Following the Readers : Media: The Los Angeles Sentinel is moving to the Crenshaw district from its longtime home, which has transformed from a black to a Latino area. Some bemoan the change, but newspaper officials say they must keep in touch with their community.

The Los Angeles Sentinel, one of the nation’s largest African American-owned newspapers, has given up the ghost of a bygone era, pulling up its deep roots in South-Central Los Angeles and moving to the Crenshaw area, the hub of black life here today.

The move signals the closing of the African American era along Central Avenue, which was once the bustling heart of the city’s black community and which now has become predominantly Latino.

“Demographics demand that we make the move,” said Kenneth Thomas, the paper’s publisher. “Our economic survival is dependent on our staying in touch with the constituency we serve and that constituency is no longer on Central Avenue.”

Thomas moved the paper to a 7,000-square-foot building at 3800 Crenshaw Boulevard in one of the few areas of the city that has remained largely African American.

Indeed, Crenshaw Boulevard, with its black-owned clothing stores, hair salons, cleaners, nightclubs, restaurants, pharmacies and offices for lawyers and doctors, is often described as having the economic vitality that was once present along Central Avenue during its heyday in the 1940s.

For years, the Sentinel resisted the journey west, preferring to remain on Central Avenue.

City Councilwoman Rita Walters, whose 9th Council District includes Central Avenue, encouraged the paper to remain as the centerpiece of a small, historic African American district. The Sentinel and the once-proud Dunbar Hotel, now a low-income apartment hotel, would have been two landmarks.

“I thought as we try to revitalize the area, there was really something symbolic involved in the Sentinel remaining,” said Walters, who lived in the Central Avenue corridor when she moved to Los Angeles in 1955 from Arkansas. “They have to make decisions that are best for their businesses, but I have a twinge of melancholy about the move.”

But Thomas said he had little choice if he wanted to keep the paper alive.

“I felt that if the Sentinel is to remain in the eye of the community it professes to serve, it must go where its readership have pitched their dreams--and that, like Horace Greeley urged, is to go west, or, at least, to the Westside.”

The paper was founded in 1933 by the late Leon H. Washington, a civil rights leader who used the Sentinel to fight segregation and promote positive aspects of black social life.

Ironically, as the racial restrictions in housing began to fall, many of the residents left, particularly the middle class.

The area was also hard hit during the Watts riots. Jobs left the urban core and crime increased.

Today, Latinos make up more than 70% of the residents in the Central Avenue community from 12th Street to Slauson Avenue, and many of the stores along the commercial strip cater to their tastes.

In recent years, the Sentinel’s circulation has slipped to about 25,000 from its peak of 56,000 in the 1960s. The paper has been struggling financially and the move is an effort to shore it up.

“The move to Crenshaw represents a recognition of a new reality,” said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, which is based in the Crenshaw community. “It means that now the Sentinel will be closer to where the largest concentration of African Americans live, in a community that represents a broad social and economic influence.”

On Wednesday, the Sentinel’s 45 employees were busy packing and moving.

Many were also busy putting out an edition.

“I don’t remember the heyday on Central Avenue,” said Dennis Schatzman, a Sentinel staff writer. “I shop on Crenshaw, wear African clothes I buy there, and I frequent the bars and eateries there. I’m more in tune with Crenshaw and I think our move will enhance our ability to cover the area.”

Amid scores of stacked boxes, some of which contained decades of history, publisher Thomas noticed that someone had neglected to pack an old laminated front page, a treasured memento, that hung in the entrance way.

It was the Jan. 26, 1934, issue in which Washington sought to flex the area’s economic muscle by calling a boycott of white-owned businesses that refused to hire blacks. He drove his car in front of a furniture store with a sign that read, “Don’t Spend Where You Can’t Work.” Washington was arrested and thrown in jail. The story led the paper that week.

“This is the issue that made the paper,” Thomas said. “Someone forgot to pack this. It’s going to be hung in the new building.”

Washington’s arrest was first of many campaigns the paper championed over the years.

This week the paper had a different message. It was reflected in a cartoon that is running in today’s edition, Thomas said.

“It shows a mother standing in the old homestead waving her hand,” he said. “She says, ‘We’re moving, not leaving.’ ”