Marne L Campbell
Marne L. Campbell is an Associate Professor at Loyola Marymount University in the department of African American Studies. She earned her PhD in History at UCLA. She also has a Master’s Degree from the Interdepartmental Program in Afro-American Studies, and her undergraduate degrees are in History and Afro-American Studies from UCLA. Her book entitled, Making Black Los Angeles: Gender, Class and Community 1850 – 1917 (2016, University of North Carolina Press) emphasizes issues of labor, politics, and culture through the intersection of this diverse community with other communities of color. She has completed an extensive database of almost every African American family in Los Angeles (1850 - 1910).
Dr. Campbell has published essays in the Journal of Urban History as well as the Journal of African American History, and the American Studies Journal. Currently, she is working on a book about race, gender, and crime in Los Angeles, and co-authoring a book on civil unrest in America with Brenda E. Stevenson. Dr. Campbell is the recipient of the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has also received research support from the Huntington Library and the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at LMU.
Dr. Campbell’s research and teaching interests focus on the middle 19th and early 20th century urban U.S., and has taught a range of specialized courses on U.S. Religious History, History of the West, Gender History, and History of Los Angeles, as well as surveys of American and African American History.
Address: Loyola Marymount University
Department of African American Studies
4429 University Hall
1 LMU Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90045
Dr. Campbell has published essays in the Journal of Urban History as well as the Journal of African American History, and the American Studies Journal. Currently, she is working on a book about race, gender, and crime in Los Angeles, and co-authoring a book on civil unrest in America with Brenda E. Stevenson. Dr. Campbell is the recipient of the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. She has also received research support from the Huntington Library and the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at LMU.
Dr. Campbell’s research and teaching interests focus on the middle 19th and early 20th century urban U.S., and has taught a range of specialized courses on U.S. Religious History, History of the West, Gender History, and History of Los Angeles, as well as surveys of American and African American History.
Address: Loyola Marymount University
Department of African American Studies
4429 University Hall
1 LMU Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90045
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Anglo Americans immediately established a racial hierarchy upon settlement in the region. Initially, whites marginalized Mexican and Chinese people, while leaving the small number of Black Angelenos virtually unscathed and able to establish their own community. Many white residents treated them more as allies than as a threat to this local hierarchy. Los Angeles, therefore, provided relatively more freedom for middle class African Americans in particular.
My case study challenges older scholarly studies (beginning with Du Bois’s 1913 essay) about the black community that emphasize greater opportunity. Most historians of this early period underscore the accomplishments of the black middle class, emphasizing how conditions for black Angelenos, particularly in the area of land and property acquisition, diverged from those in other regions, where African Americans suffered racial apartheid immediately following the demise of Reconstruction. This rosy narrative, however, privileges the experiences of black middle class men, thereby neglecting the conditions of two very important components of Los Angeles’s black community – the working class and women.
This case study argues that black working class Angelenos faced many more obstacles to securing economic and social freedoms than their middle class counterparts. Nevertheless, largely through the efforts of women, the black working class in Los Angeles forged tenuous bonds of community with black elites and built close connections with immigrant laborers and other working class people of color. This interracial cooperation occurred at higher rates in Los Angeles than in any other region of the country. A key site of women-led black working-class agency and cross-racial community building was the religious Azusa Street Revival.
At the heart of this research is an extensive database that I have compiled of all African American households in Los Angeles between 1850 and 1910 (7,200 individuals in 1910 alone) as well as equal statistical profiles on all other groups of people of color with a representative sample of whites. It charts occupation, property ownership, education, marital status, family structure, migration patterns, racial construction, color stratification, and gender convention. This information includes material from several local and state archives, as well as many different kinds of documents such as the Spanish and Mexican land grants, wills, probate records, photographs, newspaper articles, maps, church and court records, city directories, insurance policies, and finally, household data from the US Census Bureau. While most historians of Los Angeles have considered some of these documents, most use only a fraction of this source base, often relying on abstracts and summaries of these materials. This database is the first of its kind on racial minorities in Los Angeles, and allows for a much deeper understanding of the complexities of their particular histories. Drawing on this data, my book focuses on the relationship of labor to property ownership, location of households, and families, while underscoring the role of class, gender, and culture in African American and other racialized communities. Since this database contains similar information about every group of people of color in Los Angeles, it has allowed me to make very specific comparisons and analyses about race and class.
My research employs social history and community history as the primary methodologies to evaluate sources for this book. While much of the research on Black Los Angeles tends to focus on larger periods of migration than this pre-World War I era, my work places emphasis on the black community’s founding families, who established various networks that attracted later (and larger) waves of black migrants. This work draws from a growing body of scholarship on Back Los Angeles as well as western and urban history, and builds on the work of Quintard Taylor (1998), Lawrence B. de Graaf, et al (2001), Josh Sides (2004), Mark Wild (2005), Douglas Flamming (2005), Scott Kurashige (2008), RJ Smith (2006), and Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon (2010). This work also lends to a larger discussion about race and gender in the America West including studies by Quintard Taylor (1994), Ann Butler (1987 and 1997), Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (1997), Mary Ann Irwin and James F. Brooks (2004), Miroslava Chavez-Garcia (2004), Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore (2008), Albert Broussard (1994), George Sanchez (1995), William Deverell (2005), Matt Garcia (2001), and Eric Avila (2004). Finally, this work contributes to the work of Jacqueline Jones (1985), Carole Marks (1989), and Nell Irvin Painter (1992), whose studies explore African American migration and labor.
This book will contribute to the historiographies of race relations in the American West; urban communities; western migration; women’s work, interracial dynamics, racial community formation, and class and labor relations. Pedagogically, this work lends itself to African American History and Studies, Working-Class Studies, Urban Studies, Racialized Labor Studies, Women’s Studies, and Religious Studies. This work is not intended to appeal solely to an academic readership, and therefore will also appeal to a broader audience, consisting of non-academics interested in Los Angeles and the American West, as well as family history, gender history, genealogy, and racial formation.
Anglo Americans immediately established a racial hierarchy upon settlement in the region. Initially, whites marginalized Mexican and Chinese people, while leaving the small number of Black Angelenos virtually unscathed and able to establish their own community. Many white residents treated them more as allies than as a threat to this local hierarchy. Los Angeles, therefore, provided relatively more freedom for middle class African Americans in particular.
My case study challenges older scholarly studies (beginning with Du Bois’s 1913 essay) about the black community that emphasize greater opportunity. Most historians of this early period underscore the accomplishments of the black middle class, emphasizing how conditions for black Angelenos, particularly in the area of land and property acquisition, diverged from those in other regions, where African Americans suffered racial apartheid immediately following the demise of Reconstruction. This rosy narrative, however, privileges the experiences of black middle class men, thereby neglecting the conditions of two very important components of Los Angeles’s black community – the working class and women.
This case study argues that black working class Angelenos faced many more obstacles to securing economic and social freedoms than their middle class counterparts. Nevertheless, largely through the efforts of women, the black working class in Los Angeles forged tenuous bonds of community with black elites and built close connections with immigrant laborers and other working class people of color. This interracial cooperation occurred at higher rates in Los Angeles than in any other region of the country. A key site of women-led black working-class agency and cross-racial community building was the religious Azusa Street Revival.
At the heart of this research is an extensive database that I have compiled of all African American households in Los Angeles between 1850 and 1910 (7,200 individuals in 1910 alone) as well as equal statistical profiles on all other groups of people of color with a representative sample of whites. It charts occupation, property ownership, education, marital status, family structure, migration patterns, racial construction, color stratification, and gender convention. This information includes material from several local and state archives, as well as many different kinds of documents such as the Spanish and Mexican land grants, wills, probate records, photographs, newspaper articles, maps, church and court records, city directories, insurance policies, and finally, household data from the US Census Bureau. While most historians of Los Angeles have considered some of these documents, most use only a fraction of this source base, often relying on abstracts and summaries of these materials. This database is the first of its kind on racial minorities in Los Angeles, and allows for a much deeper understanding of the complexities of their particular histories. Drawing on this data, my book focuses on the relationship of labor to property ownership, location of households, and families, while underscoring the role of class, gender, and culture in African American and other racialized communities. Since this database contains similar information about every group of people of color in Los Angeles, it has allowed me to make very specific comparisons and analyses about race and class.
My research employs social history and community history as the primary methodologies to evaluate sources for this book. While much of the research on Black Los Angeles tends to focus on larger periods of migration than this pre-World War I era, my work places emphasis on the black community’s founding families, who established various networks that attracted later (and larger) waves of black migrants. This work draws from a growing body of scholarship on Back Los Angeles as well as western and urban history, and builds on the work of Quintard Taylor (1998), Lawrence B. de Graaf, et al (2001), Josh Sides (2004), Mark Wild (2005), Douglas Flamming (2005), Scott Kurashige (2008), RJ Smith (2006), and Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramon (2010). This work also lends to a larger discussion about race and gender in the America West including studies by Quintard Taylor (1994), Ann Butler (1987 and 1997), Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (1997), Mary Ann Irwin and James F. Brooks (2004), Miroslava Chavez-Garcia (2004), Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore (2008), Albert Broussard (1994), George Sanchez (1995), William Deverell (2005), Matt Garcia (2001), and Eric Avila (2004). Finally, this work contributes to the work of Jacqueline Jones (1985), Carole Marks (1989), and Nell Irvin Painter (1992), whose studies explore African American migration and labor.
This book will contribute to the historiographies of race relations in the American West; urban communities; western migration; women’s work, interracial dynamics, racial community formation, and class and labor relations. Pedagogically, this work lends itself to African American History and Studies, Working-Class Studies, Urban Studies, Racialized Labor Studies, Women’s Studies, and Religious Studies. This work is not intended to appeal solely to an academic readership, and therefore will also appeal to a broader audience, consisting of non-academics interested in Los Angeles and the American West, as well as family history, gender history, genealogy, and racial formation.