The significance of taking an asset-driven stance on Black entrepreneurship can hardly be
understated. What likely undergirds the lack of work on the geography of Black businesses is an
inability to imagine a successful ethnic entrepreneur, due to the deficit-driven sociological
literature. Wang (2012, p. 229) critically notes how the concept of an ethnic entrepreneur is one
fraught with stereotypical notions of “petty traders, merchants, or shopkeepers who engage in
small businesses” (Zhou, 2004) and “low-wages, poor working conditions, and sweatshops”
(Sanders & Nee, 1987 and 1992; Barrett et al., 2003; Bonacich & Appelbaum, 2000). Thus, it

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makes sense why, despite the clear benefits of a small business locating in a vibrant cluster (Kuah,
2002), the clustering of successful Black entrepreneurs has not been a serious undertaking to date.
Over the years, Black political economists have challenged how competitiveness-driven
entrepreneurship sociologies tend to define business success in disparate, individualistic ways.
Cumulatively, the individualists form a deficit-driven literature that make Black Americans
appear uncompetitive because they are unfit to take on the risks to succeed. One scholar noted
the prevalence of this “failure factors” approach whenever Black businesses were studied, rather
than a success emphasis, based on quantitative “speculation and/or unique anecdotes” (Ahiarah,
1993, p. 23).
The individual-specific factors include: (i) inadequate managerial capability; operational neglect; (ii)
choice of unfavorable business location; (iii) fraudulent practices; and (iv) lack of relevant training and
experience. The environment-consequent factors include: (i) random disturbances-acts of God,
theft/robberies, labor strife, etc.; (ii) lack of access to capital; (iii) lack of supportive network; (iv) lack of
role models; (v) inadequate black patronage; and the most obvious, (vi) racial discrimination and black
powerlessness.
However, unlike a general business, if we were to flip these factors into a “success factors” view,
we must acknowledge the unique traits of successful Black American business owners. “Black
American businesses must possess the attributes that generally characterize successful firms in this
country, in addition to unique attributes that enable them to counteract the obstacles to which
the U.S. caste system uniquely subjects black persons” (Ahiarah, 1993, p. 24).

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Figure 7: Theorized Factors of Business Success (Ahiarah, 1993)
Instead, he proposed new theoretical model that suggests that the three principal factors
that explain Black Americans' business success are: (1) individual-specific; (2) black American
group-specific; and (3) environment-consequent (Ahiarah, 1993, p. 30). The literatures rarely
address demographic groups in concert with their geographies and environments in this way.

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Table 3: Black Business Ownership Factors and Associated Success Indices: Individual Factors

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Table 4: Black Business Ownership Factors and Success Indices: Group Specific and Environment-Consequent

Lastly, one way to view the mapping of Black business clusters for their comparative
existence over their comparative absence is to consider it a mode of Black placemaking. Black
placemaking is “the ways that urban Black Americans create sites of belonging through the
creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being Black people in the
city” (Hunter et al., 2016). This is motivated by the belief that Black placemaking (and the larger
idea of Black urbanism I argue for in this dissertation) can improve cities by making them more
inclusive, social, and use-driven (Lipsitz, 2011): products of the Black spatial imagination. There
is a gap in creative placemaking, entrepreneurship, and Black geographies literatures in
addressing this nexus. The scholarship around the Black-driven economy needs new regional
science alongside these new stories.

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Research Question and Approach
Given the aforementioned factors, this paper explores the following question: Are there Black-
owned business (BOB) clusters in California? If so, at what scale and where? Are these BOB clusters in or near
Black neighborhoods? Answering these questions will require measuring how firms agglomerate. This
paper, takes three approaches on a single dataset in a single state to show:
• Descriptive statistics
• Cluster analysis via Location Quotients to demonstrate clustering
• Correlation coefficient analysis to demonstrate clustering of BOBs with black residential
neighborhoods
The U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners (SBO) is the primary dataset for
the analysis of clustering at the city-level. The SBO’s Economic Place (E60) level - or simply
“Place” for our purposes - provides a strong basis for the aggregated firm-level statistics. Every
five years since 1969, the SBO collects firm-level data by gender, race, and ethnicity using
multiple sources. For primary sources, they use IRS business tax returns, Social Security
Administration demographic data. For secondary sources, they use digital- or print-based “lists of
minority- and women-owned businesses published in syndicated magazines…or disseminated by
trade or special interest groups” and mailout surveys (though they are moving toward electronic
data), but also Economic Census products (i.e., Survey of Manufacturers). They also do a bit of
probability estimation for inferring race/ethnicity based on factors like:
§ Word strings in the company name indicating possible minority ownership (derived from
2007 survey responses)
§ Racial distributions for various state-industry classes (derived from 2007 survey responses)
and racial distributions for various ZIP Codes.
1

Unfortunately, SBO data does not categorize any ethnic sub-groups of Black Americans
in the same way that the Decennial Census and American Community Survey does with the

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Ancestry information. African Americans and Whites lack ethnic classification in the ways
Hispanic business owners receive (as listed in Appendix A: Table 1). Therefore, we cannot speak
to the spatial or economic nuances of at least four ethnic sub-groups that arguably fit within the
Black/African American racial group: 1) Cajun, 2) Guyanese, 3) Subsaharan African (Cape
Verdean, Ethiopian, Ghanian, Kenyan, Liberian, Nigerian, Sengalese, Sierra Leonean, Somali,
South African, Sudanese, Ugandan, Zimbabwean, African), and 4) non-Hispanic West Indian
(Bahamian, Barbadian, Belizean, Bermudan, British West Indian, Dutch West Indian, Haitian,
Jamaican, Trinidadian and Tobagonian, U.S. Virgin Islander, West Indian) business owners
(U.S. American Community Survey 2015, accessed 2017). Consequently, we are left with a very
high-level, blunt picture of the Black entrepreneurial experience, which might warrant further
study.
Secondly, over time, the SBO included more racial groups. In 1982, it was five racial
groups but by 2002, it expanded to seven. Older versions are less relatable to current versions of
the SBO. Thirdly, another data limitation is that businesses can count in multiple racial groups.
According to the Census, this is because either the sole or majority owner was reported to be of
more than one race or a majority combination of owners was reported to be of more than one
race. The SBO notes that this might lead to sub-groups not tallying properly.
Outside of firm owner demographics, the SBO contains measures of economic
performance. These include firm receipts from sales, employment levels, and annual pay. Over
time, the SBO has raised the baseline receipts that would qualify a firm for inclusion: firms with
annual receipts between $500 to $1,000 in a year were removed post-1997. Prior to 1997, the
Census removed the subchapter C corporations from the survey, which might undercount the
presence of minority-owned businesses by as much as 50% in the 1992 and prior surveys (Boston
& Ross, 1995; Boston, 1996; Feigenbaum, 1996).

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Analysis
Prior uses of SBO data have focused on the county-level patterns of business ownership
by race and ethnicity. This study narrows down to an urban level. The cluster analysis drew on
the economic place unit – which is often the size of a city but also includes unincorporated areas,
towns, and census designated places (CDPs) in California.
My primary goal is to generate comparative spatial statistics on the geography of ethnic
businesses (i.e., non-Hispanic White, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, Native American) with a primary
emphasis on the Black entrepreneurial places. In doing this, I use three types of spatial statistics:
- Agglomeration measures (Location quotients)
- Descriptive statistics on productivity measures (i.e., sales, jobs, annual pay)
- Statistical significance tests: Spearman’s rho correlation coefficients
1. Agglomeration via Location Quotients
After cleaning and data manipulation using spatial joins and queries, I tabulated the 888
economic places in California with firms by the levels of minority business. In particular, I
focused in this paper on generating counts by the Black firm owners compared to non-Black firm
owners. In economic development and regional science, one standard way to talk about the
concentration of firm activity through agglomeration is to use location quotients. Location
quotients are a ratio that expresses the share of the local firm density as it relates to the larger
(often national) concentration. In Equation 1, the U.S. EDA uses region as the local spatial unit
and the nation as the nation as the larger comparative unit.
𝐿𝑄 =
𝑅𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛
+
𝑠 𝐼𝑛𝑑𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝐸𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑦𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡
𝑅𝑒𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛
+
𝑠 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐸𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑦𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡
𝑈.𝑆.𝐼𝑛𝑑𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑦 𝐸𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑦𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡
𝑈.𝑆.𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐸𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑜𝑦𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡

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Equation 1: Location Quotient Formula (U.S. Economic Development Administration)
However, in my study, I use economic place as the unit of analysis locally (the numerator)
compared to the statewide concentration (denominator). However, the cluster analysis here is
mostly limited to the place in the following demographically-specific ways:
𝐿𝑄
<=>?=@ABCDE
=
𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒
+
𝑠 𝐹𝑖𝑟𝑚 𝑂𝑤𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑠
<=>?=@ABCDEK
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑃𝑙𝑎𝑐𝑒
+
𝑠 𝐹𝑖𝑟𝑚 𝑂𝑤𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑠
K@@<=>?=@ABCDEL

𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑤𝑖𝑑𝑒 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐹𝑖𝑟𝑚 𝑂𝑤𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑠
<=>?=@ABCDEK
𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑤𝑖𝑑𝑒 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐹𝑖𝑟𝑚 𝑂𝑤𝑛𝑒𝑟𝑠
K@@<=>?=@ABCDEL

Equation 2: Racially-Specific Location Quotient Formula (U.S. Economic Development Administration)
2. Descriptive Statistics on Productivity: Sales, Jobs, Pay
To qualify Black firm agglomeration, I produced metrics for describing how influential the BOBs
are on key economic development measures in their geographies. These aggregate output
measures would be based on individual productivity factors highlighted in economic geography
and available across multiple data sources at multiple scales. They include:
- Average jobs per firm in city/place by racial group
- Average sales per firm in city/place by racial group
- Average annual pay per firm in city/place by racial group
While spillover effects (more specifically “merchant effects”) span beyond these narrow economic
effects (Sutton, 2007), these give some initial indication of the fate of those economically
dependent on these firms. It will also allow me to rank cities and neighborhoods along similar
dimensions.

104
3. Statistical Tests
Correlations
There are two widely-used correlation coefficient tests to determine associations between
categorical and ordinal variables, depending on the type of data used: Pearson’s and Spearman’s
rho. Upon running a series of visual inspections of my data pictured in the histograms below, it
was clear that the distributions were non-normal. The total number of business owners by racial
groups, their average productivity across the three metrics, and their location quotients were
non-normal distributions with high levels of non-random kurtosis and skewness. The LQs of
White firm owners’ were highly-skewed to the right and LQs of Black firm owners highly skewed
to the left.
Figure 8: Distribution Histograms of Location Quotients of Black- and White-Owned Firms in California

Thus, the Spearman’s rho correlation coefficient is a non-parametric method that allows for
correlation tests on this non-normal data.

105
105
Hot Spot Analysis
For the hotspot analysis, I use a list of over 3,500 Black-owned businesses in the Los
Angeles County region, mined from the InfoGroup ReferenceUSA database, to explore
statistically significant areas in the region. The most appropriate hot spot analysis in ArcGIS is
Getis-Ord Gi* statistic. The Gi* statistic analyzes a dataset using to the formula in Equation 3
below and computes a Z-score. The Z-score shows how many standard deviations a number is
from the mean of a distribution; thus, it is a standardized measure capable of being interpreted
regardless of the units.

Equation 3: Getis-Ord Gi* Formula (ESRI, 2005)
For statistically significant positive Z scores in a Getis-Ord Gi* statistic, the larger the Z score is
and the more intense the clustering of high values. This is considered a hot spot. For statistically

106
significant negative Z scores, the smaller the Z score is and the more intense the clustering of low
values. These are considered cold spots. Last, there are statistically insignificant areas. These
categories help sort out fairly efficiently where to focus empirical interpretation.
However, hot spot analyses still require analytical choices. Unlike the location quotient
analysis’ dataset, which had a defined spatial unit (economic place), address-level spatial analysis
requires choosing the method of aggregation. One option was to allow the ArcGIS software to
generate units (i.e., fishnet polygons) which would have sliced up businesses in the same areas
according to mathematically sound shapes. But this would have been arbitrary and possibly in
conflict with the social mechanisms that undergird agglomeration. Instead, I decided to use two
real-world units that I believe reflect both entrepreneurs’ decisions and market boundaries:
commercial buildings and zip codes. By using the Los Angeles County Assessors’ parcel data, I
geocoded and spatially joined the businesses onto a real space: commercial buildings. This
allowed for a corridor analysis complete with zip codes, among other information (i.e., type of
zoning, cost of buildings, age, etc.). These other factors, however, were not included in this study.
Zip codes were the primary variable needed to distinguish between commercial zones for the hot
spot analysis, which can be contiguous in an urbanized Los Angeles.
Findings
My primary research interest is in the outcomes for Black American entrepreneurs. As such,
while I will touch on the high-level impacts on each of the six ethnic groups, most of my
discussion centers on Black/Non-Black differences.

107
107
Finding #1: Non-White and Minority-Owned Firms Cluster Selectively
Minority entrepreneurs are located in most places within the state of California
(93%), but they are not necessarily clustered in all locations.
People of color and ethnic minorities own businesses in most places around the state.
Specifically, 834 of the 888 places in California have non-White firm owners, which makes their
fates a concern for 93% of California’s places. Despite their dispersion around the state, not all
business owners of color have employees, though most do. 732 places host minority firms with
employees, which is nearly 88% of places with any ethnic minority firms. This is 82% of all
places, regardless of ethnicity. Most of this share is comprised of Hispanic firms (80.8% of all
places), followed by Asian firms (62%), Native American firms (21%), and Pacific Islander firms
(7.5%). Black-owned employer firms have the least amount of geographic spread: only 7.3%.
On average, minority-owned firms collectively provide 5% of the jobs in a given
California place. However, the individual subgroups of non-White firm owners (i.e., Hispanic,
Asian, Black, Native American, Pacific Islander) offer no more than an average of 3% of the jobs
across the state. While Black-owned firms are not the worst in this case, they provide no more
than 5% of employment in any place, with an average of 0.15%. This is very miniscule statewide,
but regionally significant in the places where they are located. These will be shown in later
sections.

108

Figure 9: Histogram of the Density Distribution of Minority-Owned Firms’ Location Quotients in California (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations)
Over 40% of California, 333 out of 823 places, can be considered a cluster for minority-
owned firms. Almost three-quarters (71%) of all the 1.65 million minority-owned firms can be
found in these clusters as well; there are 1,144,900 minority-owned firms located there. While
minority-owned businesses are present in nearly every place in California, clustering happens in
only a few significant places.
Table 5: Top 20 places for minority firm clusters in California (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations)
Place Metropolitan
Area
Total
Firms
Minority
Firms
LQ - Employer
Minority Firms
Avg. # of
Jobs/Firm
East Porterville
CDP, California
Visalia-Porterville 98 64 3.16 0.5
San Gabriel city,
California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim
7,839 6,981 2.75 0.91
Rosemead city,
California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim
6,189 5,642 2.72 1.21
Coronita CDP,
California
Riverside-San
Bernardino-
Ontario

193

40
2.64 2.2

109
109
Rowland Heights
CDP, California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

6,434

5,560
2.57 0.67
Alum Rock CDP,
California
San Jose–
Sunnyvale–Santa
Clara
508 394 2.57 0.51
Avocado Heights
CDP, California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

1,481

1,178
2.55 1.1
La Puente city,
California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

2,829

2,640
2.49 0.63
Alhambra city,
California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

10,635

9,059
2.46 1.14
South El Monte
city, California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

3,242

2,520
2.46 2.46
Hacienda Heights
CDP, California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

5,195

4,222
2.38 0.45
Diamond Bar city,
California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

7,124

5,398
2.29 0.7
East Los Angeles
CDP, California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

6,947

6,301
2.26 0.88
Temple City city,
California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

5,362

4,314
2.25 0.79
South Gate city,
California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

7,170

6,497
2.15 0.62
Calexico city,
California
El Centro
4,078

3,556
2.15 0.88
Gardena city,
California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

6,794

5,448
2.12 0.7
Industry city,
California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

3,105

1,901
2.06 10.59
Cupertino city,
California
San Jose–
Sunnyvale–Santa
Clara
5,960 3,809 2.04 1.51
Baldwin Park city,
California
Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim
5,286 4,794 2.04 0.9

The places with high levels of minority-owned business clustering were larger places with
a bigger economic base or business footprint in general (n > 2000 firms). We must note that 15
out of the top 20 places for minority firm owners are in the Los Angeles metro area. This will be
discussed later.

110
Finding #2: Black-Owned Firm Clusters Correlate With Benefit Other Groups
Black business clustering is positively associated with economic productivity, both
for their businesses and other non-White firm owners.
Despite being one of the smaller ethnic groups concerning business ownership, the fates
of Black business owners play an outsized statistical role in the location and productivity patterns
of other groups. Black businesses with employees are only clustered in 40 places or 5% of the 823
places in California. Over triple that, 138 places, are clusters to 128,435 Black firms with or
without employees, or 17%, of the state’s places. That means that nearly three-quarters (74.8%)
of the 171,615 Black firms located their business in a place with a high level of clustering (LQ >
1.0). Black businesses in California seem to favor these clustered, dense places.

111
111

Figure 10: Map of the top 5 places with Black-owned business clusters in California, all in the Los Angeles region, with View Park-Windsor Hills
highlighted in yellow as the highest in the state (U.S. SBO 2012)
In the top five places shown in Figure 10, it is noteworthy that these are historically (but
not exclusively or contemporarily) African-American communities. In fact, there are only two
places (View Park-Windsor Hills and Inglewood) that are predominantly Black in this list during
the time of the Survey. The rest are places where Whites make up no less than one-fifth of the
residential population. Overall, Whites are still the dominant group in the top BOB clustered
places, making up exactly 43% of the 5.6 million people who live in these cities and
neighborhoods compared to the 29% Black residents. This shows how Black entrepreneurship

112
tends to be found in more dense, multiracial places where they share space with other ethnic
groups.
Table 6: Racial Demographics of Top 20 Places for Black Clusters in California
Place Total Pop Total
White
White
%
Total
Black
Black
%
View Park-Windsor Hills CDP,
California
10,948 902 8% 8,765 80%
Ladera Heights CDP, California 7,072 1063 15% 5,430 77%
Westmont CDP, California 20,642 5409 26% 11,414 55%
West Athens CDP, California 8,794 2331 27% 4,223 48%
Inglewood city, California 110,225 29,298 27% 49,196 45%
Camp Pendleton South CDP,
California
12,355 8201 66% 769 6%
Adelanto city, California 31,040 16858 54% 6659 21%
Meadowbrook CDP, California 3,025 1357 45% 43 1%
North Richmond CDP, California 3,929 1642 42% 1209 31%
West Rancho Dominguez CDP,
California
30,483 5633 18% 15935 52%
Compton city, California
96,561

32,822
34%
30,041
31%
Mojave CDP, California 3,835 2260 59% 288 8%
California City city, California 13,361 8939 67% 2147 16%
Willowbrook CDP, California 19,554 8417 43% 4659 24%
Fruitridge Pocket CDP, California 5,927 2225 38% 961 16%
Lancaster city, California 15,5496 97123 62% 30637 20%
Hawthorne city, California 84,633 39664 47% 23038 27%
Edwards AFB CDP, California 2,585 1851 72% 265 10%
Rosamond CDP, California 18,015 11626 65% 1393 8%
Vallejo city, California
116,417

43,962
38%
24,260
21%
TOTAL 754,897 321,583 43% 221,332 29%

113
113
Table 7: Top 20 places for Black firm owners in California by location quotients (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations)
Place Metropolitan Area Total
Firms
Total
Black
Firms
Black
Firm
LQs
View Park-Windsor Hills
CDP, California
Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Anaheim

1,214

898
15.35
Ladera Heights CDP,
California
Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Anaheim

846

515
12.63
Westmont CDP, California Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Anaheim

2,692

1,396
10.76
West Athens CDP, California Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Anaheim

885

434
10.17
Inglewood city, California Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Anaheim

10,598

4,446
8.7
Camp Pendleton South CDP,
California
San Diego-Carlsbad
111

45
8.41
Adelanto city, California Riverside-San
Bernardino-Ontario

2,426

969
8.29
Meadowbrook CDP,
California
Riverside-San
Bernardino-Ontario

161

59
7.6
North Richmond CDP,
California
San Francisco-Oakland-
Hayward

175

61
7.23
West Rancho Dominguez
CDP, California
Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Anaheim

2,316

792
7.09
Compton city, California Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Anaheim

8,106

2,758
7.06
Mojave CDP, California Bakersfield
358

108
6.26
California City city, California Bakersfield
808

243
6.24
Willowbrook CDP, California Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Anaheim

1,242

367
6.13
Fruitridge Pocket CDP,
California
Sacramento–Roseville–
Arden-Arcade

258

68
5.47
Lancaster city, California Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Anaheim

12,627

3,188
5.24
Hawthorne city, California Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Anaheim

7,840

1,843
4.88
Edwards AFB CDP,
California
Bakersfield
117

27
4.79
Rosamond CDP, California Bakersfield
1,020

214
4.35
Vallejo city, California Vallejo-Fairfield
6,703

1,389
4.3

114

How statistically significant are these rankings in their bearings on the relationship to
economic productivity and co-clustering? First, I tested the relationship between Black firm’s
clustering and their economic productivity to test the theory of whether clustering has a positive
relationship to economic output. Indeed, as Figure 11 shows, overall, clusters correlate with
higher Black firm owners’ annual pay, slightly better for employment, and strongly correlated
with higher average sales.

Figure 11: Spearman's rho correlation coefficient test of Black firm clustering with Black firm economic productivity (U.S. SBO 2012,
author calculations)
0.6417
0.2904 0.2905
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
Black Sales Black Pay Black Jobs
Spearman's rho (correlation)
Correlation Coefficients of Black Clusters on Per
Capita Sales, Pay , and Jobs at Black Firms in
California (SBO 2012)

115
115
This positive in-group relationship has spillover effects onto other groups. On average,
the correlations showed a strongly positive, statistically significant (p < 0.000) correlation between
increased Black firm clustering and the economic productivity of non-Black firms.

Figure 12: Spearman's rho correlation coefficient results for Black firm clusters’ relationship to non-Black firms’ economic productivity (U.S. SBO 2012,
author calculations)
That is, the average annual pay, average number of jobs, and average sales per firm tended to be
higher for non-Black firms when a cluster of Black firms were nearby.
However, the relationships become a bit more complicated when it comes to co-
clustering. Increased Black firm clustering was moderately to strongly positively correlated with
non-Black firm owners clustering near them – except for White firm owners. As pictured in
Figure 13, White firm clustering was moderately negatively associated with increased Black firm
clustering. This inverse relationship calls for further examination of whether the Black firms’
0.7192
0.8107
0.8122
0.66
0.68
0.7
0.72
0.74
0.76
0.78
0.8
0.82
Non-Black Jobs Non-Black Pay Non-Black Sales
Spearman's rho (correlation)
Correlation Coefficients of Black Clusters on Per
Capita Sales, Pay , and Jobs at Non-Black Firms in
California (SBO 2012)

116
relationship, as a group, to White firms is unique or shared among other ethnic minority firm
owners. I share those findings in the following section on the nature of White firm owners.

Figure 13: Spearman's rho correlation coefficient results for Black firm clusters’ relationship to non-Black firms’ clusters (U.S. SBO 2012, author
calculations)
Finding #3: White-Owned Firms Cluster with Mixed Effects
White-owned business clustering is, on average, negatively associated with
economic productivity and clustering for non-White businesses in California.

Compared to minority-owned firms, there are more White-owned firm clusters in the
state, but they are spread out. There are 516 White firm owner clusters, more than any other
group in the 823 places (63%). However, a smaller share of the total businesses is located in
clusters compared to minority-owned businesses. Over 50% - 1,100,318 out of the total
0.1883
0.482
0.3192
0.4244
-0.4593
-0.6
-0.4
-0.2
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
Hispanic LQ Asian LQ AINA LQ NHPI LQ White LQ
Spearman's rho (correlation)
Correlation Coefficients of Black Clustering on Non-
Black Clustering in California (SBO 2012)

117
117
2,190,124 White-owned firms in California – are located in these clusters. This shows a greater
dispersion than non-White-owned firms, but less spatial intensity.
The places in which White-owned firms tend to concentrate are not the same as the ones
that firm owners of color do. The place with the greatest LQ (East Oakdale CDP in the Modesto
region, LQ 1.52, pictured in Figure 18) had only 384 firms there, but 362 were white-owned
firms. This phenomenon - small places (less than 1,000 firms) with high ratios of White business
owners - was prevalent in a majority of the places with White clusters. To be precise, White-
owned businesses without employees only shared a cluster with firm owners of color in seven
places in the entire 823 places.

Figure 14: Map of Bonny Doon CDP in Santa Cruz MSA, the fourth-most clustered place for White firm owners in California (U.S. SBO 2012,
author calculations)

118

Figure 15: Map of Auburn Lake Trails CDP in Sacramento MSA, ranked tenth-most clustered place for White firm owners in California (U.S. SBO
2012, author calculations)

Figure 16: A map of Lake Wildwood CDP in Truckee-Grass Valley MSA, the second-most clustered place for White firm owners in California (U.S.
SBO 2012, author calculations)

119
119

Figure 17: A map of Magalia CDP in Chico MSA, the third-most clustered place for White firm owners in California (U.S. SBO 2012, author
calculations)

Figure 18: Map of East Oakdale CDP in Modesto, the most clustered place for White firm owners in California (U.S. SBO 2012, author
calculations).
Yet, these places were also hosted some of the least economically competitive firms in
terms of average jobs per firm, annual sales per firm, and annual pay per firm. This is important
to note because White-owned businesses dominate regarding the overall share of businesses,

120
sheer number of employer businesses, and their prevalence. White-owned businesses are in 99%
of places in California, with 97% of those having at least one other employee.
How does clustering look when we factor in employment at firms by owner race and
ethnicity? Nearly 36%, 321 out of 888, places can be considered a cluster for White firm owners
with employees. 2,748,624 jobs are in these clusters, but the collective 2,158,232 White-owned
firms with employees employ a total 4,779,753 people. Over half, 57.5%, of the jobs in these
firms are at White-owned firms located in clusters. If we take a closer look at the top 20 places for
White firm owners with employees, as we have in the previous categories, we see that they form
92% of the total firms in those places.
Table 8: Top 20 Most Clustered Places of White Employer Firm Owners in California (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations)
Place Metropolitan Area Total
Firms
White
Firms
LQ - White
Employer
Firms
Ave
rage
# of
Jobs
Hidden Meadows
CDP, California
San Diego-Carlsbad
507

443
1.54
1.97
Loyola CDP,
California
San Jose–
Sunnyvale–Santa
Clara

389

307
1.48
0.24
Kensington CDP,
California
San Francisco-
Oakland-Hayward

698

612
1.48
0.38
Aromas CDP,
California
Salinas
284

278
1.48
0.55
Acton CDP, California Los Angeles-Long
Beach-Anaheim

628

521
1.47
0.55
Auburn Lake Trails
CDP, California
Sacramento–
Roseville–Arden-
Arcade

226

222
1.47
0.14
Arnold CDP,
California
Calaveras
361

317
1.46
1.85
Durham CDP,
California
Chico
634

613
1.44
1.90
Eucalyptus Hills CDP,
California
San Diego-Carlsbad
417

385
1.44
0.25
Magalia CDP,
California
Chico
446

441
1.43
0.20

121
121
Frazier Park CDP,
California
Bakersfield
240

234
1.43
0.24
Lucas Valley-
Marinwood CDP,
California
San Francisco-
Oakland-Hayward,
CA

677

627
1.42
0.21
Boyes Hot Springs
CDP, California
Santa Rosa
674

545
1.42
2.76
Pollock Pines CDP,
California
Sacramento–
Roseville–Arden-
Arcade

277

267
1.41
1.28
Jamul CDP, California San Diego-Carlsbad
792

700
1.41
1.47
Oildale CDP,
California
Bakersfield
1,587

1,371
1.41
1.41
Calistoga city,
California
Napa
662

589
1.40
0.70
McKinleyville CDP,
California
Eureka–Arcata–
Fortuna

1,500

1,331
1.39
1.25
San Martin CDP,
California
San Jose–
Sunnyvale–Santa
Clara

915

752
1.39
0.92
Nevada City city,
California
Truckee-
Grass Valley

861

826
1.39
2.00

Again, nearly all of these places are comparatively small (n > 1000 firms) for California
and White Americans own the majority. While this paper did not set out to characterize the
residential environment of these places, we can surmise based on the U.S. Census demographics
in Table 9 that they are not co-clustering with other ethnic groups very much. Of the places
where demographic groups were tabulated (which does not include unincorporated places like
“Balances” of a county), the 2012 five-year census showed that 87% of the residents in these 13
places were non-Hispanic whites, with a range of 71% to 97%.
Table 9: Racial Demographics of Top White Firm Clusters in California
Place Total
Population
Total Whites White %
Acton CDP, California 7,117 6,299 89%
Arnold CDP, California 2,552 2,323 91%

122
Aromas CDP, California 2,789 2,239 80%
Auburn Lake Trails CDP, California 3,596 3,484 97%
Boyes Hot Springs CDP, California 7,818 5,533 71%
Calistoga city, California 5,156 4,777 93%
Durham CDP, California 5,745 5,374 94%
Eucalyptus Hills CDP, California 5,290 3,990 75%
Frazier Park CDP, California 2,575 2,420 94%
Jamul CDP, California 5,633 4,938 88%
Lucas Valley-Marinwood CDP,
California
5,870 5,026 86%
Magalia CDP, California 11,420 10,457 92%
Oildale CDP, California 33,118 28,702 87%
Total 98,679 85,562 87%
This corollary finding is important because White-owned firms are the largest employer
firms in California, providing an average of 30% of the jobs in a place. In some places, unlike any
other ethnic group, White-owned firms provided nearly 100% of the jobs recorded (i.e., Hidden
Meadows CDP in San Diego-Carlsbad MSA). This creates an exclusionary, alienating business
climate should any entrepreneurs of color live there or want a job there, which may tend to be
given to employees that share the same ethnic background as the owners (Bates 1994).

123
123

Figure 19: Spearman's rho correlation coefficients on White firm clustering's relationship to White firm productivity (U.S. SBO 2012, author
calculations)
The White firm owners’ average economic productivity had a mixed, weak relationship
with clustering and none of them were statistically significant, unfortunately. On sales, there
appeared to be a very small positive correlation with White firm owner clustering at a statistically
significant level (p < 0.005).
2
As pictured in Figure 19, this is the opposite effect internally than
what all other ethnic groups exhibited. In combination with the other findings, which were
statistically significant, this pattern further complicates our notion of the benefits of
agglomeration and to whom.
Further, there is a statistically significant, strongly negative relationship between White
firm owners clustering with the clustering of all other ethnic groups. As pictured in Figure 20
0.0988
0.0046
-0.0351
0.3142
-0.034
0.3295
-0.1
-0.05
0
0.05
0.1
0.15
0.2
0.25
0.3
0.35
White Sales Sales P-Value White Pay Pay P-Value White Jobs Jobs P-Value
Spearman's rho (correlation) or p-value
Correlation Coefficients of White Clusters on Per
Capita Sales, Pay , and Jobs at White Firms in California
(SBO 2012)

124
below, the dynamic is most strongly pronounced for Hispanic firm owners, followed closely by
Asian firm owners, then Black firm owners. This is consistent with the negative correlations
reflected in the intra-group calculations wherein White firm owners had an inverse relationship
with the increased clustering of ethnic minority clusters.

Figure 20: Spearman rho correlation coefficients for White firm clustering on non-White firm clustering (U.S. SBO 2012, author calculations)
Lastly, White firm clustering is not correlated with economic productivity for other ethnic
groups, on average. While two of the groups (again, American Indian/Native American and
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander firm owners) were not statistically significant, all the groups
experienced a weak to moderate negative relationship with White firm owner clusters, on
average. The most pronounced relationship was between White firm LQs and Black firm
owners’ average sales, followed closely by Hispanic firm owners’ average sales. Asian-owned
-0.4593
-0.5946
-0.5371
-0.0938
-0.2213
-0.7
-0.6
-0.5
-0.4
-0.3
-0.2
-0.1
0
Black LQ Hispanic LQ Asian LQ AINA LQ NHPI LQ
Spearman's rho (correlation)
Correlation Coefficients of White Clusters on Non-
White Clustering in California (SBO 2012)

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firms saw the most negative relationship when it came to average jobs supplied, followed by
Hispanic firms.
Unfortunately, this reinforces the other findings in this study about the negative internal
and external effects of White firm clustering. Given the fact that they experience the most
negative position to white entrepreneurs, these findings may also complicate the “model
minority” thesis about Asian Americans (Chou & Feagin, 2015; Hurh & Kim 1989), who may
actually be perceived as a threat to white-dominant capitalism rather than the aggregate findings
of extant studies of race and entrepreneurial success (Fairlie & Robb, 2008).

Figure 21: Spearman rho's correlation coefficient for White firm clustering on non-White firm economic productivity (U.S. SBO 2012,
author calculations)
Finding #4: Non-White Firm Owners Tend to Co-Cluster with Economic
Productivity
Co-clustering is mostly happening in places among non-White firm owners and it
tends be associated with higher sales, pay, and jobs on average.
-0.2164
-0.2364
-0.2375
-0.24
-0.235
-0.23
-0.225
-0.22
-0.215
-0.21
-0.205
Minority Sales Minority Pay Minority Jobs
Spearman's rho (correlation)
Correlation Coefficients of White Clusters on Per
Capita Sales, Pay , and Jobs at Minority Firms in
California (SBO 2012)

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Minority-owned and non-White-owned firms with employees clustered in different places
than White firm owners. Only 3 out of the top 20 places for minority firm owners with employees
were shared with the White-owned employer firms; only 15%. Without employees, they only
shared one place with White firm owners in the top 20: Coronita CDP in the Riverside MSA, a
small place with only 193 total firms.
Only four of the top 20 places for Black firm clusters were shared with White-owned firm
clusters; five places were shared with the Black employer firm clusters. Across all racial groups
and between a single group (Black Americans), the places tend to be larger where the Black and
minority entrepreneurs co-locate. This is consistent with the patterns observed amongst the
spatial distribution of White firm owners.

Figure 22: Spearman rho's correlation coefficient for non-White firm clustering on non-White firm economic productivity (U.S. SBO
2012, author calculations)
As illustrated in Figure 22, there is a statistically significant positive relationship between
minority/non-White clustering and their economic productivity. This suggests that not only do
0.1899
0.1728
0.1767
0.16
0.165
0.17
0.175
0.18
0.185
0.19
0.195
Minority Sales Minority Pay Minority Jobs
Spearman's rho (correlation)
Correlation Coefficients of Minority Clusters on
Per Capita Sales, Pay , and Jobs at Minority Firms
in California (SBO 2012)

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they co-cluster, but ethnic entrepreneurs of various racial groups do so in these places with
positive associations on the bottom lines.
Finding #5: Black-owned businesses cluster in majority non-Black neighborhood
commercial corridors

A hotspot analysis based on over 3,500 verified Black-owned businesses illustrated a wide
variety of neighborhoods (based on zip codes), which are statistically significant hot spots. There
are several ways we can characterize this clustering. First, most of the Black clusters are in
commercial corridors in the heart of the county.

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Figure 23: Getis-Ord Gi* Hot Spot Analysis of Black-Owned Businesses in Los Angeles (2016)
In this map, Figure 18, Los Angeles County’s most statistically significant, contiguous
commercial corridors for Black entrepreneurs (colored red at 99% confidence) are in five

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districts: Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw, Downtown Los Angeles, Inglewood, Windsor Hills, Ladera
Heights and Mid-City/Central LA. Overall, these corridors are mostly in the City of Los
Angeles, except for Inglewood. However, we also see that there are smaller blips of Black
entrepreneurs in less spatially contiguous areas that are on the edges of the county: West
Compton, Watts, Glendale, Venice, and more. For this analysis, I do not consider those to be
clusters.
Second, Black entrepreneurs are clustering on the edges of the County but not as heavily
as in the core cities and neighborhoods. The other two hotspot confidence intervals (95% and
90%) indicate that there are at least seven other neighborhoods like this: Hawthorne, Lawndale,
Westmont, Santa Monica, Hollywood, Downtown Los Angeles (northern parts), Century City
Taken together, these two characteristics portray a complex pattern of Black entrepreneurship
occurring in racially mixed neighborhoods in the Los Angeles region.
Discussion
In this manuscript, I analyze the presence of minority-owned and Black-owned firms at
the smallest unit of analysis available for the Survey of Business Owners (SBO): the economic
place unit. I also analyze the presence of Black-owned firms at the address-level in one region
that exhibited particular significance at the larger scale: Los Angeles. Previous studies (Fairlie,
2008) calculated these at the national and county levels. This allows for a more nuanced story of
where (un)successful entrepreneurial activity is truly occurring. Even without access to the micro-
data at the firm level, I was able to generate four kinds of findings around 1) non-white and
minority-owned firms’ individual clustering patterns, 2) Black-owned firm clustering and
economic productivity patterns, 3) white-owned firm clustering and economic productivity

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patterns, and 4) non-White co-clustering patterns. With the micro-data, I was able to show a fifth
finding that Black-owned firms cluster in non-Black areas as well as Black areas.
In summary, ethnic firm clustering in California takes a few analytical and descriptive
forms. First, it is uneven. Not all places have significant levels of ethnic entrepreneurs, despite
their possible local residential make-up. Of the 1.14 million minority-owned firms in clustered
places, Hispanic/Latino firm owners occupied the highest number of firms in minority-owned
clusters (48.8%), while Asian firm owners were second (31.1%) and Black firm owners were third
(11.3%). However, Asian-owned firms employed the greatest share than any minority group in
terms of cluster employment (47%), annual pay (54.4%), and sales (52.2%). The worst
performing racial groups were American Indian/ Native American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific
Islander firm owners, occupying barely 1% of jobs, pay, and sales. Only a handful of the regions
provided any meaningful level of non-White clustering, with Southern California (Los Angeles
MSA) taking the brunt of that. The major cities all have significant levels of multiple minority
groups and white firm owners, which is heartening.
Second, clustering is profitable within ethnic groups, except whites, on average. Non-
Black clustering, on average, is strongly positively associated with sales, jobs, and annual pay.
Black clustering positively correlates with economic development improvements for Blacks and
non-Blacks. However, white clustering is not. It has a weak positive association, on average.
Third, and most provocatively, the productive clustering of non-white firm owners is inversely
related by the clustering of white firm owners. Every ethnic group has an inverse relationship
with white clustering: statistically significant negative correlations with an increased
concentration of white-owned firms. White owned businesses tend not to have high degrees of
clustering in the same places as Black-owned businesses, but in some regions and places, we saw

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co-clustering with Asian-owned firms. People of color and ethnic minorities tend to be co-
clustered with each other compared to white-owned businesses.
Interpretation and Limitations
This study raises nearly as many questions for future study as it answers. First, there is
generalizability. How widely applicable are these findings? Do regions and places outside of
California produce similar outcomes? While California is one of the largest (spatially) and most
populous states in the U.S., it has unique characteristics that might make it less similar to other
states. California’s diversity made it a prime candidate for a question around inter- and intra-
racial relations in the economy, but what about places without as much diversity? The findings
could be even more stark where fewer entrepreneurial groups competing for space and resources.
Second, given the nature of the data, there remains the question of temporality: How long
have these phenomena been in effect? Can we observe this dynamic across time? Using the U.S.
Survey of Business Owners, the same dataset used for this study, it is possible to extend the scope
of research backwards in time to the 2007 and 2002 cross-sectional cohorts. Before that, there
are serious changes in the methodology of the survey, as raised in the literature review section.
This is primarily due to how the Census Bureau counted the types of businesses (i.e., C-
corporations, size of firms, etc.). Lastly on this note of time, prior to 2002, the SBO was not
electronically available and is still kept in cumbersome portable document files (PDFs). This
makes for a more challenging analysis. Therefore, a close visual inspection of the places would be
required to ensure comparability between survey years.
Third, there is the challenge with the unit of analysis – the economic place. Given the wide-
ranging categories that count as places that only have to meet a basic threshold of a population
count without any maximum boundaries or population density, place is likely not as stable an

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analytical unit as census tracts, blocks, block groups, or even zip codes. These are not without
imperfections either – in the real world, they come off as arbitrary neighborhood boundaries, for
example – but empirically, they have benefits. Without a smaller, more uniform areal unit, it is
hard to tell whether these patterns of clustering are because of the modifiable areal unit problem
(MAUP) or because they are generally doing better as a self-selected group that clusters similarly.
This is where we must find out the levels of spatial dependence in the data, which other forms of
spatial statistics can help with in future studies.
Nonetheless, the findings based on place-based boundaries are more closely related to real-
world divisions, which cities and self-selected neighborhoods enforce on themselves via policy
and private investments, could make for a more apt study to connect social inputs to outcomes.
Considerations for Policy and Practice: Toward Spatial-Economic Belonging
Besides these methodological considerations, we must wrestle with the potentially radical
theoretic implications of the findings of this study. Cluster theory, to date, has not filtered its’ core
assumptions through a critical race lens. It assumes a veneer of universality, as if all businesses
and corporations would realize similar spatial benefits – knowledge spillovers, increasing returns
to scale, interdependence – if they agglomerated, often using Silicon Valley and Route 109 as
examples of these innovations. However, this study’s findings force us to challenge that
assumption. The data does not seem to support that clustering is happening between owners of
different ethnic groups, particularly because of white firm owners’ behavior.
However, the data also causes us to reframe this phenomenon differently. On the issue of
sharing space, why would we pressure ethnic minorities to integrate into spaces with white firm
owners who seem intent on clustering against their own best interest? If the white business
success story is not shared widely and they cluster in a way that is narrow, are we integrating

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Black and people of color into what Dr. King called a “burning house”? By blindly contrasting
the fates of Black firm owners to White and Asian ones, I would argue the bulk of the literature
does just that.
While this pattern might come as a surprise to management scholars and economic
developers who see space in economic terms, Black geographers have been warning us about the
“possessive investment” in whiteness and the deleterious “white spatial imaginary” for decades;
White-run space is tightly circumscribed and anti-septic to non-white objects, ideas, and peoples
as “disorder” (Lipsitz, 2001). Thus, white firm owners tend not to locate near non-white firm
owners, although the data shows how minority- and Black-owned firms have positive impacts on
sales, jobs, and annual pay. That phenomenon is not a purely an economic issue; there seems to
be a fundamental, embedded cultural system that needs to be understood. If possible, I would
encourage business and management disciplines to take more seriously the ideas of “racial
capitalism” (Robinson, 1983; Leong, 2013) wherein the idealized goals of “competition” might
also come to mean dispossessing certain people so that a few homogenous groups can win. That
is not the only angle to see how white clustering needs to be troubled and black clustering needs
to be improved, but it is the most salient without further qualitative study.
While these findings are limited to California, it is clear that anti-Blackness and white
supremacy in business potentially works to undermine agglomeration benefits under the right
conditions. The findings here should caution economic development organizations (i.e.,
chambers of commerce) and municipal financial officials: racial inequality is bad for (Black)
business, which is bad for their business environments.
What implications does this have for their development strategies? And more germane to
this audience, how does this change our approach to local economic development theory and
practice? First, we need to have a more sophisticated, inclusive message around industry cluster

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development. Clusters are can no longer be positioned as a silver bullet without regard to who
participates in it - which it has been argued before, but not in this way. The U.S. Economic
Development Administration’s Cluster Mapping Project, for example, is one such effort that has
received much public support from the national government. But it has very little to say about
equity. Fuller participation from a variety of owners by race needs to be considered a metric of
success for these spatial typologies and strategies to produce the maximum societal benefits –
jobs, sales, and living wages across groups. Ultimately, we cannot tell white entrepreneurs who
they cannot go into business with, but we can promote the right way (and places) to view
business. Diversity-oriented incubators that help match them, should they be open to it, might be
worth prototyping.
Second, this research suggests a need for collaboration among business owners of color to
forge belongingness based around space. It is worth celebrating these existing patterns shown in
this study illustrating spatial-economic belonging wherein they tend to co-cluster already.
However, white firms cannot be the only job creators, especially when they are so unequally
distributed in terms of their productivity. We need to scale up minority-owned businesses to
become employer firms. Modeling it amongst people of color could be the innovation our
commercial spaces need. For example, the data showed that Hispanic and Asian firms are closer
to economic parity (i.e., the number of jobs at their firms reflects their percentage of overall
population). Perhaps Black, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and Native American firm owners
can emulate strategies that enable Hispanic and Asian firms to cluster and employ their people.
Third, regionally, there is significant overlap of places where multiple minority groups are
prospering together. We should also be studying, standardizing, and framing the approaches of
such places as ones of shared prosperity. While far from perfect, the Los Angeles region is home
to the places where 5 out of the 6 racial comparison groups had the most jobs at a minority firm;

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San Francisco had one of those groups coming out on top: Asian-owners. However, there does
seem to be a same set of cities that rank highly for all of them. They should be lifted up in the
form of case studies and more.
Future Study
Given my findings, I would like to explore more than race, industry and firm
agglomeration in U.S. metros but what kinds of spatial cultures and institutional beliefs glue
Black entrepreneurs together. This calls for a more critical race analysis of business patterns and
geographies, with an eye for opportunities for inclusion in urban governance.
Economically, it begs questions like: how can we rectify the theory of
agglomeration with the practice of Black business ownership? How can we promote
clusters as a desirable feature of city life and regional economies when the business owners with
the most promise (i.e., Black and Brown entrepreneurs) are not intentionally included in those
strategies? Did cluster strategies ever include Black and Brown people in these cities? What is the
spatial dimension to minority business development policy? Are Minority Business Development
Agencies working at the cluster level of thinking or the individual business owner level? Are there
any norms-setting we can do regarding the locational strategies of Black business owners? What
can Black business owners learn from Hispanic and Asian owners about how to co-locate with
firms like them? Are Hispanic and Asian business owners thinking that way and thus these
patterns reflect that networking?
Geographically, it begs the question: what did/does Southern California do
differently that leads to these multi-ethnic business location patterns compared to
the rest of the state? Los Angeles, in particular, consistently ranked high in terms of spatial-

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economic diversity. Is there something in its economic history or contemporary nature that
fostered Black American enterprise and Hispanic/Latinx entrepreneurialism?
Culturally, it also leads me to ask questions about how the successful Black firms and
places learn to form an inviting business environment in our cities. How do Black creative
entrepreneurs interact with and claim space in commercial corridors? What spatial factors limit their everyday Black
placemaking practices? Preliminary factors from could focus on the roles of finance (Credit and
Wealth), law enforcement and security, talent systems, technological capacity, processes of taste-
making, and land tenure.
Conclusions
This study showed that there is a business case to be made for inclusion and equity,
literally. Growth for a few is not growth for all. Most white-owned firms are not benefitting from
the way the economy is now and neither are minority-owned businesses. There is a hyper-
concentration of employer firms who take the lion share. White-owned business clusters, likely
with corporations forming the base, are the common denominator among the other groups’ lack
of productivity and space to be successful. Thus, the shared prosperity framework is even more
crucial for the economic development of most regions. However, this shared prosperity model
should be modeled with those who need it most first: those who have been left out. In the
meantime, perhaps Black, American Indian, and Pacific Islander firms should study how
Hispanic and certain Asian owned firms succeed. I hope that we foster more inclusive, creative
places for people of color because there is a way to do well and do good. Supporting the efforts of
Black entrepreneurs is one of those ways.

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Chapter 3 - Black Urbanism as Civic Belonging
The Role of a Business Improvement District in Shaping Space
for Black Commerce and Art
Summary
In this chapter I provide an answer to the second question: How do Black creative
entrepreneurs claim, make, and keep places? Specifically, I pursue the sub-question of what
governance mechanisms provide the means to maintain a place oriented around their needs?
How successful are they at doing that? Why? We need to ask this question because Black social
science tends to focus on how Black entrepreneurs are marginal to the economy and how Black
people are disadvantaged, migratory, and placeless. The recent turn toward Black placemaking
via “chocolate city sociology” has been a welcome change in focus, but even this does not capture
the social preservation component - the “place-keeping” – aspect of Black urban life.
Understanding these mechanisms could help better support endogenous forms of belongingness.
Despite the challenging bureaucracy and heavy-handed analytical requirements involved
with keeping a BID contract, the Greater Leimert Park community has established a functional
mechanism for public involvement: a nearly twenty-year old Business Improvement District
(BID) that continues to expand its spatial and economic vicinity. However, to keep a BID in a
Black middle- and lower-middle-class community, they govern themselves under the auspices of
a nonprofit organization that is invested in the social status of the neighborhood, not just the
property owners. This benevolent stance is unique within the Los Angeles region, but reflects the
dual “community builder-capitalist” role that is common to Black economic development
tradition. Their successful adherence to the Black spatial imaginary shapes how they interact
with the neoliberal urban bureaucracy as they also build on their BID boundaries within the

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merchant community; thus, they are also expanding their bottom-line as they expand the BID. It
also underscores the importance of property ownership and social status in successfully
organizing the creative class, which other BIDs in immigrant and/or low-income neighborhoods
in the city have failed to achieve.
Overview
The contemporary majority-Black South Los Angeles district that surrounds the Leimert
Park Village – also known as Crenshaw and sometimes “Greater Leimert” - has been shaped not
only by private patterns of residential ownership, but explicit urban policy that instigated,
reinforced, and now maintains that status. Artists and creative entrepreneurs’ ability to claim
spaces has not always been clearly traced through that negotiation between the market forces and
the multi-scalar governmental policies aimed to shape the built environment. It is not possible to
tell that story within a single chapter, especially since other scholars and community griots have
done a much more thorough treatment of the task (Exum & Guiza-Leimert, 2012; Hester, 2013;
Washington, 2017). However, in this chapter, I trace the publicly negotiated conditions between
the neighborhood entrepreneurs in Greater Leimert Park which have led to the emergence of a
diverse commercial corridor that hosts Black business owners more than any other contiguous
public sphere in the surrounding region.
Civic belonging engages with a broader definition of public space that gets to the heart of
what concerns the black middle class, which is employed by the sociologist Karyn R. Lacy.
Public spaces are spaces “that figure most centrally in the everyday lives of black middle class”
(Lacy, 2007, p. 17). She includes: 1) shopping centers, 2) the workplace, and 3) housing market.
These are spaces where they tend to exhibit “strategies to manage racial stigmatization,” which

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Lacy finds to be successful ones. However, constructing these “public identities” comes at cost:
class fatigue from “demonstrat[ing] to whites that they are truly members of the middle class.”
This drums up a need for a place of refuge, which these black businesses can offer. At different
points in the history of the Greater Leimert area, the Village has functioned as a way to provide
public spaces that act as a construction site for Black people to manage their public identities.
Rather than tell an exhaustive history of how the Greater Leimert Park area came to be
across all of these public spaces, I will focus on the tools that Black entrepreneurs have
marshalled within the last 15 years, since the early 2000s, in which my field work pointed me
toward the Greater Leimert Park Village/ Crenshaw Corridor (GLPVCC) Business
Improvement District (BID). However, entrepreneurs are also taking measures to make their
individual mark on the landscape, such as Ben Caldwell’s effort to usher in the People’s Street
Plaza. Both will be reviewed here through the lens of how they interact with the idea of civic
belonging.
Black economic development, self-help, and BIDs: a brief neoliberal
primer
The history of federal policy on poor, Black, urban communities has led some to conclude
that the relationship of “swimming against the tide” best characterizes the way urban policies
have affected them (O’Connor, 1999). That is, place-based interventions under the guise of
community development are only drops in the bucket compared to the larger economic
restructuring that the federal government is engaging in, which are arguably causing the
economic anxieties. Neoliberal policies can be read in this way. Neoliberalism is an economic
ideology that was intellectually-seeded by the late Chicago economist Gary Becker with his
choice-driven ideas about human capital (Becker, 1994; Becker, 1962) and it was first publicly

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championed by President Ronald Reagan. However, as illustrated by the reign of Democratic
President Bill Clinton (Spence, 2015), the view that the market is the best way to improve the
fates of cities has been roundly adopted – initially by force and now by default. When cities like
New York City, Philadelphia, and most recently Detroit were taken over by non-elected, state-
run agencies to adopt budgets that aimed to make them more “efficient” and “investment-
grade”, this often meant stripping the public coffer by privatizing certain services – from schools
to gas to garbage collection.
Without a public agency to provide basic infrastructural improvements, the need for a
private actor to step in to improve the local environment has become a self-fulfilling prophecy of
urban economic policy. Businesses and corporations now, like every other aspect of urban life,
have become the response to help even the businesses themselves. However, the point remains
that self-help as a strategy for business improvement is not all about choice. Corporations often
have more resources to help themselves than small businesses, including the developmental
assistance of smokestack chasing local governments (urban, regional, state) who lay their curation
of assistance to woo business locations in ever-present “smokestack chasing” (Bradshaw &
Blakely, 1999; Turner, 2003).
However, neoliberalism also has a racial undercurrent that must be registered. In Knocking
the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics (2015), political scientist Lester K. Spence
provides a critical race analysis of the history of city-driven efforts to regulate Black life in a
variety of aspects. The rise of the public-private partnerships are prime examples of this (Mallett,
1994; Unger, 2007; Brooks, 2008). However, one recent study (Lee, 2016) found that the areas in
Los Angeles that struggled to form BIDs were low-income, immigrant neighborhoods.
Fortuitously, this is not the case for many of the Black neighborhoods in the City-region. They
only mention the Greater Leimert Park/Crenshaw effort once in their table of

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“Expansion/Renewal BIDs.” Thus, the Crenshaw community is not the subject of prior analyses
and begs the question of why this mixed-income, Black community has a functional BID, despite
these risk factors.
The Greater Leimert Park Village Crenshaw Corridor Business
Improvement District (BID)
Since their emergence in New York City in 1982, the place for markets has been shaped
by contemporary urban policies like the establishment of public-private urban governments
called business improvement districts (BIDs) by merchants and property owners. Due to the ways
the County assesses property tax, Los Angeles has allowed multiple BIDs to proliferated in the
City, which is unique compared to smaller cities. While there is a growing policy and public
administration literature building up around BIDs (Mitchell, 2008; Unger, 2016) and their
struggles in disadvantaged communities (Lee, 2016), little is known about how these urban
governance and spatial typologies have facilitated business prospects for Black entrepreneurs. It is
particularly unfortunate that the only study with attention to race and BIDs focuses on the
struggles, rather than the triumphs that Black property and business owners have earned through
operating a successful BID. My dissertation seeks to provide some necessary counter-weight to
expand our notion of what is possible.
Los Angeles is an ideal place to study how Black commerce and culture is fostered (and
falters) through urban economic development policies like BIDs. Contrary to the popular
discourse on gentrification and displacement in South Los Angeles, the GLPVCC BID consists of
property owners who are mostly African American – the only one of its kind to exist in the City.
Two other BIDs have been created in South Los Angeles – South Park I and South Park II – but
these are relatively recent creations. Besides this anecdotal exceptionality, in the prior chapter, I

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generate evidence that corroborates the South Los Angeles neighborhood where they established
as being one of the statistically significant “hot spots” for Black commerce in the state of
California. This warrant an in-depth look on why and how this phenomenon works.
Background: Policy and Governance
The City of Los Angeles initially chartered the GLPVCC in 2002 as an administered
project of the nonprofit corporation Community Build, Inc. It is a property BID, not a merchant
BID, which the California Property and Business Improvement District Law of 1994 defines as
responsible for improvements and activities that benefit each specially assessed parcel. The law
defines these two functions very clearly, as their 2014 Engineer’s Report states in their Judicial
and Legal Review:
"Improvement" means the acquisition, construction, installation, or maintenance of any
tangible property with an estimated useful life of five years…”
"Activities" means, but is not limited to, all of the following:
(a) Promotion of public events which benefit businesses or real property in the district.
(b) Furnishing of music in any public place within the district.
(c) Promotion of tourism within the district.
(d) Marketing and economic development, including retail retention and recruitment.
(e) Providing safety, sanitation, graffiti removal, street and sidewalk cleaning, and other
municipal services supplemental to those normally provided by the municipality.
(f) Activities which benefit businesses and real property located in the district.
However, the BID did not begin these operations until 2005 once the City could adjust
their Management District Plan to accommodate it. This which granted the power to assess a
taxation by the County of Los Angeles, who oversees all of the City’s BIDs. Thus, because of this
complex City-County relationship, generating a BID contract is an immense undertaking. As the
power to tax is a highly politicized one in California, the County requires a sweeping array of
documents to authorize such a task to a local entity. This stage alone is what often is prohibitive
for low-resource communities from organizing a BID.

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Each contract is a term of five years, but it tends to be slightly staggered because of the
delay in the time it takes to generate the reports and for the City to authorize the BID. In its first
five-year contract, the manager was Clint Rosemond in 2006, when the contract began.
However, after he retired, the BID needed to renew their contract in 2011. Its current manager
is Kim Ramsey, a Los Angeles native who took the reins upon her return from a long stint in
New York City, for its second term in 2013. The BID has been renewed twice and is currently in
the process of seeking a third renewal in 2019. This time, however, the BID is expanding its
coverage.
Currently, it covers three zones. Zone 1 is the core, the Leimert Park Village, which
includes the north side of 43rd Street to 43rd Place to the south and parcels facing Degnan
Boulevard on the east and west sides. Zone 2 is the Crenshaw corridor, which starts at Martin
Luther King, Jr. Boulevard and includes Leimert Boulevard and Marlton Square, not including
the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. Finally, Zone 3 is the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza. In the
next iteration, the GLPVCC will extend up past the mall to Exposition and also slightly south to
capture more of Vernon Avenue. The intent behind this is to maximize its ability to capture the
new development that will happen as a result of the two new train stops – Martin Luther King,
Jr. and Leimert Park – which will open in 2019 as the Crenshaw-LAX Line.

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The BID’s Role in Spatializing Black Aesthetics

Figure 24: Mural on Alley Wall of Hot and Cool Cafe with quote by former longstanding business Venusian

While the leaders of the BID – Kim Ramsey as the manager and Fred Calloway as the
President of the Board – would not take credit for being a force of business recruitment, the
BID’s two largest tools – cleaning and infrastructure – are forces of business retention. “The
property BIDs have very specific goals, and if I was going to summarize it, I would say curb
appeal and safety for commercial areas,” Ramsey explained to me. “So there are only a few
objectives that are here in Los Angeles. Large amount of money gets spent on the clean and
green part and included in that for some BIDs is also a safety component. And depending on the
size of your BID and the tax increment of your BID, then you either have a little bit of money or
a lot of money.” Despite not having a large floor area ratio (FAR) to implement a tax increment,

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they have been able to make a measurable impact on the Village. The BID has shaped the
experience of walking through the Village, both physically and aesthetically.
Landscape Improvements
Aesthetically, I argue that the BID is responsible for three distinctly African American
and artistic features of the Village and portions of the Crenshaw corridor. First, the then-BID
manager Clint Rosemond oversaw the streetscaping of the sidewalks into what is called the
Sankofa Passage. Dedicated in November 2007, the Passage honors local legends – all artists,
musicians, actors, poets, singers, dancers, as evidenced by the archived note. By inscribing into
the landscape who shaped the experience of Black culture, the BID created a vernacular
landscape that is still felt. Rather than pointing to an amorphous ‘spirit’ of place, I argue we can

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turn to these physical symbols to see it.

Figure 25: The Community Invitation for the Dedication of the Sankofa Passage

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Figure 26: Close-up of Sankofa Passage placard (Author, 2018)
Second, the BID is responsible for the rustic blue-painted Niger River copper pattern that
graces the gates of the West Parking lot. This wavy blue river pattern has been influential in the
businesses, such as Hot and Cool Café which credit them for the inspiration of the interior of
their lobby. It also, coincidentally, synergizes with one of their long-running businesses Eso Won
Books, which means “water over rocks.” The river pattern that flows on the gates also feature the
same animal symbols that are engraved into the sidewalk on the West side of Degnan Blvd.
Last, it is responsible for urban forestry and the pottery that graces the stage. While none
of the reports enumerate the number of pots that demarcate the urban boundary of the Village, I
was able to walk the perimeter and take pictures, which was an experience itself. People seemed
to take it as usual and not worth marveling at. Yet, nothing like it exists anywhere in the City and

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unlike any other city I have been able to experience. Perhaps it feels mundane to the pedestrians
puzzled by the photography because there are so many of them in the area. By my count, there
exists 106 functional planters as of December 2017 between Crenshaw, 43
rd
Street, Degnan Blvd,
43
rd
Place, and Leimert Blvd. This fleet of clay, Adrinka symbol-stamped pots painted in Pan-
African colors are the official boundaries of the Village that reinforce the popular notions of what
the boundaries are. They provide continuity and edges to the idea of Leimert.

Figure 27: Close-up of Pan- African-themed planter on Degnan Blvd in Leimert Park as pedestrian walks (Author, 2018)
Thus, the overall character of Leimert and the Crenshaw corridor has been shaped by the
BID. The publicly-funded art on the grounds has been accepted and expounded upon by the
private actors. Some have painted the doors to their storage facilities in a matching red, green,
yellow pattern to match the planters near them. Others, such as the apartment complex on 43
rd

Street and the beauty salon complex on Leimert Boulevard, have fashioned their gates with steel
Sankofas soldered onto them, to echo the spirit of the Sankofa Passage.

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Figure 28: Sankofa-themed gate on entrance to Hair Studio on Leimert Blvd (Author, 2018)
Arguably, their precedent paved the way for the latest public art innovation in the
Village: the People’s Street Plaza. The People’s St. Plaza was a jointly funded public-private
project of Kaos Network, the Institute for Maximum Human Potential, the Mayor’s Office, and
the Department of Transportation. It is site for leisure and performance, with its permanent
stage. The grounds also infuse Adrinka symbols into it and is decoded for those around to
understand.

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Figure 29: Adinkra Symbol Chart and Sankofa mural on storage unit (Author, 2018)
Cleaning Program: Facilitating Curb Appeal
In 2015, the City of Los Angeles hired a man named Mark Anthony Thomas as their first
Fusion Corps Innovation Fellow. As a fellow African-American graduate of a master’s program
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (me in Urban Studies and Planning and him in
Management), I was quickly introduced to him by mutual friends. Thomas’ primary task was to
identify an answer to the prompt: What is the number one thing Los Angeles can do to become a more
innovative city? It was a perfect lobbying tool primed for a neoliberal, economic growth-oriented
response. No one would have been surprised if, after his foundational research, it turned out that
better data would have been the answer, which arguably Mayor Eric Garcetti favors with efforts
like Open Data LA. To our surprise, Thomas’ report revealed that the number one thing within

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the City’s power to make it a more effective innovator was simple: clean up the streets. The
answer went viral in the media and invited curiosity, but the more it was explained, the more
sense it made. Clean streets lead to greater sense of safety, which leads to a whole host of social,
economic, cultural benefits. Currently, with the sheer size of Los Angeles and the fiefdom-like
nature of each Council District’s trash collection contracts, the quality of the streets were very
inconsistent. It did not help that the City, one of the largest owners of property, also needed a
new asset management system to track the status of doing its part.
Cleaning the streets is a social service that provides a desirable public space, a commons,
but, due to privatization, the City does not possess enough resources to provide for small
businesses in the Crenshaw area. Leimert Park Village’s BID, despite their attempts to downplay
it, stays ahead of this curve by cleaning its streets more regularly than the surrounding areas.
With its Black-owned cleaning company Chrysalis Enterprises, it performs the functions that the
rest of the City has recently decided would help everyone:
“the cleaning work provided by the Clean Team are services that are over and above the City's
baseline of services and are not provided by the City. These services are not provided outside of
the District. These activities are intended to improve the economic vitality for each individually
assessed parcel by making each individual assessed parcel cleaner, safer and more attractive
which will encourage investment dollars and generate additional pedestrian traffic.”

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Figure 30: Portrait of Black male employee of Chrysalis during mid-day (Author, 2018)
The majority of their roughly $230,000 annual budget from the assessments have gone to
the Clean, Safe, and Beautiful Programs. In FY2017 and FY2018, they spent about 66% each
year on that program: between $148,000 to $152,000. A majority of this line item was spent in
Zone 2 (Crenshaw Corridor), with the Village as the second highest, and the least on the Baldwin
Hills Crenshaw Mall, due to existence maintenance staff. The rest of their budget goes toward
Marketing their work, or “telling a story” as the California State Law requires of them. This
money goes into managing their website, where the publish a listing of the businesses they serve,
publish reports about their impacts, and share updates about what is going on in the Village. It is
not necessarily an advertising space, but it provides clarity for those interested in who exists in the
Village and the Greater Crenshaw area.

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Discussion and Interpretations
This chapter set out to understand how the Black creative class navigates civic spheres to
create places that serve their artistic and cultural needs. While it identified a few ways they have
done so, there are still unanswered questions that limit the scope of the findings. How does this BID
compare to other BIDs in non-Black and/or non-artistic business districts in Los Angeles? And what is the process
of generating a contract really like? In future studies, perhaps ethnographic, a more detailed
observation of these could sharpen our understanding of the unique or comparable nature of a
Black-run BID. Due to the study timeline and the relatively more important task of observing
cultural belonging in this dissertation, civic belonging remains under-explored.
Nonetheless, even with under-studied components, this chapter reveals important ways to
interpret the way the BID interacts with space. First, the BID is viewed as a rationalist market
actor that facilitates business-oriented solutions for the built environment that might attract
consumers. However, the choice to make the neighborhood an African-themed and artistic-
themed space conflicts with the anti-capitalist nature of the hood. As will be covered in Chapter
5, many of the Black business owners are not interested in scaling up their businesses into growth
machines. Sherri Franklin, a business and planning consultant, found that to be disappointing.
She labels them “hobbyists” without an appreciation for the virtues of market. Franklin is, like
Ramsey, a disciplinary force on the property and business owners. In fact, at several points,
Ramsey used the word “rationale” to describe how the space was designated.
MM: Well it’s part of that central zone [of the BID], right? There are like three zones. Is the zone based
on the floor area ratio?
KR: Yea well the zones are based on logical rationale. Because of the focus on keeping it clean, and also
creating a community character. So if you are here, you can tell you’re in this business improvement district
by the pots that you see.

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A second interpretation is that, given the historic changes to the transportation system,
the BIDs actions might be read as part of a long-term reconstruction project of the Crenshaw
district for the urban elite – Black and/or otherwise. The Black elite are welcome here primarily,
which I argue is the cultural innovation that the BID tries to provide. They want to make
Greater Leimert Park a good place for business and Blackness. Thankfully the BID is not run by
market capitalists; it is run by a nonprofit that has its hand on the social service needs of the
community. They are fulfilling the rationalist governance obligations that the wielding the power
of property taxation engenders, but it is couched within a sociopolitical organization –
Community Build, Inc. Thus, I argue that this model is one that Black communities might do
well to replicate.
Leimert Park Village is not unique in this dual, two-pronged approach to community
economic development. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) in the
predominantly Black and brown Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, for example, took a similar
approach. While they are nationally recognition for their ability to gain the power of eminent
domain to own the land in their neighborhood, DSNI did not turn their organization into a real
estate organization; they maintained the community-based nonprofit which controls the
management company that administers the affordable housing. Thus, like DSNI, the CBI-run
GLPVCC can address the economic anxieties within one organization that wields public powers,
but still keep the residential interests of the benevolent, Black private actors.
Conclusion
Civic belonging is a crucial element of ushering in Black urbanism. While many studies
exist on the role of affordable housing, public transportation, fair lending policies, few dive down

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into how Black entrepreneurs marshal urban and state policies within their communities to
create spaces of meaning, places that reflect African-American culture. The Business
Improvement District is a privately-managed public policy tool that can aggregate the collective
assets within a commercial space to steer the aesthetics and aura of a place for the benefit of its
users. In the case of Leimert Park Village, Greater Leimert Park Village / Crenshaw Corridor
(GLPVCC) has done just that for the last 12 years. While it cannot work alone and requires a
suite of policy tools to transform the public spaces they manage (as evidenced by the Great
Streets Initiative), it is significant contribution to our understanding of the agency of everyday
people to assert Black public identities worth promoting, growing, and preserving, as they plan to
do in the coming years.

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Chapter 4 - Black Urbanism as Cultural Belonging
Entrepreneurs Claiming Space and Preserving Place in Los
Angeles through Language and Perennial Place-Keeping

Figure 31: Close-up of Pan-African, tri-colored tile planter (Author, 2018)
Summary
In this chapter, I answer the question: How do Black creative entrepreneurs claim, make,
and keep space? Specifically, how can their use of language (i.e., business names) function as a
signal of belongingness? And more broadly, what kinds of activities and strategies characterize a
place where Blackness belongs? We need to ask these questions because extant literature paints
the status of longstanding Black communities and economic institutions as ossified, marginalized,
and otherwise mired in “dis-belonging.” When Black culture is regarded as a resource, the
literature on Black cultural capital has been limited to contexts of education, music, and electoral
politics; economic development and urban planning has been rather silent in this respect. The

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only time the Black creative class has made a serious appearance in the literature, they are
characterized as excluded from the mainstream, white-controlled creative economy. This
demands more understanding about where Black creatives do feel a sense of inclusion and
belonging.
I find that the Black creative class in Los Angeles is successful at broadcasting their Black
public identities both regionally and locally, but in very particular ways. They use their business
names to provide five types of linguistic markers of place-keeping: beauty, access and belonging,
history and heritage, humor and creativity, and sociability. These five categories of nomenclature
reflect three approaches to placemaking and place-keeping: linguistic innovation, experiential
innovation, and spatial connectivity.
Locally, Leimert Park is successful at place-keeping and attracting the Black creative class,
due to four socio-spatial drivers. First, it provides a refuge from institutional racism. Second, it
offers opportunities for congregation, not self-segregation, which studies of enclave economies
usually suggest. Third, it is viewed as an opportunity for public-problem solving and correcting
market failures in Black communities, namely the issue of the desertification and depreciation of
property value. Last, it is an opportunity for them to build and keep a cultural legacy for
themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods.
Overview
Charting how racial identities play out in public space is not a new project; historically,
“Black codes” practically made it illegal for Black Americans to simply leisure in public (Austin,
1997). Given urban legal precedents like this, much of social science has documented how Black
space has been disinvested from and controlled by white supremacy (Hunter & Robinson, 2016).
These are what I call the pre-integration Black studies. However, over time, being Black in public

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has taken on new meanings as Black Americans have gained their freedoms and fought for their
liberties. Thus, social science has only recently gained a detailed accounting and framing of how
post-integration Black middle-class people construct public identities, not just the Black poor or
lower-middle-class. In Blue-Chip Black (2007), Karyn R. Lacy provides a sense of how certain
“construction sites” exist, wherein Black middle-class people generate a “Black world” wherever
they go. Lacy was building on the work of Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann (2007), who
came up with the term ‘construction sites’ as a way to locate certain settings that help “establish
criteria that serve as the basis for establishing boundaries…[which] may vary from one setting to
another” (2007, p. 16). The construction sites model takes into account how “neighborhood context
can also have a profound influence on the formation of a sense of who one is as a middle-class
black person” (Lacy, 2007, p. 15). Neighborhoods are the context that determine “the strategies
[Black middle class] use to deal with” situations that challenge their status. Yet, numerous
strategies exist to assert it. Yet, we do not have a clear understanding how Black merchants in the
creative class, who are often also middle-class, create these Black worlds
In Part 1 of this chapter, I illustrate how language can signal an indicative product and an
incremental process of Black commercial place-making. I perform a linguistic analysis of a sub-
sample of the Los Angeles County Black-owned business dataset exploited in Chapter 3 on firm
agglomeration. For this dissertation, it is demonstrative. Yet, even with only a fraction analyzed,
we see clear patterns that distinguish Black-owned businesses as an identity group, not simply an
individual identity.
In Part 2, I describe the contemporary cultural history of a socioeconomically, ethnically,
and generationally-diverse Black world constructed in Greater Leimert Park. I do this primarily
from the perspective of the actors that made and re-make these sites between the years of 1978
and 2018. Unlike previous studies that center on a residential community’s take on Black public

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identity (Lacy, 2007), I join the tradition of urban sociologists like Stacey Sutton (2010) who
charted how the Black cultural mecca of Fort Greene constructed their identity as a bohemia.
My study fuses Lacy’s framework for analyzing the “boundaries” but is qualitatively different
than Sutton’s subjective focus. In my study, I illuminate that the middle-class blacks who make
up the Baldwin Hills, Crenshaw and Greater Leimert Park area are not the penultimate primary
users upon which the spirit of the Village is built and sustained. While most of the business
owners are firmly middle-class, the consumers they serve consistently are the long-term residents,
the lower-middle class blacks who live in the Village area, not in “the Hills.” Indeed, those who
chose to orient their businesses toward the Black bourgeoisie and upper-middle-class Blacks
suffer economic consequences.
In this chapter, I describe how this choice to cater to the needs of the everyday Black
American creates a broader umbrella for people to participate in Black culture within the city.
This socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural diversity within a single Black commercial district is a
unique opportunity to build upon. I position these scenes in Leimert Park as testimony of an
alternative way to achieve Black public identities not based on socioeconomic sameness with
White and non-Black tourist destinations, but cultural innovation and diasporic heritage.
Part 1: Broadcasting Blackness through Business Names - Vernacular
Landscapes in Los Angeles
Motivations: Black Cultural Capital and Authenticity in Business

Virginia Gomez, a Latina advocate for minority-owned businesses, leads the Southern
California Minority Supplier Diversity Council (SCMSDC), a regional certification program that
links minority-owned businesses to large buyers (i.e., multinational corporations, cities, etc.) as
part of a national program. Because they deal with government-incentivized contracts,

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SCMSDC is required to wrestle with the seemingly straightforward task of identifying the
number of minority owners in a business. However, given the fraught historical nature of the
concept of race (i.e., one-drop rule – see Hickman, 1997) and the neoliberal nature of economic
development incentives, there is potential room for mis-labeling a business as “Black” simply
because one high-level employee is part-Black. Gomez did not admit that people were doing this,
but she admitted that a big part of their job is adding transparency to the ambiguous nature of
verifying who counts as a “minority.” Thus, she posed the question that I had been asked in my
initial anthropological film seminar: What is a Black business? What are the indicators of cultural-
economic Blackness as opposed to a business that is simply Black-owned? This chapter does not
fully answer that question. But it suggests a way to reverse engineer the racial authenticity code
using a verified Black business dataset: linguistics.
In a pre-integration era where Black businesses were limited to setting up shop only
within Black communities, due to de jure segregation (i.e., racially restrictive covenant), going
into a neighborhood that is predominantly Black might be the best way to infer Black business
ownership. However, these are no longer the rules of the game. In a post-integration era, this
spatial approach that does not take people into account is fraught because Black communities are
often retail deserts (Charron-Chénier et al., 2016). To the extent that there are any accessible
retail and shopping opportunities, they can often be owned by non-Black entrepreneurs and
multinational corporations that are operating franchises in the communities. Furthermore,
despite the persistent evidence of redlining by major banks, Black entrepreneurs are no longer
located nearby Black residents. Therefore, as illustrated in the introductory chapter with the
owner of the Roscoe’s franchise, some Black entrepreneurs resist being identified as a Black-
owned business. They harbor legitimate fear of being stigmatized, damaged, or otherwise
disinvested from based on their identity.

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Thus, we need a new way to identify Black-owned businesses that accomplishes the task
of highlighting their existence without typecasting them. You cannot improve what you cannot
measure; we need a census to measure their degree of success. In this section, I argue that, writ-
large, Black-owned businesses telegraph the identity of the owner through the naming of their
business. Through signage, Black owned businesses create vernacular landscapes that broadcast
the racial identity of the owner just as much as it indicates the audience they intend to serve.
Black vernaculars of English have been written about before in the context of education.
Specifically, Prudence Carter (2003) famously argued that Black youth display their Black
cultural capital through deploying their use of hip-hop and slang among their peers, while
simultaneously deploying other forms of cultural capital expected of them in a white world. Thus,
she challenged the literature on cultural capital to move away from an either/or dichotomy
between “dominant” and “non-dominant” cultural capital. Education scholars following her in
the hip-hop pedagogy sub-field have reinforced that this Black cultural capital is a resource and a
vehicle to transmit ideas (Hill, 2009; Hill & Petchauer, 2013; Paris & Alim, 2014; Alim, 2005).
For the past ten years, architectural scholars and practitioners have been pushing for a serious
consideration of hip-hop as a mode of architectural practice (Wilkins 2007; Cooke et al., 2015;
Cooke, 2014; Ford, 2017; Mock, 2017). While my study does not call for “hip-hop” as the sole
lens through which we view the breadth of Blackness, these intellectual precedents inform and
legitimize a pursuit of a broader discovery of the presence of Black cultural capital within the
urban environment. Black business owners should be a prime subject for this analysis. Yet, likely
due to data access constraints, it has not been a possibility to systematically evaluate how Black
entrepreneurs deploy their cultural capital through the naming of their business – until now.
There are several different types of methods of linguistic analysis: phonetics, phonology,
morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The “semantics” and “pragmatics” approach

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(Reinhart, 1982) best matches to how I went about trying to code and label each title. According
to the dictionary, semantics is:
“the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. There are a number of branches and sub-
branches of semantics, including formal semantics, which studies the logical aspects of meaning, such as
sense, reference, implication, and logical form, lexical semantics, which studies word meanings and word
relations, and conceptual semantics, which studies the cognitive structure of meaning.”
Furthermore, pragmatics is a subfield that “studies the ways in which context contributes to
meaning” to help “explain how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity” that
comes from the time, place, manner in which a word/phrase is used. Essentially, semantics can
tell you what a word being used might mean in all of its varieties, but pragmatics draws on
context to come to some conclusion about its most probable meaning. This analysis combined
both in my coding the words Black business owners used to name their business.
Analytical Results
Axial Coding: Linking Relationships
By February 10, 2018, without any filtering or recoding, there were 481 coded terms and
56 codes. However, I discovered that, if I drag the code to the other code, I can link them. This is
helpful because I became surer of the categories as I reached saturation. Using axial coding, I
combined the codes through axial process of relating the concepts I discovered. The Atlas.ti
program allows you to perform one of the following relational linking functions on the individual
codes:
1. Code A contradicts Code B, symbolized by < >
2. “ “ is a Code B, symbolized by “isa”
3. “ “ is associated with Code B, symbolized by ==
4. “ “ is cause of Code B, symbolized by =>
5. “ “ is part of Code B, symbolized by []
6. “ “ is property of Code B, symbolized by *}
7. “ “ is noname Code B, which has no symbol
This axial coding/ linking allowed me to shave off 9 codes in the original scheme. The Code
Link Manager shows that I was able to link all 57 codes to each other. I found that:

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- 12 of the 57 original codes were a Type 2 link
- 12 of the 57 original codes were a Type 3 link
- 7 of the 57 original codes were a Type 4 link
- 6 of the 57 original codes were a Type 5 link
- 20 of the 57 orignal codes were a Type 6 link
Once I got these initial codes, I was able to apply them to the remaining 400 sub-samples.
Codes by Frequency
The largest categories by frequency (n) are:
1. Owner Name (163 times)
2. Beauty Institution (60)
3. Artistic Expression (55)
4. Colloquialism (54)
5. Neology (51)
6. Slogan (50)
7. African Reference (47)
8. Care (42)
9. Black Name (32)
10. Comfort (32)
11. Hair (31)
These top 11 areas (and the rest of the 45 other codes) need to merged and related to each other.
Code Groups as Relational Networks
On February 17, 2018, I spent time understanding my codes’ relationships and creating
Code Groups, which function as networks that hold these code-to-code relationships in place. In
this update, I will explain the code groups, illustrate some relationships I am arguing exist
between them, and hopefully arrive at some definitive groupings. I have sorted the 49 codes into
five code groups, which are in the table below.
Code Group/Network Codes
Beauty (5) Care
Hair
Beauty Institution
Coolness
Fashion
Access and Belonging (20)

Comfort
Care

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Small Space
Money
Community
Urban Place
Black Name
Place
Affordability
Home
Nickname
Owner Name
Giving
Survival
Family
Spirituality
Unity
Health
Access
Survival: Medical Supply
History and Heritage (13) History and Heritage
Black Place
Black Identity
Ethnicity
African Goods
Southern
Black Name
African Reference
Nobility
Food
Spanish
Caribbean
Black Greek Organization
Humor and Creativity (9) Expression
Word Play
Slang
Humor
Numbers
Colloquialism
Slogans
Neology
Pop Culture
Sociality (7) Sociality
Community
Home
Giving
Family
Cookouts

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Code Forests
There is a level below a code group called a Code Forest, which appears to show me a
“tree” style organization of the largest clusters of codes. It looks as follows:
- Access
- Beauty Institution
- Black Identity
- Care
- Colloquialism
- Expression
- Neology
- Owner Name
- Place
- Sociality
- Survival
- Word Play
Interpretation
Five Linguistic Categories: Meanings, Network Nodes, Linkages
First, the Beauty Code Group/Network (5 codes/nodes) is probably the most straight-
forward category of business names. Other than Owner Names/Nicknames code, a majority of
the sub-sample was some form of cultural economy business in the haircare and fashion
industries. That being said, this group also has strong linkages to the codes on Owner Names
(i.e., Rozina's Just Beauty) and clever, comfort-oriented Slogans (i.e., Savvy Chic Nail Cottage
LLC), which taps into the sense of belonging and humor. Examples like these helped me connect
the codes to the research questions and thus, build grounded theory.
1. Care
2. Hair
3. Beauty Institution
4. Coolness
5. Fashion

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Figure 32: Code Network for Beauty Category
Second, the Access and Belonging Code Group/Network (20 codes/nodes) is
arguably the most broad, yet theoretically useful category. I created this code grouping to
represent how businesses signal inclusivity, both economically and sociospatially. Therefore,
businesses with titles in this category belongs to both the Offerings-based and Space-based
Approach to contribute toward a sense of place. There is some overlap in this category with the
idea of sociality, especially codes related to unity and community, as well as heritage (i.e., codes
related to urban places, home, small spaces, Black names). However, the connections are
different. Heritage is associated with belonging, but it is not a cause of belonging, whereas Black
names are a more direct result of heritage and history. Dealing with these ambiguities was
difficult not only because it causes me to have to make assumptions about the content itself (i.e., is
Jenkins really a Black name? More than the name Obi, which is also African?) but it also requires
some instinct for what concepts are embedded in that content. I think I struck the right balance
but will have to workshop it.

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Figure 33: Code Network for Belonging and Access Category
1. Comfort
2. Care
3. Small Space
4. Money
5. Community
6. Urban Place
7. Black Name
8. Place
9. Affordability
10. Home
11. Nickname
12. Owner Name
13. Giving
14. Survival
15. Family
16. Spirituality
17. Unity
18. Health
19. Access
20. Survival: Medical Supply
Third, the History and Heritage Code Group/Network (13 codes/nodes) spanned
various types of codes – both industry sector-types and the name itself. Sometimes the names
indicated that it was a business that would provide a folk tradition through food (i.e., Southern)
or through selling traditional goods. Other times, the names hearkened back to a nationality or
ethnic heritage (i.e., Little Ethiopia) that the business purports to preserve. Most audaciously, this

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code group includes an interpretative code “Black Name” and “African Name” which is a shared
node between Access and Belonging and History and Heritage networks. I coded business names
like “Obi” or “Ketsela” as African Name and business names like “Yolanda Landrum Interior
Design”, “Tavis Smiley”, “Quincy Jones” as Black Names. Both indicated the idea of legacy,
which is linked to heritage and history. Many times, when place was referenced, they were also
referencing the local urban environment’s identity through the district name (i.e., Crenshaw) or
neighborhood name. This is a type of act of preserving heritage, as well.

Figure 34: Code Network for History and Heritage Category
1. History and Heritage
2. Black Place
3. Black Identity
4. Ethnicity
5. African Goods
6. Southern
7. Black Name
8. African Reference
9. Nobility
10. Food
11. Spanish
12. Caribbean
13. Black Greek

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Fourth, the Humor and Creativity Code Group/Network (9 codes) was the most
playful category with unmistakably Black conventions in the English language. Each code
touches upon a different way the business naming strategies played out. For the Neology
code/node, this represented the way Black businesses often created their own words or versions
of words: West-Vern Liquor, Quantimetrix, Biostem, Ballooningdales, Dystany, Unihealth,
Exopolis, Ntertainment, Perfectouch, Intergraphis. These examples span between a few different
kinds of linguistic approaches:
- Pormanteaus: blending two words together, a type of linguistic morphology
- Abbreviations: an initialism approach (which also included their names) where each
word is a letter
- Clippings: a shortened version of a word (i.e., ‘Ntertainment as “entertainment”) that
usually includes an apostrophe
These were also called “Word Play” in my first cycle coding. Another approach that was distinct
was using numbers to substitute for words like “to” in the title or even letters (i.e., $wag $hop),
which I linked to the larger Colloquialism code/node. Colloquialism also was the master code I
ultimately looped in the Slang code, which included business names that employed alternative
spellings and phonetic ways to say common Black phrases like “Who Dunnit” and “Dawg.” Also,
using Slogans, particularly ones that made some kind of audacious promise (i.e., “Above the
Rest”, “Heads Up”, “Sheer Elegance”), indicated a kind of creative nomenclature technique.
Last, there were clever and sometimes humorous titles like “Nock on Wood” or “Back in Action
Chiropractics” or “Goldie Lock’s Hair” or “Smooth Operators Chic” that took a spin on popular
culture for the Black business names.
3

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Figure 35: Code Network for Humor and Creativity Category
1. Expression
2. Word Play
3. Slang
4. Humor
5. Numbers
6. Colloquialism
7. Slogans
8. Neology
9. Pop Culture

Last, the Sociality Code Group/Network (7 codes) was the code group that
encompassed codes that indicated a sense of philanthropic and familial orientation to naming
black businesses. These business names indicated a sense of connectivity and relational purpose
to the business.

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Figure 36: Code Network for Sociality Category of Business Names
1. Sociality
2. Community
3. Home
4. Giving
5. Family
6. Cookouts
Theoretical Contributions: Black Business Names as Indicators of Black
Placemaking
Each code group, when viewed as a network, inspires deeper thought about what the
business titles mean for how Black entrepreneurs (intend to) approach influencing the spaces and
peoples around them. Ultimately, the businesses want to attract them in some way to induce
shopping or patronage. Thus, I came up with three co-occurring network groups:
1. Linguistic Approach: the power of naming cannot be underestimated. By providing
unique, playful, enticing titles for their businesses, Black owned businesses create a
vernacular landscape that is memorable to anyone visible. The “Humor and Creativity”
types of businesses are the expressions of the Black spatial imagination.
2. Offerings/Experiential Approach: these are businesses providing an experience –
one that connects the consumers/residents to their heritage (both living and past),

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improve their health through supplying food and medical items, improve their wellness
through beauty and self-image, and more. This creates more access to various forms of
cultural, social, financial, and human capital, thus a sense of belonging.
3. Spatial Approach: one that is often self-referential in that it incorporates the local
environments into the business identity. They take pride in their surroundings. But other
times it offers a way to connect the locals to a distant place that might better help them
understand the place their in. This might create a sense of belonging, physically, by
helping achieving some sense of rootedness, which is often a problem for Black Americans
who periodically undergo periods of migration (forced and/or voluntary).
Limitations and Future Study
First, a first-cycle, theme-driven, pragmatic analysis is not without challenges. Initially, I
found myself both becoming repetitive with certain themes (i.e., colloquialisms, beauty, slang)
and then later discovering a better (i.e., more specific, accurate, yet encompassing) title that
would need to be applied to earlier coded business names. For instance, a popular naming
strategy seemed to be using numbers and creating new words, which were either portmanteaus of
existing ideas (i.e., fusing two words into one), completely new words (i.e., “Quantimetrix”), or
abbreviated terms with punctuations so it comes off phonetic, and it feels authentic.
Second, these findings are only the result of an initial training my coding scheme on a
sub-sample of around 800 businesses. The larger population I am using is about 3,800 businesses.
Future iterations of this approach need to be applied to the larger dataset. I think this will
ultimately lead to a separate paper to publish from.
Third, as I expand the sample size, I still think that some of the codes I created could use
some rethinking. I am still wondering about the mega-group “Access and Belonging” is too
large/all-encompassing, but I think it actually lends itself well to placemaking literatures. Let’s
spend some time walking through what each category means, some sample business names that
helped shape that category, and also how they, as a network, help me better understand Black
placemaking.

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Lastly, there was no comparative group with this novel method, which could call into
sharper relief the unique ways that Black businesses name themselves compared to other
minority owned businesses. Within the Los Angeles region, there are substantial numbers of
Hispanic/Latino and Asian-owned businesses to include in future iterations. Including them
might temper the conclusions that can be drawn from Black businesses. For example, the medical
supply contingent can also seen in Hispanic businesses who have “Botanicas” which provide
health services but also spiritual services (i.e., powders, herbs, etc.). If so, this speaks to healthcare
need that is shared among Black and brown consumers, while also highlighting the unique
strategies each entrepreneurial group deploy to make these assets visible.
Nonetheless, there are political, economic, cultural, and spatial implications for correctly
identifying the identity and purpose of a Black business, as this approach aims to prime public
researchers to do. Yet, a typology of linguistic codes has never existed to understand the structure
of Black commerce, let alone their implications on placemaking. My current grounded coding
scheme is starting to reveal that Black entrepreneurs claim space in a way that broadcasts their
services, but they use the needs of their target consumers (i.e., affordability, dignity, health) near
the business to signal that they belong. For example, the naming of businesses that speak to
affordability might reveal that price and poverty are spatial factors that affect the businesses’
customer base. Therefore, the name needs to respond to that spatial factor. The spatial needs of
Black consumers, as interpreted by Black business owners, has not been integrated into our
understanding of locational theories like agglomeration. Agglomeration do not talk about these
social and cultural reasons why businesses agglomerate outside of economics (i.e., lower input
costs). The next section begins to unpack those needs, through the eyes of Black business owners
– qualitatively.

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Part 2: Constructing and Keeping a Cluster for Black Culture
in Leimert Park Village
Leimert Park Village is the Black living room in the middle of Los Angeles. It is a gracious
host, offering a plurality of purposes and potentialities that it shows, depending on what time of
day, which day of the week, and who is coming. Without a careful eye, you might misread this
complexity as cacophony or the stillness as absence. Yet, the Black world in Leimert Park is a
multi-faceted set of scenes anchored, constructed, and guarded by distinct individuals, collections
of people, people types, and social climates. I observed these social influences in both physical
and metaphysical forms over the course of nine months for nearly three years. Based on those
ethnographic experiences, this chapter will chart what a place can look and feel like that is
thoroughly committed to fostering a sense of Black belonging – through the stories of a select
group who keep the culture alive.
The Socio-spatial Factors Driving Black Business Agglomeration in the Greater
Leimert Corridor
These social influences did not appear overnight and not because of any single factor.
Through a series of deliberate efforts and planning by private actors, Black culture and
entrepreneurship has agglomerated within this historic triangular commercial district, alongside
waves of residential migration and confinement. Much of the history of Black agglomeration is
hidden in plain sight in Leimert Park Village: in the minds of living legends who still maintain
their space, in the etched placards that adorn the Sankofa Passage, on the side of buildings,
within the lobby of the Vision Theatre, in the signage of historic Crenshaw businesses like
Maverick’s Flat proudly proclaiming “Founded in 1966.” While individual entrepreneurs came
through their own pathways, some commonalities motivate Black agglomeration. In the

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interviews of key individuals who arrived at Leimert at representative points – during social shifts
internally (i.e., aging out) and externally (i.e., pre- and post-riots) – we learn how Black
agglomeration comes with distinct sets of motivations driving Black entrepreneurs’ locational
decisions. This study, given its ethnographic nature, offers both economic and sociocultural
reasons for the locational patterns that differ from the factors that scant survey studies (Boston
and Ross, 1995) have pointed toward. We learn more about the Black spatial imaginary. While
the literature on business agglomeration cites cost, proximity, and industry as primary drivers,
agglomerating while Black takes on those same economic premises as any other entrepreneur -
and then some. Through ethnographic interviews, at least four explanatory variables, in no
particular order, provided context for why a Black business owner might choose to co-locate with
other Black business owners.
Factor #1: Refuge from Institutionalized Racism and “Leisure Restraints”
In 1973, Ivan Dixon directed and co-produced a radical film called The Spook Who Sat by
The Door, based on a 1969 book of the same name. The author, a former spy named Sam
Greenlee, dramatized his experiences in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) into an action-
crime drama film that received critical acclaim (Canby, 1973; Kantor 1973). Greenlee’s film and
novel centers around Dan Freeman, the protagonist who manages to survive the CIA’s elite
espionage program. As the beginning of the film shows, the CIA only began to accept Black
applicants after being publicly manipulated by an opportunistic Senator, himself seeking to curry
favor with Black voters to fix his “race problem.” Thus, as a compromise to their existing white-
only policy, the CIA would only allow one token Black person to complete it, after weeding out
the other Black people who came into the program seeking to form a counter-resistance within
the CIA. After mastering agency tactics, Freeman himself also drops out to train young

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"Freedom Fighters" in Chicago. As one could imagine, this movie became a media darling in
underground Black nationalist spaces.
The FBI, who were heavily engaged in racist surveillance programs like COINTELPRO
at the time, launched an effort to ban and seize the film from its director, Ivan Dixon. According
to the British Film Institute, Dixon, anticipating the suppression based on his difficulties making
the film, saved alternative copies under a different title, which is how the film was able to survive
government suppression (Mentz, 2011). Despite many local white-run theaters labeling it as a
‘racist’ sensational set of falsehoods, military historians have shown that the CIA has a persistent
history of giving training to persons and/or groups who later utilize their specialized intelligence
training against the agency is an example of "blowback," (Johnson, 2001). To wit, in 2012, the
film was added by the Library of Congress to the National Film Registry alongside 25 other films
that form "a compendium of motion pictures that captures the breadth of American culture,
history and social fabric, with the aim of preserving these fragile films for future generations."
Quite a blowback.
Strikingly, several of my informants independently used this cultural reference to
metaphorically describe their previous lives before setting up shop in South Los Angeles and
specifically within the Greater Leimert Park area. In a variety of ways, they became
entrepreneurs out of necessity – whether it be fatigue with a racially-intolerant work environment
and/or capitalizing on a broader sense of dis-belonging in white (cultural) spaces. Fred Calloway
(FC), one of the pioneering and longest-lasting property-owning Black entrepreneurs to arrive in
Leimert Park, recounts his experiences in his prior life as an emigrant to Los Angeles from
Louisiana.
FC: …The Watts Riot gave me the opportunity that I needed. I moved up in the store while I was going
to college at the same time. So the people around me they see that ‘Hey this little kid over here, he got
something. He not a boo, but he’s black so he can only go so far.’ But when the Watts Riot broke out, they

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needed a spook at the door. They didn’t have any black folks in these positions. I was working downtown
on 7
th
and Flower or 7
th
and Figueroa. They didn’t have a black person doing something…what I was
doing was down in some basement. You could be a black elevator operator and maids. And that was it!
MM: So like middle men, kind of?
FC: No! Not even middle men. You drive an elevator or you cleaning up or you a porter. And that was the
only thing that was there. So, when the Watts Riot come, they had no black faces no where. They
needed a negro or somebody that would sit by the door [emphasis added] – and
that was me. I had prepared myself, I had gone to college, boom boom boom. I was almost out of college at
that point. So I was the one they would give that front office to. To let the world know, ‘Hey we’re doing
it.’
However, not being content with accepting the racial ceilings set upon him as a low-wage
worker, Calloway kept advancing in his career. Unlike his wife, who was able to secure a
Master’s degree and earn a salaried job as a social worker, Mr. Calloway was forced to hustle in
commission-only jobs such as being a regional sales representative for the former furniture giant,
Barker Brothers. Outside of working, he constantly kept his eye open for business opportunities:
he found it in the racially-intolerant cultural economy.
While not a subject of much academic literature, celebrating and leisure takes on a
different set of risks while Black, both in a public and private setting. Public leisure spaces are
often deliberately more difficult for Black people to access – the way public transportation routes
are designed to deny inner-city residents access to “outlying leisure venues like
shopping malls and beaches,” denials of alcohol and/or food licenses to primarily Black-serving
businesses, and over-policing informal park spaces (Austin 1998). In the Southern California Law
Review (1998), Professor Regina Austin at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law wrote
about governmental restraints on Black leisure, social inequality, and the privatization of public
space in no uncertain terms. “Of all the activities in which ordinary, law-abiding black folks
engage, leisure pursuits may be the most heavily policed and the most broadly restrained”
(Austin, 1998: 668). Leisure restraints are "any factor that affects leisure participation negatively,
either in terms of preventing participation, reducing the frequency, intensity or duration of

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participation, or reducing the quality of [the] experience or satisfaction gained from [a leisure]
activity” (Austin, 1998, p.669; Henderson et al., 1996).
However, governments (i.e., police) often enact what the property managers at and
residents nearby leisure venues request; thus, there exists another set of actors to mitigate risks of
Black leisure restraint. Wheth toer traveling by taxi or Uber, being granted or denied access
because of a dress code, the cost of entry, if there is hip-hop or reggae, to the treatment by the
bartenders, racism can make even efforts to seek joy a complex battle in resistance. Mr. Calloway
identified with this experience back in the 1970s and decided to do something about it. He co-
created a social club to meet up at hotels and bring young Black professionals outside of the
racially-tinged clubs to avoid that. However, according to him (Appendix C, Interview C2,
Excerpt 1), even that tactic did not last.
FC: We would have parties, but in a grand style. We rented the biggest hotels. It’d be like the Hilton or
the Hyatt. Places like those. And then they started having a resistance to having black folks there doing
their parties. That was in the ‘70s. They didn’t want us there doing that.
This led him to start the Regency West “to open up a social spot for all of these other people like
me and belonged to the groups that I belonged to and wanted to have a place to come to.” The
politics of Black belonging demands these kinds of spaces.
Racism is not always about expressing hate, but institutionalizing actions of dispossession
that ensure that Black space is more valuable without Black people in them. Due to her discovery
of that mentality, Sherri Franklin reports leaving her job in Santa Monica and deciding to work
in South Central in the 1980s in dramatic fashion.
SF: One day I was in Santa Monica having lunch with my boss – John who was his name – looks out
toward South LA and he goes, ‘One day I’m going to build that area up for people like me to live.’ And we
were just looking at each other, drinking our coffee. And it just resonated in my core and I look at him and
he looks at me like I don’t live in that community. Obviously not, I’m here working on other stuff. But he
said he wants to go build that area for him! And I just look at him and I said, ‘You know what? Me too.
I quit.’…I had to realize the value I brought to the table. But why should I give that value to what other
people can benefit from? That’s my value. I’m helping them structure deals just as much as they are, know

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just as much as they do. Why am I doing this here? And that’s really a moment I realized I had to take all
of me out of that environment and put it in the community.
Today, she is a principal at Urban Design Center who helps market Leimert Park Village market
itself online.
Others shared the idea of escaping white oppressive spaces and forming their own
productive Black space. James Fugate, co-owner of the famed Eso Won Books, left his former
place of employment in his hometown of Detroit out of frustration with office politics that
threatened his well-being. According to Fugate (Appendix C, Interview C3), his success at selling
Black books made her “insecure” and feel threatened about her own leadership position. Sensing
the resentment from prior white supervisors, either perceived or real, for selling Black products
and catering to Black consumers’ needs, he decided to seek a job, which landed him in
California. However, even Fugate’s landing in Greater Leimert is motivated by his experiences
with his first place of employment in Los Angeles, the former Compton College Bookstore.
According to Fugate (Appendix C, Interview C4), he became weary of being relegated to a
representative of Barnes and Noble, which took credit for his approach to selling Black books in
the community.
Fugate’s frustration with tokenism and economic co-optation of his cultural innovation is
shared with James Burks (JB), the founder of the African Marketplace and Cultural Faire, an
award-winning month-long event that Burks used to incubate small Black businesses for over 25
years. Burks became an entrepreneur not only because he was tired of the tokenism of the fairs
that he saw as being strategically and un-creatively programmed in the summers to prevent Black
uprising in the 1990s. He became an entrepreneur to address a glaring gap in the marketplace –
politically and economically – for spaces of vibrant Black culture.
JB: When I designed the African Marketplace, there were several elements of what I was trying to do. I
wasn’t trying to totally eradicate the traditional black festival. I was trying to eradicate the traditional
negative impact of the traditional black festival. The negative economic impact. The negative social impact.

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The negative entrepreneurial impact. In other words, all three of those, the festival [as it stood] wasn’t
designed for long-term sustainability. It was designed for a temporary fix, you know? Let these Negroes sing
and dance for a minute, particularly in the summer months in all the major cities in the United States.
Because that’s when we got most disgruntled with our conditions, the conditions of our communities.
Unfortunately, the Marketplace no longer exists. Thankfully, he brings this wealth of experience
in his current role as the Manager of the Vision Theatre in Leimert Park, on behalf of the City of
Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA).
From these examples, we see experiences of marginalization, exclusion, and dis-belonging
that persist for the last 50 years in Los Angeles. Reading the work of Los Angeles geographers
like Laura Pulido (2000; 2002) and George Lipsitz (2011), we know this white spatial imaginary is
not new. However, it is important to explore how a cultural archipelago like Los Angeles, one
that prides itself externally on diversity, internally supports racialized systems of exclusion within
cultural economic development. These are distinct forms from the Deep South. Mr. Calloway
(FC) aptly distinguishes this as a more subtle, pernicious form of racism.
FC: I experienced more prejudices here than I did in Louisiana. Or I could say I was more comfortable
with the prejudice in Louisiana because I knew what they were and where they were. And I was able to
grow or most black people were able to grow if you knew the parameters. I had my own social ladder that I
could move up if I did A, B, C, and D correctly. I could move up a step. But that wasn’t the case here. If
you didn’t do the right thing or if you did the right thing, as soon as you started to get on the top, they
started stepping on your fingers. I knew I couldn’t go sit down at that counter there in Louisiana, I knew
all that. They didn’t want me there, so I didn’t have to subject myself to that. I had a place to go. There
was a code. If I couldn’t go to Ruby’s diner shop because it was all white, I could go to Malcolm’s cook
shop that was all black. So I felt good. I could eat and be treated with respect.
Unlike the genteel South’s ‘vulgar’ racism, Los Angeles exhibits a “polite” racism (Fujitani 2011)
that is well-documented on the West Coast. It may not always result in the same kind of violence
that was the subject of the Civil Rights Movement, but its subcutaneous, sleepy, and transposable
nature is a form of structural violence that seems to await the Black creative upon attempting to
integrate into white spaces.
Justin Jackson (JJ), an accomplished photographer who recently opened J3 Collections,
attests to these dynamics influencing his decision to locate in Leimert Park Village. As one of the

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youngest members of the Black creative class in the Village, he has a more recent pulse on the
way in which racism – both polite and vulgar – shapes potentialities in the creative economy and
beyond. According to Jackson (Appendix C, Interview C5, Excerpt 1), his experiences with
vulgar racism (“being called n*gger everyday”, “being spit on”) in his childhood in a mostly
white, South Bay neighborhood in Torrance predisposed him to wanting to work with and in
Black worlds.
However, in the creative economy of Los Angeles, he felt pressure to “do the Hollywood
thing” in the Art District of Downtown LA. This led to him experiencing more polite racism
because of the dynamic of being overlooked. The novelist Ralph Ellison explored this form of
racism in his 1952 landmark novel Invisible Man. Black creativity is taken for granted partly out of
lack of being seen. However, being overlooked is only one form of cultural racism that exists.
When they are noticed, Hollywood – both the physical community and the phenomenological
symbol for the entertainment industry – decides to exclude Black culture in hyper-visible ways, as
Justin recounts.
JJ: It trips me out how we keep going to Hollywood and they don’t even want us there! They damn near
blackballed all the Black promoters in Hollywood. There was a situation a few weeks ago, a buddy of
mine, a cool dude, is an amazing clothing designer. Him and his friend want to do a block party over in
Fairfax because that’s where a lot of the youth go…They wanted to do a Block Party. They got the proper
permits and then they get an e-mail from a resident and I have the guy, he sent me a screenshot, but he goes
on this rant and calls him a n*gger like four or five times like, “You n*ggas is not gonna an event
here. I’m gonna call the City and have your event permits pulled.” And a week later, had
their permits pulled. Now this dude’s on the record, you know. So my reaction to that is, ‘Just come
home.’ It’s like come home, just come to Leimert. Why are you trying to do that? Just come on over here.
Business opportunities in the cultural economy are highly relational, not simply
meritocratic (Becker, 1982; Scott, 2010; Currid, 2009). Unlike other industries, one could say
that discrimination is just an expression of preferences. However, these persistent, unprompted
testimonies by Black entrepreneurs about multiple forms of discrimination in the marketplace –
invisibility, co-optation, denial of services, slander – lays bare that this preferential treatment can

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be racial exclusion by another name. Not acknowledging it as such is a prototypical form of
plausible deniability that partly results in diminished opportunities for business owners to thrive.
Perhaps we can read these Black business clusters as the result of “marching with our feet” as
sociologist Marcus Anthony Hunter would say (Hunter 2013). The deliberate out-migration of
talented Black artists and creatives, who might otherwise work in white settings, to form their
own spaces where they can be seen, heard, and supported is how Black agency spatializes.
Factor #2: Congregation, Not Segregation
To Leimert’s Black entrepreneurs, being around other Black people can lead to not only
more fun but more commemoration and innovation. Much of the scholarship around Black
space centers on exclusionary factors that confine Black people to certain spaces without taking
into account how that critical mass has created desirable spaces of leisure and celebration.
However, Black creative agglomeration facilitates social roles as well as economic ones. Ben
Caldwell (BC), a filmmaker who runs the media production company and venue Kaos Network
and who owns his building, arrived in Leimert Park Village during the 1970s. He recounts a
cultural vibrancy due to social proximity that attracted him and fueled his work.
BC: Some of the guys I’m mentioning, like John Outterbridge, David Hammons, Teddy who did Sweet
Sweet Back. There was just a lot of these powerful people. And then the other kinds of movements like the
Natural Movements, the Magnificent Brothers were right up the street, and you know, K-Day was here,
Soul Train was here. We had Rasta clubs here. We had blues and Rhythm and Blues and soul music.
All of those were like right here as a part of the energy of Los Angeles. It was late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
According to him (Appendix C, Interview C1, Excerpt 2), this hip scene has gone through
changes and iterations over time for a variety of reasons: aging out, exodus, ownership changes.
Many of the business owners prided themselves on being able to remember former
institutions. Lorna Hicks (LH) and Betsy (B), the managers of the gift and art shop Gallery Plus,
indulged me (MM) in remembering these places.

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LH: There was a place called Venusian.
MM: Venusian? Like Venus?
LH: Right. It was like a hair salon.
B: He did natural hair right?
LH: Yea. Well he did all kinds of hair. Eventually, he went over to natural hair. Then there were four
sisters and a brother. I was one of them. We were called The Trading House. We subletted from
Venusian, from Stewart. Right after we moved in, Sika and his then partner Shaka moved in. Sika will
tell you! They moved in shortly after we did. And I was introduced to this area through the Malcolm X
festivals.
B: Oh okay!
LH: 1992.
B: See we used to come over here when I was maybe like 9 or 10. And we would come over and go to
different theatres, especially on Easter.
LH: Mhmm!
B: We would go to Vision – well it was the Leimert [Theatre] then. So we were introduced to the area
then. As I grew up and became more ‘conscious’, I became more aware about it. But you really don’t know
about it! I could just go down on Crenshaw and you were more aware of it when you had certain activities.
I would come to the Malcolm X Festival. The LALA – the Louisiana to LA – Festival.
Stories like this contextualized the meaning of the current stock of businesses in relation to what
used to be there.
Despite all this richness, Leimert has an esoteric way of presenting its cultural offerings to
the world and that is part of the identity of the place. One reason why Black people who have
space for congregation are careful about sharing it lies in a residential dynamic: migration. The
historian Isabel Wilkerson’s 2010 novel on, as her subtitle states, “the epic story of America’s
Great Migration” gives voice to the story of millions of people like Mr. Calloway, a New Orleans
native who moved to Los Angeles in 1957 to join his uncle and aunt at 20 years old. In fact, he
volunteered to me (Interview C2, Excerpt 2) that the book was an excellent representation of his
story. He also reinforced that his space was designed to promote and protect his “Uptown
experience” for affordable price. The idea of an Uptown experience as a scenic metaphor
invokes a very specific, Southern, bourgeoisie reference to a district in Louisiana. This New
Orleans district is one that is famous for its public spaces and preserved historic homes wherein
Mardi Gras celebrations also occur.

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The fact that Leimert Park Village has provided not only individual spaces that preserve
Southern traditions like the Regency West, but entire festivals like LALA that the two women
recalled speaks volumes about the portability of Black culture. This is why sociologists Marcus
Anthony Hunter and Zandria Robinson call for an entirely new “Black map of American life”
that reframes the entire North American continent “below the Canada line” as a reflection of
Southern culture (Hunter & Robinson, 2018). In their maps, the Los Angeles area would be
considered “West South” if we embarked on such a race-conscious rendering of the regional
culture and demography of Black people.
However, outside of protecting a particular celebratory practice, a second aspect to the
idea of congregation over segregation is how Black entrepreneurs are interested in locating within
reach of other Black business owners who cater to cultural needs so that knowledge-sharing and
collective economics can happen. In the tradition of Kwanzaa, a national Black holiday invented
in South Los Angeles by Ron Karenga’s US Organization in 1967, the principle of Ujamaa
(translating to “collective economics” in Swahili) seems to be at work in the business philosophy
of newer spaces like Hot and Cool Café. Eric Moore, co-owner, emphasized the dual, co-
operative intent behind the various spaces in the cafe (Appendix C, Interview C6, Excerpt 1) and
how it has attracted a cross-industrial Black creative class.
EM: …The people we have attracted, we’ve had doctors and engineers and lawyers and police officers and
fireman, homeless folks. We’ve had artists, educators, you name it! We’ve had people who have come. And
what I’m excited about is when people see the space, somehow it incites creativity out of them to where they
say, ‘Hey you know, I’d like to do this in your space.’ It’s the whole purpose. The space is not really about
my knowledge, it’s about bringing people who have the knowledge who can share that knowledge…I think
in so many communities, there’s a lot of people but there’s a lot of isolation. There’s not a lot of spaces to
intimately communicate.
Furthermore, the rhetorical device he uses to summarize this idea is the metaphor of “home.”
This provides support to theory of Black urbanism’s focus on place-belongingness as the goal of
Black creativity. This two-fold way of viewing Black commercial space as community space

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reflects how Stacey Sutton (2010) found in her study that Black merchants possess a pro-social
“community builder-capitalist” identity. Upon being asked their views on self-identity, many of
the interviewees resisted being called “entrepreneurs” or “creative entrepreneurs,” a label
commonly associated with the cultural economy. Instead, they gave pro-social terms. Black
entrepreneurs in this neighborhood rarely use the language of “creative” to describe themselves.
James calls himself a “philanthropic entrepreneur” because he believes in using his business to
foster more mentorship and community development, especially around education.
Agglomeration is viewed through this Black cultural lens of ujamaa in Leimert. Eric posits
a distinct, yet shared perspective about business-to-business relationships.
EM: …One of the things we want to do here at Hot and Cool is really turn this place into a
destination…I’m gonna promote other people’s business and hopefully they promote my business. Because
one thing I’ve learned, my blessings aren’t attached to anybody else’s blessings…One day they might want
my neighbors food. One day they might want my food. Another day they may go to the bookstore. And then
go to this place. And that place. We want this place to be a destination and if we can bring…My
restaurant may attract 10 people. But two restaurants can attract 50 people. That brings more revenue,
more interaction.
What Eric illustrates is that belongingness through congregation does not need to be a selfless,
not-for-profit act. A business model oriented around this concept taps into the creative spirit. It
also has potential to reshape how we view a local economy as an ecosystem, rather than atomistic
businesses competing alone.
Yet, the Black property owners also echo this intentionality around space to maximize
profits for their commercial tenants. They are very upfront about their aesthetically themed and
collective view of arranging Black space in Leimert Park, as highlighted in the prior chapter. Kim
Ramsey, the manager of the BID, notes that, as opposed to pushing for uniformity, “The most
that I’m trying to push for is ‘Artistic’ or ‘African.’ Because, as a property group, we’ve
determined that we buy into that.” According to one (Appendix C, Interview C2, Excerpt 3),
who owns an entire block between Degnan Avenue and Edgehill Drive within the Village, there

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is a logic to arranging businesses that will maximize cohesion and complementary creative
business offerings. From this, we see that agglomeration is a form of congregation that Black
entrepreneurs and property owners alike appreciate.
Factor #3: Countering Depreciation and Desertification
Black space is often under-valued and laden with risk-based expenses (i.e., insurance),
which makes it difficult economically to operate a competitive business. However, for those
pioneering visionaries who decide to open up shop in Black communities like Greater Leimert
Park, they do so with a discerning eye for the possibility for a higher return on their investment.
Ben Caldwell’s story of how he was able to bid for his property and wanted to invest in the Vision
Theatre offers a very humanistic way of acquiring a building in 1984, as this piece of an excerpt
reveals (Appendix C, Interview C1, Excerpt 3):
BC: We were [bidding] against Vidal Sassoon, Tory and Black, and Dionne Warwick. They were one,
two, three. And I’m like, ‘How am I going to whip them? Just poor Ben.’ [laughs] I still
tried.…At the end of it, as I was signing the paper, the woman who owned the place, I didn’t know she
owned it. So she had been watching the whole while. Because the owner, I thought, was a man called
Robert. And her name is Robert Jewel Blitso…We just called her Jewel. So I didn’t even know she was
watching me the whole while. And so she says, “I like the things you’re doing with these kids. And f*ck
these people who are coming in here with that hair sh*t…They’re not going to do anything for the
community, but you will.’ So just watching me struggle as an artist, is what made her give her little puppy
dog to me. This building.
This seems serendipitous at first and very rare: that a struggling filmmaker and entrepreneur
would be able to beat out a wealthy singer and a hair corporation in a bidding match. Yet, the
economics take on different forms when you’re in a Black environment. Mr. Calloway had a
similar situation, but without a bidding war. Before buying it, his property was an ‘estate
property’ owned by the Los Feliz Corporation and was not being used. It was a blighted building
that used to be called Checkmates, which a friend’s wife found for him.
FC: Someone had died and it was just sitting there. Kids getting the money or whatever. So we bought it.
Bought the whole block. Took us about a year to fix it up. We opened it up, which would have been my

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th
wedding anniversary. We’ll never forget that. We had a big party. And from that point forward, the
place has never stopped. It has been busy, busy, busy.
From their stories, we learn that property owners often care about the spaces futures as well, not
just whether it can be sold to the highest bidder or passed along to their family. Land is legacy,
even when you do not own it.
Furthermore, some aspiring business owners also see the benefit of a depreciated real
estate environment as an opportunity to build collective wealth, not just an individual income-
producing property. A retired LAPD officer and former owner of a strip mall, Mr. Eric Moore of
Hot and Cool Café, saw Leimert as a ripe opportunity to take over an affordable space and work
his way toward ownership after a costly divorce.
EM: …I’ve always been interested in Leimert Park. Quite honestly, from being in law enforcement, I
actually had a lot of enforcement activity in this area. I saw the potential for the area. And then I am
seeing the area change…I knew Leimert was a good place and you have wealthier and such a diversity of
[people]. You’ve got economic diversity. Social diversity. You’ve got wealthy people. You’ve got people
who’ve got more humble incomes. Man, why not? Let’s bring the people who are financially
underperforming and let’s all make money! And all grow together versus hoarding our ideas. Or I get mine.
Good luck to everybody else. No, I’m about “If you make money, Ima make money.”
Lastly, the artist Mark Bradford, while driven partly by sentimentality over his mother’s
former hair salon being in the Village, he also sensed an opportunity to practice his art.
According to Mr. Caldwell (Appendix C.1), a close friend and co-property owner of Bradford’s,
the property owner liked Bradford and invited him to bid for it. With Caldwell’s encouragement,
he secured that first piece of what is now the A+P campus. Property being viewed as a
personalized, yet potentially profitable space is a shared view amongst the entrepreneurs. They
do not all pursue taking care of their “puppies” in the same way, but they value it as something
that can be reared and re-trained.
Factor #4: Preserving and Remixing Cultural Legacies
There are two kinds of ways of viewing the cultural function of business ownership in the
Leimert Park Village: passing along one’s personal legacy and adopting an artistic legacy through

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your own new venture. The first kind tends to be the older Black creative class. The second kind
is often the mentality of the younger Black creatives looking to make their mark.

Figure 37: Painting of African American Male Leaders Hanging in Window of framing store Gallery Plus in Leimert Park
Business owners in Leimert Park Village who have been there 10 years or longer have
stuck through the hard times not only because they exhibit nostalgia. They know the nature of
cities is to change and that is partly what brought them to Leimert – to ride the wave of change
and benefit from the neighborhood’s eventual redevelopment given its strategic position in the
region. The redevelopment that the transit line is providing offers some of that long-awaited
change. However, due to age or the desire to retire, the older business owners, despite it being in
their best interest to continue will not be around much longer past the Crenshaw line’s opening

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date in 2019. Thus, their investment in the planning processes and in the economic development
of the property is much more about preparing it for the next owner.
BC: Because what I would do is clean up outside and that’s how I describe even with what we’re doing to
this place. I’m trying to get it ready for my daughters so they can have a healthy place to work in. So as
much as a buffer that I can offer around this that’s healthy, then they can drive up, put a key in, feel
alright, the neighborhood is handled. Then, that way I can travel and do movies and not have to worry
about my daughters running around people who shoot and kill each other, you know?
These daily, tactical acts of improving the curb appeal and the street culture around his business
matter because his legacy will allow his daughters to have an inheritance he did not have. Some
of Caldwell’s generation is trying to work through their “living legacy”, as he terms it, right now.
This is creating room at the table as the Silent Generation (i.e., the Calloways, born in 1940s)
and the Baby Boomers (i.e., Caldwells) age out. How the Generation X and Millennials accept
and adopt that mantle of cultural leadership will determine the future of the Greater Leimert.

Figure 38: Picture of Barbershop with sign commemorating the passing of business owner Rodney Brimberry in Leimert (Author, 2017)

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This brings me to the second form of legacy-making: sampling and remixing cultural
heritages for a new audience. Justin Jackson spoke of how Leimert inspired him to reclaim the
artistic spirit of the musicians that came before him and put it within his photographic art.
1

However, he also is aware that his legacy would do best to mind the “African spirit” of the
Village itself. We see signs that young people – Generation X folks like Justin and Eric Moore as
well as Millennials like Nipsey Hussle, the Billionaire Burger Boyz food truck owners, Bananas
co-founder Verbs, and farmer’s market owner Olympia – are all trying to do their part to
advance the consciousness while expanding the Black cultural capital of Leimert.
What Black Agglomeration Produces: Narrating a Black Sense
of Place in Leimert Park
With its sleepy streets and seemingly lackadaisical attitude toward public displays of music
and dance and leisure, Leimert Park Village is an unusually comfortable place to be Black and
creative in public at almost any time of the day. Most of my daytime experiences were on
Mondays, wherein I would attend public meetings at Third Street Church or the Vision Theatre.
One February morning, as I was leaving a meeting at the Vision Theatre, my ears were flooded
with the sound of jazz music. As I walked around the corner, I beheld a man boldly playing his
saxophone to an audience of naked coral trees and empty parking meters. Not only was he
trained in the tradition of jazz music, the man displayed all the peacocking elements of Black
dandyism – a red feather-accent top hat, a white-checkered blazer, paisley tie, and sheened
penny loafers. I knew I wanted to get a picture of him, but I didn’t expect him to immediately
accept my invitation, let alone ask me to make a video.

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“Aight, let’s do it! Don’t get my car in it though,” he confidently accepted, “Actually,
let’s get in the middle of the street.” Jarred by the suggestion, I hesitated, which he noticed.
“Ain’t nobody out here in the streets during the day, man,” Mike the Barber, as he is known in
the Village, reassures me as he adjusts his music stand and speakers near his green, sun-worn
Honda Civic. He set his Samsung phone on the hood of his car, as it was connected to the single
amp speaker and began playing his favorite song. I kneeled on one knee initially to stay put and
let him be in the street, opting to simply zoom my lens. But as Mike lost himself in the song,
swaying the neck of the saxophone into the clear skies and paced further into the street, I had no
choice but to match his energy. Three minutes later, as I took my eyes out of the scope of my
camera, I didn’t realize a man was standing behind me watching the whole scene unfold. “He
cold, ain’t he?!” the proud pedestrian declared, immediately after I stopped recording. We all
reviewed the footage together. I thought that perhaps this was a fluke incident. However, he
confirmed that he does this regularly and I have, on Monday mornings, come to rely on his
saxophone flooding the otherwise under-populated streets.

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Figure 39: Mid-day photoshoot with Mark the Barber on Degnan Blvd (Author, 2018)
This is daytime Leimert, a place where individual stars can shine without shame, but also
sometimes are only comforted by their own shadow. There is a palpable spirit of creativity that
runs throughout the place – from the Adinkra symbol-spotted People’s Plaza that graces the
grounds like a game of Twister to the humming of a jazz tune from Sika’s jewelry store speakers.
This spirit manifests itself in a variety of scenes that one might find on a semi-regular basis – if
you know where to look. Mike the Barber wanted me to look for his moment.
“Yo! Can you put this on YouTube? And then come to Barbara Morrison’s on
Thursday?” he ratted off excitingly in stark contrast to his previously unbothered attitude, “I’m
going to play, and I want there. I’ll even pay you!” I assured him that I could come and what he
might have to do to help me help him share it. He gave me his card. “Here, let me write my
number on here. This ain’t the one I want you to use. And can you do pictures too?” Upon
confirmation, he began to pose in front of the pale brown wall with his saxophone.

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As I showed him his pictures, he became increasingly confident and experimental. “Ooo-
hoo! Look at that one, boy! That’s album cover right there!” he oozed, “But don’t get that sign in
there. Let’s try it again.” Mike is one of three barbers on staff there at Brimberry’s Barber &
Beauty Salon, named after the late founder. A note, handwritten Sharpie love letter to the public
eulogizing him, which had been there for months, was part of what he wanted to avoid.
Leimert has too many stars, past and present, to describe all that the place has meant for
sustaining Black culture in Los Angeles and beyond. However, this dissertation privileges those
who keep the place alive on anchoring and perennial bases and who made themselves available
to be interviewed and observed.
Black Place-Keeping in Action
Nicola Dempsey and Harry Smith define place-keeping as the “long-term and responsive
management which ensures that the social, environmental, and economic quality and benefits a place brings can be
enjoyed by present and future generations” (Dempsey & Smith, 2014). They recognize there are six
dimensions that need to be marshalled for place-keeping: politics, governance, partnerships,
funding, connecting design and management, and evaluation. Thus, it is a locally-felt but multi-
scalar exercise in public and private property rights oriented toward preserving space for present
users. In Chapter 5 of this landmark text, Mel Burton and Alice Mathers outline the various ways
communities take “collective responsibility for place-keeping”, which are built on various models
of partnerships – whether it be youth-led or public-private partnerships. Within these different
models, it requires several resources:
o Sense of responsibility
o Individual efficacy with shared interest
o Capacity
o Time
o Right partnerships/fit

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Furthermore, they have an awesome graph on page 93 that visualizes four patterns of place-
keeping according to length of time:
o Sustained place-keeping: a gradual, logarithmic pattern
o Activity-driven place-keeping: a sound-wave looking pattern
o Event-driven place-keeping: an uptick of stars with no connections between them
but regularity
o Unplanned place-keeping: a scattering of stars with no apparent logic
In Leimert Park, there is not one single model that fits how the place is maintained. From what I
was able to gather from the duration under study, it displayed a combination of what Burton and
Mathers would considered to be activity-driven, event-driven and unplanned place-keeping. The
anchor scenes and perennial scenes in Leimert illustrate these dynamics.
Sustained and Activity-Driven Scenes: Five Anchors in the Black Living Room of LA
Five anchor scenes regularly brought people into Leimert Park Village over the course of
my fieldwork: Taco Tuesdays at Regency West, open mic night and workshops at the World
Stage Performance Gallery throughout the week, Thursday’s Jazz Alley at Barbara Morrison’s
Art Center, weekday afternoon/early evening classes at Fernando Pullum’s Center Performing
Arts Center, and Sunday’s Drum Circles and Art Walks. Thus, there was a spread of activities on
every day of the week in some fashion, with the largest draws being Taco Tuesdays and Art
Walks.
Stepping “Uptown” with Regency West’s Taco Tuesday
Taco Tuesday revealed itself to me in August 2017, upon finding it on a Yelp page about
the Regency West. That is the only digital trace publicly acknowledging it; it is not promoted on
any Best Taco Tuesday lists that food blogs like LA.Eater or LA Weekly curates. Only those in
the know come. Thus, as I walked up, at nearly 10pm, I had very low expectations. There was a
gated area around a parking lot outfitted with seats where well-dressed Black women gathered

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around smoking, commiserating about how they "ain't got time for tired b*tches." I kept walking
toward the entrance and a security guard opened the door for me, nodded and smiled, as people
freely walked in and out of the club with no covers or no pat-downs. As I walked in, my ears were
bouncing to the sounds of decidedly ‘80s old-school hip. “Ain't no half steppin', Give it all you
got, give it all you got, Cause we're the Get Fresh Crew, yeah, yeah...” the Doug E. Fresh-led rap
group Get Fresh Crew flowed over the sampled Heatwaves song. I expected it to be a largely
middle-aged crowd, but I was unprepared for the physical environment: marble floors in the
lobby, Black paintings with gold-encrusted frames on the walls, a photography area by the
entrance with a smiling Black photographer Andre David Charles taking complimentary photos.

Figure 40: Classical Painting of Black Jazz Players in Lobby of Regency West in Leimert (Author, August 2017)
I had been transported to an unfamiliar, uncharacteristically vibrant evening economy
milieu that daytime Leimert Park Village had never shown to me. Thankfully, I spotted someone

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I knew strolling by, balancing an alcoholic drink in his hand, which the Regency sells for under
$10. His name is Wesley Groves, a trained filmmaker and longtime collaborator of Ben
Caldwell’s who had helped launch the Leimert Telephone Company with USC and had made
significant contributions to the Sankofa City workshops I joined. I flagged him, partly out of
discomfort in being the youngest person there and partly out of curiosity of how I had not heard
of this place. He let me know that the Sankofa City work had branched out to Chicago, where
they wanted to replicate our approach. He then passed me his card, wherein I learned that he
had a business “Smooth Touch Massage.” He reassured me that this is where he and his friends
come to let loose.
As I had this conversation, I felt eyes on the back of my head. Out of my peripheral
vision, I noticed a short, white-bearded man in transition glasses with a brim hat standing next to
me. I nodded to him, as I would anyone I noticed watching me. Later, I would see this man
sitting in an elevated wall seating, with a sign on the bar stool that had his name: Fred Calloway.
Mr. Calloway is the owner and father of the operator Anthony “Tony” Calloway and the father-
in-law of actress Vanessa Bell-Calloway (Coming to America), Tony’s wife. The Calloways are
arguably one of the founding families of Black culture in Leimert Park Village.
The Regency West is the crown jewel of the block that property owner and manager Mr.
Calloway, or “Freddie” as those closest to him say, has owned since 1978. This was around the
time that Black artists like Alonzo Davis and Dale Brockman Davis began de-segregating the
commercial spaces. The Regency made its own mark as the host of some of the most iconic Black
comedy acts of the 1990s, who launched their careers with Mr. Calloway’s (FC) help.
FC: We would have Lambos parked from end of the street all the way down to the other. So we were
already hot. And these agents that would come in like Creative Artists [Agency] and this one, that one, who
would try to come and pick up these comedians. I think there was only one spot in town and I think they
would call it Comedy Store and they would let one or two [black comedians] in every once in a while. But
for the most part, they had to come to the Regency. And it worked out. They had a guy by the name of

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Robin Harris who was the master of ceremonies, or who ran the whole show. Unfortunately, he passed 6
or 7 years in. He got so big and success just got to him. He couldn’t handle it. But Jamie Foxx came out
of there. Martin Lawrence came out of there. Chris Tucker, D.L. Hugley.
Because of this legacy, thus, Mr. Calloway is very selective about who he promotes the Regency
West to. During the day time, it is inconspicuous and unassuming. As he puts it in a later
interview (Appendix C, Interview C2, Excerpt 4), he clarified that he intends to provide a place
that lets folks know “they have stepped Uptown.”

Figure 41: Early evening view of the Regency West (Author, 2017)
Both lower-middle class (“East side”) and upper-middle-class Blacks (“West side”) suffer,
in his view, from a white supremacist view of Black space that “it’s not gonna be worth
[expletive].” However, he primarily markets the place toward lower-middle-class Blacks to
achieve a sense of consumer loyalty. While I did not know that upon initially visiting the space, I
came to understand this target market and their appreciation of the Uptown experience. That

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first August night, it served the purpose of being a woman named Sherrie's (no relation to Ms.
Franklin) birthday party as announced by the DJ, who reserved five of the sixteen roundtables
that surrounded the square wooden dance floor.
“Ain’t no funnnn, if the homies can’t have none,” the late Nate Dogg crooned, which
brought people out of their seats to it. Rather than allowing people to go outside to grab the tacos
themselves (as other clubs like the Savoy in Inglewood does), the Regency acted as a restaurant.
Two to three waitresses served the $5 for 3 street tacos special to seated tables (which you didn’t
have to pay for), constantly darting in and out of an exit door to the right of the stage where the
caterer cooked them outside. This dignified environment attracted about 100 people, some
dressed up in club attire.
But above, all it was a communal gathering where most folks knew each other. I felt
underdressed a little, until I saw a table of all Black men playing Dominos and another table next
to them with three men taking toasts with dark liquor. The DJ then transitioned from the 1990s
R&B and hip-hop to Rihanna and Bryson Tiller’s summer jam, “Wild Thoughts.” You could tell
it was an older crowd because they took this as their cue to sit down from their previously
vigorous dancing. That didn’t stop Wesley from dancing it out.
Taco Tuesdays, as grand and gregarious as it can be, is the Regency West’s only public
event. It is primarily home to private gatherings. The Martin Luther King Day Parade, which
has culminated in Leimert Park Village for the past 20 years, brings scores of people through
South Los Angeles. In the 2018 Parade, the Regency West hosted an afternoon community-
facing meeting, primarily instigated by the Vision 2020 Stakeholders Group. It was at this
meeting where I first met Mr. Calloway, who sat at an old-timers table consisting of James Burks,
Kim Ramsey, and Sherri Franklin.

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After getting to know Mr. Calloway he invited me to a Taco Tuesday which happened to
also serve as their Fat Tuesday celebration, a New Orleans-based Mardi Gras tradition. Unlike
the other times, the hall was decorated in Mardi Gras masks on the entry table. Women waved
their flags to the sounds. Calloway welcomed me, this time, to sit and observe by the rarified tall
seats against the back wall and enjoy a complimentary drink. I sat in the seat normally reserved
for his son, Tony.
Next to me was a young woman with pressed long hair and a purple-gold-and-green
mask on. As I introduced myself, I asked to take a picture of her. She mistook it for a portrait
shot, but thankfully she did. I realized it was Freddie’s granddaughter, Ashley Calloway, a former
cast member of the three-season docudrama teenage show Baldwin Hills, which Black
Entertainment Television (BET) aired in 2007 until 2009. “Oh, you want the mask on? Okay!”
she laughed as she put it back on, “I love pictures.” Her friend came by, a fair-skinned woman in
a halter top who was about a foot shorter than her. They waltzed away and met more of their
friends on the dance floor. This crowd was decidedly more intergenerational than last.

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Figure 42: Photograph of Vintage Car in Parking Lot Across from Regency West (Author, 2018)
While Calloway markets the place toward lower-middle-class blacks, it ultimately still
attracts those with greater economic means. John Jackson, a 55-year old, Gary, Indiana native
who moved to Los Angeles to pursue his realized dream of becoming an opera singer, owns an
apartment complex in Leimert Park and serves on the Cherrywood Block Club. He attested that
the Taco Tuesdays are the only regularly occurring event he attends in Leimert Park. “My sister
will drive all the way down to Malibu to meet her girlfriends too,” he laughingly confessed to me.
I witnessed that show of Black economic mobility upon simply watching patrons exit to the East
side parking lot across the street from Regency West. Men usually gather in the parking lot to
smoke and brag about their tricked-out Cadillacs dutifully polished and nicknamed. This
particular night, two Black couples in matching Bentleys left together, with the red one plated

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with a Grambling State University license plate that also had an Alpha Phi Alpha symbol on it.
Upon complimenting them on going to an HBCU and being part of a Black Greek fraternity,
they joked that the other couple sold them the lesser of the two cars at his dealership. All in all, at
its best, the Regency West seems to draw a very Black, very proud, and very bourgeoisie set of
Baby Boomers and Generation X crowd at the same time. One can’t help but wonder how the
Regency might affect the evening tenor of the Village if it were allowed to host more than one
night a week.
The World Stage: A Week of Workshops and Healing
The World Stage Art, Education, and Performance Gallery (“The World Stage”) is cited
as the birthplace of many famed poets and musicians since its opening in 1989: drummer Billy
Higgins, poet-activist Kamau Daáod, and jazz musician Horace Tapscott being the most
notable. However, it is very unpretentious. On my first venture there, a Tuesday in the middle of
summer, I was unsure if it were open to the public, despite the purple neon OPEN sign. While
there is a doorway that faces the street on Degnan, it is locked and is seemingly kept open for
pedestrians to peek at the crowd from the perspective of the performer – or to provide fresh, cool
air to the stage-lit performers. In the months to come, they would replace the white fluorescent
plastic sign reading “WORLD STAGE” in red with a 24-hours-a-day running LED banner that
reads the same but additional information (i.e., times, offerings, etc.).

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I would later learn from informants that this current location on 4321 Degnan was not
the original location for the World Stage; it used to be on the other side of Degnan Boulevard in
the former Brockman Gallery that A+P now owns (and rarely uses). The founders never
managed to gain building ownership. In its current location, a former Dental Laboratory as the
ghostly residue on the window still faintly attests along with the defunct (323) 291-7586, the
World Stage requires entry from the alley. Perhaps it did not want to remove that because they
just took over the spot in 2016 as a tenant of one of the more erratic property owners, known as
BK.
It’s true entry that faces the West parking lot of the
Village, requires you to either cut through the courtyard.
As you walk under the amber-lit awning, an almost-closed
door, with royal purple stage lights ebbing outward,
awaits you. Opening it was creaky and heavy, but the few
people scattered in the audience didn’t seem to mind the
croak of me opening and joining them.
“I won’t forget, I won’t be lonelyyyy,” a grey-
haired Afro-rocking woman sang accompanied by a
band of four men – a pianoist, a cellist, a percussion
drummer, and a talking drummer – as I passed the table promoting their wide-variety of
programs. They seemed to be playing an improvised version of a classic song I, not an avid
listener of jazz, was unfamiliar with. Their jamming filled the tall-ceilinged, black-painted room
to where you almost forgot the place was intimate. “Don’t forget to give your $10 donation,” she
added as she finished her song and began anew. After her second song, she gave her mic to the
tall man with the sandy-colored Afro who was on the talking drum. “On the wings of every wings
Figure 43: The Facade of the World Stage
Performance Gallery on Horace Tapscott Birthday
Tribute (Author, 2018)

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of every kiss,” he began with a wide-smile and a shockingly deep baritone voice, “Drifts a melody
so strange and so sweet.” He was cheered by the woman singing before like a mother in a church
would her child singing their big solo.
In later sessions, I would be greeted by this same woman – Rene Fisher-Sims. She leads
the Sisters Healing, Inspiring, Nurturing, and Empowering (S.H.I.N.E) program that aims to
extend the often male-led drumming circle to women.
“Do you sing?” Fisher-Sims softly asked me.
“Um, yes. Sometimes,” I replied with a nervous laugh, sensing her interest.
“Alright, well you can go next,” she replied confidently as she walked away.
It reminded me of a choir director encouraging a nervous new singer to perform a solo for the
first time. I opted not to that night. Another audience member, a sweater-rocking, young white
woman with her notepad, witnessed the conversation and my recognized my reticence and
smiled as if she was wishing me good luck. As I would visit in later sessions, during the fall, a $10
donation would be enforced.
Unlike many of the other sites, the World Stage markets their events to the public
through Facebook with a short caption like “Admission: $10”, while they post their list of weekly
workshop on the tall glass window on Degnan Blvd. This year, they will have a birthday tribute
to Horace Tapscott, the famed community jazz musician who was influential in fostering a
cultural mecca in Leimert Park through his cultural organizations [i.e., the Pan Afrikan Peoples
Arkestra and the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension (UGMAA)]. His well-
documented “Black Apostles” ethos (Isoardi and Miranda, 2006) was the basin that contains a
well-spring that still waters the roots of many of today’s practitioners in the World Stage and
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However, unlike the anti-capitalist, money-averse, philanthropic business model he
brought to Leimert Park, the contemporaries tend to do a bit better on charging for their services
– and rightfully so. On April 7, Horace Tapscott’s birthday, the World Stage hosted a four-hour
concert at their Performance Gallery, which attracted nearly a full street parking a Jenga-puzzle-
like arrangement of exactly 20 cars in the back. This was nothing like the night I first came there.
As I walked up, the long outdoor rug leading up to the door was capped with a bar stocked with
wines. An older woman with grey locs, a pink apron and a wide smile tended the bar, which had
a chalkboard leaning against it reading “Suggested $5 Donation” in green. The alcohol could not
be brought inside, however, which kept a handful of people out there, conversing. I decided to go
in and was joined by the sandy-haired Black tenor who sang my first night. This time he had
camera equipment.
As we both went inside, around 9:33pm, the house’s seating was nearly full. With an aisle
splitting between two groups of 40 seats, there were only a few more ready. “Hi, are you coming
to see the show?” the person at the table asked me. Her name was Trudy, a middle-aged, light-
skinned Black woman rocking gold wire-framed glasses, a yellow zip-up sweater and ponytail
under a top black tip hat, along with military, camouflage pants, and white and gold Adidas.
After paying for my $20 entry fee, I asked her if it were alright to take pictures. “Yes, please
pictures!” she quickly responded, “Please tag us in anything!” This was clearly a night they
wanted to use to exhibit pride. There were at least four other attendees with professional-grade
cameras, with a pair sitting behind her in the corner and two more who sat on the stairwell
(including the tenor).
The crowd who came to see the performers – all friends of the late Horace Tapscott –
were very similar to the Barbara Morrison crowd, except much Blacker and slightly younger.
This time, I also noticed the intricacies of the building’s interior design: two wall mannequins

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decorated in t-shirts, with one pinned with a “The World Stage t-shirts $15” paper note, a steel
wall decoration that molded the word “JAZZ” as the shape of a trombone, the tall cylindrical
“$10 donation suggested” box, the coffee table in front. As I sat down around 9:36pm, the
opening set came to a close. Within two minutes, the
gregarious, plain-clothed MC in a purple shirt took to
the mic. “Welcome to the World Stage, home of the
human metronome!” he spoke with a deep, yet
charismatic voice, as he introduced each of the band
members – a pianist named Bobby West, a drummer
Mekala Session, a cellist named Roberto Miranda, and
a trombonist named Michael Session. It was a similar
ensemble format as the first night, except with an
audience. As he previewed who would perform that
night, he became a super fan in front of the crowd.
“This is probably the hottest spot in town. I beg
anybody to differ!” he declared to the audience, which was met with an awkward pause; I
remember thinking maybe he should have qualified his statement with “jazz spot.” But he
persisted with the unmatched legacy of the place. “But this night is about Horace Tapscott. For
50 years, he had a band in the community. He played in hospitals, churches, prisons, parks, and
anybody that came through this band is devout. It was an incubator,” he touted like a testimony
to a church congregation. He continued and reminded people of how it all began. “[Horace] was
at a shopping center in Hollywood. It was Lionel Hampton’s band. He was getting ready to go
on the road with his trombone. All of sudden, he just stood and walked off the bus. He said, ‘I
can’t do this anymore. I have to devote my mind to the community.’” This story evoked the
Figure 44: Pianist Bobby West Playing for
Horace Tapscott Tribute

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audience into a familiar set of “Mmm’s” and a head nods, as if they were hearing a sermon. His
next statement is what cued me to the mentality and ethos of the place: “I have a lot to share, but
let’s get right to the music. Let the healing begin.”
At this moment, an insight occurred: the Tapscott generation saw their work as
restorative, not profit- or ego-driven. This is likely the core reason why music was not
commercialized as highly as the other comparable cultural spaces. They also were living in the
aftermath of the deaths of highly-commercialized artists – Berry Gordy’s Motown, the
Philadelphia Sound, and Stax Records – all of whom imploded due to capital interests. If you
were ego-driven, you might not be able to simultaneously be the home of the world’s most
recorded jazz musician, Billy Higgins, whose work is featured on nearly 800 albums, while also
living in relative obscurity. The artistic achievements not followed by commercial success would
be maddening to someone motivated by industry standards, rather than socio-spiritual one like
healing. This might also be why, on the side of the building, a sticker reading “Real Music
Comes from Musicians” – a not-so-subtle jab at the studio-enabled commercialization of music
that has dehumanized and overtaken the industry.

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Figure 45: Vocalist Maia from Chicago Performing on Harp
The first soloist was a singer named Maia. A Chicago native who flew out to perform at
World Stage, she was a green-eyed, Black woman with teal wrap and a long, white flowing dress
tied around the waist with a mermaid-like, shimmering fabric tied around her waist. I remember
seeing her sitting by the doorway when I came in. She had perfect posture and a quiet confidence
that spoke volumes. She practically marched to the front when the MC called her name and took
her seat at her instrument of choice other than her voice: the harp. After thanking the World
Stage, she announced that she would be singing two Negro spirituals with music inspired by John
Coltrane, one called Equinox. Both of her instruments – voice and harp – were simply angelic.
She quieted the room, as she began stringing the harp and lulled us into her original rendition of

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the first song. “Nobody knoooows the trouble I seen, Lord, nobody knows,” she began and
repeated slowly. Incrementally, she was joined by the rest of the band.
The second soloist was Dwight Trible, the executive director of the World Stage. Trible
had a dramatic singing style, with lots of directions to the band before performing. As he slowly
turned his back from the crowd to the band, building up the volume of his voice, we witnessed a
man displaying the fullness of the Pan-African ethos: a tri-color Kufi, robe with big Ankh symbol,
a long salt-and-pepper goatee on his brown skin. His transition glasses blocked his eyes from the
eight spotlights of red, green, blue primary colors, which beamed the galaxy-inspired painting on
the stage walls.

Figure 46: Vocalist Dwight Trible, the Executive Director of World Stage, performing with Mekala Session and Michael
Session

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“My eyes have seen youuu…will you be my wife?”
he very breathily sang, almost in a trance, with a
deep, soft voice alternating with a falsetto that would
have easily doubled for Luther Vandross at times.
The “World Stage” is written like a streak of shooting
star for a reason.
After his exemplary performance, Trible
stopped to give a speech. He wanted to recognize the
songwriter, Jesse Shaw who was a part of the Pan
African Arkestra, despite his shy nature. Jesse, with
his blue cap “66 North Island”, white athletic sweater
with a large, red Letterman’s jacket-like “T” on his
spine, stood up briefly to the applause and sat back
down. Following this performance, the bassist Roberto Miranda, told what he called “a Horace
story.” He revealed that he got to know Horace very well, as he played with him since he was 19,
and that he cooked very well. However, as a Puerto Rican, he was able to share with him his
mother’s cooking. At this point, I was able to safely get up and leave, to which I was greeted by a
standing audience in the back. Nearly 150 people RSVP’d for the event, but there were only 90
seats. I was glad my exit could provide a seat.
Outside was busier than it was before. There was now an outdoor grill, with two Black
men making Black-inspired fusion food. I recognized the man who allowed me to take a picture
as the same cook from the Freedom Festival. It appears that the World Stage was still an
incubator for more than music.

Figure 47: Kah's Grill Fusion Menu on Night of
Horace Tapscot Birthday Tribute

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Jazz Alley with Barbara Morrison: Continuing “Mama’s” Legacy in Leimert
Branding itself as an “intimate and unpretentious venue” similar to its fellow jazz
neighbor World Stage, the crowd was largely a white and older artist scene in my visits to the
Barbara Morrison “Jazz Alley” event on Thursdays. Barbara Morrison, a snowy-haired, electric
chair-scooting whose name adorns the Performing Arts Center on the corner of Degnan and 43
rd

Street, would be well within her rights to be pretentious if you understand her stature in the jazz
community. People echo her 61-year-old name in the same breath as B.B. King, as evidenced by
the glass-encased doll of her and King on a miniature stage preserved in the California Jazz and
Blues Museum a couple of doors down on Degnan Boulevard. Morrison also started and runs
this place with her friend and employee Theo. Morrison, a Detroit suburb native, has lived in
Los Angeles since 1973, when she gained her start in music through her stint as a 21-year-old
working on “The Johnny Otis Show.”
Since then, Morrison has released over 14 solo albums and has appeared on stages with
the top jazz and blues acts of the last century. One of them she gave to me for free in trying to
find time to interview her (which has not happened during the course of my field work). The one
time we attempted to pull off an interview at her Museum, in which she did not show up, her
manager Theo simply laughed and pulled out her calendar, pointing to the fact she overbooked
herself. This seems to be endemic to someone of her stature. For example, in 1995, she was part
of a televised Tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, with Diane Reeves, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan,
Dionne Warwick, and others. Venues such as the Carnegie Hall and Sydney Opera House in
Australia have invited her.
Morrison continues the tradition of the local legend Laura Mae Gross aka “Mama”, the
founder of a place called Babe and Ricky’s Inn. The Yelp page, which clear says ‘CLOSED’, acts
a memorial to Mama. One user named Carrie C. wrote in a top-rated 2011 review, “Thanks to

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Babe & Ricky's, I have a deep appreciation for budding Blues artists and thanks in some small
part to Mama, I am now married to a Southern gentleman.” Barbara Morrison herself is a
beneficiary of Mama’s space, as she got her start in Leimert in that Inn, which used to exist on
Leimert Boulevard near Kaos Network. Thus, the life-changing stories like the Yelp reviewer
spill out not only into the digital sphere and within tributary films like Babe’s and Ricky’s Inn (2013),
but also into Barbara Morrison’s currently existing center.
One potent example: on Sunday March 25, Morrison hosted the 7th Annual Babe and
Ricky’s Inn Reunion. With a modest $5 charge, older men and women of all stripes came in,
many strapped with their equipment. Rushed mini-reunions were occurring left and right as I sat
outside in the courtyard that leads to BMPAC. The dark, crowded space left little room for
mistakes. Morrison wore many hats that day. She sometimes was seen zooming in her electric
wheelchair at the speed of a segue, gathering things in the alley hurriedly. She acquired the chair
in 2011 after by a bout with diabetes that resulted in an amputation. A philanthropic effort
partially crowdfunded her procedure by conducting a Benefit Concert advocating a “return the
favor” for all Morrison had done. But she was not confined to that chair, as she has a prosthetic
leg. She sometimes was seen at the door, tendering cash from patrons and ensuring people got in
a seat or waited outside between performances.
Toward the end, the entire group came out for their annual group photo. No less than 45
people filed out of BMPAC, at the behest of an energetic, red-vested white woman, using teacher
language like “Single-file line, fellas! Come on!” It was a reunion that worked like a well-oiled
machine that does not look like it will end anytime soon.

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Figure 48: Annual Group Photo in front of Barbara Morrison’s Performing Arts Center for Babe and Ricky’s Reunion
(2018)
The Sunday Ritual: Art Walks, Drum Circles, and Celebrations
While it is a monthly event that should technically be viewed as a perennial event, the
Leimert Park Art Walks build on an accumulation of a weekly practice of displaying communal
musical energy in the Park. The World Stage workshop attendees and drum practitioners come
here to display and share their talents with the public and each other. If left up to my initial
literature review, I would have thought this practice existed as a continuum of the evangelically-
communal music ethos that Horace Tapscott ushered into Leimert in the 1970s. It was not until
I met Nzingha Camara, a respected dancer who taught in the Katherine Dunham tradition at a
defunct studio called The Dance Collective that used to be in the Village, where I learned where

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this practice came from. “We started [Dance Collective] in 1990…and that’s where Eso Won is
standing now,” she explained to the group, who was tasked with writing a timeline of Leimert
Park. “It’s a lot of histories on this block. A lot of good things too.”
“I think my ex-wife, her mother danced with you?” a participant named Prometheus
confessed to Nzingha. “What’s her name?” “Her last name is Beckford. Janice.” “Janice? YES! I
remember her. Not to brag or anything but I have taught everybody in this city.” One result of
her contributions is not just the individual success of dancers, but Camara shifted the place
identity of the Leimert Park Village itself with her Dance Collective.
NC: “This place evolved into a cultural mecca. It’s the Village. Like the Drum Circle that they have now?
That was non-existent. It was something that was an overflow of our classes. We used to have classes on
Sunday. And after the class, the drummers still wanted to play. They wanted to still gather. And so they
came into the Park and started drumming in the Park. That’s the birth of that.
MM: It’s like the mid- ‘90s or so?
NC: Mhmm. Exactly. And for the future, I think they want to keep the drum circle. It’s become a
historical spot for tourists now.
MM: So would you say about ’95 or ’96?
NC: I’d say about ’95…They actually started right in front of the Dance Collective. Because the street
and the traffic, ‘Let’s go up to the Park?’ It was as simple as that. And it became a staple.
Camara noticed that this led to a new way to engage the public around musicality. According to
her (Appendix C, Interview C7, Excerpt 1), it was influential in providing a foundation for more
well-known community jazz efforts like the Arkestra to flourish in public during the 1990s.
However, even with this hopeful history of Black music animating place and being kept through
various partnerships, Camara reminds us of the fissure lines around gender that prevented
participation.
NC: Back in the day, women didn’t play drums. When we first started Dance Collective, women started
coming into the classes and maybe just picking up a drum and playing and the men would push them to the
back, almost to the door.
Times have changed. As mentioned prior, these days, the drumming tradition is sustained by the
singer and teacher Rene Fisher-Mims every Thursday at the World Stage. I witnessed several
women integrated into the circles, both as dancers and drummers.

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Figure 49: Drum Circle in Leimert Park on Martin Luther King Day 2018 for Freedom Festival
Sundays in the Park seem to attract this and much more. It is a favored day of the week
for celebrations. On Sunday, June 25
th
, 2017, a team of young artists combined their brands –
the Crockpot, Bananas, and Snatch Power – to host a free concert called We Love Leimert. On
social media and at the event, they made it clear that the intent was to not only celebrate their
love for the neighborhood but also to raise funds for a nonprofit called Happy Period, a supplier
of menstrual products to anyone with a period that has low-income or is homeless. As their post
on social media made clear:
“We’ve decided to use this #crockpot to preserve and promote the importance of community. Instead of our
usual $25, we will supply this amazing lineup for FREE!! We only ask that you join in the effort to fight
poverty and mend our homeless community by donating to our friends @wearehappyperiod. Check them
out!! You can change the world and turn up at the SAME DAMN TIME!!” (June 21, 2017,
@thajuicejoint)

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The concert concluded with the ritual the Park is known for: a performance by the Drum Circle.
This time, however, new people decided to dance in the middle – not all Black people and not all
on rhythm but all love all the same. Once concluded, after the We Love Leimert concert ended,
a gang of artists meandered over to an after party, which the Crockpot founder and Master of
Ceremonies Melanesia Hunter, announced that there would be an afterparty at the photography
gallery, J3 Collections. As a group of 10-15 of us walked over, I had a chance to talk with Hunter
about her motivations for doing the concert. She was the co-founder of a weekly open-mic music
jam session that originally began in Leimert Park called Tha Juice Joint. While they no longer
host it in Leimert Park, opting instead for the artistic scenes in The Study in Hollywood or The
Federal in North Hollywood closer to the suburban valley communities, the line-up attested to
the Park’s symbolic resonance across generations of artists and creatives.
Lastly, outside of the drum circle and concerts, related unprogrammed musicians meet in
the Park. In July 2017, I witnessed a set of men on Degnan Boulevard near the parking meters
playing their horns and trumpets and skateboarding and jamming. I just walked across the street
and told them, “Hey, I love your music man. Do you play regularly?” They thanked me and we
started talking. One man was just sitting in his car, looking down while playing his trumpet that
was wrapped on the neck with blue painter’s tape while playing old school hip-hop. He was really
casual about it. His friend Raymond White, who goes by “Rayband” (because he’s been in bands
his whole life), said he’s from San Diego originally. He’s 57. His parent are 80. His sister lives in
LA. He said he lives out of his car. He said they meet up regularly by this tree right across the
street from Ackee Bamboo, which they call “The Tree of Life,” and that on Sundays that they
get together and jam, “11 am till whenever.” Whenever I would come, that was indeed the case.

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The Afternoon “Let Out” at Fernando Pullum Center for the Arts
In the HBO television show Insecure (2016 - present), the Fernando Pullum Center for the
Arts (FPCA) earned notoriety by being the location where Issa Rae, the protagonist and creator
of the show, taught at the white-led nonprofit that hosts an afternoon program called We Got
Y’all! While not white-led and not a public school-based program, FPCA does loosely cater to the
same demographic of primarily high-school-aged Black and Latinx youth. At the Martin Luther
King Day Parade community forum at Regency West, I was finally able to meet the founder and
namesake, the famed musician and former charter school teacher Fernando Pullum who founded
it in 2009. Mr. Calloway encouraged him, as one of his tenants, to speak to me and we even
exchanged phone numbers. However, he did not return texts or a call from me.

Figure 50: Children Drummers Practicing Their Performance (Author, December 2017)

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However, after leaving a long day of meetings at the Vision Theatre on December 4,
2017, around 4:45pm, a program that shares some of the same youth with FPCA used the gated
part of the parking lot to practice their drum procession for an annual performance for the
community. “We take them around the country and keep them aware of where music can go,”
the band coach, a Black man in a navy-hoodie, explained to me after allowing me to capture a
clip of their practice on my iPhone. “They have a performance tonight at Fernando’s right here,”
he said pointing to FCPA across the street. Parents in their SUVs were beginning to circle back
around and alumni of the program would also attend, according to him.
While this particular crowd was a perennial one, it illustrated the impact that FPCA is
having on the Los Angeles arts scene, by providing pathways for youth and families to engage
with the cultural economy. After practices, youth created their own “let outs,” a term commonly
used to describe the lingering and socializing that happens after clubs. It was epitomized in the
song “Let Out” by Stanford alumni and Insecure actor Jidenna Mobinson. I was not able to stick
around for this one, as the performance would have been hours later. But I knew what to expect.
Perennial Scenes
While Leimert Park’s got staple scenes, it is known for being, sometimes to its own chagrin,
unpredictable. Place-keeping in Leimert happens on an event-driven basis.
Martin Luther King Day Parade
Between October and December 2017, the LAPD South Bureau liaison from the
Southwest Community Station acted as a messenger between the organizers of the Martin
Luther King Day Parade and the Leimert Park stakeholders group for a particular dilemma. For
the first time in the 33 years of the Parade, Adrian Dove was considering moving it from ending

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in its traditional location – Leimert Park Village – to the Exposition Park near USC. “The
Department is in support of whatever the community wants, whatever is best for the community.
We are the neutral party in this,” the slick pony-tailed, plain-clothed, polo-adorning Black
policewoman opened her report with at the December 4
th
meeting. “I can give you the concerns
are for either of the routes so you all can make an educated recommendation on what you want
to happen." One of the disadvantages of eastbound route on MLK, because it was televised
parade for the first time in its 33-year history, the staging had to be larger and it would have
caused the streets on La Brea to Figueroa to be closed for more than 12 to 18 hours. The
audience began whispering, shaking their heads, and scoffing at the idea. She could barely get
through the list of negative changes that would occur because of the route change (i.e., residents
would have to move their cars in Crenshaw Manor, no access to the shopping center’s grocery
store, etc.). Rosemond and Raines began interjecting with critical questions and she encouraged
them to hear her out. Once she shared that the alternative would be to end it at the George
Lucas Museum’s future construction site, the audience completely turned off to the idea. It was
clear that Leimert Park Village has a deep stake in the Parade, but not the organizer. Adrian
Dove was not there to share these plans, but his presence loomed large amongst them. Dove was
a former organizer with the Congress for Racial Equality in California (CORE-CA), an offshoot
of the venerable civil rights group based in Chicago. When he finally did come to a meeting
uninvited at the Vision Theatre, it was clear why Rosemond resisted involving him deeply. With
his dandy-like, three-piece suit, pointed-toe shoes, top-hat and exhibitionist, charismatic form of
speech, Dove has an ego that the George Lucas offer to direct the Parade to USC only stroked.
There would have been zero benefit to anyone else and that is why unanimously, the community
instructed the LAPD to direct the public event to its original landing spot: Leimert Park Village.

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While I was unable to make the Parade because of an event at the California African
American Museum (CAAM), I was able to arrive at the penultimate landing spot in the Village
on January 15, 2018. I now understood why the business owners, property owners, and
advocates were anxious about the route being changed: the diaspora was in full effect unlike any
other time of the year. It was my first time going to the Parade’s penultimate Leimert Park
Village Freedom Festival and, in 2018, I would have both an inside and outside view of it.
On the street, all kinds of interactions were taking place – and this was by design. Three
stages existed: one on Degnan where the young people’s crowd for families, one within the
People’s Plaza for movies to show, and the last one under a large tarp for adult-centered
performances. Thus, people were constantly moving between seeing entertainment, purchasing
cultural goods, and being offered essential services like voting registration and housing assistance.
Families came out and friends were reunited, while children played in the streets near their
parents, without fear of being struck by cars or approached by harmful strangers.

Figure 51: Black Father Carrying His Sleeping Daughter Through Leimert Park During 2018 Freedom Festival

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Figure 52: Black Woman in Dashiki Hugging Her Friend in Wheelchair as Red-headed Twin Sons Play in Background
Gang members like the man in the Blue, Los Angeles-Cripps colored outfit danced without fear
of violence to the sounds of West coast rap being played in between segments.

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Pan-Africanists wore their colors proudly as they carried their flags, soaking in the scene.

Figure 53: A Black couple carries Pan-African flags as they walk in Festival
Of course, the Drum Circle came out and attracted a crowd of photographers (like myself) and
dancers.

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Figure 54: An older Black woman dances in the middle of the Drum Circle during Freedom Festival

Figure 55: Anonymous, All-Black Performer Named NoFacE performing behind piano for Freedom Festival

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Figure 56: Black Man Selling T-Shirts with Martin Luther King on the Corner of Degnan and 43
rd
Street
Not even the widely-touted annual Taste of Soul provides this essentially free foot traffic
to the Village, which doesn’t charge or penalize the street vending that occurs in a spectrum of
forms during the Parade. Least formal of all, there are individuals like the man who set up a
mobile cart selling tee-shirt business with emblematic Black leaders like Martin Luther King and
NFL player Colin Kaepernick or those with jewelry and African artifacts. There are food trucks,
who are completely mobile but on a regular basis at predictable locations like the Billionaire
Burger Boyz or the unnamed food truck pictured selling soul food. There are brick-and-mortar,
single-place establishments like Hot and Cool Café, who serve coffee on the street in strategic
locations, as Tony does on behalf of Hot and Cool and his own sole proprietorship Synthetics
Tony, or the man who is cooking in front of World Stage who goes by Kah’s Grill. Lastly, most
formal and complex of all, there are franchised businesses like Kobbler King, who sell their foods
in their own brick-and-mortar stores (i.e., location on Crenshaw and Jefferson) as well as within
large grocery chains such as Vons and Safeway.

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Figure 57: Kah's Grill Attracting a Crowd in front of the World Stage’s Façade during Freedom Festival

Figure 58: Tony of Hot and Cool Café Serving Coffee in front of Shop for Freedom Festival

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Figure 59: Handwritten Menu of Cajun Food Truck with Lemonades Foregrounded

Figure 60: Black male merchant playing trumpet under his tent while selling hand-painted plates with African women

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However, outside of the scenes publicly, presentations were going on in the Regency West by
various business owners. Terry Scott, a nonprofit arts consultant and filmmaker who recently
moved back to LA from New York City to be involved in his hometown, was the primary
organizer of the 2018 Martin Luther King Day community forum. Despite it being promoted
less than three weeks before the day, the “Leimert Park Vanguard” event, with Ben Caldwell’s
film Sankofa City leading the group on the projector screen.

Figure 61: Grey-haired Black couple recording Ben Caldwell's presentation of Film “Sankofa City” in Regency West
Overall, the Leimert Park Village MLK Freedom Festival was liberating for not just
them. I, too, had a chance to walk the streets with my camera and, for once, not have to stress
about whether taking a picture of Blackness in public would be viewed as an intrusion on
someone’s living room. It felt like a truly public space now to do as the spirit moved you.

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J3 Collections: Mixers, After-Parties, and Community Photoshoots
My first interaction with J3 Collections was when it served as the site of an evening
community forum, hosted by the Cherrywood Block Club residents. I was invited to facilitate a
discussion around gentrification. Justin Jackson, the founder, was the gracious host. “Do you
want a drink or anything?” he asked me as I arrived a tad bit later and we walked to the back
room, where white wine rested. As I accepted, I noticed a mini-wall of fame above the knee-high
refrigerator where the wine was stored: an album signed by artist Miguel, who I would later learn
is a former client of his. Jackson, a 41-year-old Los Angeles native by way of Torrance, has had a
very potent set of experiences with race that motivate his desire to build up Black representation.
JJ: I went to school in South Torrance. And there was a period in my grade school, I think it was 5
th

grade year, where I used to get called a nigger every day. Every single day. I got into so many fights bro. I
can show you scars on my knuckles from knocking mu’fuckas teeths out. Excuse my language. But it was
that bad. I got for real racism! Kids trying to spit on me and just getting bullied.
And so having that type of experience only drew me to wanna be as close to my people as much as possible.
As long as possible. And till this day, I’m like that. I’d rather deal with the nuances of the angry Black
person that thinks that I’m an Uncle Tom because I own a business. That’s fine. You can think that. But
I’m still gonna say wassup to you. I’m still gonna offer you some water cause it’s hot out here and
eventually you gonna recognize that I’m not, so we cool now right? Alright we cool.
This pro-social behavior is also a strategic sensibility for the type of art he creates. When I first
met him, he described how he wanted to have an exhibition that honored Leimert Park, in the
tradition of pioneering photographers like Gordon Parks. However, Leimert also acts as his
canvas and his subject from which he tells certain stories.
JJ: …[B]eing here in Leimert and getting to build this place and getting to meet the people of Leimert and
seeing the change that’s going on and coming to a realization that some of these people aren’t gonna be here
down the line? I figured it was an opportunity for me to exhibit my place for the first time and not just for
the compilation of musicians that I’ve worked with but for the people. I wanna showcase the people of
Leimert: the person you see outside drinking the Old English where the person on the Hill thinks that
person is just a complete f**k-up…I learned a lot about myself when I took on something I didn’t know
how to do…and I did it all while looking at things in encampments right over there across the street. I did
things while getting to know the homeless guy across the street that I see every day. Meeting a guy who used
to play with Count Bassie and Duke Ellington, you know, it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, what?’

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Unfortunately, he has not publicly released this art in his intended “People of Leimert” exhibit. If
it’s as sensitive as he is to the “angry Black person,” it will be worth the view. Currently, however,
it is very unpredictable to know what is going on at J3.
But that is partly by design. Justin is not the only user of the studio space, which was
evident to me from the beginning – from when he hosted the after-party for the We Love
Leimert concert in the summer to the gentrification neighborhood meeting to the photoshoot he
was doing the last time I visited him at Art Walk. But this is part of his business model (Appendix
C, Interview C5, Excerpt 2). While it is difficult to say how often he creates a scene, it is very
clear that, as one of the newest business owners with some of the most exciting contemporary
pop culture connections, we might see new things happen like, as he puts it, “his own version of
Annenberg” right in Leimert.
Block Parties with Billionaire Burger Boyz
I first caught wind of the Block Parties, hosted by the food truck vendor Billionaire Burger
Boyz, in two ways. First, unfortunately, it was out of disdain by the Leimert Park stakeholders
group. According to the LAPD liaison, they had incorrectly went about gaining their permits to
host it and did not share a clear plan of how they would do their event. This irked them because
it seemed to build on a pattern of disrespect where vendors who do not pay rent or any costs of
doing business, yet they extract the virtues of their Afro-centric space. This led to a conversation
with the organizers, which I assume led to an eventual approval. Because the second time I was
made aware of the Block Party was through the popular millennial-focused advertiser Black Book
LA.

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Figure 62: Black toddler hugging the leg of older brother at the Billionaire Burger Boyz Block Party

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Figure 63: Young Black couple posing for a portrait during Block Party
With nearly 20 different Black-owned food trucks, the four-hour evening event was
effectively the young adults’ response to a lack of space for Black-focused, hip, musical and food
space like you might get at the well-promoted Street Cinema series hosted in large parks
throughout Los Angeles. While I missed the first time, the second one I attended was a scene of
young people: artists, couples on dates, big brothers dancing with their siblings, older Black
enthusiasts of bikes tricked out with beaming neon lights. And of course, the traditional line
dances like the Cha-Cha Slide. BBB plans to host another Block Party on Friday, April 13, to
which was promoted by Black Book LA.

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Organized Chaos at Kaos Network: BANANAS Party

Figure 64: Picture of KAOS Network Neon Sign on Leimert Blvd in Late Afternoon
“This might sound dumb, I don’t know how to explain the way in which your space
functions, Ben!” I confessed to him after years of watching and working with him – from tours
back in 2015 to building a nonprofit in 2017 and 2018. “I’m leaning into the idea of using the
metaphor of ‘organized chaos.’ Would you agree?” He laughingly responded, like it was a
familiar question he gets. “That’s exactly it. It’s the Kaos Network. My [ex]wife and I came up
with the title for two reasons. One, I studied under the originators of chaos theory. And the other
is that the word ‘chaos’ means ‘where brilliance is born’ in the original Sanskrit language.” This
explanation is emblematic of everything that makes Kaos Network the educated, hip, innovative
cultural amalgamation of Leimert Park Village that birthed careers of contemporary musical

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artists like Anderson .Paak and fanned the flames of Kamasi Washington alongside World Stage.
Several television shows and films have been shot here – Straight Out of Compton, Insecure, and the
upcoming movie Leimert Park – as well as
countless student works. However, it was not
always the case.

As the grandson of a film projectionist and a
neighborhood entrepreneur in a small town in
New Mexico, Caldwell was perfectly positioned
and socialized to be the art-based community
developer that is to the Crenshaw community’s
music and youth scenes. However, what few
understand about him is that he is also a veteran
of war, having been drafted around the ripe age
of 20; the fact is hiding in plain sight with his limp.
Besides this physical impact it had on him, it helps
to understand why he is a devout believer in the power of the arts. “I think politics and religion
kill people,” he confessed to me when reflecting on the impact that his first major claim to fame –
as a member of the “L.A. Rebellion” cohort of the UCLA School of Film and Television.
“Whereas I think the arts have been a pacifier. It’s the only thing that, after [politics and religion]
have gotten done with each other, that you have as remnants to prove that humanity was there.”
Thus, Caldwell believes that art is “a peaceful, healthy way to fight” - an end and a means to
making change.
Figure 65: Portrait of Ben Caldwell in Office (Author,
January 2018)

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Not everyone has appreciated the change that he represented in South Los Angeles, but
the number of believers in his scenes would drown those people out many times over. This
dissertation would not do justice to the decades of youth-focused programming that has
happened at Kaos Network. The famed Thursday night Project Blowed underground hip hop
scene grew out of an event at The Good Life Café, the subject of the very first documentary film
by director Ava DuVernay (a former emcee herself). The Blowdians, as they call themselves, even
produced two albums – one in 1994 and another in 2005 – based off material developed at
Caldwell’s event. In the post-1992 Los Angeles, youth needed positive outlets and, like the Good
Life, Blowed forced them to rap without resorting to traumatizing language. Blowdian networks
now exist in three other locations in two states.
However, a new era of musical and creative incubation exists every third Tuesday: the
monthly Bananas party, hosted by Kyle Guy – better known as the rapper VerBS. I ran into the
31-year-old for the first time while at the Freedom Festival on MLK Day in the Village. I
recognized him and made eye-contact, which prompted him to ask, “Do I know you?” with a
smirk as if he was the one who forgot. This emblemizes his mode of being: he is a super
connector in the underground hip-hop scene, avidly and religiously promoting his knowledge of
after-parties on his Instagram. “DM for deets” is his common way of inviting further
engagement. In an LA Weekly article, he called himself “Wolverine” of hip-hop because “I’ve
been on all sorts of teams” (Bell, 2016). Thus, scheduling an interview was difficult with him.
Nonetheless, the fruit of his work speaks for itself. As Verbs describes it, “Our party
carries the torch from the blowded [sic] era until now. Whether it be a drop-in from Kendrick
Lamar or countless perforamnces [sic] by Anderson Paak and numerous other alumni who've
gone on to bigger and better things…Bananas is the rose that grew through concrete.” Bananas,

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as the title might give away, attracts an eccentric, creative, young community. On his social
media, Verbs proudly shares portraits of his attendees, a few of whom are pictured below.

Figure 66: Two portraits of Black creatives at the KAOS Party (Courtesy Kyle Guy – Instagram)
However, this is not the full extent of what Kaos brings. They also are the home to the
nonprofit LA Commons, a community arts organization that engages teams of professional artists
and youth artists (age 15-25) to collect neighborhood stories as inspiration to create temporary
works of public art. Karen Mack, the brown-locs-rocking, middle-aged Black woman, can often
be seen in Ben’s private office with her team of interns; she is well-known for her expertise on
cultural tourism (Loukaitou-Sideris & Soureli, 2012). Furthermore, as I interviewed Ben, I
learned that he allows his two daughters – one of whom is a costume designer for the Shonda

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Rhimes television show How to Get Away with Murder - to use his space for occasionally storing
things.
While interviewing him, at nearly 8:00pm, a man came in, draw in by the Leimert Park
merchandise in the front of his window.

Figure 67: Leimert Park Apparel Sold at Kaos Network (Author, 2018)
Stranger: [knocks] Hey! Quick question. How you doing this evening?
BC: Hey man, how you doing?
Stranger: How much for the black and white Leimert Park hat?
BC: Man those are $40.
Stranger: 40.
BC: Yea because it’s custom-made. I can do it for you for 30.
Stranger: [counts his money] I’ll be right back, Mr. Ben. I’ll take that one right there.
BC: Oh okay.
Stranger: I’ll be right back. [starts playing Motor Sport by Cardi B.]
MM: So you sell shoes and stuff in here too?
BC: Yea those are the last of them. They were custom-made mud cloth from Senegal.

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Because Ben owns his location, 4343 Leimert Boulevard, he can afford to take on additional
projects – from selling merchandise, to hosting parties, to creating street plazas, to providing
office space for nonprofits. He offers, as he puts it, “an umbrella from the rain,” primarily for
youth ages 11-25. But there are no hard and fast rules. After all, Kaos is where brilliance is born.

Community Arts and Forums at the Vision Theatre: Ramping Up to 2020

The history of the Vision Theatre is well-recited. The Leimert Company built it in the
1930s along with the planned residential
community. It was originally called the Leimert
Theatre, but was operated by Fox West Coast
Theaters. The Leimert Theatre was the still name
which originally adorned the tall steel frame that
has become a source of place-branding. However,
over time, it evolved from being a large
neighborhood movie theatre to a niche space.
Different owners took it over. According to the
City of Los Angeles website and various
interviews with business owners, the actress Marla
Gibbs, known as Florence Johnston on The
Jeffersons and on 227, purchased it in 1990.
However, she lacked the resources to completely
rehabilitate it, especially after the damage the area suffered in the 1992 civil unrest and uprising.
Figure 68: A View of the Vision Theatre from a Hill in
View Park (Author, 2018)

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Thus, it was unable to host regular concerts and shows, for fear of overusing its well-worn
facilities.
“She would only let certain people come in here, like one time she brought Winnie
Mandela here,” Nzingha Camara recounted. “She let the ballet come in. She let another dance
company come in, but basically, she was just trying to fix it up. And there was bungalows in the
back of the Theatre where she would teach acting classes. And they tore all that down and built
the parking lot.”
However, what people often do not recall is that, before Gibbs bought and sold to the
City, a church owned it. And before that, Ben Caldwell was also interested in the property before
settling into his current neighboring location on 4343 Leimert Blvd.
BC: I really came here [in the 1980s] to try to buy the Theatre actually. Because I was pretty impressed
and it was pretty reasonable at the time. And since I came from a family that had little theatres, I had
always been trying to buy theaters. So my real interest was to buy the Theatre and to have this be next to
the Theatre so I could read and see when it came up for sale because the City didn’t own it at the time.
And it was, believe it or not, about $200,000…then the Church [Watchtower] took over and they put air
conditioning. They re-did the air conditioning and so the prices started going upward and higher and higher
and higher as it went to a million-something. Now I think it’s easily $22 million or something like that.
This church made it into a Jehovah’s Witness Temple and called it The Watchtower. However,
they too let their lease expire and sold it back to the City, who then put it under the domain of
the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA). The DCA finally completed an $11 million
renovation in 2011, wherein they added a second floor with a meeting space, which used to be
the projection booth in the former iterations.
Currently, James Burks is the manager of the space as an employee of DCA, from noon
to 8pm from Monday to Saturday. However, he was never given an operational budget to do
original programming.
JB: Like this right here. I’ve had this Theatre for 5 years and I don’t have a budget for this theatre. I’ve
operated for 5 years and I’ve done a lot of things here over those five years that I don’t get a lot of credit for.
I get more hassle than I get respect from a number of people. Anyway, it’s 3 and I gotta get this done. We

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can talk again another time, but I gotta do all this stuff. But the day-to-day operations is a long, long, long
story.
As an entrepreneur, he has become creative by inviting filmmakers to use the space and charges
them rental fees. The Pan African Film Festival (PAFF) in Los Angeles is one example of an
annual partnership he formed, which the City of LA still cites as a regular occurring event.
However, in my experience, as of 2017 and 2018, the PAFF is based up the street at the Baldwin
Hills Crenshaw Mall. Since 2015, the multi-phased renovation process has prevented the
Theatre for being used for full-screen screenings. The City of LA plans “to reconfigure seating
within the existing walls, add a lounge area under the seating, enlarge the stage, add a fly loft
with office spaces, and build lower level dressing rooms, green rooms, trap room, technical staff
office space, and orchestra pit” (DCA, 2018). As of March 2018, half of the parking lot behind
the Theatre has been shut down to accommodate these changes to the rear of the Theatre. While
the future is bright, the time of transition for this staple requires Burks to limit the audience of
users and activities to small-scale arts and community forums.
On Mondays, I attended the bi-weekly public Stakeholder Meetings from August 2017 to
April 2, 2018 as well as the private meetings that would take place there to help form a nonprofit
cultural economic development corporation called “Leimert Park Village, Incorporated.”
However, my first time visiting the Theatre was in January 2017, as a student presenting the
results of a community-based USC workshop to gain feedback. The humble wooden black stage
hosted a stage that would be regular seating space of the two 11-year conveners of the Leimert
Park Stakeholders Group (sometimes dubbed the “Vision 2020”): Clint Rosemond and Johnnie
Raines III. Rosemond, the former manager of the BID and one of the earliest trained Black
urban planners from USC’s School of Planning, Policy, and Development, often provided a
wealth of conventional wisdom about how to translate a wide variety of community issues into
avenues for action. Thus, it attracted a cross-section of problem solvers: homelessness and

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affordable housing advocates, young doctors organizing to protest for racial justice, new business
owners looking to become community-minded, old business owners looking to vent about their
gripes with the City, (non-)Black police officers learn how to interact with all of the above,
perennial parade organizers, neighborhood council members, and more. The spatial challenges
raised in this forum will be addressed in Chapter 7 on delimiters to cultural belonging.
The community events that take place in the Vision Theatre were relatively small-scale in
attendance. One included the 2017 Pan African Global Trade and Investment Conference
(PAGTIC) on September 15, a seemingly annual event hosted by an organization called Africa-
USA International Chamber of Commerce & Industry (or “AfUSA” as they called it) since 2010.
When I walked in the Theatre, I expected someone to check me in, seeing as I paid $20 online.
However, it was an open-door policy. I wanted to come to hear the session about “Restoring the
Village Mentality,” but I came in whilst a puppeteer and a head-wrap-rocking middle-aged Black
actress were in the middle of a performance. It did not seem like the kind of thing that would be a
subject of a global trade and investment discussion. The conversations they aimed to have
centered around re-introducing an African-centered model for learning and community
relations, rather than structuring deals and facilitating business relations. I began to wonder if the
other location for the PAGTIC – the Carson Community Center – was the site where most of
the business-related discussions were happening, rather than arts and education. Nonetheless, I
listened alongside the 10 to 12 other audience members, largely Black women. I even decided to
participate when the puppeteer called for audience members to be a part of their skit, to my
surprise enjoyment. After they were done, I got some clarification by the organizer.
“Bravo! We hope you enjoyed that!” the plainly-clothed, middle-aged Black man named
Al Washington announced, “Just as a heads up, our presenter is running behind so feel free to
peruse the books, as we get set up for the next speaker.” In the back of the room, there were

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educational materials of the expected variety with this Pan-African crowd – holistic health books,
history books about Egyptian spirituality, and more. The next speaker was a long-time educator
who spoke about his model for African-centered education (ACE). This became a testimonial
with Black parents sharing strategies on how they would infuse ACE into their local schools
and/or supplement what the public schools would not teach their kids.
About mid-way through enters the Morehouse-educated rapper and youth educator,
Corey Nash—one of the panelists who I actually expected to hear from. He came in with a crew
of friends and fellow youth and went upstairs without hesitation. I decided to follow them and sit
in on what would essentially be a discussion of rap technique and how they evolved it in his East
Compton-based organization called Rap Sessions, an event that uses hip-hop to build
community. I would later run into Nash again after an event at USC where Issa Rae spoke. As
we lingered during the let out, Nash explained to me how he engages in a form of Black
placemaking through organizing events like the February “Black Excellence Art Pop-Up” at the
MLK Transit Center Plaza. The Vision Theatre also engages the same populations Nash does,
as it is the host of the Manchester Youth Arts Center (MYAC).
While I did not get a chance to see how the MYAC uses the Theatre, I imagine the
upstairs space had accommodated conversations like this on many occasions, surrounded by the
African art that James Burks installed from his personal collection. As a City-owned property,
Burks provides Black aesthetic and spirit that animates the Vision Theatre – the same way he did
for Los Angeles at the African Marketplace.

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Figure 69: Original Logo for James Burks’ African Cultural Fair and Marketplace Framed and Preserved as a Quilt
Conclusion
In this chapter, I answered the question of how Black creative entrepreneurs claim, make,
and keep space using the actions and experiences of Los Angeles’ Black creative class.
Specifically, I provided a two-part analysis of how language and commerce coalesce into making
a rich Black world where Blackness belongs. With this evidence, I challenge the economic
development literature to take better stock of these assets as illustrative of how race can function
as a cultural resource. This case study begins to end the silence of urban studies and city planning
on the power of Black cultural capital, which had previously been limited to scholarship in
education, cultural studies (i.e., ethnomusicology, anthropology), and political science.

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The Black creative class in Los Angeles is successful at broadcasting their Black public
identities both regionally and locally. First, using a linguistic analysis, I found that the Black
creative class uses their business names to provide five types of linguistic markers of place-
keeping: beauty, access and belonging, history and heritage, humor and creativity, and sociality. I
argue that these five categories of nomenclature reflect three approaches to placemaking and
place-keeping: linguistic innovation, experiential innovation, and spatial connectivity. Second,
locally, I recount the success of Greater Leimert Park at place-keeping and increasingly in
attracting the Black creative class in its 50-year history as a Black artistic themed district because
of four socio-spatial drivers. One, it provides a refuge from institutional racism and racial fatigue
that the Black creative class faces when attempting to integrate into predominantly white
professional settings. Two, it offers opportunities for congregation, not self-segregation, which
neighborhood studies of ‘enclave economies’ usually suggest pejoratively. Three, it is viewed as
an opportunity for public-problem solving and correcting market failures in Black communities,
namely the issue of the desertification and depreciation of property value. Last, it is an
opportunity for them to build and keep a cultural legacy for themselves, their families, and their
neighborhoods.
While these Black cultural institutions are often low-capacity and not engaged in
sustained, daily place-keeping, the social and cultural benefits of agglomeration are clear on
multiple levels. Their perennial activity-driven and event-driven place-keeping efforts are
evidence of their potential to meet the demands of their communities – if strategically and
collectively invested in. These factors, which are threats that cause the flight of the Black creative
class, will be addressed in the following chapter.

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Chapter 5 – Dis-Belonging and the Flight of the Black
Creative Class:
Five Delimiters to Black Business Agglomeration in Los Angeles
Summary
In this chapter, I answer the question: what are the spatial factors that limit the ability of
Black creative entrepreneurs to claim, make, and keep space? We need to ask this question
because the factors that have been cited in the management and sociological literatures as the
mechanisms by which Black entrepreneurs are challenged in the marketplace (i.e., family,
education, wealth) are usually not made explicitly spatial. Furthermore, they are often behavioral
in nature (i.e., lack of managerial experience, corporate backgrounds, etc.), which underscores a
neoliberal logic (i.e., human capital and choice) as the predominant starting point for evaluating
a capable entrepreneur. We need a new reading of the Black experience, from the ground up and
with urban ecosystems in view, that clarifies how certain business choices become viable for some
and impossible for others.
Leimert Park teaches us that there are five delimiters which variegate the spatial power of
Black creative class. First, socio-spatial stratification divides the Black community’s wealth by
neighborhood and by social status. Second, Black creative class members struggle with adopting
marketing best practices, usually based on how many employees. This aversion to marketing
shows itself in three dimensions: 1) their dependence on word-of-mouth as the primary vehicle
for gaining customers, 2) their affinity for and sense of entitlement to Black customers, 3) lack of
standard operating procedures. Third, retail and food desertification in Black neighborhoods
limits the foot traffic from everyday consumption opportunities for BCC members to anchor
themselves to. Fourth, civil unrest from social trauma due to unsavory relationships with law

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enforcement and public institutions. Last, lack of investment by banks and credit institutions
through debt financing forces them to self-finance or seek equity financiers, which are harder to
come by.
I argue that the degree to which the BCC can adhere to and survive under neoliberal
urban capitalism reveals their participation in either end of spectrum: the Everyday Black
Economy versus the Spectacular Black Economy. However, I also argue that in the Everyday
Black economy, given the struggles to deliver on economic well-being, the persistence of these
institutions in these communities reveals the wide-ranging definitions of what successful economic
development means, rather than simply economic profit and growth. Being a member of the
Black creative class is also about belonging to the beloved community.
Overview
“We can talk, sure, but I have a problem with your proposal,” the smirking bookstore
owner offered without making eye contact, “You called this a ‘cultural hub.’ Well Leimert Park is
a myth. It’s an imaginary construct.” This was not the first time someone challenged the idea of
the Village being a hub. At times, I had similar impressions, especially during the daytime when
you were hard-pressed to find more than 20 customers an hour walking the streets. But it was the
first time a locally prominent Black entrepreneur had called it out so forcefully. Yet, as Chapter 4
pointed out, Leimert Park is a hub for activity-driven and events-driven Black place-keeping. In
later sessions, I returned to this point about the lack of sustained foot traffic (and thus patronage)
with him and others to uncover what his lasting critique actually might be. Rather than simply
lambast Leimert wholesale, the specific dilemma became clear: why has the Village changed
from being a site of sustained Black place-keeping that it was in the 1970s to the early 2000s?

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Why is the present-day Leimert a transactional, limited “construction site” of Black public
identity?
Five consistent delimiters emerged from interviews, observations, archival, and content
analysis that challenge the Black creative class’ ability to claim and keep space: 1) socio-spatial
stratification, 2) aversion to marketing and advertising, 3) retail desertification, 4) crime and civil
unrest, and 5) access to credit and capital. Combined, they create a multi-dimensional, five-
headed hydra of cultural, economic, political, social, and spatial resistance to Black
belongingness. I argue that these dilemmas reflect a chasm between the believers in the
neoliberal economic order and those who seek a capitalism that is more culturally responsive and
benevolent, which spatializes through a spectrum of Black economies on two ends: the Everyday
versus the Spectacular. Due to neighborhood changes, Leimert Park is currently in transition
from being a largely Everyday Black Economy to something more mixed. This transition reveals
how these delimiters are being confronted with new zeal in the Los Angeles community.
Delimiter #1: Socio-Spatial Stratification
The discourse around the transit-oriented redevelopment of the Greater Leimert Park
neighborhoods provides a rich canvas upon which to observe how class and spatial status plays
out within the Black community. Namely, how those in the entrepreneurial ecosystem around
Leimert Park Village talk about the specter of gentrification reveals their standing. Social
constructivist analyses of space teach us that conflicts are opportunities to uncover the
assumptions of social actors playing out through their discussions. According to cultural
anthropologist Seetha Low, they allow us to “decode and deconstruct the struggles, contestations
and power dynamics underlying existing social and spatial relations” (Low, 2016: 69; Lussault,

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2007). Low also notes, rightly, that “power relations always underlie the social construction of
space and are embedded in race, class, and gender inequality” among other contestations. The
way gentrification was talked about and framed by property owners versus business owners
versus advocates reflected their positions of power and socialization: where they lived, how long,
and how that space responded to what their taste was.
“The Hills versus the Heights”: Space Framed as a Symbol of Territorial Status

Figure 70: A mansion in the predominantly upper-middle-class Black neighborhood of View Park (Author, 2018)
Six years ago, in 2011, the plans for 8 ½ mile, $1.7 billion light rail expansion project
were announced by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (“MTA” or
commonly called “Metro”). In the original plans, the new line that would connect the Exposition
(“Expo”) line to the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) was supposed to connect the line at

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the La Brea stop of the Expo Line. This sparked great consternation within Black political
organizations and residents of the Crenshaw District, who felt as though the County was
overlooking their transit needs. Long-time politician, Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, distilled
these concerns publicly in meetings where the design of the rail was being revised. “Moving a rail
line through the Crenshaw corridor without a stop at Leimert Park simply doesn’t work,” he
calmly but firmly stated to the MTA Board in a public meeting (Arce, 2012). Thus, he advocated
for the MTA to add a $140 million stop in Leimert Park Village and also to change the way in
which the 1.1-mile stretch interacted with the streets. However, Ridley-Thomas was only able to
push them to place the line underground in the Park Mesa neighborhood in South Los Angeles.
“Economic development is at stake, safety is at stake, the aesthetics of our community at stake,
and therefore, we want to make it clear to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board that
they can and should do the right thing,” he warned them. By the right thing, they mean to avoid
an at-grade rail line that might displace merchants along Crenshaw corridor.
Cultural figures like Tavis Smiley, the television talk show host, showed up to pressure
them because his studio is based in Leimert Park across from the potential stop as well as his
friend, the public intellectual Cornel West. “I think the spirit of Ella Fitzgerald, the majestic Ray
Charles, the legendary Tom Bradley are all here in Leimert Park. The times we spent - jazz
clubs, talking on the corner, philosophy, politics, wrestling with the God question. And here we
are wrestling with the rail question.” With Supervisor Ridley-Thomas pointing out to the MTA
Board that additional billions of dollars would be available to do the rail Yet, in July 2011, the
final plans only compromised on the route change to run through Crenshaw, but not keep it
underground.
Later, in a 2018 interview at USC, newly elected City Council Member Marqueece
Harris-Dawson explained to me the perception of this design decision by the MTA.

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MHD: “LAX-Crenshaw train line goes from the airport to the line that goes out here…There’s a mile of
that will run at-grade from essentially Slauson to Leimert Park. It’s about 1.1 miles. That was very
controversial in the community because in all of LA County, no other light-rail line runs at-grade on a
major street. So where are the light rails on Sunset? It’s underground. Where’s the light rails on
Hollywood? It’s underground. Where is the light rail on Wilshire? It’s underground. So all of the major
thoroughfares, the light rail runs underground – except on Crenshaw.
With this in mind, during my fieldwork, the coming rail line formed a major actor in the way in
which residents and business owners understood the spatial risks to Leimert Park. In January
2017, John Jackson, the manager of the Leimert Park-Cherrywood Block Nextdoor website
portal, reached out to me because of a bubbling controversy that ultimately became the source of
a Los Angeles Times story entitled “Selfie of white joggers in African American neighborhood
sets off debate, and quest for understanding” (Jennings, 2017).
As the title indicates, a resident named DeMille Halliburton took a picture of his running
club and posted it to the Nextdoor website in October 2016. Over the course of two months, as
John explained to me, were posting very unwelcoming comments on it, accusing the white people
of being gentrifiers. Many of these Internet bullies were not actual residents of Leimert Park, but
given the stature of the Village, it attracts an
outsized interest in the South Los Angeles
communities. John and DeMille decided to host a
community discussion on December 12
th
at 7pm to
take the conversation offline, featuring a potluck
among neighbors. I was invited to facilitate the
conversation, which was attended by a mix of
people: gay couples, white mothers, but mostly
young and middle-aged Black residents. Few of the
attendees actually believed that Leimert was facing
Figure 71: Selfie by DeMille Halliburton during jogging
club run (Courtesy of Los angeles Times)

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an external threat to its historic status, unless they ceded power to individual real estate agents
and developers seeking to flip property.
Their stance on the fight around gentrification should seem less empirically salient for
residential status in Leimert Park than its comparatively low homeownership rate communities in
the Crenshaw district. Leimert Park, as of the 2015 census, can boast that 43.1% of resident own
their homes compared to Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw (21.3%), Hyde Park (42.6%), Jefferson Park
(30.2%), and West Adams (32.2%). The only other neighborhood that a higher percentage of
homes than Leimert Park residents is venerable, upper-middle-class View Park-Windsor Hills
(71.1%). The claims that residential gentrification is the cause of the increasingly white
homeownership is unlikely to be the case. Rather, it is second-generation inheritors of property
who decide to sell it, similar to how the property-owning businesses were able to buy their
commercial buildings from retiring owners whose children were not up to the task. However,
because of its regional draw, the consumers of Leimert loop the Village into the larger regional
concerns.
More validly, then, might be the effects that gentrification is having on commercial
tenants. In July 2017, while dining at Ackee Bamboo in the Village, I overheard and joined a
discourse on the gentrification question that initially cued me to how it was affecting businesses
and renters. Jamal Jones, a social worker, member of the Empowerment Congress West Area
Neighborhood Council (ECWANC), and a second-generation Leimert Park resident, was at the
restaurant to talk to the owner. Jones attended my gentrification workshop and I recognized him.
As we began reconnecting, I learned about how he viewed gentrification’s effects on merchants.
In this informal interview, he felt there is a class-based difference between Blacks here, which
results in an “apathy” between the Black property owners about the Black renters. He drew on
the example of Ackee Bamboo, who had issues with their air conditioner but the property owner

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(Community Build) would not replace it. This adds costs to the business. Furthermore, other
businesses cannot be sure their rents are stable. “All of these guys are month-to-month leases,”
Jones said while pointing to the businesses along the same side of Degnan. He was referring to
the businesses that BK rents to: Barbara Morrison, RideOn, Eso Won Books, and more.
On the residential side, however, things got a bit more personal. In one interaction, he
recounted that one of them accused him of envy: “Are you jealous of us because you’re a renter
and we’re not?” to which he apparently responded, “I’m not jealous. Not to brag, but my parents
probably make three times as much as you guys. So, my motivation is not as much an economic
one as a community motivation.” My reaction to that with him was that it illustrated a loss of a
sense of communal thinking and an acceptance of “linked fate” with other black people. He
agreed with that and added, “there’s a difference between the working class, poor people and the
middle class and the rich people that is not easily sorted out by race.” These socio-spatial tensions
create abiding divisions.
However, these cautionary tales of gentrification continue to show up. Just recently, in
late March 2018, an Anti-Displacement Fund purposed with raising $8,750 for the RideOn! Bike
Shop and Co-op emerged on GoFundMe in a mere seven days.
Our beloved Leimert Park is under attack by gentrifiers and hostile landlords looking to displace folks at the
earliest sign of hardship. With rents in the area skyrocketing, the ongoing construction to Crenshaw Blvd.,
and the impending closure of the actual park that draws significant numbers of foot traffic, businesses in
the area are under immense pressure to remain open.
We know what happens when we displace a Black-owned business. We know who'll move in. RideOn! is
more than just a bike shop, RideOn! provides education and enrichment programs for local youth, they've
been on the front lines of improving street safety for the neighborhood, and they've been a very loud advocate
for directing much needed public resources and money to the Leimert Park community.
Your donation will help cover unpaid rents and will ensure RideOn! and the other Leimert Park businesses
remain within reach of The People. Any amount will help!
Yet, the property owners say nothing publicly about these mis-information campaigns that paint
a false picture of who really owns Leimert: Black people. It allows property ownership to remain

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a symbol of whiteness, rather than of a class positionality. This silence is not negligence; it is a
calculated response. In one sense, they confront this mythology with private incredulity.
Kim Ramsey and the majority of the business community does not believe it requires
addressing and to the extent that they do address it, they do not point fingers at white people.
They look within and are very specific about how they view the idea of “displacement” and
“gentrification.”
KR: …To me, a displacement would be if we got rid of the drum circles. Because the drum circles are the
opportunity for, especially African and Caribbean black folk, to have a place where they can come and sort
of get their hair washed. We call it getting their head washed. So they can make it through the week with
the kind of employment they’re forced to do. And it is, that is displacement. And the biggest challenge to
displacement is middle-class black folk.
A similar line was shared by Ben Caldwell, who has believed since the very beginning of his
building acquisition, that Leimert can productively address gentrification on its own terms – if it
wanted to.
The inter-generational economic struggles of Black communities in Los Angeles – forced
migrations, restrictive covenants, displacement, manufacturing de-industrialization, grocery
deserts - lends credence to the idea that plenty of trauma exists. However, being that these
communities co-exist with some of the most wealthy, well-educated, and talented Black
communities in the country, it forces us to see that these structures affect Black people differently
based on where you stand. This social stratification plays out within certain spaces that average
and medians do not capture. I argue that Leimert Park Village is one of those spaces, given its
informal living room-style of public presentation, where Black stories come to be heard,
regardless of their match to reality.
Not all business owners feel that the fears are unfounded. As indicated by Justin Jackson
tenant business owners feel as though the threat of erasure is real.
JJ: About 2 months of me getting this particular space, I had a dream about Leimert Park…I was
walking into this huge beautiful building and inside, it encompassed everything about Leimert Park – from

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the drum circles to the Congo drums and the paintings and the jazz players and pictures of all the jazz
players and trumpets and horns and all the culture. But it was in this huuuuge building and it was in this
strip mall. And everything around it was all stuff I see on Third Street Promenade. Like an H&M and a
Pinkberry’s and a Trader Joe’s. It was just all commercialized. And in this dream, I was like, “Oh shit,
this is the last, this is like the Museum of Leimert Park. This represents what Leimert Park used to be.
But everything else is what Leimert Park is now. It’s not the Leimert Park where I used to grow
up…With the inflation and the way everything else is going? It’s kind of scary to think that Eso Won
[Books] won’t be here in 10 years. Or Ackee Bamboo or Barbara Morrison or myself, you know? Unless
we own these buildings!
Thus, unless they want the Village to be a figment of what it means now, Jackson believes that
the business owners should be not only giving voice to the struggles of low-income and poor
Black people. They also seek to reinvest the success of their business back into the community.
Loyalty to Leimert Versus Hollywood: Patronage as Politics
Property ownership is only one dimension, albeit an important one, that affects the
prospects of Black entrepreneurial success because it affects the costs of doing business.
Patronage, the source of income, is the other factor. Most business owners in Leimert Park
Village aim to court the Black consumer loyalty. This is a noble, but fraught exercise for a few
reasons. Millennials are a true diaspora right now within the region: North Hollywood,
Downtown, Carson, and even desert communities like Lancaster and Palmdale. However, that
depletes the core and diminishes the consumer base and stretches thin the trade market area to
unrealistic distances.
Black business owners are not the only people who lose out from this population
dispersion in a post-integration age: Black consumers also feel increased need for connectivity to
Black space. Few academic studies exist that spatialize the structure and geography of Black taste;
this tends to be the privatized knowledge domain of marketers and media. The ones that do talk
about how the Black middle-class engage in “strategic assimilation” with white culture (Lacy
2004; Lacy 2007) and particularly by actively engaging them in fine art appreciation (Banks

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2011). While numerous studies exist on how integration into predominantly white spaces, few
studies have illustrated how these experiences might motivate Black people to form their own
spaces.
In Los Angeles, I argue that this post-integration racial anxiety is what precipitates the
existence of a digital service like Black Book LA (BBLA), which they claim was founded as a
direct response to the question, ‘Where all the Black people at?’ There is very little shared
understanding and predictability to where you can find blackness in Los Angeles – except on an
activity-driven and events-driven basis. This longing for and sharing of individual spaces is why
over 11,000 people, in just a single year, have become BBLA subscribers. After being a
subscriber for a year, I decided to mine their website and e-mail announcements, which
conveniently contained the location, time, and cost of each event. In total, there were 481 events
they promoted between June 2016 and June 2017.

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Figure 72: The Spectacular Black Economy vis-à-vis Black Book LA Events Advertised from June 2016 to June 2017
As shown in the map, the Black-centered entertainment options are widely dispersed through the
Los Angeles region. However, a majority of them are in Inglewood, Downtown, Mid-City, and
Hollywood, not Crenshaw communities in the City of Los Angeles. Furthermore, they tend to
exhibit what I call “the spectacular Black economy” – big-ticket cultural events that make a statement
and require big spaces. While many of them are free, most of the events are oriented around
partying and meeting up for concerts.
While valuable and valid forms of celebrating Black culture, I wanted to observe a
continuous stream of Black economic activity – the everyday economy of Black culture. Rather
than leave Leimert Park Village and spend untold levels of money and time chasing the

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influencers in their aspatial pursuits of cultural belonging in white space, I decided to be still. I
decided to observe the relative emptiness and commercial depopulation. I decided to understand
the ‘no there, there’ that was assigned to Leimert Park Village by a number of interviewees.
Divergent Business Owner Stances: Solidarity versus Profitability
Calling out the poverty was one way that business owners who sympathized with the
lower-middle class Blacks indicated their loyalty to Leimert; this was not a concern I would have
seen marketed in a service like BBLA. Jackie Ryan (JR), the longtime owner of Zambezi Bazaar,
a 30-year old gift shop on 43
rd
Street, was one of those pro-social business owners.
JR: …People don’t have any money! You got some money, you ain’t got nothing to be apathetic or upset
about! It’s not an apathy. It’s a crushing of the human spirit when people don’t have money. It crushes
them. Look at that lady over there. She’s unbelievable. She lives there.
MM: You’ve talked with her before?
JR: Naw, I just watch her. I ain’t got nothing to say to her. She has her own people that she talks to that
don’t exist. Moving about.
MM: How do you get by with the challenges of paying rent and stuff? Do you have family and friends
that help out?
JR: No. I have a good customer base, but it’s not gonna be enough to sustain me. I’m not gonna be able to
stay here, you know?
MM: Is it partly because the rent is increasing?
JR: It’s because people don’t have enough money to support this! If everybody, if the money was equal, it
would be supported by natural inclination.
MM: And Black people are your main customer base? Or the customers you want to support [Zambezi]?
JR: 99.99! And they’re great. And they support to the extent that they can. They do. They do support.
And I appreciated that, them supporting me and resisting however they can. But they gotta hang on. I
mean…wages have been flat for the last 30 years! Flat for people who got wages! They gotta fight to get a
job. You got the LA Port Workers. They out there treating them like slaves. People can’t afford to buy
houses anymore here. What kinda crap is that? We gotta make sure housing is a human right.
Her insistence on poverty was also coming from a personal place. Less than six months after this
informal interview, Ms. Ryan was evicted by the building owner, Fred Calloway, after five years
of being at this location. “I have no problems with any of my tenants other than Jackie,” he
admitted, “She fell into a hard time. I think she just forgot how to do business. And she’s pretty
uppity and she just wasn’t aggressive enough to do what she needed to do.” Perhaps it was also
because of her product selection, which reflected a similar variety – Black Santa Clauses,

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Kwanzaa candles, African textile gowns, natural body oils – to the businesses in the Village:
Sika’s and Gallery Plus. However, Calloway’s portrayal of her as a poor businesswoman who
lacks aggression reveals his narrow view of how Black business owners who are not well-
connected, propertied, and fully staffed can get ahead.

Figure 73: The Facade of the Retail Spot Formerly Known as Zambezi (Author, 2018)
Though she may not have a trade market analysis handy, Ms. Ryan has a clear
understanding of what some Black consumers want but cannot afford to pay its fair market value
– Black culture. Thus, she is not wrong for wanting to primarily market to Black people (like the
other businesses). It is the unequal structures (i.e., stagnant wages, inhumane workplaces) around
her consumer base that is what fails and forces Black creatives to avoid an over-reliance on Black
dollars to fuel a Black business. Ms. Franklin (Appendix D, Interview D1, Excerpt 1) passionately

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critiqued the idealistic thinking that consumers interested in a Black cultural experience would
“spend on a pillow that’s $175 because it’s made out of mud cloth,” an authentic African textile.
This reality might force some ethnic markets to become more inclusive of all consumers and to
price items according to their ability to pay. However, in an African-themed business district,
marketing to white consumers runs the risk of appearing to “sell out” or gentrify what is
primarily a Black-owned space. There are no easy answers for a Black commercial tenant faced
with this quandary.
But the consumers are not quite off the hook either. As a dual business and property
owner, Mr. Calloway had a scathing take on what the lack of patronage at his venue meant in
terms of Black loyalty.
FC: And Black folk don’t particularly like dealing with black folk. I’d hate to say that. But we’re our own
worst enemy.
MM: That’s a bombshell statement. [laughs]
FC: It’s true!
MM: What do you mean?
FC: I mean we think that the white man’s ice is colder than our ice! And how you get up the ladder works
against that. I have a nice place. And good service. A lot of parties that are given by people in this area that
would rather take it to the Marriot than take it to 43
rd
street. And I am smart enough to know how they
feel and I don’t try to sell it to them. And I didn’t build it for them anyway because they need to go across
town to feel as though they’re getting their needs. That Nigg*rati attitude is what I would call it. They
[emphasis added] need to be at the Beverly Hilton. I’m gonna give ‘em the same po’kchop or play the same
music, but those that’ll stumble in like, ‘Oh this is nice!’ Well shit yea it’s nice! You oughta sit down there
and see!
To Calloway, his fellow wealthy neighbors illustrate a sense of disloyalty to Black communities
and their institutions by preferring to patronize predominantly white cultural spaces. The work of
sociologist Karyn Lacy on Black middle class “public identities” reinforces these phenomena:
Black upper-middle-class people do tend to disavow lower-middle-class blacks to avoid being
stereotyped or typecasted as poor and thus, more vulnerable to white scorn. In the novel, Our
Black Year: One Family's Quest to Buy Black in America's Racially Divided Economy (2012), advocate
Margarita “Maggie” Anderson deals with this palpable internalized stigma in the South Side of

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Chicago where even well-polished Black-owned businesses do not receive the benefit of consumer
loyalty. Black consumers, in her experience, seemed to distrust a Black-owned business that was
too nice because it did not seem authentic. Black creative entrepreneurs must tow a careful line
in how they present to Black consumers to be authentic, high-quality, and yet not over-priced.
Delimiter #2: Aversion to advertising, marketing, and
commercialization
Word-of-Mouth Woes
Black consumers are arguably more influential in the American economy more than ever.
The amorphous yet viral presence of “Black Twitter” regularly sets media agendas. The Internet
provides a mode to see the ‘interpretive community’, not just the spatial ones, around Black
worlds. Simultaneously, it has become almost passé to cite the numerous consumer studies from
Nielsen that repeatedly show that Black consumers form an outsized-role in the globalized
American economy: nearly $1.1 trillion dollars are spent every year from their households
(McGirt 2018). Black middle-class people are more integrated into white space and are
increasingly located in the suburbs. Thus, technology-enhanced advertising has become crucial
in securing their patronage, along with any other mobile-device user group. However, Thus,
Black businesses in Leimert Park (or anywhere, for that matter) face stiff competition in securing
their monied interest if they chose to enter the digital arena and market toward them. Yet,
evidence shows that they are not the most dominant users of the primary digital space that has
been created for cultivating interest: Facebook.
Facebook advertising is one of the most popular ways for a variety of organizations to
promote their content – from small businesses to political organizations to multinational
corporations. A Facebook Page is, admittedly, already a self-selected group that would usually

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require you to “Like” the page to see the posts or have someone in your network share it to your
timeline. One of the main ways to break free from that, however, is to pay for Facebook to run a
“boosted post”: paid for the content to be seen by a range of non-followers who fit certain
demographic characteristics such as age, interests, race/ethnicity, and location. A business owner
who cares about expanding their customer base would take advantage of these tools available at
the touch of their keyboard or mobile phone.
Yet, with the Leimert Park Village page, the Insights show that only two users have ever
paid for their posts to be seen for the website with over 3,500 page followers: Sherri Franklin, the
creator, and a user named James Daughrity. They paid a total of $130 for three posts, with
Franklin’s two posts taking up $120. This illustrates a wholesale disregard of paid advertisement
by the Village’s staple institutions. This pales in comparison to advertising budgets of major
corporations or small-to-medium enterprises intent on growing.
While organic posts are helpful for building an audience and a community based on
engagement, sales require higher numbers of viewers and monetarily-linked action items. The
majority of the posts were articles or non-paying event invites. The posts that were related to
paying for anything were real estate listings sent to the Village’s audience. They would often
agitate them to buy it up before someone non-Black does, a provocative economic call to action
but one that does not translate to business transactions to the existing stock.
Sense of Entitlement to Black Consumer Market
At the public Stakeholder’s Meeting in September, Sika (the owner of Sika’s) made a
grand appearance after being gone for apparently two weeks for a vacation with his son. In his
Adidas-like jumpsuit and gold chain, the jewelry maker boasted about the pictures, waving his
cell phone to the familiar audience of fellow residents and friends. He was gleaming with how

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beautiful the exotic location was. But then Sika, once nicknamed the “Mayor of Leimert Park,”
turned his attention to publicly shaming the attendees of a concert he hosted. “We couldn’t pay
the musicians, man! A damn shame!” he curtly waved off like he was swatting a fly. When people
tried to drill down with follow-up questions about the way in which the event was marketed and
whether he used any sort of ticketing service, he evaded the question and kept turning it back on
the attendees. Essentially, he wanted them to give what they would pay for a similar live
experience, but he didn’t want to have to ‘shake them down’ for it. This old-school, church-like
approach to funding the arts in the Village is exactly the kind of barrier that keeps culture under-
funded in Black communities. This is an aspect of aversion to commercialization that few were
willing to address head on and in public, as they let him rant on and offered piece-meal solutions
like reminders to the audience.
Marketing is not just about making sure your customers know what your product
offerings are. It is also making sure that your business has the correct fit with what that customer
needs. Sometimes, customers do not carry cash around to place in a bucket. But some of Leimert
Park Village seems to lack fluency in managing cash flow; other business owners and property
owners seem to know it too.
This “living room” model of Black place-keeping has limits when it comes to priming
consumers to spend money. For example, despite all of the reverence to figures like Horace
Tapscott and Billy Higgins, the biggest regular performance venue there does not enforce
payments on their patrons. On their website’s About page, they state very clearly “Workshops
are generally offered to the public for $5 but no one is turned away for lack of funds.” While
noble, this is not a public school: it is a business. Yet, this aversion to commercialization has deep
roots in Leimert Park. In Dark Tree (2006), scholars trace the history of Horace Tapscott’s
community jazz work and how he aimed to create nonprofit organizations who train musicians

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without regard for money. In fact, it was a spiritual endeavor for him and his protégés: the Union
of God’s Musicians and Ascension should make that very clear.
While Sika’s critique might be a fair assessment of the purchasing behavior of their
patrons – who tend to be lower-middle-class Blacks – this only speaks to the event-based
offerings, which is not enough to sustain an entire Village of businesses. For the sustained
offerings, by and large, the Village’s offerings were not well-matched to what consumers might
expect from a retail environment.
SF: Understanding your market, your trade area, that’s for any business! That doesn’t change because
you’re black! It doesn’t change because you’re selling a dashiki! It doesn’t change because you want to sell
sage. How many people wanna buy that? I don’t know anybody that uses it frankly.
This lack of understanding has had steep consequences on the ability of many businesses to
effectively steer market demand toward what they supply. While I did not ask them what their
annual revenues were, a source familiar with the business climate blatantly volunteered her
assessment.
SF: Hello! Less than $60,000. Definitely nobody’s making over $100k. For everything. That’s you,
staff, less than $10,000 a month for a business to pay rent, and then pay you, then pay any staff people.
$10,000 a month? What can you do with it? As a business?
Thus, Leimert Park business owners seem to misunderstand how consumerism works – for Black
customers or otherwise. They target their businesses to Black customers, which only make up less
than 10% of the City of Los Angeles, rather than providing a Black experience to anyone who
wants to pay for the cultural experience. This limits their market size and scope.
Each of the business owners, in their own ways, were exercising a word-of-mouth
approach or one that otherwise refuses to take advantage of mainstream channels of
communicating Leimert’s presence. For example, Eso Won Books has their own e-mail list,
Regency West relies on word of mouth, and Ackee Bamboo is on Yelp. This lack of sustained,
shared communication as a place is only a recent move and it wasn’t initiated by the business
owners. According to Franklin (Appendix D, Interview D1, Excerpt 2), business owners – with

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exception to World Stage and Kaos Network – seem to be committed to being obtuse and
esoteric rather than commercially appealing and accessible. They struggle to generate a shared
calendar for promoting for the Facebook page, let alone the Tourism Bureau (which requires
four months advance notice). Even for those who are savvy businessmen – such as Regency West
– they do share their events in advance to be considered for larger audiences looking for a Black
experience.
Instead, there exists an over-abundance of small, sometimes archaic, un-financed
communication channels - the Leimert Park Beat website, the websites and YouTube channels
for Eso Won Books (with their calendar). I call this digital territorialism. Because of their
territorialism, they miss out on the larger opportunity to market the place as a multi-faceted
cluster of cultural experiences. But even if they did market together, there are serious questions
that remain about what kind of experience a consumer might expect to enjoy on a sustained, not
just an event- or activity-driven, basis.
Lack of Standard Operating Procedures
In business, standard operating procedures (SOPs) are helpful tools for scoping and
keeping a viable commercial endeavor on a day-to-day basis. This does not mean that every
business runs the same; it just means that you take reliable approaches and adapt them to your
business to ensure a smooth operation, no matter who was running the shop. There are many
benefits to this. First, this allows you to also better predict the behavior of your employees in
times of conflict. Second, this allows you to show investors that you know how to cultivate a
welcoming environment. Third, if anything ever happened to the owner(s), it would make it
much easy to create succession plans.

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The Village’s entrepreneurs lack an appreciation for these things, opting to run their
businesses as something they do out of passion over profit. As Ms. Franklin states:
SF: Well Leimert has a lot of people who are hobbyists. They’re not business people. They’re cultural
people and they are hobbyists. They’re not trying to be a commercial entity. So that’s a problem. There are
things you have to do for any business or commercial entity – from your staffing, customer service, hours of
operation, consistency of your product and food, marketing, and competing with other interests who people
can spend their expendable income on.

Figure 74: Closed Sign on a Monday Afternoon for Restaurant in Leimert Park
While having a passion for the product or service is a good first step, it is not enough to
retain customers. Worse, it perpetuates the stereotype of Black-owned businesses as having high
levels of poor service, despite that many “Mom and Pop shops” lack SOPs.

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Figure 75: A Post-It Note Announcing for Late Opening Time for Gallery Plus
Personally, I have experienced this shop closure phenomena on more than one occasion. On
Mondays, after the Stakeholders Group meetings, there are no restaurants in the Village open;
they always close on Mondays. However, even after being promised they would be open, the
owners would be late or simply forget to show up. When I tried to interview Barbara Morrison,
her Museum was not open and her assistant had to come. When James Burks and I tried to walk
over to Hot and Cool Café (which promised to be open by February) to see about reserving the
space for an event, Tony was thirty minutes late and we were not the only ones waiting; this was
April. When I tried to meet up with the long-time hairdresser, Noweli, who is based in Sika’s
shop, she did not show up on that Friday for the interview. This reinforces Sherri’s observation of

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the business owners acting more like hobbyists. This is the dark side of the Black living room
model of place-keeping: it is too leisurely and not commercialized to prioritize customer needs.
Delimiter #3: Food and retail desertification
Food inaccessibility
Sociologists of race and ethnicity have noted how there is a racial spending gap because
of this desertification (Charron-Chenier et al., 2016). South Los Angeles, like many other Black
urban cores, still has not fully recovered from the riots and civil unrest of the 1960s and 1990s,
which has added to that grocery gap (Lewis et al., 2005). In Leimert Park Village, they lost a
grocery store and that has since been replaced by a Jamaican restaurant. This has left a sore gap
in the way potential customers – whether upper- or lower-middle-class Blacks – come to the

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Village and spend money.

Figure 76: Grocery Give-Away from Simon Foundation with Commuinty Build, Inc. (Courtesy of Simon Foundation)
SF: Let’s just think about it. You live in View Park, your median family income is at least $150,000 a
year, your kid is involved in all kinds of programs – in sports – that’s your focus. And you also need to eat.
And so the first question is, ‘Where are you going to go eat?’ What in Leimert Park can you eat?...
I mean…really even on Crenshaw, now we have Brooklyn Deli, which is good. And then Delicious, which
is not African-American-owned but you can still go there. But other than that? There’s nothing. And
there’s Philips Bar-B-Que. But you have to get your food through a peep-hole. Now, you live on the Hill.
You work pretty hard. The last place you wanna do is go get your food from a peep-hole. Where do you do
that? You don’t go through a drive-thru. Why are you when you could go sit down and go to a nice place to
eat? Why do you need to get your food from this little bitty ol’ thing? That’s not an environment. So then,
you need to go shopping. It’s Saturday. What are you going to buy in Leimert Park Village? I don’t know.
I force myself to shop. I try to go to Eso Won. I try to buy books at Eso Won. That’s all I could buy.
There’s honestly nothing else in that whole entire place for me to buy. Nothing. So the first problem is that
there’s nothing in Leimert to attract the people off the Hill on a daily basis. That was meant to be a
commercial center. There’s no food. There’s no groceries. There are no supplies for your kids. The best
thing they have going are the programs for the children. That is what brings parents to that location.

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Middle-class tastes aside, Franklin is articulating how one group sees and reacts to the
limited food choices and leisure space the Village provides. The only grocery store there
(Dobson’s Market where my informants like Kim Ramsey cited shopping as they went to
Leimert) was burned down in the 1992 unrest. The only grocery store in South LA near Leimert
Park Village is Albertson’s. This store is repeatedly cited as inaccessible for produce and too small
to meet the demands of the multitude of communities in Greater Leimert Park. The effect the
food desertification is having on the residents is palpable. In my follow-up conversation with Kim
Ramsey, her employees were returning with several bags of convenience food: potato chips, hot
dogs and Slurpees from 7-Eleven on Crenshaw and 43
rd
Street. Ramsey is aware of this and she
has formed nonprofit responses, similar to the way they have with the crime issue and the
business development issue.
KR: People who live and work in this area, if they could also do their grocery shopping in this area, that
would be very positive.
MM: And I take it the Albertson’s over there doesn’t really meet the full demand?
KR: No. And because part of it is that there still is a very strong interest in eating clean and healthy and
the Farmer’s Market is sort of it in terms of organics. Or you pay a lot more for organics if you go into
Albertson’s. Their prices are for organics are much higher than the other stuff. One thing we do, we made a
link up with a group. Community Build, not the BID, made a link-up with Sam Simon Foundation,
which is… Sam Simon was one of the original founders of The Simpsons. He’s passed away now. He has
lots of money.
MM: I bet.
KR: He has lots of money and he put it, his kids are taken care of. He put most of his money into a
foundation and his foundation has two goals. One is veganism and the other goal is animal rights. So we
connected with them and they provide 400 bags of vegan groceries twice…we’re done giving all 400 in
about an hour. And what’s great is that everybody comes to get them. So it helps to break down some of the
class issues that are in.
MM: Class issues in veganism or in the area?
KR: Both. And one of the things that we also see is that we’ve sort of people are saying that, because you
want to eat healthy, it’s not a poverty thing. It’s not a poverty thing.
Eric Moore of Hot and Cool Café sees this issue as a business opportunity; he wants to make the
food and obesity challenge a part of their business model. He shared with me an idea to integrate
fitness groups and and lessons around nutrition within the café space. But these all seem to be
stopgap solutions to a structural challenge.

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Retail desertification: the slow beginnings of Art + Practice
Why haven’t the Black property owners tried to bring another grocery or anchor store to
the area? Commercial abandonment is one major issue reducing the number of spaces available,
but also incompatible uses of the existing ones is another. Several past property owners (i.e., BK
Botash discussed in future sections). Within the Village itself, it is worth focusing on the efforts of
Art and Practice (A+P) as the latest and largest property owner to get a sense of the challenges of
right-sizing retail and cultural options to the Village. With the help of technology mogul Eileen
Norton, the co-founder of Norton Antivirus Software who ultimately is a co-founder of A+P,
Mark Bradford expanded his ownership of the live-work space to the corner lots on both sides of
Degnan Blvd and W. 43
rd
Place with his partner Alan DiCastro.

Figure 77: Map of A+P Arts Colony and Campus Vision (Courtesy of Art + Practice)

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Publicly, A+P envisions Leimert Park as a campus with several anchoring spaces, but it remains
unclear how they plan to activate the Village alongside the current merchants and property
owners. There are few publicly available documents about their ancillary business plans, such as
opening the supposed coffee shop next door to the Vision Theatre. According to an anonymous
source, privately, Bradford also has ruminated about A+P as a future urban ‘artist colony’ where
artists may take temporary residencies. This makes sense given his history with Leimert as a live-
work space. In the long run, the assortment of combinatory uses could be exciting and promising
for the future of the Village.
In the short run, this ambiguity about how to do it might explain why, even with their
current stock of property, several spaces have been underutilized over the last five years, with
only a few only open for selectively-advertised events on a bi-monthly basis. Since 2015, A+P
have hosted monthly events in their Public Programs Space on 4334 Degnan Blvd. This space
holds great meaning for the community: it used to be where artists Dale Brockman Davis and
Alonzo Davis’ Brockman Gallery located in the 1960s through 1980s. Thus, their very first
public event on February 17, 2015 was with these two partners. Since then, they have hosted 8
events in 2015, one event in 2016, 8 events in 2017, and 5 events in 2018 – a total of 21 events in
3 years, which is relatively infrequent compared to the daily and weekly offerings of the other
partners who host events in the Village. Coupled with the lack of nighttime lighting, A+P’s
spaces often feel deserted to the average pedestrian; I had the (incorrect) impression during the
majority of my fieldwork that this part of A+P was under construction or vacant.
Because of the lack of clarity about how exactly A+P’s maturing plans will integrate their
vision into the existing culture of Leimert, it also leaves them increasingly vulnerable to the larger
“arts = gentrification” accusations lobbed in popular media. Coupled with the actual

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desertification due to the transit line on Leimert’s nearest thoroughfare (Crenshaw Blvd), A+P
may be unwittingly perpetuating a stereotype of arts-led gentrification. For example, during a
conference at UC Berkeley in late 2017, upon sharing with people that I was researching Leimert
Park Village, an artist-scholar Sharita Towne asked if I was aware of how Mark Bradford and
A+P is being perceived. She shared with me the article by art critic Catherine G. Wagley
entitled, “Spoiled Roots: Mark Bradford and the Erasure of Community,” a title riffing on
Bradford’s installation Spoiled Foot that premiered at 2017 U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It
was a bombshell piece of reporting that formalized a sense of disingenuous deal-making at A+P.
As the story goes, Bradford and DiCastro, a former banker-turned-community liaison,
invested together through a property management intermediary called Clint Lukens in Leimert
and throughout Los Angeles. The article alleges that, rather than being upfront with the tenants
of the buildings they now own as their new landlord, they chose to mask their identity behind
Clint Lukens. Like a community-based organization, A+P gave them various initial
arrangements to stay. However, one by one, they evicted them for failing to pay rent: Zambezi
Bazaar, the World Stage, the Right Way Foundation.
While it is true that A+P has shifted the landscape of commercial tenants, they have also
attempted to fit new ones into these spaces that still fit within the artistic and African-American
themed ethos of Leimert. For example, PAPILLION run by Michelle Papillion, a formerly New
York-based art dealer who specialized in African-American art. She only lasted less than 2 years
at the 4336 Degnan Blvd location, which now remains vacant. According to a confidential
source, this had little to do with a conflict with A+P, but a realization that her large-scale
artworks could not be accommodated in the historic space. To the outside community, though, it
appeared as though she joined the string of evicted tenants.

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Another source of negative perception revolves around their opening date delays due to
conflicts in coordinating renovations alongside the longstanding anchor building, the Vision
Theatre, owned by the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Because they share the same land,
activating the A+P retail spaces became a power struggle over who gets to shape the design
aesthetic and decide the primary users of the Village. On-site manager James Burks is one of the
primary witnesses to how A+P’s requests come into conflict with the Vision Theatre’s needs. At a
Stakeholder’s meeting in December 2017, Burks shared with the public why the Vision Theatre
construction has been delayed. In short, they were suffering from A+P’s stances on space.
“We told them they could [provide parking lot access to their space] from that side. They refused to do
that. So, I talked with us and talked with Asset Management, the Real Estate Office and with Art and
Practice to purchase that lot. But we had to redo the City plans…After we already pushed back for the fly
loft 30 feet and now we have to push back another 10 feet, which means we have to get a Conditional Use
Permit to be an exit for the parking lot, which is something that we generally do not do. So that took two
years to get that done. And then there was the construction of the fly loft, which we had to shore up on the
side of Art and Practice because they’re so close there. We had to construct that 87-foot fly tower. They
had to anchor it and go down and under their property. They refused to sign off on that. And then when we
finally got to this plan here, they decided they didn’t want to buy that property and go through with that
plan. Not to mention that we have the electrical pole in the back that we spent $5,000 to put underground
strictly for Art and Practice’s building and yet, they still would not give DWP [Department of Water and
Power] access to their building because they started construction and before [A+P] started doing
construction there. And so now the City attorney got involved about two months ago, trying to force this
issue, because it’s been such a delay. It is the longest delay on construction in the City of Los Angeles. This
project was supposed to be started in 2013. The other thing is the gate on Degnan, they want to move it
closer to the curb…It’s going to cost $37,000.
A+P clearly has spatial needs for their artistic business that is distinct from the way a Vision
Theatre-anchored Leimert might require. However, due to the clashing of these frames, retail
space lies in the wait as the dust settles.

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Figure 78: The gate leading to the Vision Theatre that Art + Practice Wants the City of Los Angeles to Pay $37,000 to Push to the Curb
How museums like A+P integrate into an urban, Black environment – regardless of their
ownership – is an especially a sensitive matter given the conversation happening nationally
around the racial demographics in the art world (Kennedy 2015) and the way in which museums
interact with urban neighborhoods’ affordability. While little evidence has panned out that art
museums are harbingers of economic displacement via housing (Meyer 2016), the social and
cultural changes they illuminate – more upper-income, white, educated attendees and visitors –
challenges the place identity of the neighborhoods. These impacts are not felt the same
everywhere; recent scholarship has found that it depends on the type of art and the context
(Grodach, Foster, & Murdoch 2018). Given the fact that Leimert is already a 50-year old artistic
neighborhood, the art museum is not likely to spur speculation, especially given their focus on
works by artists of color, many of whom began in Leimert (i.e., Brockman Brothers).

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Nonetheless, consumers, merchants, and residents exhibited varying levels of skepticism
that should be taken as the baseline for A+P’s work. On an institutional level, it might help if
A+P began participating earlier in the cultural events that the Village hosts in the Park. At a
community meeting in September, resident leaders commiserated that A+P refused to come to
their Vision 2020 charrettes and Sunday Art Walks reportedly because it falls outside of the scope
of their hours of operation, to which it was met with gaffes by the attendees. Thankfully, in 2018,
after three years of being operational, A+P finally opened their facilities for the public at the
famed Martin Luther King Day Parade. If their goal is to integrate themselves into and/or
extend the social fabric of the Village’s existing traditions, it has more work to do.
This is especially important because the Leimert Park stakeholders are starting to take
control of this destiny. The business advocates who run the public meetings are forming an
organizational response. Between October 2017 to April 2018, a group of four to eight business
owners, managers, and nonprofit consultants met to hash out how to best brand and re-orient the
marketing strategy of the Village – with or without Bradford’s involvement. At their latest April
2
nd
meeting, they were signing the articles of incorporation for filing with the State of California.
The timing is ideal, as Romerol Malveaux, a grey-haired, black woman and no-nonsense, long-
time citizen planner, spelled out to the group:
RM: The topic of a Master Plan was introduced at a meeting with the Metro because, given the way that
the Crenshaw communities have developed, there were specific spaces for specific types of development. So
the [Baldwin Hills Crenshaw] Mall was regional in nature. What is currently District Square, where the
old Ralph’s used to be, was kind of a neighborhood-serving function. And then where you go to the big-box
where Barker Brother’s used to be along King, that was a combination of big-box or spillover mall and
neighborhood-serving uses. And the idea was, all of these things are currently up for development, which is
unique, and don’t miss the opportunity to get a synergism between all those sites.
While Leimert Park is the cultural, entertainment, and arts venue-serving zone, there is a need to
reconsider that in the context of a lack of anchor institutions that provide steady foot traffic. In
this same meeting, the group scheduled to meet with the top public officials in economic

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development positions– Jan Perry at the City of LA’s Economic and Workforce Development
Department (EWDD) and the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation – to solicit
feedback about fashioning a retail-oriented strategy that balances the over-abundance of art
venues. There remains much to be seen as these plans translate paper to pavement.
Delimiter #4: Crime, unrest, and informality

Figure 79: Security Guard Standing in Front of Vision Theatre in the shade (Author, 2017)
Trauma on Display: Daily Civil Unrest at Forums
When you walk in the Vision Theatre, a tall, well-trimmed, confident young Black man
in a security coat with black pile/shearling around his neck. At first, I did not understand why
the Theatre – a relatively quiet and sparsely used space - needed someone to be on guard. That

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is, until I kept coming to public meetings. One informant (Appendix D, Interview D2, Excerpt 1)
called these Black meetings a form of “psychosocial trauma” where “people explode...because its
their only time to have therapy” from “dealing with Jim Crow” in their personal lives. I was privy
to one such instance of an explosion of community anger in my very first Vision 2020 meeting on
August 2017. After an hour of thoughtful, strategic conversations about how to execute a retail-
oriented economic development strategy, a young Black man in a white tee-shirt who
represented the Millennium Black Panthers, who was previously sitting anxiously in the back
corner the entire 1.5 hours, stood up and spoke:
“I appreciate the intellectual words and stuff y’all saying. That’s real nice. But the stuff that’s going on in
this Park. We been having too many meetings. This Park is going through gentrification! I’m just trying to
raise the vibration, ya-mean? It seems like we don’t have an attitude that these white folks can come in and
have our shit, ya-mean? Yea we want they money. We want they money. They coming up in this
motherfucka! The police pulling out guns on people! A couple of days ago! Why don’t y’all talk about that,
huh? Because this Park? We bout to lose that shit, nahImsaying? I don’t give a fuck how intellectual, what
big words. I heard they was gonna close down the Park in September. Put a big gate up around it like they
did last time!”
At this point, a large man dressed in a dashiki sitting next to him began chiming in and an older
Black woman with wrapped locs and a peacoat began nodding her head silently, bowing her
transition-glasses-covered eyes while resting her chin on her hands. I later learned that she goes
by Nzika, an African name she chose for herself, and is a trained architect and a member of the
Leimert-based Cherrywood Block Club, the oldest continuously active block club in the City of
Los Angeles. They were definitely raising their vibrations, which a camera-man, in an elaborate
set of vests and at least four chains and fifteen organizational pins on it, began recording. They
came to make a statement, which a white police officer in the front, Officer Evleth, probably
needed to hear.
“There was a shooting on Crenshaw yesterday on. The police shot a brotha on Florence
and Crenshaw. I don’t know who did it. I don’t know if it was the Southwest Division.”
“77
th
[Division] did it,” Officer Evleth, a member of the Southwest Division, clarified.

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“Then I got word, I get alerts on my phone, that they gonna have police from Southwest
Division. patrolling the parking lot! Two Black police officers. But they wasn’t here when those
white and Hispanic police officers pulled a gun out on us,” he continued. What the man was
referring to is a situation that Justin Jackson helped me understand in an interview with him.
“The [Millennium] Black Panther Party that [sic] was actually really testing the police
officers…From what I was told, there was a situation in the park where they diffused the
situation. And I’ve noticed that, as a business owner, there’s a sense of self-policing. We handle
our own. We don’t wanna bring in the police officers.”
The MBPP tried to diffuse a situation in the Park on Saturday, August 5, 2017 where two
white young men came and were arguing with homeless people. The police were around and got
involved. Apparently, they sided with the two white men and the confrontation led to guns being
drawn. The two white young men were incredulous in their ability to manipulate the police.
“We had two white boys who asked the police officers for a ride because they were
scared,” the MBPP activist continued in the Theatre lobby, “But when they got in the police car,
they flicked us off?! We got these white boys in plain-clothes undercover working with the
police…walking through the Park.” The older Black woman, sensing that began to corroborate
him.
“I really agree with you Brother. They got police harassing us. They got Art and Practice
harassing us trying to keep us away from the Museum,” the woman attested. As I later
experienced, they are very anti-septic toward street culture, with Sam Hamilton often acting as
the muscle enforcing it. In defiance of that, she actually set her book sales up on Art Walks to
protest their behavior.

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Figure 80: Nzika showing an older Black man her book sales in front of A+P on Sunday ArtWalk
“I got a lawsuit against them. The brother’s vocabulary ain’t proper to everybody, but
I’m out here every day and I’m seeing what they doing! And I’m in contact with the Black police
and even the Black police are complaining about what they doing! They sending police out here
to harass us and falsely arrest us!” she testified, sensing that Rosemond was not going to back him
up.
Sure enough, Rosemond started trying to quell them with pacifying language like, “I
respect everybody’s opinion, but…” which was sharply drowned out. The activist and the
woman tag-teamed him with a call-and-response form of communication: “You doing too much
talking” and “He ain’t got no power” and “they finna run you out of here” and “Amen, tell the
truth, brotha!” The MBPP turned the session, which was originally about how to secure more

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money for economic development, into a tell-all about how they feed the homeless and stop knife
fights and intervene with the police, who do not respect them.
Needless to say, the conversation around how white supremacy was not boding well with
Rosemond, who seemed inflexible about sticking to an agenda. This sparked another member of
the audience to co-sign that LAPD came in with military tactics in the community where there
were families, rather than asking questions and seeking to root out the white troublemakers who
came to the Park to stir up trouble.
“I told them we need Black officers, not white ones!” Nzika screamed while clapping her
hands, “They come out here with they WHITE SUPREMACIST ATTITUDE! LIKE WE IN
A CAGE OR SOMETHING! Sheesh!” she yelled, before crossing her legs and resting her face
in her palms.
“I’m a drummer here. We are trying to focus on how to focus on something positive
here,” a soft-spoken man added in while extending his arms to the flustered Nzika, “They are
trying to do something positive for the community by policing it. But the real police come in and
assume we trying to do something negative.”
“OUR ANCESTRAL ROOTS! That’s all we LOOKING AT. We want to be Africans,
we don’t want to be Negroes. SHEESH!” she fumed, crossing her legs, and put her hand over
her mouth. Again, Clint did not cede to these deep anxieties.
“This meeting was not called to…” he robotically recited.
“We don’t care about that, Negro! We-sick-of-you-talking-about THE MEETING! WE
CAME HERE TO TALK ABOUT THE COMMUNITY!” she interjected with a dramatic
clap.
This type of incident was the only one I witnessed. However, the display of these traumas
in a public forum seemed typical to all who attended that were longtime contributors to the

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planning process. Public participation usually suffers from a lack of citizen control (Arnstein
1969), but it takes on a racially-tinged urgency in Black forums about Black space.
Defiant Informality
This conflictual meeting has only become richer to contextualize, in retrospect, as I
became integrated into the inner workings of the businesses and the advocates and the street life.
Ultimately, I saw how tone-deaf Rosemond was in that conflict to the clear intersection of crime
and economic development the users of the Park were pleading to address. He failed to
understand how the shutting down of the Park, though perhaps a legitimate temporary act of the
City to try to plant new vegetation, was nonetheless being perceived as another intrusion on the
everyday Black culture that exists there. It felt like the ringing of another bell that low-income
Blacks don’t belong there and upper-middle-class Black and White interests in aesthetics are
more important than social unity.
However, I also saw why Rosemond had little patience, too. By late March 2018, rather
than September 2017, they managed to put up a gate, but by April, the gate was knocked down
by the residents of the Park. Burks and Rosemond wanted to reinforce the gate by placing it in
the ground, but I couldn’t help wondering why no one had explained to the users that the Park
closure was meant to beautify it physically. Unfortunately, closing the Park would also mean
strangling whatever remaining informal street life that sustains the Village during the weekdays.
Activities that I witnessed like men giving out free haircuts to the homeless, dance breaks by the
benches, and more indicated that this is a space for healing the socioeconomic traumas that
afflict the Crenshaw community, which is hard to come by. It is a spiritual space for them.
Yet, I also understood why a security guard needed to be there through Kim Ramsey’s
valiant efforts in stemming, sometimes fatal, crime in the Park through Community Build, Inc. In

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fact, she would not even have had a job at the nonprofit had the 1992 civil unrest not resulted in
the burning down of the original three-story structure, which led to Congresswoman Maxine
Waters securing federal funding to help launch Community Build. According to Ramsey, it used
to be Dobson’s Market, a building owned by the Shriner Family (not to be confused with the
Jewish philanthropists whose names grace the venerable hospital). Ben Caldwell also verified that
it was also home to a club, a Lodge, and more.
The threat of rioting seemed to be one constantly concerning to the business owners,
namely at the behest of protests staged by the MBPP. For example, in late October 2017, they
began setting up a street corner protest by the Hubert’s liquor store. It was a very savvy
production, with three men: the same loc-headed man who was speaking at the August
stakeholders meeting, another person holding the Pan-African flag, and one more who tended a
table with information and snacks. They were protesting the treatment of Black customers by the
Korean store owner; it eerily had all the familiar elements of the riots that sparked the 1991
outrage over the young Black woman Latasha Harlins who was killed by a Korean female
convenience owner. Thankfully, the protests did not escalate; in fact, they were effective. By
November, the old store owner retired and sold the business to another Korean man and his son.
They both showed up to the Stakeholders Meeting asking for guidance on how to be better
community partners. This is a rare outcome, but it happened.

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Crime for Profit

Figure 81: Police cars monitoring the Freedom Festival in Leimert
Yet, the police interactions in Leimert Park have been tolerable, at best. Part of the
tension with law enforcement in general was inflicted by a property owner B.K. Botash, who
owns a holding company called Botech. An erratic, inner-city hustler better known as BK, he
introduced a dangerous nuisance use of the location that is now Hot and Cool Café: storing and
selling ammunition to gun dealers, including the Sherriff and LAPD.
KR: …We do have a long-term property, BK Botash, you know you’ve probably heard about BK. It’s
sort of like…we knew he was going to get himself in trouble. [laughs]
MM: With the community or the law?
KR: No. With the law. Because he’s greedy. Because he sold too many guns to the wrong person. That
person died. Somebody was killed with one of those guns and so he…yea. He would text me this crazy
stuff. I was like, ‘Oh okay BK.’ He calls me up one day and he’s going off, ‘I’ve got all these homeless
people in my backyard! Are you there?’ And I go, ‘Yes I’m listening.’ [laughs] ‘Oh! Well they’re not by
your place!’ And I go, ‘It’s because I talk to people. I explain to them why they can’t be there. And I find
housing for them.’ And he goes, ‘Oh.’ [laughs]. You know? So he decided he didn’t want to do that, but he

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comes back and decides to apologize for acting a fool. It’s now he leases to Barbara Morrison, to Eso
Won, to the bike shop. All of those places are BK’s land where he had and selling guns and ammunition to
the police and the sheriffs! Yea! At one point, I told the police, ‘I don’t want you up in here all the time. I
got kids I’m trying to get together and they see you guys and they get nervous. I don’t want you here!’
[laughs]
MM: So I’ve definitely noticed that you all have a working relationship with the beat, the police whose
beats are in that area.
KR: Right. It’s like…we made it clear: Until you can come correct, we don’t need you here. And you have
to always come correct.
Today, “coming correct” in Leimert includes having Black police officers, three of whom
eventually did start to come to the area and were an integral part of ensuring that cultural events
went as planned, such as the Freedom Festival and the Block Parties. It is poetic (spatial) justice
that the new business owner, Eric Moore, was a former LAPD officer who knows how to direct
law enforcement.
Besides managing threats from insensitive law enforcement, there are the legitimate
criminal activities that occur in a range within the Park and the Village: 1) illegal vending, 2)
prostitution (both women-led and gay) and its violent trappings, 3) petty theft, 4) drug sales, and
5) gang-related shootings. Most of these occurred at night, but not exclusively.
Regarding female prostitution and drug use, Ramsey recounts incidents with two female
pimps and drug dealers, Amber and Tish, both of whom she attempted to intervene with
(Appendix D, Interview D3, Excerpt 1). In her experience, both of these women used Leimert
Park as their trade area and their stomping grounds (sometimes literally) to violently control their
prostitutes. Ramsey also acted as an interlocutor with Amber and medical professionals n to
attempt to coordinate interventions – even with their local family members. Ultimately, Amber
was imprisoned. Tish still roams free, but has eased up on the Village.
Ramsey’s perspective on crime also includes understanding who the users of the services
of pimps, prostitutes, and drug dealers are. According to her sources, the upper-middle-class
Black people who live in the Hills are the clients.

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KR: …People will use the terms “Up the Hill” – so that means View Park, Baldwin Hills, Ladera.
Mainly Windsor, but those closer ones on the other side of, say, La Brea, is what they’re really talking
about. What they don’t want to either recognize is that there’s a lot of activities from those areas that
happens after midnight. We have the drug sales that people who come from the Hill and they come down
and they get their drugs.
MM: In Leimert? From Leimert?
KR: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Black folks, okay? And we’ve had, since the ‘70s, we’ve had gay prostitution in
that area. We’ve had people come down the Hill, do their business, and go back up the Hill. So the
complaints that go on in the Stakeholder’s Meeting? [points up and laughs]
MM: Okay. Wow. Ben started to put me on game about it, but he was talking about what it used to be
in the ‘80s. But I’m hearing another story now.
KR: I work with gang members. They’ll tell you. I know what’s going on.
In prior meetings of the Vision 2020, as we made small talk reminiscing about what
Leimert used to be, Caldwell confirmed this to me. He recounted how prior to the desegregation
of West Hollywood’s club scene, the area would attract white men looking for “their black meat.”
On occasion, while he was in his building, which is next to an alley, he would overhear sexual
activity. This would also attract LAPD, who were homophobic and threatened the lives of these
prostitutes and their clients. One vivid example he recalled of an officer violently interrupting a
homosexual encounter caused him to duck down in his office, for fear that they might also
associate him with the activity rather than the building owner. Besides crimes of passion,
shootings have also occurred in the Park. Community Build is usually the first to piece together
why, due to their in-house community-based expertise.
KR: There are times at night that [gang members] do not come into Leimert. Because there’s protection.
There’s pimps protecting. We just had a guy, a 40-year-old, shot to death a couple weeks ago. Two guys
with 9 millimeters shooting at each other right at, by Ben’s place. We had bullets that went into the walls
of Art and Practice and the Vision Theatre. Forty year-old guy, no gang activity because I get text messages
immediately from my intervention staff who work with the gangs. It wasn’t gangs. This was about
protection and sales.
This interaction happened less than two weeks before I interviewed her. Indeed, Leimert Park
has a dark side that rarely gets talked about in the public spheres of social media or elsewhere.
Thus, it was easy to be surprised by it. My last meeting with the Stakeholders Group involved
neighborhood gossip about a stick-up that occurred at, of all places, Regency West. Apparently, a
faux tow- truck man pretended stop a car and then proceeded to rob the driver. While they

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laughed about it, I got the feeling it was out of discomfort the possibility that Leimert might be a
hot spot that needs more self-policing.
Gang-Related Activity
Fortunately, there is one South Los Angeles group, fortunately, is unafraid to voice this
need for reduced violence and do more than self-police.
“We had two recent gang shootings between what is called the Rollin’ 60s and the
[Rolllin’] 40s,” the leading minister, Tony Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, “So we were with
them yesterday. We just want to drive up today so that they can continue to feel us, you know?
Every time we do these rides, the community loves it! People throwing up the peace signs on our
way here. Mothers and families who’ve lost their children to gang violence, they are saying ‘My
God, people care about us?’” He was encouraging the volunteer families, all decked out in their
orange and black motorcycle gear, to stay involved. He also announced that they would be
coming back in May, complete with a stage and funded by the City Councilman. They then
began to pray, led by a Black Christian minister.

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Figure 82: Black female minister praying over South Central with the Peace Riders
As this inter-faith, pro-social scene unfolded, I began to take pictures. A well-dressed,
dark-haired, white woman in a pantsuit approached me, named Corinne, asking if I were
affiliated with media. She explained that she works for United in Peace, the nonprofit that
connects primarily the Crenshaw, Compton, and South LA families affected by gang violence
through these “Peace Rider” efforts. She boasted that recently, in 2016, they hosted a meeting
between rapper The Game and Snoop Dogg and 300 gang members at the Church of
Scientology, wherein they signed a peace treaty. They’ve apparently had great results: the gang
violence is the lowest it has been in the area since the 1970s.
Given these factors, the illegal vending seems to be the crime that irked the business
owners and their advocates the least. In fact, part of the function of the Art Walks are to steer this

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inevitable car-trunk hustling into a productive format. It seems to be a compromise that the
business owners are willing to accept.
Delimiter #5: Credit and Capital Access
Banking while Black is still a fragile, culturally contentious exercise in the 21
st
century.
Some of the reasons are the same stubborn racialized capitalism of old – redlining, primarily. But
other reasons are only talked about in private, which makes them even more pernicious cultural
factors. There are multiple scales to the problem, which the entrepreneurs have spelled out in no
uncertain terms.
Redlining and Disinvestment as Economic Trauma
In February 2018, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that a new study of
over 31 million Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) records found that in over 60 metro
areas, applicants were being redlined against. HDMA records were analyzed by racial groups –
Black, Latino Asian, Native American – and even when controlling for applicants’ income, loan
amount and neighborhood, some metros were up to five times as likely to deny an applicant of
color a home mortgage loan. This is nothing new, as the Great Recession also revealed the
racialized nature of the sub-prime mortgage crisis (Farber 2013). However, while we are gaining
much more insight on the persistence of home mortgage loan denials to people of color – based
on arguably flawed metrics like “at-risk” neighborhoods and credit checks – it is rarely talked
about for commercial loans.

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However, when asked what the challenges were to his business, access to capital was one
of the most consistent ones mentioned by the Black entrepreneurs. Not everyone used the
language of ‘redlining’ to describe it, but Ben Caldwell was not adamant about using that word.
BC: So there is a good example of that I’ll give you. This isn’t the first that I… I was just counting
today, I think I’ve bought five houses in the City. And so the first house I ended up buying a house on 35th
Street and Western. And the house on 35th and Western, it took it almost a year and a half to two years
to go through escrow. The last part of it run through Beverly Hills Bank and they just sat on it, sat on it,
sat on it until they got sued by the Feds and when they were sued by the Feds, I got a $1.5 [million] loan.
They rushed me through so fast.
MM: Whaaaat?
BC: Yea. Because they were wanting to prove that they had a Black person that they were giving money to.
And so they gave me that loan. That was in 1978. So that was the first time I got. And they called it
redlining. They said this and they got sued for redlining and they were adjusting the rate.
However, this is an example of how it was happening in the mortgage products (though it is not
inconceivable that the same behavior is happening with commercial). Nonetheless, when I
pressed him on how it applied in the commercial context, he responded with his more specific
assessment of how the banks are keeping the businesses from getting loans: deliberately under-
valuing the property.
BC: They just… well for one thing, they dig deep into all your shit. Because…if you get an equity loan,
they don’t dig in your shit. Because what they’re talking about it, ‘how sound is your piece of property in
the commercial sense?’ And that’s usually what you leverage in commercial [loans]. You leverage your
property to lend and help your property get better, help your property get better, help your property get better.
But if they keep it like within [laughs] a category of control, then your money has to come from outside.
What Caldwell means by “keeping it within a category of control” refers to a conversation he had
with Wells Fargo. The bankers met with him in 2018 to ask how they might be a better
community partner and when he pressed them about their lack of loans, they told him the area
was “at-risk.” Yet, they do not take into account the $23 million investments that the City is
making on the Vision Theatre, the property right next door to him, or the coming Metro stop.
Critical race theory teaches us to value how testimony like this lays bare the tools of oppression –
which can often hide behind quantitative algorithms or amorphous, subjective terms like ‘at-risk.’
Caldwell is still unable to get a clear definition from them about what that term means.

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As we can see, Caldwell had his own well-researched, multi-instance case he was making
about it to anyone that would listen. He admitted to me that he was redlined against. Caldwell is
networking with artist-entrepreneurs like Chicago-based Theaster Gates, whose Herculean
efforts to self-finance his real estate empire, to come up with equity market-based financing tools,
rather than debt-based financing that banks are clearly now willing to provide.
Nonetheless, the issue of financing does not just fall on private banks. The federal and
local governments, who have debt products, also do not seem to be a viable source, though some
like Justin Jackson have tried to get a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan.
JJ: I already had a studio prior to and already have my business and my bank statements, you know? Just
being prepared and so I was able to acquire this space and I went to work! I put in over 1400 hours
physically myself bringing this place to look the way it did. I didn’t get any business grant, you know. I
wasn’t privy to any municipal bond or any minority business incentive. I wasn’t given that information. So
I pretty much sold everything I had to get this. And that’s why I got it. I was just relentless.
Thankfully Jackson is young enough to endure and persevere a low investment environment.
However, the older James Burks, though not a private entrepreneur, was not given an
operational budget for keeping the Vision Theatre open and running. Thus, he has had to find
revenue streams without having a support staff. He admitted to me privately that this
disinvestment by the Department of Cultural Affairs caused him immense stress, which has led to
health challenges.
In 2018, I was recruited by a former student to join the Milken Institute’s Los Angeles-
based, multi-year effort called the Partnership on Lending to Underserved Minorities (PLUM).
PLUM consists of several committees of local experts – mostly practitioners - that tackle different
aspects of the challenge of finance. What I found to be most germane to the issue of banking was
how banks are circumventing the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) but without
consequence. I had a chance to interview and listen to Michael Banner, the CEO of the Los
Angeles Local Development Corporation (LA-LDC), a Community Development Finance

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Institution (CDFI), present his findings to the group in Santa Monica campus on behalf of his
Lender Referral Committee.
“We Black and Brown applicants are disproportionately in the bucket that gets the ‘No,’”
he frankly began his remarks. “But I personally interviewed five banks who I know were
specifically interested in a referral program.” He revealed that many of them are open to
referring minority applicant to banks that cater to “ethnic specialty markets” (i.e., Black, Latinx,
Asian customers). These minority depository institutions (i.e., “Black banks”) are often the go-to
response for commercial banks when they feel a loan applicant is too risky for their liking. One
area of “risk” that he and another presenter clarified is that banks often have biases against
certain industries, such as ones that are reliant on “rolling stock” – a flexible inventory that
cannot be pinned down as collateral like a trucking business or a grocery store. Unfortunately,
those are the very service-oriented industries that African-Americans tend to be concentrated in.
The issue of applicant risk profile mismatched with commercial bank preferences is not
simply one that can be passed off like a bad date, especially when the alternative is worse. MDIs
are often under-capitalized themselves and unable to lend to businesses, though California is
home to two of the largest: Broadway Federal and OneUnited Bank. Black banks are
disproportionately utilized by Black low-income people rather than the middle-class. This is a
grave structural problem because of the way in which banks survive. Banks rely on customer
deposit to charge interest fees and to seek outside fund sources like from interbanks or, if they are
very competitive, seeking shareholder equity. Thus, Black banks must also be competitive as
businesses themselves if they want to have capital to lend out to their depositors. Yet, we know
that Black Americans are less likely to have bank accounts and they are less likely to be able to
save money in them (FDIC, 2015), let alone take on investment products.

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Sherri Franklin, a board member of the Pacific Coast Regional Bank, confirms this much
to be the case in Los Angeles.
SF: The Black banks that exist, they too are not doing enough to commercialize and advance themselves.
MM: Yea I tried to do an account with one of them and it’s frustrating.
SF: Yea there’s only two now. OneUnited and Broadway. The both of them are kind of family-run kind
of businesses and I actually tried to buy a bank, which is similar. And they’re just people grandpa’s sitting
on a board and they’re not commercialized…They’re taking deposits but they’re not figuring out how to
leverage them and make money the way every other bank does. They’re not required to.
This is the vicious cycle that is a center of the problem that legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran
writes about in The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (2017). Black banks,
ultimately, are still beholden to the big banks, who act as interbanks by investing in CDFI-
oriented networks like the Community Reinvestment Fund (which Banner is also a part of).
However, Black applicants get lost in the shuffle. The Community Reinvestment Act does
penalize the banks for shuffling over these applicants to the less-equipped MDI/Black bank.
Thus, the loan denials can go unabated and communities like Leimert Park Village remain
under-capitalized.
Nonetheless, Banner touted the ability to marshal networks, collaboration, and deal flow.
“It’s not what you do, it’s what who knows what you do,” he reminded, riffing off a message
about the power of banker-community relationships in improving the rate of loan approvals.
This pro-social network view might hold some truth. Yet, he seems to play down the other side of
that story. Michael Lawson, a Harvard-educated lawyer and newly elected President of the Los
Angeles Urban League, told about his own experiences with loans in his keynote.
“Fast forward 31 years, I retired from the firm [Skadden Arps]. A sweet little retirement too. And I’m
buying some income property, call up a bank I won’t name, get the call back. ‘Sir you made a mistake.
You put your annual income in the monthly income spot.’ ‘No, I didn’t. That’s my monthly income.’ ‘Well
we need confirmation of this. Can you send us bank statements?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘Well that’s not enough. Can you
send us a copy of your retirement letter?’ ‘Can you send us an original copy of your retirement letter?’ No
relationship there. That’s the piece that we cannot miss in this.
Given the structure of the MDI industry, as one more heavily skewed toward Asian-owned
banks, it is uncertain how Black business owners are supposed to generate relationships.

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James Burks emphasized to me that, in doing his work on the African Marketplace, he
realized that there is not a single African-sponsored bank in the United States which might loan
to Black Americans. Years ago, he tried to fix this by narrowing in on a potential source of
additional income for Black banks with the top African money exporters: intermittent banking.
However, he was unable to get them to accept the deal and instead, they would continue working
with Western Union.
This frayed connection between Black Americans and African countries might seem
inconsequential to those outside, but it matters. Korean Americans have several Korea-
sponsored banks like Hanmi Bank. Before it was rebranded as Bank of America, it was originally
called Bank of Italy to help Italian immigrants assimilate into American society. If a white-owned
bank that is supposed to lend to you will likely not for a variety of cultural and economic reasons,
it is highly unrealistic to expect most Black Americans to walk into an ethnic bank explicitly
oriented – from language to marketing – around another ethnic group. When it comes to seeking
debt financing, Black Americans are practically designed to feel as though they do not belong.

Discussion: Defining Black Economies in the Wake of Neoliberal
Capitalism
The common thread that unites these five challenges is that some of the Black creative
class believes in a market-driven society while others see it as a social ill that is to be resisted.
Their adherence to a profit-focused, capitalist approach, thus, leads to challenges in the way they
interact with the market forces (i.e., banks, influential consumers, tourism agencies) and public
agencies (i.e., police) as well as solve problems that threaten the viability of their businesses. Ben

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Caldwell, for instance, put it plainly when he drew upon the examples of how he sees traditional
capitalism as the root cause of the destruction of iconic Black cultural institutions.
BC: I’m totally not interested in owning any of these brands and concepts of people that are normally
thought to be what you’re supposed to do when you’re a capitalist. I started reading Motown and Stax
Records and all that. I really don’t see what capitalism has done well for Black America. I think it’s been
a total dismal lack of success. All we’ve done is…you just see piles of bodies. You just piles of hurt spirits.
You see businesses hurt what they love. Like Motown and Stax Records and Philadelphia Sound and they
just treated people so horribly. And they were young people doing it. And look at where they are? They’re
all f**king dead! And the artwork is wonderful but the thing that they’ve done to themselves decimated
what the businesses and no legacy and all of that just for the hunger of this thing that is a multi-billion
dollar business. It’s creative industries of the Black Americans here that were trying to bounce back from
being oppressed like we have, you know?
While slightly hyperbolic about the deaths of these artists, Caldwell is right-headed to be pushing
for an alternative to neoliberal capitalism that respects people of color and tempers the blatant
individual pursuits of money as a form of freedom (especially when those money-making schemes
rely on oppression). He represents a viewpoint shared by several of the interviewees: creating a
profit-maximizing institution while Black is a perilous exercise.
Yet, a profitable yet humane system of Black business does not exist in the contemporary
climate around Leimert Park’s core creative class. Therefore, others who see themselves as being
more pragmatic about the monetary needs do not see the neighborhood as being capitalized
enough. Further, they see it as a reflection of bad choices. Franklin, for instance, chided the Village
entrepreneurs with fairly scathing critiques of the pro-social nature of the neighborhood.
SF: People we gotta stop these myths! They’re myths! Like people have a myth about Leimert. It’s not
owned a majority by other people. It’s owned by us, who are not commercializing it.
In her view, addressing the racism and intra-racial issues – lack of foot traffic, social traumas,
redlining – are all choices to be distracted from and “fearful” of the ultimate reconstruction project
of making Greater Leimert Park a destination for the consumption of Black creative exchange.
Her insistence on choice underscores the point that political scientist Lester K. Spence writes
about in Knocking the Hustle. Choice has been weaponized as a variable in a neoliberal theory of
human capital that paints freedom as the ability to pursue unfettered consumption.

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SF: You have the ability to choose. You have your energy: your choice. You have your beliefs. And really
that will get you through everything. And notwithstanding the politics. And you look at things and some
things are important to empower yourself and to stand your ground. And I think we should do that every
day: stand your ground. I’m one – the way I stand my ground in my own way is that I believe and always
tell people, ‘There’s nothing wrong with us. We have the capacities to do anything anybody else can do. I
believe that, all the way up to down, there’s nothing we can’t do.’
While some Black leaders have confronted neoliberalism by resisting it and forging their
own approaches to business (successfully or not), others like her accept it with critical acclaim by
focusing on the power of choice. Furthermore she, like former Mayor Michael Nutter and former
President Barack Obama who have criticized Black people for bad behavior in very public
venues, has the unique ability to critique Black people who deviate from capitalism for not
making better choices. Because of her identity as a Black woman who has benefitted from white
institutions despite her working-class roots in South Central, Franklin can draw on Black cultural
history to propagate an alternative, behavioral explanation for the lack of investment.
SF: It’s a matter of how we structure ourselves and what we focus on and what we put our energy. If we
don’t do it, then we’re not going to participate. Because I can guarantee you, anybody that wants to create
a bank right now, on Saturday morning, they are sitting around creating that bank. What are we
doing?...We don’t do that! That’s all it takes!... [T]here’s a cryptocurrency meeting every single day in this
town that, if you wanted to be in that business, you can go there. Here, there, they’re talking, they’re
meeting, they’re blogging, they’re online, they’re reading evaluations, they’re reading reports. That’s what it
takes! We gotta do the same thing. If you’re launching your business, I mean I’m sure if you talk to
Facebook people, Mark – he didn’t have no free time when he was launching his idea! That’s what it
takes. And we’re not doing it then no, that’s why capitalism exists. Because some of us are willing to do it
and some people aren’t. And those who aren’t, oh well! But it works.. And Africa and all the
places we want to pretend that… Africans were the first capitalist as far as
I’m concerned. We were sold to white people by people who were making
some money. That’s how it started.
While Mark Zuckerberg is hardly the kind of person that most Black people can identify with,
her reconfiguration of Africans as the first capitalists is an adept assertion because further imbues
neoliberal capitalism with a sense of heritage. With the interpretative work of Black creative
people like Franklin, neoliberal capitalism is a reconfigured as a socio-spiritual and economic
hustle that can become natural to Black people - if they will it and reclaim it. No one else could
come in and reasonably chide Black entrepreneurs like one of their own.

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There is some merit in this tension: those who can balance out the environment and keep
the businesses true to their profit-making form with those who participate in social service work.
Yet, it is not clear that they have or will achieve that balance of race consciousness, financial
literacy, and cultural vitality that they need. However, rather than interpret this imbalance as an
absence of profitable businesses, I believe that the profit-maximizing Black firms exist in Los
Angeles, but are bifurcated into two dominant modes, which I explain next.
Towards a Spectrum of Black Economies: Closing the Gap Between Everyday
versus Spectacular
Black economic development is an arena with potential to bring the CRT conversation
back down to earth, to the material realities. The urban political economy that shapes how Black
culture is expressed as an industry at multiple scales. The underlying the rich social and spatial
milieu that shapes Black culture is complete with a set of folk traditions outside the market.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Manning Marable described the Black political economy
according to class-based groups in his 1987 classic How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. In
his chapter on the history of Black capitalism, he challenges the Reaganite “pro-Corporate” and
“neo-Horatio Alger” ideologies that collapsed the complexity of Black economics into anecdotes
of bootstrapping Black entrepreneurs. Instead, Marable outlined three strata in the Black
economy: 1) the proletarian periphery, 2) the petite bourgeoisie, and 3) corporate core.
First, the proletarian periphery, the class to which the majority of Black-owned U.S. firms
belong. By Marable’s count in the 1982 U.S. Survey of Business Owners, 82.7 percent of the
total number of Black-owned U.S. firms belonged to this class. Marable labeled them “worker-
entrepreneurs” who are trying to leave this class because often they are sole proprietorships run
by Black employees of another firm. While the number of Black-owned firms has grown since

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then, the proportion that are on the periphery has grown. The latest SBO shows the percentage
of Black firms without employees at 96% compared to 82.7% in the1980s.
Second, Black petty bourgeoisie are small-scale capitalists such as shop-keepers and
workers, who manage the production, distribution, and/or exchange of commodities and/or
services owned by their bourgeois employers. Size-wise, this class is an intermediate level that
constituted about 16.8% of Black firms in the 1980s. As featured in Table 1, petty entrepreneurs
usually have paid personnel between 1-19 people. Unlike the sole proprietors, the employers
usually work full-time in the enterprise. Black petit bourgeoisie are the largest group of people of
color in real estate, finance, manufacturing, which Marable calls “traditionally all-white sectors.”
Thus, they are likely receiving loans and savings to expand, including SBA loans. Today, only
4.2% of Black businesses have paid employees, of which 36% are less than 20 employees.
Last, Marable names the Black corporate core as the biggest firms but the smallest class of
Black firms. They are likely to have been featured in Black Enterprise magazine’s Top 100, with
examples including Motown Industries, Johnson Publishers, Fedco Foods, Russell Construction
of Atlanta, Johnson Cosmetics, and several banks. These are notably in the cultural industries,
but not exclusively. Cynically, Marable argues that “white corporations allow these Black
companies to exist for symbolic value alone” (Marable 1983: 158), as larger white corporations
tend to “rewards” the individuals over these corporations with board positions. Today, while the
percentage of firms with employees is lower, 64% the 109,000 Black-owned businesses that are
employers that there have more than 20 employees. This is significantly more firms than what
Marable pointed out in the 1980s, which makes the need for a nuanced exploration of a stratified
Black economy even more urgent.

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The Need for Building a New Spatial Typology
While Marable’s class-driven characterization of Black entrepreneurship is helpful for
understanding the outcomes, it falls short in explaining the process by which businesses connect
to markets. Instead, I propose using a spatial-temporal, polarized spectrum to explore how the
Black economy manifests itself. This is how the study of Black urbanism will advance our
understanding of the dynamics of Black culture and commerce.
Figure 83: A Proposed Spatial Typology for Mapping Black Commerce by Strata, Traits, and Business Types
Strata (according to
Marable)
Features Spatial Manifestation Business Types
Black proletarian
periphery
• sole proprietorships,
• started by blue-
collar individual
• undercapitalized
• no paid employees,
• concentrated in two
sectors: human
services and retail
trade
• over 75% become
bankrupt in < 3
years
• average annual
receipts $3k to $15k
Everyday Street vendors, car
trunk salesmen (i.e.,
musicians),
consultants
Black petty
bourgeoisie
• Paid personnel
between 1-19
people
• average gross
receipts = $30k-
$300k
• employers are
working full-time in
the enterprise,
• all receiving loans
and savings to
expand,
• large minority are
in real estate,
finance,
Everyday Food trucks,
restaurants, insurance
agents, law firms, real
estate brokers

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manufacturing,
“traditionally all-
white sectors”
• likely to have
received an SBA
loan
Black corporate core
• workforce of 20 or
more employees
• likely to have
board
representation on
other white-owned
companies
Spectacular Hair corporations,
touring companies,
film production
studios

First, there is the Everyday Black Economy (EBE). The EBE are smaller, brick-and-mortar
establishments, usually at the behest of small-medium enterprises. This end of the spectrum also
includes the more informal business owners such as street vendors, car trunk salesmen (i.e.,
musicians), and even the “Bean pie men” often associated with religious groups like the Nation of
Islam. Churches often host these kinds of activities as well, and traditionally nurtured
neighborhood worker-entrepreneurs. Street trucks are probably the most high-profile,
contemporary example of these, as cities in the States have grown to legalize this form of cultural
economy. Lastly, Black-owned corporations that sell their branded products through bigger retail
outlets are the closest to the other end of the spectrum, but still associated with everyday life.
These include newer brands with nascent integration into mainstream retail (i.e., Shea Moisture)
and also longer-standing brands (i.e., Dudley’s).
Second, there is what I call the Spectacular Black Economy (SBE). The SBE manifests
itself through events-driven, communicative actors: promoters, concert and show organizers,
advertisers, networkers, deal-makers and brokers, performers, filmmakers, and the like. As they
are events-driven, they tend to exhibit a “pop-up Blackness” that is not permanently place-based,
but subsumes a great deal of the urban Black imagination. The SBE is celebrity-centric, large-

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scale, well-advertised, and mobile. Therefore, SBE activities tend not to occur in Black
communities due to the spatial needs of accommodating regional audiences. Nonetheless, they
create temporary hubs of Black people and are no less authentic than the EBE activities. In Los
Angeles, these were places like The Study in Hollywood, a club which included a Black-run event
called The Juke Joint. They were often promoted by advertisers like Black Book LA. The crowds
tend to be younger, well-educated, professional, and suburban-residing.
The SBE and EBE are linked in their commitment to uniting Black peoples of different
socioeconomic classes, genders, professions, skill sets, nationalities, and more. They do this
particularly with a clear-eyed view of how exclusionary the cultural industries can be.
Undergirding these formats of economic exchange, however, is a community with norms, values,
and traditions that are very distinct. Given the diversity of formats, the relatively under-studied
nature, the localized connections, the overwhelming mundanity, and the problematized
discourses about the EBE, I chose to focus this dissertation on theorizing about it. With Los
Angeles, in particular, the EBE is also a foundation for cultural actors who eventually become
stars and are supported the SBE (i.e., jazz musician Kamasi Washington, who began his training
in Leimert Park at World Stage, and Anderson .Paak, who would perform regularly at Bananas
open mic concert/party in Leimert).
Conclusion
In this chapter, I outlined the limits that the Black creative class experiences using the
case of the Leimert Park Village. First, within the Black community, there is a social and spatial
stratification that creates tension over who truly belongs in the Village – both as businesses and
residents. Second, the Black creative class in Leimert is averse to standardized approaches to

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telling their stories and commercializing their true value propositions for the urban cultural
economy; thus, there is little adherence to business practices that might spur growth. Third,
Leimert is in the middle of a food and retail desert, which they attempt to counteract with social
services (i.e., grocery giveaways) and temporary outdoor activities. However, it is not the most
efficient use of space. Fourth, the area faces a variety of kinds of illicit activity and tensions with
law enforcement unrelated to these activities. Thus, the business environment is negatively
affected for those attempting to curry consumer favor. Last, the Black creative class in Leimert is
notoriously under-capitalized, even for those who are running their businesses in standard ways;
this impairs their ability to pay even low rents and/or forces them to self-finance with their own
savings or an equity investor.
I conclude by pointing toward the conflicting levels of acceptance of neoliberal capitalism
and offer a remixed version of a Black Marxist economic typology. I argue that, by re-
characterizing Black businesses as part of a unified spectrum, we might advocate for their uplift
without falling into the trap of labels such as “hobbyists” or “sell-outs”, which often are
symptoms of a deeper lack of understanding. We might also begin to redefine an economy that
achieves dignity, vitality, and sustainability for people of color in the city.

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Part III: Futures.

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Chapter 6: Black Futurism, Innovation and the Black
Spatial Imagination
Reclaiming the Spirit of Leimert Park and Crenshaw Corridor through
World-building and Public Art Planning
Summary
In this chapter, I answer the sub-question of the prior questions around claiming space:
How do the Black creative class engage with planning and urban design through creative
placemaking? And what role(s) can Afro-futurism play in engaging them in place-making? We
need to ask this question because, while the creative class has often been defined as the
beneficiaries of urban development and revitalization efforts (i.e., cool cities, innovation districts)
as well as harbingers of post-industrial beautification (i.e., neo-bohemias, cultural quarters), few
studies have positioned them as planners and designers of entire communities. None have
deliberately included and studied how race informs the creative class’ interactions with designing
and fashioning their neighborhoods, let alone how a Black community of artists might do so.
This is important to address how planning and development reproduces racialized exclusion
through cultural blindness in their designs. Moreover, the role that universities could play in
providing that capacity to communities is also lost in that shuffle to attract talent and creativity to
urban areas.
Black Los Angeles is providing us with two potent examples of how the Black creative
class ushers in urban innovation when they are empowered. First, they do it with a film design
method called community world-building. With the help of the University of Southern California
faculty and students, Leimert Park has adapted film-based designed methods (world-building) for
a community scale to engage the Black creative class in re-imagining and re-designing their

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neighborhood in the year 2050. In this future, the Village is dubbed “Sankofa City” and draws
on four Black placemaking modes to generate alternative modes of living: 1) gardening and
education, 2) freedom and mobility, 3) musical play, and 4) visuality.
Second, the Black creative class in Los Angeles plans for and generates public art that
reflect their stories. In Los Angeles, they are building a 1.1-mile outdoor museum dedicated to
the contributions of Black Los Angeles culturally to the world along the coming Metro. This
“Destination Crenshaw” project aims to accomplish seven objectives of their Black public art.
1. Telling a Black LA Story
2. Showcase South LA Arts
3. A Green and Sustainable Crenshaw
4. Leverage Existing Assets
5. Transform Intersections
6. Connect East and West
7. Engage Metro Infrastructure
Together, these principles illustrate how a Black spatial imaginary can productively shape the
future of a place while carrying forward heritage in a planning process.

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Figure 84: Futuristic artistic rendering of public autonomous vehicles shuttling people around Leimert Park Village in 2050 (Courtesy of
Karl Baumann, 2016)
Overview
If I ruled the world (imagine that)
I'd free all my sons, I love 'em love 'em, baby
Black diamonds and pearls
(Could it be, if you could be mine, we'd both shine?)
If I ruled the world
(Still living for today, in these last days and times)
Lauryn Hill and Nas, If I Ruled The World
(Imagine That), It Was Written (1996)

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For time immemorial, social scientists and policy advocates have emphasized Black
Americans’ deficits due to structural disadvantages in Black communities without much regard
for the agency that Black Americans have to build on their cultural assets. Planning theory treats
matters of race and ethnicity from this perspective as if Black lives are all but doomed to
inferiority. On the other extreme, urban scholarship fetishizes the growing Blackness and
Brownness of America as a growing cosmopolitan set of “mongrel cities” or a “diversity
explosion” (Sandercock 2003; Frey 2014). Our presence in cities are neither problems to be fixed
nor exotic decorations. These lamentations and lackluster frames leave some of us in the
predicament like Robin D. Kelley and Steven Duncombe who question: Where are the Black
dreams and fantasies motivating the quality of life we seek?
In planning, we need more sincere, imaginative approaches that include more diverse
cultural approaches to shaping the built environment than what I have found is dominant
practice. As such, the planning field is on notice that, as Black Americans, our race is not just a
burden on our life chances. Innovatively, race also acts as a resource to draw upon a set of worlds
nuanced by the diverse ethnic, class, gender (identity and representation), educational, regional,
sexual, and spiritual identities we also harbor. It is high time that we systematically understand
how these identities create asset-based spatial possibilities.
Our generation of critical race consciousness in planning and design cannot settle for
critique without construction. We urgently need to characterize what Manning Marable called
the “racial imagination” (1995), what George Lipsitz calls the “black spatial imaginary” (2011)
and what Robin D. Kelley (2002) calls the “Black radical imagination” to make and keep cities
where Black Americans truly belong. One intervention that I am seeing could draw out these
nuances in narratives that we Black Americans accept about our places while also contributing to
an externally-facing vision for planning entities is called “world-building.” In this article, I

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introduce the high-level features of the practice and my experience with the process in a series of
workshops I have been able to participate in as a student at the University of Southern California
(USC) and an observing participant in Leimert Park Village (LPV).
I argue that, despite the dis-belonging and the disconcerting efforts to create belonging
outlined in the previous chapter, LPV is demonstrating how all three forms of Black urbanism –
civic, storied, and spatial – can be achieved through community-driven, race-conscious public
art. Overall, the arc of belonging bends toward spatial justice.
Blindness to Black Tastes in the Creative Economy
World-building is an emerging concept and practice most attributed to film production
designer and storyteller Alex McDowell, the founder of the USC-based nonprofit called the
World-building Institute (WBI). It can also be understood as a method of creative economic
development, particularly within the film industry. As an organized research unit within the USC
School of Cinematic Arts dedicated to “the future of narrative media,” WBI partners with
organizations like the Buckminster Fuller Institute to prototype speculative ideas that could
innovate on the theory of a storytelling system. Yet, it is also a practitioner-driven space. For
example, world-building was the approach taken to build out a story universe for science-fiction
feature films like the Tom Cruise-starring Minority Report (2002). While I share their enthusiasm
about storytelling as a system of innovation, I argue that there are plenty of humans, especially
Black Americans, whose imaginations could be realized with the existing technology. New
technologies are important for sculpting certain high-tech driven imaginations into existence, but
regardless of the gadgetry, what we consistently lack is the moral machinery to engage Black
Americans in representing themselves: in media and in place. This exclusion can be carried into

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the future, if we are not careful. Though I do not possess longitudinal empirical evidence of it yet,
world-building at a community scale is poised to change that.
As the entertainment capital of the world, it should surprise few that Los Angeles has
been prototyping a cinema-inspired community planning tool that merges imagination and
placemaking. In January 2015, I was invited to participate in one of three World-building
workshops for the future Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) “Imagination Corridor.” The
attendant developers, civic elites, academics, and artists titillated each other with high-brow,
high-tech ways to move, live, and make on Figueroa Street. Few participants actually lived in
DTLA, but all cared about positioning it as LA’s “spine.” In my session, there were no explicit
overtures to any particular ethnic culture or even what kinds of people would want the things
imagined for the DTLA Imagination Corridor. But USC staff made it clear that this was the first
time anyone had used world-building for a real place. Therefore, as a first-year Ph.D. student, I
suspended criticality and rode the wave of rudderless brainstorming.
In reflection, it did not dawn on me that we were missing an explicit consideration of how
local ethnoracial groups might imagine this future corridor. Because world-building has no
critical race consciousness built into it as an industry practice, it creates a blind spot when
translated onto real places. I remember feeling like I could not insert my own Black experience
into my teams’ dreams. I had no idea what their politics or preferences were. Perhaps it was
because I was not invited to the Living Workshop where the theme of inclusivity (“the code”)
emerged. But each group was different each day, which made for a very transient experience
among strangers without a shared set of politics.
This brings me to my joint critique of design, cinema, and planning: each play a role in
the creative economy and each has systematically ignored how taste is contoured by race and
ethnicity. In a consumer society highly driven by neoliberal privatization, taste matters

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everywhere. Designers and filmmakers, compared to planners, tend to be very aware of their
own tastes. The white, colonial spatial imaginary is a product of a certain taste; more specifically
the “habitus” of those who enforce Eurocentric, market-based, bourgeoisie sensibilities under the
universalist guise of “good design,” “good films” or “good plans.” Good for whom and where?
Habitus is a sociological term that is rarely taken in a spatial sense; but it is both. In her essay in
the book Habitus of the Hood, Nicole Mann reminds that Pierre “Bourdieu has described habitus as
a ‘sense of one’s place… a sense of other’s place’ in the world of one’s surrounding environment”
(2012: 276). Habitus would appear to be co-intimated with imagination toward space, no?
Despite centuries of enforcing a white spatial imaginary onto American cities, considering
Black tastes might still seem myopically focused on a minority group for planning professionals.
They may lack the capacity or willpower to consider a world run by a Black spatial imagination.
They might feel it is overly burdensome to their real estate empresarios and architectural
cognoscenti who shape the built environment. Readers like you may even wonder: don’t all
imaginations matter in planning? Why single out Black imaginaries?
Three facts should dispel this bias. First, there is not enough space here to recount the
tales of neighborhood horrors inflicted by the exclusionary history of American planning as a
form of state-sponsored, institutionalized violence and as an elitist profession inaccessible to Black
Americans. I am continually grateful for scholars like Robert Bullard, June Manning Thomas,
Jason Corburn, and Laura Pulido for documenting these racialized spatial injustices. Planners
must help if we care about full participation in (planning) our society. Second, Black Americans
intimately know the failures of social systems as they exist and have found ways to design against
it to survive. This is why I yearn for more focus on architectural design and placemaking scholars
like Craig Wilkins, Lawrence Sass, James Rojas, Sara Zewde, Marcus Anthony Hunter, Zandria
Robinson, and Roberto Bedoya who have cultivated some understanding of the everyday sites of

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belonging that people of color create, despite these incursions. Third, planners have historically
made themselves and their processes invisible and, thus, inaccessible to Black Americans.
Through its captivity by austerity politics and market-based colonialist logics, planning at
multiple scales has rendered cities ambivalent if not hostile to the cultural needs of Black people.
While Black Americans increasingly embrace their cultural power, we often do not understand
the specifics of how planning and design undergird everyday life. Much of this disengagement
and ignorance is by design.
Art is one clear way to construct new realities, but without careful planning it can also
reinforce existing politics of desire. Planning has not been careful. For all the discussion of diversity,
planners are not taught or asked to engage with culture from a variety of perspectives critically.
Unlike related fields of design, architecture and management, the planning curricula in the
schools I have attended virtually ignore divergent theories of taste, which shape what we desire
from spaces politically and culturally. This is part of a broader blindness that manifests in
‘creative’ interventions, which tend to preserve colonialist urban hierarchies, as even Richard
Florida concedes now to be our “new urban crisis” (2017). Creative-oriented cultural planning
has largely cooked up a bohemian, trend-riffing, hipster flavor of the status quo: exclusionary
cities. Therefore, building on what Leonie Sandercock once theorized, planning still lacks an
inclusive imagination. Cultural planning for Black Americans without the Black imagination is just
as inhumane as planning for their erasure.
Because there is a lack of concerted intellectual focus on Black placemaking and the Black
imagination, I want to believe there is a sleeping giant of interest in community-led planning
within Black America. If there is a deep wellspring of potential Black placemakers who are
awaiting the sincere solicitation of diverse urban dreams, I believe it is when the political

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empresarios align with the cultural cognoscenti in the interest of a compelling Black
neighborhood identity. Leimert Park Village (LPV) could be one of those places to lead the way.
A Community World-Building Intervention using Afro-futurism:
Leimert Park Village’s Sankofa City

Figure 85: Collage of the Sankofa City actors, scenes, and products
Afro-futurism is often defined as the practice of imagining the future from a Black cultural
perspective. I also argue that, based on this case and the increasing number of institutions
forming around it (i.e Black Panther, Center for Afrofuturist Studies in Iowa, the Community
Futures Lab in Philadelphia), Afrofuturism is becoming the Black creative class’ contemporary
intervention in the creative economy. According to legendary filmmaker Ben Caldwell, one of

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the long-standing business owners in LPV, it simply represents a way that Black people can “stay
ahead of the curve.” Staying ahead of the curve is what motivated the four-year partnership
between Caldwell’s business KAOS Network and a USC Professor Francois Bar through the
Leimert Telephone Company, a public musical instrument project which earned them several
grants to develop. Therefore, in Fall 2016, the community was receptive to the USC PhD
student Karl Baumann who helped evolve the partnership by proposing a community-based
USC class and workshop in LPV called Community World-building: Designing City Futures in South LA.
To my knowledge, LPV is the first neighborhood in the country to spur an Afro-futuristic
cultural turn within planning (and possibly urban cinema) through a world-building process,
which has actually resulted in a tangible vision tied to strategic priorities. Over the course of a 10-
week semester, we generated these with weekly prompts helping us to imagine life in 2050 in
LPV. The group members had already been playing with a new place identity: a futuristic place
called Sankofa City, which at once blends urbanism with the Africanist symbology of the sankofa
bird that is prominent in West African spirituality. As I have done more research on LPV, I have
learned how central preserving the “African spirit” of the place is to its private residents and its
public residents (i.e., homeless people) in the Park itself. Thus, the Afro-futurist world-building in
Sankofa City represents more than mere speculative thought. It is an ongoing, credible effort to
combine and carry alternative modes of Black placemaking into the future.
The four dominant generative modes were:
1. Black placemaking through gardening and education (“Garden Leimert”): a
dense, interactive cornucopia of cooperatively-owned gardens and biodomes that could
act as S.T.E.A.M-based, service-oriented learning climates.
2. Black placemaking through freedom and mobility (“Free Leimert”):
community policing and complementary autonomous vehicles, locally designed and
manufactured.
3. Black placemaking through musical play (“Play Leimert”): public instruments
that would play historically Black music from local legends as wayfinding and allow new
music to be created by visitors.

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4. Black placemaking through visuality (“Virtual Leimert”): augmented/virtual
reality projections of LPV legends (i.e., Ray Charles, Mark Bradford, Barbara Morrison)
and wearable technology informing users about food.

Figure 86: Filmmaker Darol Kae presenting the Garden Leimert drawing from Author
How did we call into focus such sharp, spatial visions? In short, the approach mimicked a
design charrette in that each team was given materials and asked to work on a particular aspect
of LPV in 2050. However, the innovation came with the guidance by Karl Baumann, the PhD
candidate leading the workshop. Instead of only being told to come up with a wish list of
improvements in that dimension, like traditional public participation sessions do, we were told to
imagine ourselves as a person in that place. The protagonist in our narrative was to be a young
person of color, to be specific. We were prompted to engage in role-play and imagine what a
typical day would be like navigating that new world. What might it sound like? What might it smell like?
What might it taste like? Who else would be there? This not only intensified the quality of our
interventions, but it increased the sense of attachment to the designs and drawings collectively.
Each team’s characters began to talk across the themes and imagine how their protagonists might

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find it exciting or difficult to exist in that world. We were literally building a new set of narrative-
driven worlds through placemaking.

Figure 87: Group Building Dioramas for Sankofa City in Kaos Network
In successive sessions, we built on these story-driven sketches and translated them across
more elaborate mediums: dioramas using toys and props, then digital 3-D models, and finally a
science-fiction film about Sankofa City from the eyes of a Black international visitor. In January
2017, the film was part of our pitch to the community forum Vision 2020 Stakeholder Group,
who had rightful skepticism about what our innovations meant for whom. The homeless
community and poor youth, in particular, were populations that generated the most fruitful
conversations about equity, design, and urban technology. Thankfully, we had considered this
thoroughly because the community members were co-producers. We knew that we needed to
design for public facilities in the park to include the needs of homeless people. We were excited
that the autonomous vehicles concept that emerged as a new way to navigate LPV could also

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serve as a new local, manufacturing economy. One of the teammates, a transportation engineer
and designer who works at Urban Systems Laboratories, could verify the feasibility of locally
designing cars using cost-effective 3-D printing robots that would create the entire car based on
the imaginations of the computer drawings. These job-generating vehicles were also included in
the film. Lastly, this film was jointly produced by USC students and KAOS Network, who both
shared the rights to use it for their multiplicity of overlapping yet unique needs.
Imagining Destination Crenshaw: ‘Unapologetic’ Civic,
Storied, and Spatial Blackness on Public Display
Operating as a subtext for the Sankofa City 2050 work is the fact that the Greater
Leimert area must first best the year 2020, the year after the Crenshaw-LAX Line opens in 2019.
As recounted in Chapter 7, the original plans of the MTA to bypass the Leimert Park was taken
as an insult to the needs of the Black community. This was in addition to the fact that the line
would be one of only at-grade, pedestrian-level light rails in the County, which exposes the
residents to many more economic, spatial, and cultural disruptions. It is partly what has
organized the efforts of the Stakeholder Group into one oriented around the idea of “Vision
2020.” At the Leimert Park Village Freedom Festival on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2018, the
Regency West hosted an event billed as an opportunity to update the community on a range of
topics and projects. Sherri Franklin presented the developmental projects, such as the $30 million
Cultural Community Center which the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA)
designed as a replacement to the West Parking lot across the street from the building where we
sat. After sharing this, James Burks lobbied a question her way. “Tell them about the Destination
Crenshaw project!” which elicited some knowing laughs, as the crowd understood he

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“Well we understand this to be the center of the [Black Los Angeles] universe,” she
smilingly accepted his challenge, “But one of the things we have to do is better at marketing and
branding and the more people we bring, that’s what’s going to create value here. We need the
traffic. Anything else I should add about it?” Finally, sensing her lack of language to pitch the
project, James Burks chimed in and supplemented her description of the 1.1-mile outdoor
museum as more than a branding effort.
“Marqueece Harris-Dawson designed this project to activate Crenshaw Boulevard
between 47
th
and 62
nd
Street to basically unapologetically talk about the influence of African-
Americans across the world,” he clarified with confidence, “It really talks about what we’ve given
to the world culturally.” I was intrigued about what the museum oriented around Black culture,
especially one billed as an effort to steer cultural tourism into the Village and the Corridor, would
look like and feel like. Fortunately, three weeks later, the office of Councilman Harris-Dawson
would host a town hall where, for the first time, they would introduce the aesthetic intent, human
resources, and initial achievements of the Destination Crenshaw effort.
The Community Town Hall was held on March 6, 2018 at the Museum of African
American Art, a 40-year old institution located on the third floor of the Macy’s at the Baldwin
Hills Crenshaw Mall. Despite the relatively confusing location and the evening timing, the gallery
room was relatively full, with nearly 150 people who came to here from the Councilman.
However, they also came to hear from Zena Howard, billed on the flier as “one of the lead
architects and designers of the National Museum of African American History and Culture,”
(NMAAHC) widely regarded as the crown jewel telling of the triumphs and trials of the Black
journey in the Americas. Harris-Dawson acted as the MC for the event, explaining the purpose
of the effort. He reminded people of the challenge he was faced with when he was elected – the
only at-grade level train in the County cutting through his district – which he organized people to

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turn an insult into an opportunity. “If you’re going to run a train through our community, we’re
going to make sure nobody comes through here without knowing our story,” he declared to the
audience, which was greeted with clapping ‘Amens’ and hooting. By memorializing the
Crenshaw corridor as not just the new Central Avenue for Black Los Angeles and making
reference to the Harlem Renaissance, it was clear that Harris-Dawson sees this as a national
political project: making Crenshaw the new Harlem for the world.
Besides providing the big vision, Harris-Dawson also dropped hints of who else was
involved with the project, many of whom are celebrated leaders such as the urban gardener Ron
Finley, who received a generous applause. He also shouted out Sherri Franklin and Karen Mack
as tireless advocates before teeing up the presentations by the members of the Los Angeles
chapter of the global architectural firm Perkins+Will. First, it was Drake Dillard, a Black man
who would serve as Project Manager, who also doubled as the President of the NOMA. They
had designed the Cultural Community Center pro-bono for Leimert Park. Second, it was
Gabrielle Bullock, a Black female architect, who would serve as the Managing Director, who
explained the philosophy around diversity at P+W. Lastly, Zena Howard, also a Black female
architect who would serve as the project’s Principal Architect. Howard’s presentation served as
the most substantive about their methodology for designing the coming outdoor museum.

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Figure 88: Photo Roster of the Black Architects/Designers of Destination Crenshaw (Courtesy of Destination Crenshaw)
Howard is an accomplished designer and architect who takes a culturally responsive
approach to public art projects, as evidenced by the three major projects she was the lead
designer for: the NHMAAC in Washington, D.C., the Motown Museum in Detroit, and a North
Carolina-based museum. while many knew of how she weaved in West African textiles and
Southern front porch influences into the NMAAHC, it was her presentation on the Motown
Museum which elicited the most emotional response. She explained how she goes through a
process of layering different lenses based on the stories of those who the space is meant to
memorialize.
“Is it the lens of the artist? Is it the lens of Barry Gordy? Is it the lens of the producers?
What we decided was a couple of things. There was a song that was revolutionary for its time by
an artist named Marvin Gaye and that song was ‘What’s Going On?’” which elicited audible
coos from the crowd, an older set who were likely in their youth during the time of that 1971 hit.
“And so the lens of telling a very extensive story through the eyes of Marvin Gaye and going
through a process of sound mapping that pattern against all of the colors of the #1 hits that

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Motown had.” Howard could barely finish explaining her methodology before the crowd began
clapping at the visual she produced.

Figure 89: Perkins+Will rendering of the Motown Museum façade designed by Zena Howard and inspired by Marvin Gaye
The Museum’s façade – the vertical striped array of colors that graced the back of the original
Hitsville, U.S.A. house of Barry Gordy – was the ultimate result of their process. It is what visual
artists might call “a terrain of defamiliarization” which takes something we know and “make us
look at it in a new way” (hooks 1995, p. 4). “This is why we mine and probe and try to get to the
heart of the story,” Howard explained. Unfortunately, they did not have work to share about
how they would tell the story of Crenshaw and Black Los Angeles. Toward the end, Harris-
Dawson announced that his office had secured the funds to redo the lighting all along the
Corridor, as they would begin phasing in the project once the Metro’s Crenshaw-LAX Line
construction sunsetted. He invited the community to take a look at the visual inspirations on the
wall, which they could provide feedback on with stickers indicating approval (green) or
disapproval (red).
Upon leaving the presentation, Ms. Franklin and I discussed impressions of the event. She
was underwhelmed by their lack of detail about what would actually be happening in the
corridor, feeling as though the project had only been a private exercise in visioning rather than a

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plan of implementation, which she is well-versed in providing. Apparently, her firm Urban
Design Center has a $7 million-dollar infrastructure grant from the State of California to fund
the work – whenever the Councilman’s office decides they want to reach out.
Thankfully, privately, Ben Caldwell shared with me their plans vis-à-vis a Destination
Crenshaw manual that only he and a few other team members are in physical possession.

Figure 90: Ben Caldwell reading to author a copy of the Destination Crenshaw vision as of January 2018 in Kaos Network
There are seven design themes – “Outcomes” in the manual – that they are weaving into their
plans for the corridor. I transcribed them below.
1. A Black LA Story: Destination Crenshaw will bring to Crenshaw Blvd the Black LA
story, supporting the arts in expressing the complexity of African Americna culture in
South LA. The design will embody the DNA of the Black LA community in support of
continued cultural consciousness, helping future generations understand their heritage
and take command of their future.

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2. Showcase South LA Arts: South Los Angeles arts are complex and diverse,
representating generations of Black LA cutlrue in exploring an authentic and original
voice. The design will support this diversity of artistic expression thorugh a variety of
platforms so the full ragne of the arts can continue to flourish in response to issues
relevant to the African American experience. The design will also make room for future
art forms to emerge and flourish alongside established forms of art.
3. A Green and Sustainable Crenshaw: From Leimert Park to the 60
th
Street Metro
Tunnel, the design will transform Crenshaw into a green, sustainable corridor in support
of a healthy, active lifestyle and resilient economy for self-determined security of land
tenure. Balance pedestrian and bicycle interests with vehicular interests for a safe, urban
environment. Plant significant long-growth trees to replace the foliated cover that once
thrived along Crenshaw. With Leimert Park anchoring the north end of the corridor,
establish a large green anchor on the south end near Slauson and the Hyde Park Station.
4. Leverage Existing Assets: The project will utilize a number of the many assets along
the 1.1-mile extent of the Destination Crenshaw project in support of making Crenshaw
Boulevard a destination for all of Los Angeles. Many of the assets are modest and
underdeveloped while others are well established. The design should orchestrate these
assets of the existing open space, art, businesses, schools and architecture for a unified
expression of place and transform them in support of the arts and community.
5. Transform Intersections: From 48
th
to 60
th
, the seven significant intersections along
Crenshaw are an opportunity to introduce vibrant, pedestrian oriented community
programming around the arts and other subjects relevant to the community. Maximize
the visual impact of each to elevate Destination Crenshaw with an iconic and easily
identifiable urban identity.
6. Connect East and West: The urban scale of Crenshaw Boulevard is vast and its
redevelopment in support of Crenshaw/LAX Metro line will further establish its
prominence as a north-south transit corridor. The design must address the scale of this
infrastructure in support of efficient, safe and quality connections east and west. This will
offer practical and necessary benefits to the community and maintain Crenshaw’s legacy
as a place for coming together of the various neighborhoods that abut Crenshaw
Boulevard.
7. Engage Metro Infrastructure: The Crenshaw/LAX Metro line will introduce a
significant level of transit infrastructure along the center of Crenshaw Boulevard.
Significant limitations exist around design influence to this infrastructure but as a key
path of arrival for visitors, consider the points of interface between the Metro and the
neighborhood for their opportunity to enhance the experience of Destination Crenshaw.
Consider how two tunnel entrances, a Metro station and one mile of landscape buffer can
enhance the visual character and overall experience of Crenshaw.
Clearly, the project is not lacking any literacy in planning, development, and design. It is
striking in its ability to think comprehensively while also at-scale about how to achieve a sense of
Black urbanism that uses civic engagement (i.e., Councilman Harris-Dawson convening this
working group) to usher in cultural prioritizes (i.e., “A Black LA Story”) with spatial benefits of a
more . It is asset-based community development at a scale the country has rarely seen executed

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simultaneously. At many levels of the plans, Leimert Park Village is, once again, situated as the
axis that balances the regional influences on Black public identity: the Black mecca of Los
Angeles.
They are doing their homework to include the local, everyday influences in many
mediums, as evidenced by a page that instructed the team members to do their research on
artists and soundtracks: “In your daily life, which artists have had the greatests influence on you
and your community?” So far, they have a list that includes, but will not be limited to:
1. John T. Riddle
2. Charles Bibb
3. Enkone
4. Kamasi Washington
5. RTN Crew
6. John Outterbridge
7. Nipsey Hussle
8. Ice Cube
9. Jurassic 5
10. Tupac
11. Verbs
12. Odd Future
13. The Internet
14. Kendrick Lamar
15. Varnette Honeywood
16. El Mac
17. Koshin Finley
18. The Lockers (Don Campbell)
19. Kehinde Wiley
20. Ben Caldwell
21. Betye Saar
22. Brockman Gallery
23. Haile Gerima
24. Hiroshima
25. Earth, Wind, and Fire
26. Nancy Wilson
27. Marla Gibbs
28. Frances Williams
29. Nick Stewart
30. Crenshaw Consciousness Mark
Greenfield
31. Senga Nengudi
Matthew J. Miller
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When discussing these plans with Ben, he expressed joy but with atypical restraint. “The
proudest part that I had was that they started naming all the things that influenced this
neighborhood,” he quietly recounted, “Around six of the guys came from here [Kaos]…Kids
Under the Stairs, Verbs. It was about five of our guys. You know, Kendrick Lamar who has been
up in this spot. So, it was just kind of interesting.” Ben neglected to mention that he, too, was one
of those handful of iconic people who made the list and will be memorialized as one of the
cultural leaders of the outdoor museum. It looks like Justin Jackon’s dream of a Museum of
Leimert will be coming, but it won’t be inside a nightmarish strip mall.
Conclusion: Towards More Colors in the Sky
“When movements have been unable to clear the clouds, it has been the poets – no
matter the medium – who have succeeded in imagining the color of the sky, in rendering
the kinds of dreams and futures social movements are capable of producing. Knowing the
color of the sky is far more important than counting clouds” (Kelley, 2002: 11; emphasis added).

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Figure 91: Picture of a behind-the-scenes moment in producing Sankofa City film
Cultural innovation is where much of Black power exists. Yet, during my experience with
community world-building in Leimert Park Village (LPV), I initially lacked language to
contextualize this practice of Black-driven, Black-centered design. How Black people design
space is less well-understood than how they are dispossessed from it. I argue that the fields of
urban planning and design, like many disciplines and professions, have produced too many
cloud-counters of Black pain and not enough colorists of Black possibility. Cultural production
can be integral to our work because it can help us sift through the mess of politics and dare us to
dream.
Matthew J. Miller
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World-building is a process-based, culture-producing intervention that can tether current
needs to a visionary inclusive future. As I’ve explored race, arts, and economic development in
South Los Angeles, this new mode of Black urbanism has them forge plans for the future. If we
could invest in this story-driven approach in more Black communities, I expect many practical
payoffs through the mechanism of increased place attachment. If we truly want an “informed
inclusive urbanism” and “equitable development” as many top planning and design schools
rightfully say that they welcome, we need imaginative planning, placemaking, and urbanism that
emanates from Black bodies.
Yet, the cynic in me still questions: is developing with the imaginations of Black
Americans too much to consider in programming our places’ designs? In many architectural
renderings, the Black and Brown folks often don’t make the cut (when/if people are included at
all). Is seeing ourselves fully represented a privilege only reserved for real estate owners, who tend
not to be Black? Landscape architect Walter Hood and the authors in Everyday Urbanism (2008)
seem to think it is not too tall of an order to imagine but few discuss implementation. More
recently, James Rojas and Roberto Bedoya have conceptualized “Latino urbanism” and
rasquachification. If Black dreams are a tall order that requires property ownership to implement,
my resolve only deepens to demand that America does as Martin Luther King Jr. once urged:
cash our overdue checks. Provide economic standing for Black imaginative placemaking to
succeed.

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Figure 92: Women in South Side of Chicago practicing community world-building with Sankofa City team
Art and culture is proving to be more than decorative props of Black placemaking and
place-keeping, but as leading lights within the process of planning for community revitalization.
This is why, over the past year, the Sankofa City team has quietly expanded its Afro-futurist world-
building beyond just LPV. The resulting film has become a teaching tool that filmmakers and
imaginative placemakers have used to organize communities in the broader Los Angeles and
even outside in Chicago with (and more importantly without) Theaster Gates. I plan to continue
to participate with newfound appreciation for the sincerity of immersive, imaginative
placemaking into the future. Stay tuned.

Chapter 7: Conclusion
Black Urbanism as Concrete Acts of Reclamation

Maxine Waters, a long-time Congresswoman serving the U.S. House of Representatives
from South Los Angeles, made national news and became a cultural sensation when her C-
SPAN televised cross-examinations of an embattled bureaucrat became a meme.
“Reclaiming my time! Reclaiming my time!” she repeated like a seasoned veteran, to
which the chairman of the committee ceded to her request to give her back her time. I posit here
that she tapped into a missing word in discourse around urban conditions of Black Americans:
reclamation. Many people have written about reparations as being the dominant response to racial
inequality. Across times and at various spatial scales, advocates have argued for this as a policy
solution to the centuries of colonialist market-based and political treatment to Black Americans:
my partner Malcolm Kenyatta’s grandfather Muhammad Kenyatta at the Black Economic
Development Corporation, Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic, and even the now former business
owner Jackie Ryan.
JR: Just give the people some money. Give all black people a million dollars a year. Give all black people
a million dollars. Just give it to ‘em. Government. When I say ‘give,’ you already earned it. So that’s what
it is. People don’t have dollars. Like go into other communities, “Oh people are shopping” but Black
people? Looking all disheveled. Worried or angry.
They are not wrong. However, as I argued in Chapter 1 on Black urbanism, these macro
solutions blind us to the everyday tools we have at our disposal to forge futures and change
systems of meaning around us. While reparations might be a capital ‘S’ solution, I argue for
reclamation as a smaller ‘s’ solution to make that capital S possible.
In her book Art on my Mind: Visual Politics (1990), Black feminist scholar bell hooks argued
that, in a world contextualized by global Western imperial conquest, “If one could make a people
lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then

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the work of subjugation, of colonization, is complete. Such work be undone only by acts of
concrete reclamation” (1995: xv). These acts of concrete reclamation sound like something
that involves developing space and place. With Black urbanism, our cities might gain the tools to
heal themselves from the economic, cultural, social, political terrors enacted for the last several
centuries. I argue using the evidence in this dissertation that we should be especially keen to heal
and advance the conditions of Black entrepreneurs attempting to survive this “neoliberal turn”
and improve their livelihoods alongside their community.
The Contributions of this Dissertation
In this three-part dissertation, I argued for us to revisit the foundations, flows, and futures
of Black spaces through a lens of what I call a theory of Black urbanism. In the Introduction, I
introduced this idea by way of my personal experiences, which gave me the sensibilities to seek
an understanding of how culture and commerce plays out in Black communities, particularly in
the everyday spaces of Black-owned businesses. In Chapter 1, I argued for a better-specified,
normative theory of Black urbanism as a framework centered on belongingness as the
penultimate goal of planning, design, and development. It takes Blackness to be a cultural,
ecological, political, spiritual, and economic resource for improving the self-determination,
wellness, and empowerment for and within urbanized places (i.e., towns, cities, neighborhoods).
Blackness here is defined as more than a phenotypical racial identity, but an African-diasporic
way of seeing the world that privileges traits found in what is called the Black spatial imaginary
(Lipsitz, 2011): inclusivity, sociality, and use-value. Blackness resists the definitions holstered upon
it by decades of scholarship that privilege death and violence, which Katherine McKittrick
rightly points out are the “circularities of anti-Blackness” often re-capitulated in academic and
popular media. Belonging is an idea that has been the subject of many disciplinary efforts to

327
claim it, but as geographer Marco Antonsich sums up, there are two dominant lanes to see the
concept at play when scholars are looking to understand and measure belonging.
“…Belonging should be analyzed both as a personal, intimate, feeling of being ‘at home’ in a place
(place-belongingness) and as a discursive resource which constructs, claims, justifies, or resists
forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion (politics of belonging)
However, by invoking the sociopolitical categories of race and space, a study informed by a
theory of Black urbanism requires a holistic consideration of both place and politics. I argue that
Critical Race Theory can help elegantly unite this endeavor, with its intersectional, feminist,
story-driven, legally-critical take on society.
In Part II of the dissertation, I showed four ways to understand the flows of geographies
of Black commerce and culture: spatial belonging, civic belonging, cultural belonging, and
cultural dis-belonging. In Chapter 2, I applied the CRT approach to the theory of cluster theory,
which, from its very beginning has obscured how local Black businesses have agglomerated in
space. Using the latest version of the Survey of Business Owners, I showed that black clustering is
happening within neighborhoods more than we think, particularly in the Los Angeles
metropolitan region. I also revealed how, based on economic productivity, not every racial group
clusters in the same way; white owned businesses tend to cluster in majority-white places while
Black-owned businesses co-cluster with all other businesses with positive correlations in economic
productivity. The same cannot be illustrated with white-owned businesses.
In Chapter 3, I applied the theory of Black urbanism within the civic dimensions to the
Los Angeles region to understand how Black entrepreneurs have claimed space in a host of
innovative ways. The Leimert Park Village and Crenshaw Corridor provide the core of the
neighborhood-based ethnographic work where I trace the mechanisms by which Black urbanists
make and keep sustain places of meaning over generations. I used the case of the 15-year old
business improvement district (BID), the Greater Leimert Park Village / Crenshaw Corridor

328
(GLPVCC) BID. I show how Black property owners shape space to infuse African-American and
artistic identity in the vernacular landscape to provide infrastructural and political benefits to the
Black entrepreneurs they serve. We learn that clustering around culture requires sustained civic
engagement in multiple arenas of public life, not simply electing the right people.
In Chapter 4, we see how clustering can lead to multiple forms of cultural innovation and
is written into the landscapes. I provide two forms of cultural belonging that Black entrepreneurs
in Los Angeles and Leimert Park Village have given the world: linguistic and artistic innovation.
In Part 1 of Chapter 4, I apply a pragmatics-oriented linguistic analysis to a sub-sample of a
dataset of Black-owned businesses to understand how business signage might communicate both
Black cultural capital and placemaking impacts. Indeed, these semiotics suggest that there are
five types of naming approaches that Black entrepreneurs have chosen to communicate their
value propositions to their consumers: 1) Beauty, 2) Access and Belonging, 2) History and
Heritage, 4) Humor and Creativity, and 5) Sociality. Together, I argue that these five types of
naming tools fall into three types of placemaking approaches: linguistic, experiential, and spatial.
In Part 2 of Chapter 4, I tell the stories of Black entrepreneurs in a historic commercial and
cultural hub, Leimert Park Village, attempting to claim and keep space in a rapidly gentrifying
district faced with multiple forms of neighborhood change. By describing the vibrant scenes that
they create independently on a regular basis, I illustrate that Black culture can exist in many
formats, especially when property ownership is achieved and maintained.
In Chapter 5, however, I lay bare five threats to the “Black living room” model of
placemaking and place-keeping that the Leimert Park Village entrepreneurs provide to primarily
lower-middle-class Black people. Within the ecosystem that surrounds the Village, the first
delimiter stems from the economic diversity of being at the base of what is commonly “Black
Beverly Hills”: socio-spatial stratification. This stratification causes consumers to feel unwelcome

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and the business owners to politicize (lack of) consumption as an act of (dis)loyalty. Second,
because of the socio-spiritual and leisurely motivations of the entrepreneurs, many of them are
averse to commercializing their businesses. This reduces their willingness to advertise outside of
word-of-mouth and resist creating standard business procedures. Third, the recent dynamics of
property owner shifts and civil unrest have led to an uptick in food and retail desertification. The
desertification threatens to reduce the street vitality and the patronage opportunities that are
already limited outside of events and activities. Fourth, the Village faces a variety of forms of
criminal activity and civil unrest – from protests to informality to prostitution to gangs. They
resist it and have found ways to keep it at bay, but it burdens their bottom dollar. Lastly, the
Village’s business owners face systemic, persistent lack of access to debt financing (i.e., credit,
loans); they are forced to self-finance and solicit equity investments instead, which are relational
and highly unpredictable.
However, in Part III on futures, Chapter 6 shows how the most fortunate Black property-
owning entrepreneurs are taking the lead in re-vitalizing their spaces across all three dimensions
of Black urbanism: civic, spatial, and storied. I focus on two visioning tools that have been
marshalled. First, a process called community world-building is being used to re-imagine the
Village through the year 2050 and resulted in a film called Sankofa City. This film has been an
organizing tool for the Los Angeles community to communicate their desires for a continued,
advanced infusion of African, African-American, and artistic innovation in the Village. Second, a
broader collective of artists, at the convening of Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson, have
formulated a new place identity for the Crenshaw corridor called Destination Crenshaw. Rather
than fear or accept the disruptions as spatial traumas to Leimert Park Village or the broader
area, they have chosen to forge a 1.1-mile outdoor museum that tells the stories of what African-
Americans have given the world culturally. This public art shows how leaders are staying ahead

330
of these challenges through visioning work. Overall, their methods allow us to see the practical
ways to lean into the assets and agency that people of color have to exercise their power and
demand something different of themselves and the communities they traverse in this post-
integration age.
Implications for Future Discourses

Figure 93: Sun-baked Leimert Park Sign Hanging Between Trees in the Village (Author, 2018)
Since the 1960s, Black communities have often referred to, especially when they are
blighted, as appearing to be “deserts” or “war zones.” Indeed, after the riots of 1964, Senator
Robert F. Kennedy’s tour of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant – with
brownstones in disrepair, torched commercial buildings, and crime – made for a public spectacle

331
of urban poverty. While this led to the founding of the first Community Development
Corporation (CDC) – the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation – it also left a lasting
stigma of the area being called “a war zone.” Over 50 years later, the same stigma exists in South
Los Angeles, which also had its share of civil unrest and property damage. One of my informants
stated, “It’s like…there’s no one here right now. It looks like after the LA riots, everyone was like,
‘Alright we’re done. It’s a wrap.’”
However, I invite us to take that metaphor its completion: if you encounter people who
have fought in a war, do you treat them as a victim? Or as a veteran? Instead of playing into
pathologies of or pity parties for Black Americans, I invite sincere, balanced work from myself
and others that is evaluative without being judgmental, negative, and fatalistic. We need work
that is honoring both the trials and triumphs, both the struggles and the successes, both the
deficits and the dignities, that are present in the everyday Black experience. I demand this from
the creative community - from academics and artists to engineers and lawyers and technologists
and entrepreneurs and politicians. Black leaders often make their claim to fame as being “the first
[insert achievement]” to “make it” in a white dominant space, but often are doing so at the
expense of the places from whence they come from. This dissertation represents my attempt to
not just valorize the people and products that come from a Black community like Leimert Park
Village, but to invest the best ideas and innovative problem solving back into the places that have
given the world so much. When do we, as Justin Jackson implored, “come home” and fix the
problems in the places that many of us middle-class Blacks have nested? I think if we care about
expanding geographies of opportunity, we must stop pole vaulting our Olympians out of the
sands. Black communities are waiting for their chance to generate endogenous wealth forms, for
and by it. My advice? Do not expect it to be shovel-ready. These hidden jewels of embattled
beauty require work to polish them.

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Appendices
Appendix A: Demographic Groups by U.S. Survey of Business Owners
Demographic
Data
Group Sub-Group
Gender 1. Female-owned
2. Male-owned
3. Equally male-/female-owned
N/A
Race 1. White
2. Black or African American
3. American Indian and Alaska
Native
4. Asian
5. Native Hawaiian and Other
Pacific Islander
6. Some other race
7. Minority
8. Equally minority/nonminority
9. Nonminority
Asian sub-groups
1. Asian Indian
2. Chinese
3. Filipino
4. Japanese
5. Korean
6. Other Asian

Native Hawaiian sub-groups
1. Native Hawaiian
2. Samoan
3. Guamanian or Chamorro
4. Other Pacific Islander
Ethnicity 1. Hispanic
2. Equally Hispanic/non-Hispanic
3. Non-Hispanic
1. Mexican, Mexican
American, Chicano
2. Puerto Rican
3. Cuban
4. Other Hispanic, Latino, or
Spanish origin
Veteran status 1. Veteran-owned
2. Equally veteran-/nonveteran-
owned
3. Nonveteran-owned
N/A
Public-private
status
1. Publicly held and other firms
not classifiable by gender,
ethnicity, race, and veteran
status
2. Private companies
N/A

Appendix B: Summary Table of Field Work
Type of Content Individual or Group of Subject(s) # of Photos/Videos
(P/V)
People: Documentary
(i.e., event,
observational)
1. Attendees of We Love Leimert
Concert
2. Attendees - Friday Block Party
5

10
82

333
3. Attendees - Taco Tuesday (Mardi
Gras)
4. Attendees of Martin Luther King
Day Parade
5. Drum Circles at Art Walk
6. Attendees of Leimert Stakeholders
Meeting (various)
7. Attendees of 7
th
Annual Babe’s And
Ricky’s (Barbara Morrison)
8. Olympia (Suprmarkt)
9. Peace Riders at Art Walk

37

13
15

7

3
90
People: Portraiture 1. Ben Caldwell (Kaos Network)
2. Fred Calloway (Regency West)
3. Ashley Calloway
4. Kim Ramsey (Community Build/
GLPVCC BID)
5. Mike the Barber (Brimberry Beauty
and Barber Salon)
6. Sherri Franklin (Urban Design
Center/ Leimert Park Village, Inc.)
7. James Burks (Vision Theatre)
8. James Fugate (Eso Won Books)
9. Eric Moore (Hot and Cool Café)
10. Tony (Hot and Cool Café)
11. Lorna Hicks (Gallery Plus)
12. Homeless family in Vision Theatre
West Parking Lot
13. Theo at California Jazz and Blues
Museum
14. Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Mall –
Attendees of Pan African Film
Festival 2018
15. Clean Team Worker - Chrysalis
8
10
1
4

29 (25 P, 4 V)

2

2
2
9
10
6
27

3

110

6
Place: Landscape and
Object
1. Leimert Park - Sankofa Passage
2. Leimert Park Village forestry
3. Façades - Art+Practice
4. Façades - Brimberry Salon
5. Façades - CA Jazz/Blues Museum
6. Façades - Fernando Pullum Center
7. Façades - Gallery Plus
8. Façades - Hair SBS Salon Complex
9. Façades - Hot and Cool Café
10. Façades - John Singleton Bldg
11. Façades - Kaos Network
12. Façades - Regency West
13. Façades - Ride On! Bike Shop
14. Façades - Sika’s
93
23
4
1
2
2
2
1
1
4
12
3
3
5

334
15. Façades - Vision Theatre
16. Façades - World Stage
17. Interior of California Jazz and Blues
Museum Collection
18. Interior of Gallery Plus
19. Interior of Kaos Network
20. Interior of Hot and Cool Cafe
13
5
68

45
5
17
Total 43 800

Appendix C: Select Interview Transcriptions for Chapter 4 on Cultural
Belonging
Interview C1: Ben Caldwell, 01.25.2018.
Excerpt 1
BC: It’s just same thing with Mark. Mark got his first piece of property through someone who
liked him: Mr. McDaniels. He didn’t like me. Because that property was really cheap! But he
ended up getting that first piece. And Mark was like, ‘Ben! should I buy it?!’ And I’m like ‘Hell
yea man! Get involved with this property!’ And so I’m so proud that he bought it but like I said,
it was Mr. McDaniels passing along his favorite little puppy and he said, ‘You should really buy
this.’ And he offered up because people want you to take care of their puppy.
Excerpt 2
BC: Some of the guys I’m mentioning, like John Otterbridge, David Hammons, Teddy who did
Sweet Sweet Back. There was just a lot of these powerful people. And then the other kinds of
movements like the Natural Movements, the Magnificent Brothers were right up the street, and
you know, K-Day was here, Soul Train was here. We had Rasta clubs here. We had blues and
Rhythm and Blues and soul music. All of those were like right here as a part of the energy of Los
Angeles. It was late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
MM: That’s so interesting. I’m trying to make quick comparisons in my head between the place
you’re describing that was compared to what it is now and like I guess. How would you say it’s
shifted?
BC: It’s greatly shifted. It was whiter, for one, which is… Even though I say it was so Black, it
was still a whiter community because it was more shared. But we had just started owning it. And
it was like a Black Hollywood in ways because you would see fine cars, fine people, and see lines
of people waiting to go into these venues that I was describing. So there was like five, six, seven of
them along this strip here.
MM: On Degnan you mean?
BC: On Crenshaw.
MM: Oh on Crenshaw. So, like Maverick Flats and stuff like that?
BC: Yea Maverick’s Flat, which had Soul Train. And Richard Pryor and it was lines out there.
And on Sundays, it was usually just for teenagers. And then the club at the end of the block was
just like the rock scene. It held more people and they had all the top of the line performers there,
you know? You go up further, you could see BB King, Memphis Slim, those kinds of blues guys.

335
Go up a little further, you could see all of the top Reggae acts. And then still a place to hang out
for teenagers when I was younger. It was more fun. And then they had an Underground Spot,
which is Tavis Smiley’s.
MM: Oh, where he is now?
BC: Where he is now. That was called, ‘Persian Auditorium.’ So it was like an auditorium that
held about 300 people. And then we also had an auditorium where Community Build is. It was a
three-story building that was a Mason’s lounge.

Excerpt 3
BC: That was in 1984 when I made the bid for this. Because she was selling it. And I was like,
‘I’m going to make sure I put a bid in for this because I’m sure whoever is going to own this is
going to kick me out.’ Because I’m not doing something that they think is viable. So I then bid for
it and like I said, we got it. But we were competing against some interesting. This is the story. We
were competing against Vidal Sassoon, Tory and Black, and Dionne Warwick. They were one,
two, three. And I’m like, ‘How am I going to whip them? Just poor Ben.’ [laughs] I still tried.
And I was like I’m going to still try. And anyway, at the end of it, as I was signing the paper, the
woman who owned the place, I didn’t know she owned it. So she had been watching the whole
while. Because the owner, I thought, was a man called Robert. And her name is Robert Jewel
Blitso. And so we didn’t…we just called her Jewel. So I didn’t even know she was watching me
the whole while. And so she says, “I like the hell things you’re doing with these kids. And fuck
these people who are coming in here with that hair shit. They not going to do nothing!’ Because
she was a hair… She said, ‘They’re not going to do anything for the community, but you will.’
So just watching me struggle as an artist, is what made her give her little puppy dog to me. This
building.
Interview C2: Fred Calloway, 02.12.2018
Excerpt 1
FC: …After I bought the duplex, and saved up a bit of money, I’d started looking at other things
that we could do. I belonged to a social club where we would do parties and dancing and we
would do them at the hotels.
MM: So you didn’t actually own a club for it yet?
FC: Not at that time.
MM: But you were creating this social club that would go places and make it happen there?
FC: Just something to do. Something to do. We would have parties, but in a grand style. We
rented the biggest hotels. It’d be like the Hilton or the Hyatt. Places like those. And then they
started having a resistance to having black folks there doing their parties. That was in the ‘70s.
They didn’t want us there doing that. So I found one little place like the one I have. A small
place, and I happened to know the guy that owned it. And his name was Adam. [unintelligible]
and I was like ‘Hey lets get together. Maybe we can do something. I got some money. Maybe two
of us can get together and [explosion sound] we can do a big place.’ But he didn’t like the idea of
us two going into a partnership and I couldn’t blame him. He had a thriving business. He
probably he could have done it himself if he was that kind of guy. So I just told him, ‘Well I
thought I’d bring it to you because if it opens, it’s going to be a direct competition. There’s
enough business out there for all of us.’ So this is what gave me the idea to look for a spot to buy

336
to open up a social spot for all of these other people like me and belonged to the groups that I
belonged to and wanted to have a place to come to.
Excerpt 2
FC: “…That was basically my story. People from Louisiana were drifting West and I had an
uncle who brought his sister out and then I came out and fell in love with it. I was supposed to be
here for 2 weeks and I stayed and went back home 17 years later.”
Excerpt 3
FC: That’s tricky. I know what kind of businesses I don’t want. And it gotta have a certain match
on that block. Not another type of beauty place.
MM: Yea it’s really saturated with that.
FC: I got one and a nail shop over there. The ladies that I interviewed on Saturday, they got a
business that I don’t know what it is, but I need to see their model. They filled out the
application, but bring me your business model. Let me look at it. Now I don’t have to like it or
agree with it, but bring me something that I think will fit with the other businesses that I have on
the street.
MM: So you’re thinking about the space and how it flows?
FC: how are you going to work with the places that are on the corner? How is it going to
interface with the community arts center? How is it going to interface with the beauty shop? And
the nail shop? And the other space that I have, which is a leased space which is closed most of the
time. And that space is leased by John Singleton. He’s been there for damn near 20 years.
Excerpt 4
FC: I just don’t wanna hang with the roughest thing that’s out there…And when I get the
roughest thing out there, when they walk in and they see what they walking into, they tighten up.
Immediately, they know that they have stepped Uptown [emphasis added]. Most people think when
they find a place in a black community, it’s not gonna be worth shit. They don’t come in
expecting anything. But we had no problems with people coming from the East side or wherever.
People live all over now so you can’t tell a person from where they live. But when they come
from a lower class area and come into our place, the whole attitude change. I got a pretty good
looking bar. They look at that bar like, ‘Oh man! This is beautiful. Nice chairs and tables.
Paintings.’ This is great. We have no problems. But, and this is basically, I designed a place
primarily for a middle-class or upper-lower class person if I can get people up like that…That’s
where I market.
Interview C3: Sherri Franklin
N/A.
Interview C4: James Fugate
Excerpt 1
JF: Nah this was when I was in Detroit. And I left my friend’s company, come back to working
with them full-time. I was working in a management position but I was working with a woman

337
who was my supervisor, but she was nuts. And this guy I had used to work with, he actually – she
was about that tall [motions to elbow] – he actually picked her up and shook her.
MM: Oh my Gosh.
JF: And he was actually telling me this story. And he called me up and told me this story. And I
kept thinking, ‘They’re gonna fire you. Why would you? She’s a little short thang. Why would
you shake? You never put your hands on a woman.’ But anyways, a couple years later, I’m
working with her and I see, ‘Now I know why he picked her ass up and shook her.’ And that’s
when I realized, it’s time to go.
MM: Time to go.
JF: Yea because she is really insecure. And she doesn’t know anything about Black books. And
here’s the person who knows all about it and he puts books in and they all sell and she doesn’t
like that. You know, maybe she was looking at a bigger picture, that maybe I’d push her out the
way because I had been a manager. But I wasn’t even thinking that way. That’s power games
and I didn’t wanna do that.
JF: Yea because she is really insecure. And she doesn’t know anything about Black books. And
here’s the person who knows all about it and he puts books in and they all sell and she doesn’t
like that. You know, maybe she was looking at a bigger picture, that maybe I’d push her out the
way because I had been a manager. But I wasn’t even thinking that way. That’s power games
and I didn’t wanna do that.
Excerpt 2
JF: But then we kept being asked – Compton College – to come out to community events and
sell black books. And I really was uncomfortable. I would go to all these community events and it
was representing Barnes and Noble. And I had begun to get this idea that maybe.
MM: Wow, even back then? I didn’t know Barnes and Noble was around in the ‘80s.
JF: Late ‘80s. Yea. Barnes and Noble has a college division. Even now, they have a big college
division. They came close to getting USC Store when I was working for them, but they probably
still run Cal State LA. And you know, what I had done was an innovation. I had made the
bookstore into something that probably none of their stores were like: where people would know
‘Oh call Compton College for stuff.’ And I didn’t like the fact that every time I would come
through, using their credit card, I’d have to tell them, ‘When you get your statement, it’s going to
say Barnes and Noble.’ And it’s Compton College. So I had come up with this idea that maybe
we can start a bookstore where it’s on the weekends, where we could do these events and it’s
something that we could do.

Interview C5, Justin Jackson
Excerpt 1
JJ: I think my childhood in growing up in a mostly white neighborhood, it was a need for me to
identify with my blackness. So I feel that people who’ve had experience on the outside tend to
want to come back to the community and people who grew up in the community tend to want to
leave.

I was determined to do it because I had my time as a creative to hang with the Joneses in a sense.
And be in the popular Art District of Downtown LA. And have a studio and shake hands and

338
party with the celebrities and the musicians and the actors and do “the Hollywood thing” that I
think is the culture of Los Angeles. It’s the Hollywood. Like…there’s a Black culture within
Hollywood but that Black culture is the Black culture of the ‘woke’ or the conscious Black person
doesn’t necessarily partake in. Meaning the Hollywood Black culture of poppin’ bottles and
sparklets and you know what I’m saying, that Kardashian type vibe? You know? The LA shit.
That’s just, that’s not Leimert Park. You know. But just that culture is huge. That type of
approach as an artist, for me, I was just kind of lost in that shuffle. I was just one of many. There
was nothing really special about what I did. I was just somebody who had a studio in the Arts
District. Where Leimert Park, it made sense to me…[F]or me, it was like an opportunity to say,
‘okay well I’m out here and I’m assimilating. I’m doing all the things I’m supposed to do as a
creative. I have the fancy studio in downtown. I go to the Hollywood parties, but I’m getting
overlooked.’ You know, I’m getting overlooked. I’m not special to them. And so me coming to
Leimert Park, it was an opportunity to set myself aside and be a part of something that I see as
the future of Leimert.
Excerpt 2
JJ: I’m still in the process of curating the ways that I can best utilize this space. So as a studio, yea
I’m a photographer, I do photoshoots. But there are other things I can be doing when I’m not in
the middle of a photoshoot. I can open it up for someone to have a yoga class. I can open it up
for someone to do a real estate training course or I can have someone come in here and do a
signing event or I can have another photographer do an art exhibit, you know? There’s all these
other things I can do. And so kind of taking that co-op model which I think is starting to become
a little more common because not everyone necessarily has the cash flow to maintain a business
by themselves. So just using that model and opening up the space to let other creatives use it and
not just be about me is part of my business plan.
Interview C6, Eric Moore
Excerpt 1
EM: You can come to Hot and Cool, as you see. We have a meeting space here. We’ve got three
different facets. We got the back of the house, the upstairs portion, the dining area, where people
can sit down. And the people we have attracted, we’ve had doctors and engineers and lawyers
and police officers and fireman, homeless folks. We’ve had artists, educators, you name it! We’ve
had people who have come. And what I’m excited about is when people see the space, somehow
it incites creativity out of them to where they say, ‘Hey you know, I’d like to do this in your
space.’ It’s the whole purpose. The space is not really about my knowledge, it’s about bringing
people who have the knowledge who can share that knowledge. Like I shared with you, we have
a tree where we got a little stoop under it. We have a griot type relationship where people can sit
and talk to the youth and tell them about their path. And maybe somebody says ‘hey I like that
path.’ Or maybe someone says ‘that’s not my path or something I’m interested in doing.’ But it’s
a place where we can interact because I think in so many communities, there’s a lot of people but
there’s a lot of isolation. There’s not a lot of spaces to intimately communicate. What we want to
have here at Hot and Cool, we want to provide an environment, while you have great food and
good music and nice people, you know? We want Hot and Cool to feel like you’re at home.
When you come in here, just like we invited you in. like “hey what do you do? Could you come

339
and share? Teach us something.” We may have something that changes your life. That’s the
whole basis. And at the same time, we have something good to eat and drink.

Interview C7, Nzingha Camara
Excerpt 1
NC: “This place evolved into a cultural mecca. It’s the Village. Like the Drum Circle that
they have now? That was non-existent. It was something that was an overflow of our
classes. We used to have classes on Sunday. And after the class, the drummers still wanted
to play. They wanted to still gather. And so they came into the Park and started
drumming in the Park. That’s the birth of that.
MM: It’s like the mid- ‘90s or so?
NC: Mhmm. Exactly. And for the future, I think they want to keep the drum circle. It’s
become a historical spot for tourists now.
MM: So would you say about ’95 or ’96?
NC: I’d say about ’95…They actually started right in front of the Dance Collective.
Because the street and the traffic, ‘Let’s go up to the Park?’ It was as simple as that. And it
became a staple.
NC: Eventually, jazz artists would come and people would bring their poems and
different types of drums. Flutes. The built the Arkestra around that drum circle!
MM: The Arkestra was built around that?!
NC: Yeah!
MM: Oh my God!
NC: The different instruments that the musicians would play because they were a
drummer. They would bring what they can.
MM: You’re talking about Horace Tapscott and the Arkestra?
NC: No, not Horace and them, just the regular people that were meeting at the Pond.
MM: but the Arkestra is the name of a group, too, right?
NC: No, Horace had the Pan-African Arkestra. He chose people that you might not see
in other big bands. He groomed them. He taught them. He taught them that this planet is
inside an Arkestra. And he created his Arkestra that was fantastic. So was composing his
own music separately at the World Stage.
NC: Back in the day, women didn’t play drums. When we first started Dance Collective,
women started coming into the classes and maybe just picking up a drum and playing
and the men would push them to the back, almost to the door.

340
Appendix D: Select Interview Transcriptions for Chapter 5 on Black
Dis-Belonging
Interview D1: Sherri Franklin
Excerpt 1
SF: To spend on a pillow that’s $175 because it’s made out of mud cloth. That’s actually not
your target market for your product, but we do nothing to broaden the horizon [in Leimert].
And it cannot be just black people. It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Because Black people
are in Chinatown. In fact, when I go to a restaurant in Chinatown, the last person I see is a
Chinese person sitting down eating. They’re serving you. We’ve got it backwards. We keep
thinking, ‘Oh when you go to Little Tokyo, you see all kind of people! You go to Little Ethiopia,
we go! And we’re not Ethiopian! Everybody else goes, because they couldn’t survive in a
commercial. Now they could survive if somebody was cooking at their house but you can’t
survive on a commercial business. It’s not enough of us here.
Excerpt 2
SF: So we’re not commercialized. We’re not even thinking about it. So when I launch the
website, duhhh! We gotta market, we gotta brand, we got to have a calendar for four months to
get on the Visitor’s Bureau. ‘Ehhhh. Well.’ But they continue to launch events two weeks out.
You have yet, in four years, to be able to go to the Visitor’s Bureau and say, ‘Can you put this in
your magazine? Because in four months, we’re going to have this. So for the millions of people
who come here, they can see it.’ Hasn’t happened.
Interview D2: Ben Caldwell
Excerpt 1
BC: Oh so like Monday morning meetings. When you see everybody exploding and screaming
and yelling, that’s psychosocial trauma. Because they have all been hurt.
MM: oh oh oh you’re talking about the 2020 meetings?
BC: Yea all these different meanings. When you go to Black meetings, people explode. They go
crazy. Because it’s their only time to have therapy. You know. And so that’s Jim Crow showing
itself in our business meetings. You know, and once I saw that at Howard, I said, ‘I’m making
that a part of my business plan. Not to deal with Jim Crow. Not feed it. Watch it just shrivel up
and die. Because if you feed it, it lives. But if you shrivel it and let it stay there in the corner, it’ll
fall off the leaf.’
Interview D3: Kim Ramsey
Excerpt 1
KR: Yea! Right. Tish. Who we just talked about. It’s so interesting. We just talked about her in
another meeting on homelessness. So you have the medical people who come and do their clinic
who sort of want to protect Tish and I’m saying to them, ‘Look. Tish needs to be an in-patient
somewhere for a while. Tish has family in Baldwin Village, okay? They have come down and

341
tried to do interventions with her. She doesn’t want it.’ I said, ‘I saw Tish beat her girls so badly
when they were in the parking lot behind my building.’ I went out. She had a golf club. She was
beating them with a metal golf club. I went back there. I grabbed it. She looked at me, I went
over to a trash, I told the facilities manager, ‘Open it up.’ I put it in there and told him, ‘Close it
down. She is NOT to get it back.’
MM: Wow. Well kudos to you for getting in and out of that situation safely. But wow.
KR: Yea I was like, ‘No!’ If you let people think they can do that out, that she can just beat these
women like that? No! She needs to be in-patient. She needs to be in-patient. She needs to be. She
does multiple types of drugs. She needs to go to detox probably for a year because of the types of
drugs she’s on. That would solve her homelessness problem! This is what I was trying to explain
to these nurses! What are you doing? You solve two problems! She doesn’t go to jail. She gets
treatment. What’s wrong with that?

342
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Chapter 5: Dis-Belonging and the Flight of the Black Creative
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Chapter 6: Black Futurism, Innovation, and Spatial
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Conclusion
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Endnotes
1
See more at his website: http://www.enactedenvironment.com/urban-patterns
2
Cosmopolitanism is defined in terms of allegiance to the world community of humankind - i.e. “planetary humanism”
(Gilroy 2000) - and almost always in contrast to nationalism, because national boundaries are seen as the chief
mechanism for separating peoples. Yet, there is a healthy debate in cultural sociology about “elite cosmopolitanism”
versus “ordinary cosmopolitanism,” as best summarized by Michéle Lamont and Sada Aksartova’s 2002 article push back

366

on the former as being too upper-middle-class (Hannerz 1996) or too color-blind (Gilroy 2000). Their study does
indicate that there is a blue-collar version that includes “anti-racist rhetorics” in the goal to achieve some form of
everyday cosmopolitanism, but Black urbanism is not predicated on anti-racism: it is pro-social.
3
See more at https://www.artemusjenkins.com/if-you-know-the-words-feel-free/ as found on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffNwzBz6WaU
4
Notice that I did not include the terms money, wealth, or jobs; I think these are means to the accomplish ends
that have overshadowing the true quality of life we seek to create.
1
See the Census Bureau’s full methodology here for more on how they did the racial imputation.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/sbo/technical-documentation/methodology/2012-sbo-methodology.html
2
In earlier iterations of this statistical test, the sample size included unincorporated communities, often called
“Balance of” the county. Many of these communities were predominantly White firms, but the Census does not
include residential demographics, which meant it needed to be removed for the purposes of this study’s research
questions about neighborhoods. This removal had consequences on the statistical significance of the results; so much
so, the correlation coefficients lost statistical significance in the White clustering tests. The fact that the removal of
certain small places has led to the loss of statistical significance leads me to question the power of agglomeration in
small, low density White places on their ability to deliver jobs and higher pay.
3
A few links for these sets of linguistic patterns:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(morphology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_(grammar)#English
1
See transcription in the Appendix. Full quote: “So when I initially got my place, obviously the thought of having a
grand opening initially I had this idea that I was gonna curate images of all the different musicians I had worked
with because I was gonna correlate, you know when I think of Leimert Park, I think of jazz, the old Billy Higgin
pictures and John Coltrane and all the singers that used to perform on Central, you know? Just that Blue Note. A
little bit about what inspired me to be a photographer is that I grew up looking at Blue Note album covers. So the
John Coltranes and all that. All that stuff I’ve tried to emulate to be the modern-day version of.”

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Blackness and belonging: the impact of Brockman Gallery and the Underground Museum on Los Angeles Art and Culture

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Creator Miller, Matthew Jordan (author)

Core Title The geography of Black commerce and culture: Los Angeles, California, and beyond

School School of Policy, Planning and Development

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Urban Planning and Development

Publication Date 08/06/2018

Defense Date 06/22/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African-Americans,agglomeration,arts and culture,belonging,Black entrepreneurship,Black urbanism,creative class,creative placemaking,cultural urbanism,OAI-PMH Harvest,place-keeping,Small business,spatial analysis,spatial ethnography,visual ethnography

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Creator Email mattmill90@gmail.com,millermj@usc.edu

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