When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

by Donovan X. Ramsey

But South Central was changing rapidly. Many of the good factory jobs that so many came to Los Angeles for were quietly moving out of the city. People blamed the Watts riots in 1965, but in truth, the trend began much earlier. Between 1963 and 1964, twenty-eight industrial manufacturing firms left South Central and parts of East L.A.—four metal shops, eight furniture factories, one electrical machinery factory, one food processing plant, four textile plants, and two oil refineries. These were jobs that sustained the local Black community. They made the difference between a Black working-class neighborhood and a ghetto. By 1965, South Los Angeles—which was more than 80 percent Black—had unemployment rates double those of greater Los Angeles and the entire state of California. One in ten adults in South L.A. was out of work. In 1970, the year Lennie started kindergarten, a quarter of Black Los Angeles lived below the poverty line. Folks got desperate and from that desperation a new South Central emerged, full of gangbangers, hustlers, and pimps, who moved from the margins of the community to the center.