On Oct. 24, Danny Widener gave the second lecture in Pomona College’s Connections series titled “Corner Stories: Place and Time in South Central LA,” where he spoke about the history of social movements in Los Angeles and their links to wider global struggles.
Widener is a professor of history at UC San Diego where he researches social movements, expressive culture and the global history of the anti-imperialist left. He is also the author of “Third Worlds Within: Multiethnic Movements and Transnational Solidarity.”
“Too often we think about history as things that happened in the past,” Widener said. “We think about the cops, or [other] horrible structures, but actually, the measure of how liberated a society is is how much free time people have … Students and young people are the only people for whom a certain amount of dead time is legitimated, and that’s connected to why students are activists, radicals.”
Director of the Humanities Studio, which hosts the Connections series, and English professor Kevin Dettmar explained that Widener’s lecture was a counterpoint to the previous lecture by Arthur Jones on conspiracy theories.
“[Jones’ talk] was about a destructive kind of connection, conspiracism, and I’m hoping Widener’s talk will begin to move us into conversations about the connections that build community,” Dettmar said.
Widener’s research draws from his family history of racial conflict in 1940s LA, where his family members were victims of racist attacks on Black activists and homeowners.
“The story I want to tell today starts in 1946 in the spring, May, early one morning when my family, the Aubrys, awoke to the site of the cross burning in their front lawn,” Widener said. “That was only the first racist attack on our family that happened that month.”
The homeowners Paul and Loretta Aubry were migrants from Louisiana. A couple weeks later, Paul Aubry’s brother Richard was stabbed by two white men in a staged home invasion.
In South LA, both Paul and Richard were known activists and targets of the Ku Klux Klan.
“[The police] said, ‘I can’t go after [the Klan] just because they’re prejudiced. You’re prejudiced against the Klan.’ This kind of farcical official response was a kind of counterpoint to this terroristic violence,” Widener said.
His family’s ties extended to African American liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s. As Widener described the stories and plight of Black people, from families to activists to musicians, he explained the conditions that led to tension as well as joy.
“Under these conditions of segregation across class communities … you have to imagine today like this, where Beyoncé would have to stay in the hood. It’s a totally different America, and you bump shoulders with these kinds of folks,” Widener said.
His aunt and stepmother were acquainted with Babatunde Olatunji, a Nigerian drummer, and Duke Ellington, as well as political figures like Nikita Khrushchev and Gamal Abdel Nasser. In fact, he learned that his stepmother met Fidel Castro very recently, which surprised him, as a scholar of Cuba.
Widener explained an early attempt to unify Black gangs, like the two main gangs in Venice Beach, Shoreline Crips and V13, in a neighborhood called Slauson, where the gang was well known for their own dance “the Slauson Shuffle.”
“A …[Slauson] guy named Ron Wilkins formed something called the community alert patrol, which was the first police monitoring organization in the U.S. …They would protect and observe,” Widener said. “This is really, in many ways, one of the hearts of Black insurgency in LA. This South Park, Fremont area is really where you find a lot of revolutionary nationals … because people had been fighting by 1965 for 20 years, just for dignity, for space, for their survival, their safety.”
Widener explained the racial shift in South LA through the conflict at the Marvista Gardens Housing Project with a population of mostly Black and brown people. He noted the ethnic shift over time in the area from white to Black and brown.
“It historically had two entrances, and one of those entrances was controlled by African Americans, and one of them was controlled by Chicanos,” he said. “That allowed each group to have a half monopoly on selling drugs to the white people who would come through … when they changed the entrance and when the housing authority closed one of them.”
“My whole framework is that the challenges between our communities are contradictions among the people. These are popular contradictions, instead of antagonistic contradictions.”
White working class people in Widener’s town who couldn’t afford to live in the industrial working class suburbs fought to keep Black people out.
“These are people who have a kind of class precarity, and when Black folks start to show up, they’re terrified of losing whatever economic mobility they expected or had,” Widener said.
Widener reflected on the importance of building a unified framework for liberation, using the development of Indigenous representation at the U.N. as a model. During a debate over whether to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival, the African Delegation walked out, leading to the International Decade of Indigenous People from 1995 to 2004. In this way, the liberation struggles of Indigenous people for many nations were interconnected.
“My whole framework is that the challenges between our communities are contradictions among the people. These are popular contradictions, instead of antagonistic contradictions.”
He said America has given up trying to put Black demands and Indigenous insistence upon the return of stolen land into a common framework. However, he believes it is still possible.
“That gets into the whole question of talking to your elders, going to the archive and believing right, believing that mobilized communities, given political education, given experience, given an opportunity to dialogue, will come around to the correct answers.”
Attendee Linden Beckford Jr. said it was essential to record and preserve the history of our communities because his family has roots in the neighborhoods Widener was speaking about.
“I’m very familiar with a lot of that history … But this part of the history is very important to be preserved … If it’s not recorded, it goes away like the dinosaur, and we just can’t afford that,” Beckford Jr. said.
Attendee Rosemarie Johnson found the way Widener integrated several perspectives into his narrative particularly refreshing.
“I’m quite impressed by the way he connected the dots …We have this big knowledge pie divided up just for convenience, [such as] sociology, history, etc. I liked his open-mindedness,” Johnson said. “I don’t have all the answers, but I have some …We’re not just in this ivory tower. We’re all connected.”