Coveted Westside: How the Black Homeowners' Rights Movement Shaped Modern Los Angeles

Description: The Coveted Westside explores the middle-class African American-led movement to challenge housing discrimination, gain equal access to twentieth-century Los Angeles, and ward off resegregation. Black professionals, from actors to entrepreneurs to doctors, made the city's distinguished neighborhoods of West Adams Heights in the 1940s and the Crenshaw area, View Park, View Heights, and Windsor Hillsin the postwar era hubs in the fight for fair housing.

Review Quotes:

"This is a thoughtful, insightful, and thorough history of the Black homeowners' rights movement in LA. The Coveted Westside provides important contributions to our understanding of the history of LA, in particular the 'coveted' Westside and the civil rights efforts focused on desegregating housing there."

--Robert Bauman, New Mexico Historical Review

"Mandel, using personally collected archival material and interviews, has delivered to the scholarship on race, segregation, and urban housing a deeply researched and nuanced case study of Black homeowner politics and how they shaped Los Angeles. . . . Mandel's study is an essential read for any scholar seeking to deepen their understanding of segregation and white flight as an extended political struggle over property and property values that spans nearly the entire twentieth century."
--Marques Vestal, California History

"Built on an exhaustive foundation of research, The Coveted Westside shows that neither fame nor wealth inoculated Black Angelenos from the struggle for access to housing. The Black homeowners' rights movement was not just about occupying a home. It was also the ability to secure, shape, and interpret the neighborhood."
--Amanda I. Seligman, The Western Historical Quarterly

"The Coveted Westside is an extremely well-researched and clearly written manuscript that synthesizes a lot of the literature on Black Los Angeles and makes several key contributions of its own. Mandel delves into greater detail than anyone has concerning the precise mechanisms of zoning and housing restriction. The material [is] impeccably researched and novel . . . and the richest account I've seen."
--Josh Sides, Whitsett Professor of California History, California State University-Northridge, director of the Center for Southern California Studies, author of L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present

"The Coveted Westside is the most comprehensive treatment of how a highly motivated population of middle-class blacks fought for housing equality, and therefore made a specific and identifiable contribution to the broader enterprise of securing basic democratic rights in postwar America. "
--Daniel Widener, associate professor of history, University of California, San Diego, author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in black Los Angeles, 1942-1992