In honor of Black History Month, this is the second in a 3-part weekly series exploring the shifting Black communities of Los Angeles. Read part 1 here.

As manufacturing labor from the Great Migration afforded skilled Black migrants a middle-class income, the previously unattainable suburban Southern California dream became closer to reality. Unlike the congested and deteriorating properties of South Central Los Angeles, working-class suburbs like Compton allowed Blacks to raise their families in manicured homes with space enough for livestock and petting farms.

Take Marie Hollis for instance, an Oklahoma native who in 1967 moved west to a quiet block in Compton with nearby flower gardens to escape the crime and density of the slums. At the time Compton was predominately Caucasian and, for a time, Blacks peacefully coexisted with their white neighbors. But soon the white residents began to feel that too many Blacks were moving in - a perceived threat to their property values - and thus began a devastating transformation in the area.

Earlier in Los Angeles - before the 1950s - suburbs fighting integration often became sites of significant racial violence. Whites resorted to bombing, firing into, and burning crosses on the lawns of Black family homes in areas south of Slauson. White gangs in South Gate and Huntington Park confronted Blacks who dared to travel through their area. This violent reaction to Blacks' presence in white communities echoed across the nation as the Great Migration transformed cities in the North and West. In 1917, the Supreme Court ruling of Buchanan vs. Warley, declared municipally mandated racial zoning unconstitutional. Unfortunately the case only dealt with legal statutes, leaving the door open for alternative agreements such as restrictive covenants, which served to perpetuate residential segregation on private properties.

A final public meeting on the mural ordinance draft was held earlier this month, giving artists one more night to butt heads with policy makers and differing perspectives before the draft heads back to City Hall. (The deadline to submit comments for the zoning code amendment was February 8th).

The final meeting brought over 155 people to the new LALA Gallery in the Arts District. The panel, moderated by City Planner Tanner Blackman, included Saber, the street artist who took to the sky to state "art is not a crime;" Shepard Fairey, the street artist who arguably has the highest profile of any creative guerilla; and Daniel Lahoda, owner of the gallery and curator for L.A. Freewalls.

The panel and the attendees first discussed the historic tradition of Los Angeles murals; the question period brought out territorial aesthetics. A heated debate arose on the floor when the panel credited commercial sponsorship as a means of allowing them to produce new works. The conflict between corporate-funded street art and socially-minded murals with ethnic-based narrative has been at the center of many of these public meetings.

On this Presidents' Day, The Laws That Shaped L.A. invites readers to revisit Departures' comprehensive recent multi-media exploration of the 1965 Immigration Act.

Signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson, the Act transformed Los Angeles' Chinatown -- and had many other significant effects locally, nationally and internationally.

To learn more about the 1965 Immigration Act and it's local as well as national and international importance:

• Click the link in this sentence to watch videos, see photos and read the accompanying text of Departures' "The Postwar Years" mural.


• Click the link in this sentence to read and watch videos of, "When Chinatown and a Nation Transformed.


• Click the link in this sentence to read Juan Devis' appreciation for and to view videos of the late activist, Irvin Lai.

A new Laws That Shaped L.A. post returns next Monday. Read the stories in the series so far here.

Top: Irvin Lai. Photo via Departures: Chinatown.

In honor of Black History Month, join us each day from February 10th to the 19th as we celebrate Black Angelenos who have influenced culture, social justice, and progress in Los Angeles and, in some instances, the nation.

Today we celebrate Ben Caldwell:

It must take a mighty thick skin to build a community-based, education-focused media center just a (metaphoric) stone's throw from the sound stages of Hollywood. Such work calls for the intestinal fortitude to ignore the smart money's dismissal of your quaint devotion to collective work (or was that the purpose?), as well as a willingness to forgive students whose progress will ultimately be measured by their ability to take what they've been taught and run with it... as far away from you as their feet, talents and a few more lucky breaks can take them.

Or, it takes a certain kind of love to build said media center. Educator and documentary filmmaker Ben Caldwell has long been an exemplar of that sort of stubborn, revolutionary love, a form of devotion for which there are many, many historical precedents but increasingly fewer living avatars. Caldwell's love is not just a love of black people although it is in the black art enclave of Los Angeles that his reputation would be made. Born in New Mexico in 1945, Caldwell remembers assisting his grandfather in his work as a projectionist in a small town movie theater, his earliest memories a kind of colored Cinema Paradiso where an attenuated Hollywood apprenticeship and the patent oddities of being a black child in splendid desert isolation combined to work a curious alchemical magic on him. Caldwell would grow up to be an iconic citizen of black Los Angeles, but first he had to come here, attend UCLA, fall in with the wrong, early 70s crowd (Caldwell and his cohort's adventures in black filmmaking were recently the subject of the UCLA Film Archives' L.A. Rebellion series http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion), and make a life for himself. That life would encompass a series of documentaries and experimental narrative films, as well as founding the KAOS Network community art center, which has not only produced entire generations of South L.A. trained filmmakers, technicians, web designers, artists, and animators, but a whole slew of MC's through its Project Blowed open-mic night. Looking at his accomplishments, it is possible to forget that Caldwell was in some ways a convert to black Los Angeles, but this often the way of such lives: it often takes a convert's zeal to show us how it's done.

In honor of Black History Month, join us each day from February 10th to the 19th as we celebrate Black Angelenos who have influenced culture, social justice, and progress in Los Angeles and, in some instances, the nation.

Today we celebrate Paul Williams:

Black Los Angeles may have a distinct, instantly recognizable architecture, but it has no master builder. Close your eyes and think of the architecture of black L.A. and what you'll most likely see is an afterimage of recent 'hood flick mise-en-scène, collectively art-directed expanses of flat road, heat radiating from concrete and asphalt, craftsman houses reduced to pill box repetition, blank blue sky stabbed by a single palm tree. This overwriting of black L.A. by Hollywood takes on another layer of complexity when you consider that Los Angeles does indeed have a singular black architect, a man responsible for over 2000 private homes, so many of them designed for the bold faced names of the local dream factory that this man was once known as "The Architect to the Stars."

Born in Los Angeles in 1894, Paul Revere Williams lived a story that could have made any screenwriter proud had it been visual fiction. His father died when he was two, his mother when he was four. The only black child at his elementary school, he was urged away from his first love - architecture (Williams knew from the very first what he was meant to be) - on the well-intentioned (but deeply racist) logic that there would never be enough demand for his services among local Negroes. He persisted, studying at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design in what was then Westlake Park, before going on to USC's School of Engineering. (It was during this period Williams purportedly taught himself to render drawings upside down so that he could sit far across from clients who might not want to sit right next to a black man.) He married relatively young (why waste precious time looking for what he already had?) and, that done, became the first certified African American architect west of the Mississippi in 1921. He also became the first black member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1923.

He designed enough iconic Los Angeles buildings, to well, fill a city: the MCA Building, the Ambassador Hotel (renovations), the Beverly Wilshire Hotel (renovations), contributions to the design of the "Theme" building at LAX, Hollywood palaces for Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, Lon Chaney, Sr., Tyrone Power, Danny Thomas, Barbara Stanwyck, and a host of other once-bright, but now faded stars. Away from the bright lights he also contributed to buildings across the country, working as an architect for the Navy (notch another name for the "military as race-neutral meritocracy" meme) and the U.S. government, for whom he helped design the first federally-funded public housing projects, Langston Terrace in Washington, D.C. and Pueblo del Rio in Los Angeles.

Stone, of course, has a tendency to outlive the soft meat of both architect and the client, and so it is that the world in which Williams achieved these unlikely things largely no longer exists. This is not just a matter of outliving racism, but of also outliving a parallel world of black glory and glamour. He lived and designed homes for many black notables in West Adams, back when it was the seat of Los Angeles' colored society. He married at the First AME Church in Los Angeles and his wife, Della Mae Givens, founded the Wilfandel Club, the oldest African American social and philanthropic club in Los Angeles. Harvard apparently did not come calling, but Howard, Lincoln and Tuskeegee all awarded him honorary doctorates, while Joseph Cox's Great Black Men of Masonry records that Williams achieved the Thirty-Third Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Prince Hall Affiliation. There is today, among a certain cadre of bourgie black folks, a fad for the ownership of a Paul Williams home. How better to display one's taste and wealth than pluck one of Williams' buildings from relative obscurity, goes the thinking? But how much stranger and more powerful it must have been to build all this from nothing.

Bowling alleys, burger shacks, auto garages - not the kind of images you conjure up from hearing the name Ansel Adams. His famous photographs of magnificent landscapes suggest a man so entwined with nature, he never bothered with the hustle and bustle of city life. But there he was, in 1941, lugging his camera around Los Angeles County, getting dirty with smog instead of dirt, heading inside bowling alleys, snapping away at the happy bowlers and lurkers enjoying a few drinks. In town on assignment for Fortune magazine to document the aerospace industry, Adams spent many of his hours rambling about the city and capturing the pulse of its inhabitants while seemingly amused by its quirks.

The collection has been in the possession of the Los Angeles Public Library since the early '60s, when Adams donated the 135 contact prints and 217 negatives - which he deemed to be worth about $100. The Library estimated the value to be a bit higher - about $150. Now new prints of these photos, assumed to be worth a lot more, will be on display at drkrm gallery on Spring Street in Downtown Los Angeles as part of Pacific Standard Time. The exhibit opens this Saturday and continues until March 17.

Browsing through the collection, among photos of industrial complexes, novelty architecture, and typical L.A. streetscapes, one can't help but notice a couple that appears in many of the photos. They are in fact Cole Weston, son of master photographer Edward Weston and a renowned photographer in his own right, and his wife Dorothy. Taking a break from an aspiring theater career to join in the war time efforts, he worked as a rivetter at the Lockheed plant in Burbank - one of the main subjects of Adams' pictorial for Fortune magazine -. These photos perhaps display a more intimate and sensual side to Adams than what he is known for (though some may argue that the sight of a gush of squirting liquid from the ground is as sensual as it gets).

In honor of Black History Month, join us each day from February 10th to the 19th as we celebrate Black Angelenos who have influenced culture, social justice, and progress in Los Angeles and, in some instances, the nation.

Today we celebrate Ava Duvernay:

Ava Duvernay made her mark in the indie-mainstream this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where she earned the Best Director Prize for "Middle of Nowhere," becoming the first Black woman to receive the honor. Though only recently has her work been exposed to a more general audiences, Duvernary has been breaking grounds with the Black American film circuit for years. A publicist by trade, Duvernay formed DVA Media + Marketing in 1999, providing strategy and execution for more than 120 film and television campaigns, including Spider Man 2, Dream Girls, and The Help. In 2008 Duvernay launched her directorial career with the hip-hop documentary "This is The Life," which debuted on Showtime in 2009. She then went on to direct and produce three network music documentaries. In 2011 her first narrative feature "I Will Follow" was released theatrically via her distribution collective, the African American Film Festival Releasing Movement. Duvernay is Los Angeles native and graduate of UCLA.

The Sepulveda Basin is one of few areas along the Los Angeles River that offers a glimpse into what the river once was and what the rest of the river may one day be.

Unpaved paths on both sides of the river are filled with walkers and joggers on the weekend. Smaller paths diverge into forests of mulefat, cottonwood, mugwort, buckwheat, and elderberry. Canada Geese routinely fly overhead in a V formation, and egrets mill along the bank amongst the foliage waiting to close in on a carp. Small rapids form where rocks have piled up as the water weaves in and out of islands. It smells like a river.

It still takes a little imagination to see this river as a river in the truest sense. One cannot crop out the golf courses that sit on both sides of the river - yes, two golf courses - while the plastic bags entangled in branches and shopping carts half submerged in the river's basin cannot be ignored. And you definitely cannot block out the buzz of the remote controlled airplanes in the near distance.

Yet this is the beautiful irony of this particular stretch of the river. In the middle of "sprawlsville," where the 405 intersects with the 101, this hidden gem provides access to and sanctuary for nature, recreational resources for families, and tranquility from the chaos of our city. Just north of the river - within walking distance - is the Anthony C. Beilenson Park, filled with picnicking families, quinceaneras, and the occasional jumparoo. People on rental bikes and rollerblades ride along the paved paths of the park's man-made lake. And to the northeast is a wildlife preserve and japanese garden.

As river advocate and city councilman Tom La Bonge would say, "Let's Live it, let's love it!" This is your river Los Angeles, get out this weekend and enjoy it!

More on L.A. Letters:

• Rappin' Black in Los Angeles
  
• Beats & Rhymes: A Tale of L.A. Literature
  
• Lionel Rolfe and Johnny Otis: Literary Icons of L.A.

News and stories on the shifting culture of our neighborhoods:

• Who will be in charge of famous Siqueiros mural on Olvera St.? - L.A. Downtown News

• Los Angeles encapsulates the ideal China story - China Daily USA

• Japanese American family's souvenir of internment - Multi-American

• How was your last trip along the Arroyo Seco? - Patch

• Performing a symphony for 1,000 car horns in L.A. Traffic - SCPR

Top: Photo of pre-restored "America Tropical" mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros by Flickr user The City Project used under a Creative Commons license.