Hotel California
More than eager, I was downright hungry to see "The Magnificent Dunbar Hotel," the latest production by the Robey Theatre Company now running at the L.A. Theater Center downtown. The title promised a reenactment of the most celebrated era of local black history, an era that looms larger and larger as time passes and the very notion of local black history feels ever more endangered. The Dunbar was a swank affair on Central Avenue, known for its headlining jazz acts that boasted everybody from Duke Ellington to Lena Horne. Plenty of other famous folk passed through, including the great W.E.B. DuBois and the actor/activist Paul Robeson. More than a hotel and entertainment center, the Dunbar was a kind of base of black operations, something vividly portrayed in the show. It was also a postcard of possibility for what the race could achieve, what DuBois might have had in mind when he famously effused in 1921 about Los Angeles being a place where the Negro was more "beautifully housed" than anywhere else in the country. As the site of the last big wave of migration out of the South and into more hospitable environs, this was definitely was the place.
Central was the main drag of L.A.'s black community that lived in what was then known as the eastside, a neighborhood forged by segregation: black people didn't live in great numbers anywhere else in town. They couldn't. But that segregated neighborhood had a cohesion and civic vibrancy that ebbed away once the walls of segregation officially started coming down around 1948. The Dunbar and all its magnificence ebbed away with it, faster than I'd like to believe. This happened to black areas all over the country, but the loss of the Dunbar and all that it represented, notably the Hollywood glamour provided by the stars and other luminaries who frequented Central Avenue, is a loss that feels acutely L.A. Central, in effect, lost its brand. Black folks here haven't had one since.
The most interesting aspect of the "Magnificent Dunbar" is not really the visual re-creation of the place, though that's fun. It's the heated ongoing argument amongst the leaders and notables who routinely gather there about what "the race" needs to do to better itself, how it needs to respond to crises like World War II -- why should we fight a war abroad, the argument went, when the real war for our freedom is at home? Those leaders include lesser-known but important voices like Lucius Lomax, the Dunbar owner; Charlotta Bass, editor of the now-defunct California Eagle newspaper; and Chester Himes, the novelist who started his writing life in Hollywood but quickly discovered it was not receptive to his ambition and wound up working in a naval shipyard. While these discussions are largely imagined, the sense of urgency behind them is real.
The tragedy of the play -- of history -- is how swiftly but inevitably the Dunbar, and Central Avenue, meets its end. The triumph of desegregation meant that black folks with means left a place where they were once confined, the vibrancy notwithstanding, and what remained was the beginning of a new, permanent sort of black neighborhood that has come to define 20th and 21st-century urban struggle, stagnation, sometimes blight. It's what has defined South Central, Oakland, Harlem, Ferguson. Not that those places don't have their good points, or advantages, or even beautiful housing stock that has appreciated over time. But the dominant view of black neighborhoods is one of loss, of holding ground against more loss. It is, at best, a view of survival, not of prosperity or imagination. We do not think of black neighborhoods today as Central Avenues that nurture talents like Paul Robeson or Ralph Bunche. We still think of them as places of escape. The people who live in these neighborhoods know this. I know this. Michael Brown knew this.
At one point in "Magnificant Dunbar," the ghosts of the Dunbar past loudly chastise Duke Ellington for decamping from the hotel to the Roosevelt across town, once the racial barriers came down. Ellington shoots back that he only did what every black person had fought so hard for so long to do: exercise his right to go where he wanted. Isn't that what freedom is all about? A chagrined Charlotta Bass responds with one of the best lines in the show: "It's not that you left. It's that you didn't come back." Touche.
