‘Black Flight’--Residents of L.A. Return to Roots

Fed up with the traffic, the drive-by shootings and the police helicopters of South-Central Los Angeles, Hazel and Joseph Hampton packed their belongings in a U-Haul truck this month and returned to their roots in this Northern Louisiana lumber town.

The Hamptons had left Marion on their wedding day in 1960, abandoning the racially segregated South for the jobs and the hope of California. In Los Angeles, they raised five children in a small yellow stucco home on 70th Street.

With their return to Louisiana, the Hamptons became part of a dramatic but little noticed “reverse migration” of blacks from Southern California. Each year, several thousand trucks and station wagons carrying black families begin heading eastward from Los Angeles on Interstate 10, headed for Louisiana, Texas and other Southern states.

“I was getting older, getting slower. I decided to take it easy,” Joseph Hampton, 57, said as he sat in the living room of his newly built Louisiana home. He recently retired from his job with a Hawthorne aerospace firm. “It’s nice and quiet out here. You get away from the hustling and bustling way of life.”

“Black flight” has become a fact of life in South Los Angeles. Unlike “white flight” that was triggered by racial tensions, the large migration of blacks away from local neighborhoods is precipitated by growing congestion and violence in the city.

South Los Angeles still is home to more blacks than any community west of the Mississippi. But now, it seems, there is a house on every block that is left vacant by a family leaving the area. Local community activists have coined the phrase “Don’t Move, Improve!” as they attempt to stem the outflow of people.

In the summer, when the annual exodus peaks, South Los Angeles moving companies will pay their employees to work overtime to meet the demand.

Many former residents of South Los Angeles have resettled in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, where a sizable black community has existed for years. From 1980 to 1985, the black population in the Riverside-San Bernardino area increased 39%, making it the fastest growing black community in the West.

For other black residents of Los Angeles, like the Hamptons, the journey eastward is longer. They choose the familiarity, the memories and, in some cases, the property they left behind in the South a generation ago.

A recent study by the U.S. Census Bureau showed that in the 1980s more blacks migrated out of California and other Western states than migrated in, reversing a 100-year trend. If “black flight” continues at the pace of the last 15 years, at least 5,000 black Los Angeles County residents will resettle in Southern states this year.

The Hamptons’ journey begins and ends in a rural Southern town, where the last three decades have brought momentous social change, but where the land itself has remained essentially the same for a century.

Marion (pop. 989) is nestled in the rolling hills of northern Louisiana. Bayous and slow-moving rivers give way to thick forests of pine, oak and pecan trees. A sign on the state highway leading into town declares: “Marion, Timber Capitol (sic) of the South.”

The Hamptons built their dream home just outside Marion, on the 40-acre farm of ocher-colored soil where Hazel’s late father once cultivated corn, cotton and peanuts.

Complete with a pair of two-car garages, the Hamptons’ new five-bedroom, white brick home has something of the flavor of suburban Southern California. By contrast, most of the Hamptons’ neighbors on the unpaved country road live in tumbledown, wood-frame houses.

The new home is a reminder of the relative affluence the Hamptons enjoyed in California. But Hazel, 58, said that during her three decades in Los Angeles she always missed the clean air and moist skies of Louisiana.

“I cried when I went to California,” she said. “I was used to rain. It never rained (in Los Angeles), it took a year for it to rain.. . . . To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to die out there. I looked at it like being a long ways from home.”

Part-time Marion policeman Lee A. Washington has seen other Louisiana exiles return, most of them retirees who spent their working lives in California, Detroit and other faraway places.

“They went out, made some money and came back,” said Washington, 52, a lifelong Marion resident who also works in the local lumber industry. “Some want to come back, but there’s no jobs.”

One of the returnees is Patsy Lee Williams, 55, Hazel Hampton’s sister, who left Marion to live in Europe with her husband, a U.S. Army officer. Since 1974, Williams and her husband have lived on the edge of her father’s property, just down the road from where the Hamptons built their home.

“The Lord told me she would be the next one to come back,” Williams said when she greeted the Hamptons on the front porch of her home. “And she was.”

For Williams, the Hamptons’ homecoming offered a chance to reminisce and to ponder the fate of the family--all of Hazel’s brothers and sisters left Marion and were scattered across the country. From an old dresser, Williams produced several tattered photo albums.

“Who’s this?” Joseph Hampton asked with a playful smile, pointing to one time-worn photograph.

“That’s me!” Williams answered indignantly. “Don’t you recognize a good looking woman when you see one? I got fatter in a lot of spots, Joe, but it’s still me.”

Back in Los Angeles, a week earlier, the Hamptons had loaded a rented 26-foot moving truck and attached a trailer with the help of their children, all of whom were staying behind in Los Angeles.

The block of 70th Street where the Hamptons lived for nearly 30 years consists mostly of attractive tile-roofed homes, decorated with flower and cactus gardens. But the Hamptons’ children said the apparent calm belies the shootings and thefts that at times make life in the neighborhood unbearable.

“I wouldn’t mind getting out of here,” said the Hamptons’ oldest son, Charles. “It’s too wild.”

The Hamptons’ youngest daughter, 23-year-old Joanne, who is moving into her parents’ home, added: “(In Louisiana) the car insurance is cheaper, there’s no drive-by shootings. . . . That’s the reasons I’d go back.”

But for now, the Hamptons’ children said the lack of employment in Marion--where the median family income is only $14,027--will keep them from following their parents.

The South-Central Los Angeles neighborhood where the children grew up was much more peaceful when the Hamptons bought the home in 1964 for $16,000. Back then, there were no Bloods and Crips.

By 1975, however, the neighborhood began to change and Joseph said he bought the iron security bars that now cover the windows. Later, the iron bars became something of a fad in the neighborhood. At one point, Hazel remembers, the demand for the security devices was so great that a series of entrepreneurs flooded the neighborhood with flyers in a brief bidding war.

Gang violence and crack cocaine took hold in the 1980s. Not long ago, Hazel said, a family of four only a few doors down were killed when a gunman mistook the home for that of an enemy. Another neighbor, about a block away on Cimarron Street, lost a son in another shooting--rival gang members took revenge upon the young man even after his death by shooting up his casket.

To get away from the increasingly unpredictable city, the Hamptons reserved their moving truck several months in advance from the South-Central U-Haul on Vermont Avenue.

The Hamptons wanted to beat the rush of the summer months--demand for rental moving trucks is greatest when school is out. For employees at the rental company, the exodus of black families means summers filled with long hours of overtime, according to manager Calvin Green. On Saturday mornings, lines of anxious movers form before dawn at the office.

“In the summertime, you don’t want to be in the office,” Green said, shaking his head at the thought. At one point last summer, he said, “We refused to take people’s money for deposits because we were completely bone dry of trucks.”

As Joseph Hampton filled his rented truck with the last of his Los Angeles-bought furniture, he waxed philosophical about his long stay in California.

Despite the problems in the neighborhood, Joseph said: “I’ve seen my best days out here. I never complained about it. I never regretted living here. . . . I’m going to miss it. The people I knew on the job. It became part of me.”

With the truck loaded, the Hamptons headed north on the Long Beach Freeway. The first few miles went smoothly, until the eastbound San Bernardino Freeway handed them one last reminder of Southern California living.

A multi-car pileup of some sort or another backed up traffic for two hours, Hazel said.

“We were trapped in that for 10 miles.”

Both Los Angeles and Marion were different worlds in 1960. The San Bernardino Freeway had only been completed for three years and, for most of the long trip through deserts of New Mexico and Arizona, the Hamptons drove their 1957 yellow and black Oldsmobile along old U.S. Route 66.

Like many of the estimated 1 million blacks who settled in Los Angeles between 1940 and 1960, the Hamptons were drawn to the region by its booming economy. Eventually, Joseph landed a job at the Northrop Corp. plant in Hawthorne, where he made aircraft parts for more than 20 years.

But Joseph recalled that his friends in Louisiana were at first skeptical that he would succeed in Los Angeles. With so many Louisiana residents then traveling to California, the land “out West” had become something of a myth, and the stories of success that returning migrants told seemed like tall tales.

“They said, ‘Oh man, you’re going to be on the soup line in California,’ ”

Joseph celebrated when he saw the sign “Welcome to California” that greeted travelers at the state line in Needles. Only then, he said, did he realize he had finally escaped the segregated South.

“I saw that sign and I said, ‘I’m home.” ’

Jim Crow laws that made blacks second-class citizens were still very much alive in Louisiana. The Hamptons said they never voted before arriving in California--a white’s-only political structure made their votes meaningless.

Joseph was to receive another stunning reminder that he was no longer in the South on his first day in Los Angeles. While running an errand at a shopping mall on Crenshaw Boulevard, he saw an interracial couple--a black man and a white woman--embracing. As he strolled down the sidewalk, he was so distracted by the sight that he hit his head on a sign post.

“I was a green country boy,” Joseph said, laughing. “I had never seen something like that. Down South, that was a no-no. You were a dead dog.”

Now, in Marion as in other Southern towns, Jim Crow laws are only a bad memory.

“If it hadn’t changed, I wouldn’t be sitting here,” Joseph said. “When I left this town, even the job where I worked had signs on the restrooms that said ‘Colored’ and ‘White.’ People seem to respect each other now.”

On their Marion farm, Joseph and Hazel are surrounded by other, more pleasant reminders of the family history before dreams of a better life led them to Los Angeles.

A few feet away from their new Louisiana home is the crumbling tin-roof house where Hazel grew up with four brothers and sisters. Her father bought the house and farmland with money he earned leading a blues band that performed in the 1950s throughout northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas.

Nature has now reclaimed much of the old house. The garden where Hazel’s late mother grew vegetables is overgrown with tall weeds. Young, 6-foot tall pine trees are growing in what once was a fenced-off pasture where horses grazed. The pecan seedlings that Hazel and her sister planted when they were children have grown into 40-foot-tall trees.

Hazel seemed to draw strength from the sagging old building and its memories. She watched quietly with a visitor as deep-gray rain clouds gathered over the farm.

“I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time,” she said.