In 1973 , Tom Bradley was elected as the first African American Mayor of Los Angeles. While he ran in 1969, he lost to the incumbent Sam Yorty, because of the “racial anxieties “ and communist/liberal allegations made against him (Michelson & Oliver, 1998). At the time, Los Angeles was predominantly White, and the Watts Riots had occurred only four years prior , so the allegations made by Yorty only fueled racial tensions and white conservatism. However, in the 1973 election, Bradley utilized the coalition of African American and wish voters to gain the mayoral seat from Yorty. While, this coalition also include Latinos, liberal Whites and Asian Americans , the largest part of the coalition that helped him get to office were African Americans and Jews ( Simon, 1992).
What
The coalition created by Tom Bradley was created as a voting bloc for the Los Angeles
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During the time, he “grossly neglected” , the conditions in impoverished Black neighborhoods , which fueled the Watts Riots in 1965 (Holli , 1999). Yorty did not participate in the “government’s War on Poverty” which affected the funding for minority and low income communities (Sonenshein 2015). As a result, the lower income black community wanted more political power, which the liberal candidate , Tom Bradley could offer them. Furthermore with the assassination of Martin Luther King occurring only a few years prior there was more focus on “turning social activism into political empowerment” (Saunders 2014). The Jewish community was also ignored by Yorty in his campaign’s as Sam Yorty focused on “ the Midwestern migrants, who were most white” (Sonenshein 2015). These two groups were also very similar in socioeconomic status and the location of their homes. Los Angeles was still a segregated city , however “middle-class blacks and Jews lived in fairly close proximity” (Boyarsky,