This article on Inglewood (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kaplan-20100613,0,271441,print.story), with its remarks on geographical racial divides, spatial stereotypes, and the remark that El Segundo is "a planet away from Inglewood" reminds me of an issue that has been on my mind on and off the past several years. I look at the racial and spatial divides from the other side of the invisible fence.

In 2003, my hometown put up a memorial at a local park to publically mark the rather unsavory history of the location (click on the image to see the details).

On the one hand, this incident from the 1920s may seem like this medium-sized town's one blemish and it is good that this is finally being publicly recognized. Most towns with a history of a racist past - like the "sundown" laws prohibiting black people within citiy limits after nightfall - do not have memorials. While the marker's use of passive voice and the attribution of responsibility to the "circumstances" conveniently avoid the question of who is or was actually responsible, this kind of wording is common on markers and should not be condemned too harshly.

While some deeds may seem less reprehensible if they "reflected the views of a different time," in this case I think the case is the other way around. This is an example of an historical event which gains signifigance when seen in the wider context. We need to take the word "circumstances" on the marker seriously. The marker does well to point out that attitudes and circumstances in the 1920s were as they were. But by imbedding the tragedy into the context of the history of the park's changing names, the marker still gives the impression of an isolated incident, which dramatizes the sense of place, but shields the visitor from recognizing that segregation (spatial, economic, political) was pervasive throughout Los Angeles for decades. It remained legal until 1948 and common practice until well into the 1950s to prevent minority families from living in certain areas by explicit clauses on property deeds. I don't know if Manhattan Beach had these legal provisos, but the Bruce's Beach incident shows that other uses of state and legal force were possible even here. In the 1920s and 1930s, the White Knights, a KKK-like white supremacist organization, flourished in Los Angeles. In Manhattan Beach, they attacked and beat up at least one homosexual in the mid 1930s (I would really like to know more about whether they had a Manhattan Beach chapter and whether incidents like this were common). The transportation policies of the 1920s to 1970s further solidified racial segregation, protecting Manhattan Beach from integration, stagnating or declining property values, etc. The political battles of race and urban space continued at least into the school busing politics of the 1970s and 1980s and could be said to be still raging today.

Thus, this marker is beginning to put public, explicit contour on Manhattan Beach's place in a wider historical context involving the whole country, but especially Los Angeles. I guess my point is this: The "tragic circumstances" were not just a few houses and families on some beachfront property in the 1920s. They are that the city without a history that I grew up in has a history after all. While I grew up facing west, out to the ocean, proud that my home town was mentioned in the song Surfin' USA by the Beach Boys, there was, the whole time, a history that ties the city into the east. There is no complete history of Manhattan Beach without a history of Watts, Carson, Inglewood and East L.A. - none of which are very far away at all. Indeed Hawthorne actually touches Manhattan Beach at one point, but it was a no-go area in my youth. We may fly or drive over those places and never go there, but we are tied to those places by a common history that is not a national abstraction, but local reality well within living memory that transcends the Great Wall that is the 405.

This is not about showing up the people of my home town to be racist or to "unmask" anything for purposes of attack. Indeed, the people I knew while growing up there after 1970 were, for the most part, tolerant and open and neighborly. The article on Inglewood (linked above) would also make no such accusation. It is about perceptions of space which are tied to race, but not about race as such. But to the extent that history should be about tearing down explicit or implicit myths about why things are the way they are now, I would like to help draw attention to how this marker shows the "circumstances" under which our way of life was built. I sense we were in a way aware of this back when I was growing up, when I consider how we thought about those dark, forboding places to our east, places we would never go.

This is a slightly modified version of a text I published at http://sites-of-memory.de/images/culiacan.html in 2005. I have deleted the text there an posted this blog entry instead.