Tipping Points: African Americans Gain Agency in Lynwood

For many of the city’s white residents, The Watts Riots represented the beginning of the end. Over time it remained clear that African Americans would remain persistent in their desire to relocate their families to regions they felt to be safer and more stable. And while the calculations of some of these aspirational African American families - especially those seeking to purchase homes in cities like Lynwood - likely included a basic assumption around the ability of African Americans and White people to coexist peacefully, As evidenced all across the country, few Whites were sold on this integrated vision of the future. 

Josh Sides chronicled the changing face of Compton, Lynwood’s neighbor to the south, in his work “Straight Into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb.” Sides tells tales of white denizers rallying to “Keep the Negroes North of 130th Street” but ultimately losing out to migration pressures from surrounding regions. The reaction was typically negative even though African American families entering the region were generally moving into nice homes and operating as net contributors to the community.

In Lynwood, slowly but surely the de facto and de jure control that African Americans had over the city continued to mount. It was against this backdrop that Robert Henning emerged on the civic scene in Lynwood. From protesting trash collection plans in the late 1970s to becoming the city’s first black council members in 1983 and then ascending to the position of mayor in 1986, Henning in many ways represented the formal acknowledgement that Lynwood was no longer the “lily white” city that it once prided itself on being.

Henning called his victory “historic” because it was. Prior to Henning’s victory Black had largely been locked out of prominent roles in cities like Lynwood and the neighboring communities of Compton and South Gate. Post-victory, the seemingly ever-present Century Freeway warrior John Byork proclaimed when asked about Henning’s victory, “I’m now a minority, but my neighbors are just as good or better than the ones that are no longer here.” Numbers suggest that Byork was one of the few White residents to cast a positive light upon the city’s transformation. At the time of Henning’s selection as mayor, the city was 20% white, 34% black and 43% Latino. As the city’s white residents continued to flee, people of color continued to pour in. 

The writing for an eventual takeover by the growing Latino population was on the wall all along. While Black politicians had finally mounted a sufficient amount of agency within the Black community, it would clear that the Latino movement would come. Such recognition was seen in the neighboring city of Compton when Omar Bradley - who would eventually go on to become a scandal-ridden and controversial mayor of the city - was first elected to city council. He would note an interest in understanding the needs of the city’s Latino community before later taking actions that explicitly alienated and/or countered the community’s interests.

Prior to Henning’s assumption of the mayorship in Lynwood, he was joined on the city council in 1985 by an African American woman named Evelyn Wells. For a period of time, Wells would become a staple on the city council having been the one that nominated Henning to become the city’s next mayor in 1986 and eventually becoming the city’s first female mayor in 1989. The year prior, Wells was credited with spearheading the push for the creation of a gang task force to help tackle the growing gang issue in the city. At that time, dozens of people were dying each year at the hands of gang violence; with the city’s African American community being materially impacted.

Albeit inconsequential to the larger story, it is worth noting briefly that Wells was nothing if not prone to controversy. Days after Wells’ husband, Donald Morris, publicly accused her of having an affair with another city employee - which was true - he was gunned down by yet another city employee by the name Samuel Baxter. Wells was never found guilty of any wrongdoing and Baxter was one of the individuals profiled in a 2012 New York Times article detailing support that he helped to provide to other prisoners dealing with dementia. 

In 1991 as the opening of the highway drew closer, Mayor Henning stressed that the city council was “trying to upgrade the community” in preparation for what many hoped to be an influx of economic activity. He made reference to the $1.5 million the city had recently spent on new sidewalks as evidence. But even with city leaders grasping onto the spoils they believed the Century Freeway would bring, Henning would also note that the biggest challenge for city leaders was “serving an ethnically diverse community.”

He went on to add, “we can’t just think of our own culture…originally there was a white flight when the blacks moved in. Now there is another shift in the population as blacks move away and Latinos move in.”

Kendrick Karifa-Johnson, a director of community development in the city framed it more explicitly. “People want to keep things the way they are, but this may not be possible in a multiethnic society,” he observed. The complexities and realities associated with his statement would begin to take hold over the city in the years that followed.

The apex of Black power in the city would take many, many years to reach. And it would ultimately be gone in what feels like a historical blink of the eye. Several decades later, a Latina politician would come under considerable fire for aligning herself too closely with the interests of African Americans in the city.