![]() ![]() One of the oldest cities in Los Angeles countyįounded in 1888, Compton CA is one of the oldest cities in the United States. Here are five things you didn’t know about Compton CA. If you thought music was the only thing the city has to offer, you’re in for a real treat. Sure, there are bigger and more well-known cities all across the state, but Compton is a pretty interesting place. However, aside from the music, Compton has a rich history that many people gone completely unaware of. “I think a haunted country deserves haunted stories.Last year, the city of Compton CA found itself in headlines all over the world thanks to the success of the NWA biopic, Straight Outta Compton. For years, the city has been well-known as the hometown for several of raps most influential rappers, and hip-hop fans everywhere have credited Compton with putting the West coast on the map. “Excavating those is dark work, but I think it’s necessary work,” added Little Marvin. The difference is that Black folks have been searching for those opportunities within the boundaries of their own country.” But in both those cases, you have folks who were looking for opportunities, jobs, and education-and really trying to stake their rightful claim on the American dream. “Those experiences were wildly divergent and obviously nuanced and complex. from India-and the creative has often compared those plights. Little Marvin noted that his father’s family migrated from Alabama to Massachusetts during the Great Migration, while his mother’s family immigrated to the U.S. “As dark and as twisted and as sad and strange as our show is, I was determined to write a love letter to those Black families and Great Migration families that had sort of scrapped and scraped and made impossible journeys across the country…only to be confronted with the exact same tactics they left behind in the Jim Crow South,” he said. Little Marvin admitted that it could be grim work immersing himself in such ugly chapters of American history while working on Them-but important work nonetheless. When he dreamed up the series, several years back, “it was literally every day that I was reading about something which got me thinking about my own experiences being followed in stores, my own experiences being watched when I’m in a ‘wrong neighborhood.’ Those experiences extend all the way back through my life, but they also extend all the way back to the history of this country.” And in 1952 with a series of new developments, the demographics change almost overnight.”īeyond this slice of history, Marvin told Vanity Fair that he was overwhelmed with contemporary inspirations for Them. There was a brief, harmonious inflection point in Compton, a moment when the racially restrictive covenants were banned, said historian Josh Sides-“where Blacks and whites coexisted quite peacefully in Compton.” But the moment did not last long, per KCET: “When the legality of racially restrictive covenants was destroyed, white developers with the primary goal of turning a profit looked to creating affordable housing for aspiring middle class African Americans who wanted to move to Compton. Little Marvin was clear that Compton, with its intense segregation tactics, was far from an outlier at the time: “Compton was emblematic of an experience of it happening across the country.” “Anything from acts of vandalism, like burned-down salons, nails up and down the driveway, windows being destroyed to really psychologically terrifying tactics.” Urban League had actually identified, I want to say, 26 or 27 types of tactics that Black folks experienced,” Little Marvin said. In one act of startling aggression, white neighbors set up chairs outside the Emorys’ new home and blast radios. The first season of Them takes place across 10 days in East Compton, chronicling how the Emory family is met with shocking hostility from their neighbors. ![]() There was no more effective tool in 20th America than the racially restrictive covenant in terms of keeping neighborhoods white.” As historian Josh Sides similarly pointed out in an interview with KCET, “It’s difficult to overstate how white Compton was in the early ’50s and late ’40s…exclusively white with an extraordinary web of racially restrictive covenants with a very aggressive policing strategy about keeping Black people out. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |