South Los Angeles Overview

Books and videos are available for checkout. Contact us for more information about how to access and use our other materials.

• South L.A. Documentation Collection: a community-created archive collection that includes high school yearbooks, photographs, clippings, and more documenting churches, schools, community organizations, and neighborhoods in South Los Angeles.


• Charlotta Bass/California Eagle Photo Collection: records of activist Charlotta Bass who used her newspaper, The California Eagle, based in South Los Angeles, to cover key political and social issues in L.A. See more info.


• L.A. Subject Files: under several headings, including African American, Arts and Culture, Demographics, Housing, Korean Americans, Latino/a, Neighborhoods, and Regional Planning; includes reports, clippings, flyers, and more.


• Apartheid in an American City: The Case of the Black Community in Los Angeles: a report from the Labor/Community Strategy Center, by Cynthia Hamilton


• Ode to Central Avenue: a KCET documentary program on the history of South Los Angeles.


• On Any Day: A Visit to Four Los Angeles Neighborhoods: a documentary on neighborhoods in South L.A., East L.A., Koreatown, and the Pico Union area.


• People's Guide to Los Angeles: a poster that maps sites of racial and class struggle in L.AÕs history and landscape. (See also www.pgtla.org.)

• Globalizing L.A.: Trade, Infrastructure, and Regional Development, Steven P. Erie (2004).


• Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007).


• L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present: Josh Sides (2004)


• Latino Los Angeles: Transformations, Communities, and Activism, Enrique Ochoa and Gilda Ochoa (2005)


• Los Angeles--Struggles Towards Multiethnic Community, edited by Edward T. Chang and Russell C. Leong (1993)


• Residential Apartheid: The American Legacy, Robert Bullard (1994)


• Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, Robin D.G. Kelley (1997).