Tom Bradley Day
Farmworker Oral History Dramatization Project
The inauguration of Tom Bradley as Mayor of Los Angeles on July 1, 1973, was a milestone in the history of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday, June 28 proclaimed July 1 as Tom Bradley Day in the city to mark the 50th anniversary of his inauguration as mayor. To mark the 50th anniversary of this event, our newsletter provides a sample of photographs by photographers Guy Crowder and Harry Adams, who covered Bradley’s inauguration as mayor for the newspaper Los Angeles Sentinel. Also, we offer you a preview of an Oral History Dramatization Project we have been working on with a group of performing, media, and art students. We provide a link to our edited version of Luis Valdez’s and Dr. Jorge Huerta’s presentation at our campus theatre from last March. And we tell you about a special visit from our colleague Charlene Foggie-Barnett, community archivist for photographer Charles Teenie Harris.
Tom Bradley Day: The Impossible Dream
On July 1, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Tom Bradley’s inauguration as Mayor of Los Angeles. The son of a sharecropper, and grandson of a slave, Bradley became the first African American mayor of a large city—LA was the third largest city in the nation, after New York and Chicago. Born in 1917 in Calvert, Texas, he moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was seven. He won a track scholarship at UCLA and became one of only 55 African American students at the University. He joined the police force in the 1940s and also married his high-school sweetheart, Ethel May Arnold. Despite Chief Bill Parker’s brutal, corrupt, and racist style of policing in the 1950s, Bradley was able to become a lieutenant, supervising white officers, and later studied law at night at Southwestern University. He was admitted to the bar, retired from the police force, and opened his law office in 1961. He replicated Roybal’s strategy of racial coalition building to get elected to City Council in 1963. Six years later and after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, he launched his first campaign for mayor in 1969 and lost to Mayor Sam Yorty, who ran an openly racist campaign, taping on the fear of the white electorate.
In 1973, things were different, Bradley was elected mayor by a large margin and was inaugurated on July 1. He was sworn in as Mayor by Earl Warren, retired U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and former governor of California. Approximately, 10,000 people witnessed the 60-minute inauguration and subsequent 45-minute parade down Spring Street from Temple and 4th St. The Los Angeles Sentinel described it as “the first mayoral inauguration with soul,” where O.C. Smith gave a “bluesy rendition” of “The Impossible Dream,” the Operation and Breadbasket Choir sang with a “gospel flavor,” Bishop H.H. Brookins led a “soulful prayer,” and Quincy Jones led his band in several musical pieces. “Turn Los Angeles to Tomorrow” was the main theme of Tom Bradley’s inaugural speech as mayor. For the next 20 years, Bradley would remain as Mayor of Los Angeles, helping transform it into the global city of today. More images of Tom Bradley.
If you want to know the full story of Tom Bradley, you can watch on YouTube Bridging the Divide: Tom Bradley and the Politics of Race, a documentary film by Lyn Goldfarb and Alison Sotomayor. Here is a clip from the documentary:
Dramatizing Farmworker Oral Histories
The Bradley Center has been working with a team of talented media and performing arts students and their professors to bring the excitement of oral histories to a younger audience by dramatizing some oral history segments and using photographs from our Farmworker Movement Collection. Theatre Professor Doug Kaback directed a group of acting students and Art Professor Joe Bautista put together a talented group of film students to tape and edit the video pieces. It also helped us that the chair of the Department of Cinema, Television, and Visual Arts, Jared Rappaport, allowed us to use their TV studio to record them. Besides a small sample of images of the taping event, we offer you here a few clips—captured with a mobile device—to show you how students are creating an innovative oral history dramatization project that we plan to feature on our website for the Farmworker Movement Collection. This will show you the process and not the final product. We are still working on this project.
Luis Valdez: Aesthetics of El Teatro Campesino
On March 15, 2023, acclaimed Chicano playwright and filmmaker, Luis Valdez, discussed, with Theatre professor Jorge Huerta, Valdez’s career and his new book, Theatre of the Sphere: The Vibrant Being—an actor’s guide that fuses ancient Mayan and contemporary Western performance aesthetics within an interdisciplinary framework. Carmen Ramos Chandler served as moderator for the event. This video version was captured and edited by a group of students. We present it here closed-captioned and divided into chapters. Enjoy!
Charlene Foggie-Barnett visited the Bradley Center
Earlier this week, we received a special visit from Charlene Foggie-Barnett. Besides being the daughter of Civil Rights leaders Bishop and Mrs. Charles H. Foggie, Charlene is the Community Archivist for the Charles “Teenie” Harris photo archive at the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA). She researches the Teenie Harris Archive’s photos, conducts outreach, and collects and records oral histories that result from the Archive’s exhibitions, events, lectures, blogs, and tours. The Teenie Harris’s collection has 80,000 images that span seven decades of African American life in Pittsburgh. At the Bradley Center, we have admired the collection and the amazing work that Charlene and others are doing in promoting community engagement and highlighting the historical and artistic importance of Teenie Harris’s photographic work. She and Dan Leers, the Museum’s curator of photography, are planning a photo exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Arts showcasing the work of other African American photographers whose collections are preserved in other cities across the country. We are happy to be part of this effort and look forward to establishing a partnership for future projects.
