This December, we celebrate the 104th birthday of former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley and the 45th anniversary of Joan Baez’s back-to-back performance at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to support the farmworker movement.
Tom Bradley 1917–1998
by Guillermo Márquez
Thomas “Tom” Bradley was born on December 29, 1917 in Calvert, Texas. The Great Migration brought him to Los Angeles in 1924, where he attended local schools. In 1937 attended UCLA, and shortly after in 1940, joined the Los Angeles Police Department. Not long after, he met Ethel Arnold, whom he married in 1941. In 1963, Bradley began his political career with his election to the Los Angeles City Council’s Tenth District. In 1973, he was elected the city’s 38th and first black mayor when he unseated the controversial Sam Yorty. As the longest-tenured mayor, Bradley served until 1993, and during that time he ushered the city through unprecedented growth. Tom Bradley died on September 29, 1998, leaving a loving family and a legacy of coalition building.
Joan Baez at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium
In 1966, Joan Baez was approached by LeRoy Chatfield to perform at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with the proceeds, $75,000, going to the United Farm Worker Organizing Committee. “Both performances were sold out within hours when tickets were available,” recalled Chatfield. Baez’s performances, on Friday, Dec. 16, 1966, were preceded, according to the Los Angeles Times, by Maffitt and Davies and by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Emmon Clarke’s photos of the event also include images of Tim Buckley.
Two New Episodes of Emancipated
In episode #16, Marta Valier talks to Giovanni Batz, President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, about his upcoming book, titled The Fourth Invasion: Decolonizing Histories, Megaprojects and Ixil Resistance in Guatemala. He discusses the Ixil resistance, and the struggle against megaprojects in Guatemala analyzing topics like state-sponsored violence, the persecution of human rights defenders and activists, the negative impact of megaprojects on the indigenous communities, and the historical land inequality in Guatemala. Browse the photos by Richard Cross preserved at the University Library. They portrayed the situation of the Mayan refugees in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1983.
In episode #15, Marta Valier talks to Brandon Lien, a Cal State University Northridge (CSUN) student that has been working for the last year at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center on The Black Power Archive Oral History Project, a collection of oral histories documenting the African American experience in Los Angeles. We wanted to hear from a student's perspective what it’s like for younger generations to work with oral histories archived at the Bradley Center. Lien, a film student in his third year at CSUN, shared with us three of his favorite audio clips he discovered working at the archive. One clip is from Kumasi, a member of the Slauson street organization The Slausons and author of the 1970 "Folsom Prison Strike and Bill of Rights Manifesto." A second clip is from an oral history with Watani Stiner, a member of the Black nationalist group US Organization. And the last clip is from Donzaleigh Abernathy, daughter of Juanita and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, leaders in the civil rights movement and close friends to Dr.Martin Luther King Jr.
Condolences
We express our condolences to the families and friends of three amazing women who passed away recently. Hassina Leelarathna co-founded with her husband, Deeptha Leelarathna, Sri-Lanka Express, the first weekly newspaper to serve the Sri Lankan diaspora in the United States. Because the Express was based in the San Fernando Valley, Hassina Leelarathna developed a strong connection to CSUN and the Bradley Center during the last fifteen years. Deborah Charles, artist agent and curator, was the widow of photographer Roland Charles, whose collection the Center has the honor to preserve. Deborah Charles was not only a friend and supporter of the Bradley Center but also a generous collaborator—she and our archivist-historian Keith Rice co-curated the photo exhibition “The Civil Rights Movement: Los Angeles to Selma,” at the Museum of African-American Art in early 2018. Jacqueline Avant was with her husband, music producer legend Clarence Avant, a strong financial supporter of several African American politicians, including Tom Bradley, Maxine Waters, Willie Brown, and others. Jacqueline Avant, according to the Los Angeles Times, “helped guide her husband to unite powerful figures from the worlds of sports, entertainment, and politics, usually to benefit the less fortunate.”
Hassina Leelarathna
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Enormous gratitude for this newsletter and the tributes it contains from beginning to end. Thank you for your celebration of so many valued lives, the contributions they made and preservation of images. I can imagine Tom Bradley would have been very proud...Charmaine Jefferson, Executive Consultant to the Tom & Ethel Bradley Foundation.