John Sides’ LA City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present focuses on the migration of southern African Americans to the west between the early 1900’s and the 1970’s. Although there was a great migration of Southern African Americans to the north, there was more of an impact on African American lives in western cities like Los Angeles. Sides claims that the migration of southern African Americans was due to their desire to escape the bigotry and injustices that they faced in the southern states. Los Angeles was one of the many cities that provided hope for the southern African Americans to escape their prior social and economic conditions. While life in Los Angeles was better than the lives that the southern …show more content…
City Limits we follow the growth of the African American community in Los Angeles along with the social and economic injustices that the community faced. Sides’ presents the growth of the population using documented census data from the African American migration to the west. From his use of this data, we can see the statistics of how great of a migration this was. According to the data that Sides retrieved, between the 1940’s and the 1970’s, the African American population grew from 63,744 to about 763,000 (Sides, 2). This large growth goes to show the ambition that the southern African Americans were seeking …show more content…
These oral stories also help illustrate why urban areas such as Compton and south-central Los Angeles became heavily poverty ridden. The overall significance of Sides’ L.A. City Limits is to document the experiences of developing urban areas and the effect that these growing areas had on the city itself. Sides speaks on how the development of urban areas within Los Angeles contributed to the rise of the Civil Rights movement and to the 1965 Watts riots. The contribution from these developing urban areas led to increasing of opportunities for the African American community such as desegregation and better work opportunities. To conclude, while Sides did focus solely on the African American community, I personally would have liked if there was more inclusion of multiple ethnicities since urban communities are not made up of only African American families. Considering that Sides is tracking the development of urban communities over time, it would make sense to add the perspectives of other ethnicities besides those of the African Americans. It just seems narrow to focus on just one group of the urban community that is multiethnic. Besides that, Sides effectively tracks the development of urban communities between the 1900’s and 1970’s while also illustrating the hardships that African Americans faced when migrating west from southern