A thin blue line down central avenue: the LAPD and the demise of a musical hub.(Los Angeles Police Department )

Publication: Black Music Research Journal

Publication Date: 22-SEP-02

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 Center For Black Music Research

Before Los Angeles's South Central had become indelibly linked in the public mind with gang wars and riots, its main strip, Central Avenue, boasted glamorous nightclubs and swinging dance halls that rivaled the great African-American music centers back east. Saxophonist Art Pepper paints an idyllic picture of "the Stem" as he remembers it from the 1940s:



It was a beautiful time. It was a festive time. The women dressed up in frills and feathers and long earrings and hats with things hanging off them, fancy dresses with slits in the skirts, and they wore black silk stockings that were rolled and wedgie shoes. Most of the men wore big, wide-brimmed hats and zoot suits with wide collars, small cuffs, and large knees, and their coats were real long with padded shoulders. They wore flashy ties with diamond stickpins; they wore lots of jewelry; and you could smell powder and perfume everywhere. And as you walked down the street you heard music coming out of everyplace. And everybody was happy.... [T]here were all kinds of places to go, and if you walked in with a horn everyone would shout, "Yeah! Great! Get it out of the case and blow some!" They didn't care if you played better than somebody else. Nobody was trying to cut anybody or take their job, so we'd get together and blow. (Pepper and Pepper 1994, 41-42)

Less than ten years after reaching its dizzying height during the war years, however, the Central Avenue club scene was on its way to extinction, and fifty years later, little remains of its former glory.

What caused the precipitous decline of this vital and vigorous musical culture? Clearly, a number of factors--social, economic, and political-propelled Central Avenue on its downward trajectory. The downsized postwar economy threw many out of work, and unemployment hit the African-American community particularly hard, leaving little money for cultural or recreational activities. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that housing covenants were illegal, upwardly mobile black families moved out of South Central in droves, seeking more commodious living conditions on the west side of the city. The merger of the black Musicians' Union 767 with the white Musicians' Union 47 opened up opportunities for black musicians to play in other venues throughout the city and diffused the musical talent on Central Avenue. Nightclubs in general suffered as the rapid adoption of television kept their clientele at home.

While acknowledging the deleterious effects of these factors on the clubs, many musicians from the era point to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as the real culprit behind the demise of Central Avenue. As singer Ernie Andrews (1993, 71) remembers, the police "harassed the people--tear up their joints and put them in jail, you know, just keep harassing them, harassing them, harassing them, and putting them in jail and whatnots." Trumpeter Art Farmer (1995, 57) concurs: "The police started really becoming a problem. I remember, you would walk down the street, and every time they'd see you they would stop you and search you." Jazz trumpeter Clora Bryant (1994, 252) maintains, "They'd catch you over there, and you'd better not have a ticket out or something, you know, the least little thing and you were going down." In his autobiography, Raise Up off Me, pianist Hampton Hawes conjures up a dystopian snapshot of Central Avenue after the invasion of the police: "On any weekend night on Central Avenue [along] the forties [numbered blocks] you could probably see more blinking red lights than on any other thoroughfare in the country. Seen from a distance you'd think it was some kind of far-out holocaust, a fifty-car smashup, Watts '65. But it was only the cops jamming brothers" (Hawes and Asher 1979, 29). Increased police presence on the avenue transformed street life from a festive to a nightmarish scene in only a few short years.

In the 1940s, the LAPD was beginning to fashion itself in a new image. William H. Parker was appointed its chief in 1950, and during his fifteen-year stewardship, the LAPD turned itself around completely, from a department under the thumb of City Hall and corrupted by its associations with mobsters to one of the best-paid, most-emulated police forces in the world. That the time period in which the LAPD's status rose also saw the decline of Central Avenue is hardly coincidental; I would go as far as to posit that the two events had a direct impact on one another. I examine here why the LAPD at this pivotal moment in its history targeted Central Avenue, how it used generally accepted perceptions of the South Central music scene to win support for its often unconstitutional actions from the Los Angeles establishment and white populace, and how its "success" in destroying the Central Avenue economy both bolstered its position in the short run and undermined its standing in the long run. The modern LAPD, shaped by the reactionary forces that governed the Los Angeles civic arena, was (and, some would argue, continues to be) instrumental in the suppression of progressive social, political, and cultural movements and in the preservation of the power structure. Its combative and despotic rule over street life in South Central and elsewhere in Los Angeles incurred costs and benefits that went far beyond the fate of a dozen nightclubs.

The LAPD Before and During the Parker Era

The LAPD in the mid-twentieth century looked back on a short but heavily checkered past (see Domanick 1994; Woods 1993). Not infrequently, underpaid police officers gave in to the temptation of lining their pockets with payoffs from vice operators in the Los Angeles underworld of gambling, prostitution, and liquor and narcotics trafficking. To appease both the reform-minded Protestant voting population and the politicians whose elections were financed by mobsters, the police department played a duplicitous double role, selling protection to select vice operators and raising arrest numbers by apprehending their competition. Highly respected criminologist August Vollmer was hired as police chief in 1923 and raised the professional standards of the department considerably, but his position lasted only a year, and his reforms proved to be almost as short lived. James Davis, LAPD chief from 1926 to 1929 and again from 1933 to 1938, left a deeper imprint. He encouraged his men to carry out dragnets--sweeps of entire streets of people, innocent and guilty--and bum blockades--illegal police bulwarks that turned away "vagrants" and migrants at various points along the state border during the Great Depression. His Intelligence Squad spied on, collected dossiers of, and intimidated critics and foes of the department; his Red Squad raided meetings of labor unions, Socialists, the American Civil Liberties Union, and any other groups suspected of subversion. With the mayoral election of Fletcher Bowron and his reformist platform in 1938, the city's vice operations suffered a major blow. From the late 1930s into the 1940s, as Bowron's City Hall deployed the police force in its zealous crusade against the Los Angeles underworld, police brutality and infractions of civil liberties came to dwarf corruption as matters of public concern.

It was in this rather lawless environment that William Parker, a devout Catholic and an autocratic moralist, mastered the political skills that would help him maneuver his way to a position of power. He joined the force in 1927 and rose through the ranks quickly. While acting as Chief Davis's administrative assistant, he helped rewrite Section 202 of the city charter, which vested and codified the rights of LAPD officers and which, in essence, guaranteed the chief of the department lifetime tenure, free of accountability to City Hall or to the general populace. Upon his return from service in World War II, Parker, upholding an ideology in line with the reactionary ethos of postwar Los Angeles, was within arm's length of the chief's office. In 1949, he assumed a position as the head of the Internal Affairs Division, a new division responsible for investigating complaints of police misconduct and meting out appropriate disciplinary measures. By internalizing this function, the LAPD in effect shielded itself from outside intervention. When at last Parker was offered the job, the position of LAPD chief was perhaps the most powerful, certainly the most autonomous, in the city of Los Angeles, largely through Parker's own efforts and design. In 1950, he seized total control over the department, reorganizing divisions, implementing scientific and technological improvement in police work, recruiting drill instructors from elite military academies to train police cadets and to put into place a military code of conduct, generally raising the standards of police comportment, and remaking his men (and a handful of women) in his own image. Parker's value system permeated every aspect of the LAPD and shaped a police culture that survives to this day.

First and foremost, the new chief envisioned the role of the LAPD to be one of social control. Parker (1957a, 8), who often resorted to barely veiled white supremacist rhetoric, proclaimed that "Los...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.