Ladera Heights Grapples With Its Racial Harmony

It’s a slow day at the Arcade Barbershop that serves Ladera Heights, an affluent community of several thousand homes tucked between Culver City and Inglewood. A handful of long-time customers, all of them white, trickle in for an old-fashioned haircut, to listen to a radio playing music from the 1930s and ‘40s and talk about how the neighborhood is changing.

“A Greek fellow, an old-timer who lived down the street from me, moved the other day,” one elderly customer says. “The only people who come to look at the house are colored.”

A few yards away at Hair Architects, a line of customers, all of them black, wait inside a prosperous black-owned barbershop offering designer cuts, manicures and pedicures.

“It’s an extraordinary opportunity for blacks,” said Henry Graham, who opened his shop 22 months ago. “I started out with four barber chairs and now I have nine.”

Welcome to Ladera Heights. Long considered a jewel of race relations in Los Angeles, Ladera is becoming a lesson in how integration is as difficult to maintain as it is to achieve. In a Westside neighborhood of 6,700--57% black, 34% white in the 1990 census--a slower, subtler version of what was once called “white flight” is taking place.

A little more than a decade ago, whites were Ladera’s majority. Today, few whites with children are moving in. The median age of white residents is about 60, compared to 40 for blacks. Enrollment in the two local elementary schools is more than 90% African American.

And so a black real estate agent buys Ladera Realty. A white restaurateur adds chicken wings, grits and blues music to the 1950s-style diner he inherited from his father. A clergyman, aware that Sunday church service is usually America’s most segregated hour, promotes his integrated flock to would-be members. A disenchanted white couple who expected more new arrivals of their own race wistfully prepare to move out.

Acceptance is civil, adjustment is earnest. The people of Ladera still covet their integrated existence in an era marked by heightened racial isolation and separatist stereotypes. In supermarkets, in churches and on the street, people are far more likely to be unified by economic class than divided by race. The crime rate is low. Disdain for public education is high. Property values are cherished by a vigilant homeowners association that removes graffiti overnight, works closely with law enforcement and nudges residents to trim their lawns.

“Most people couldn’t care less about the color of the person who lives next door as long as the properties are well maintained,” said Ronnie Cooper, a white resident who is president of the Ladera Civic Assn.

To wander through Ladera Heights and the neighborhoods that surround it is to grapple with the complexities of integration, particularly as it applies to America’s oldest racial gulf, the gap between blacks and whites. In this small slice of unincorporated Los Angeles County, where the average family income is nearly $90,000 a year, residents find life to be a series of trade-offs--compromises that, in many cases, depend not on your class but your race.

A Welcome Exception

Three years ago, a developer began adding more than 60 luxury homes to Ladera Heights on a 37-acre hilltop tract he called Ladera Heights Estates. To sell the four- and five-bedroom Mediterranean and colonial-style houses, listed for $450,000 to $650,000, he took pains to launch a sales campaign directed at African American professionals.

Paula and Harlan Sims, two black regional executives for Xerox, were among the first to buy. Their arrival symbolized another step in a long historical trail that has marked change in Los Angeles: the inexorable westward movement of the upward bound.

What is happening today in Ladera happened more dramatically decades ago to the neighboring upper-middle-class communities of View Park, Baldwin Hills and Windsor Hills, which lie east of Ladera and west of the Crenshaw district and are now populated almost entirely by African Americans.

In the early 1960s, the civil rights movement prompted well-to-do blacks to move into those formerly all-white neighborhoods--and prompted almost all whites to flee within a few years.

Ladera was different.

It was not until the late 1960s and early ‘70s that blacks in significant numbers began buying into this neighborhood of 3,500 ranch-style homes, some with sweeping views of the Pacific. Some anxious whites left. But in what was considered a remarkable victory for race relations, more of them stayed put, eventually creating an even and harmonious balance by the 1980s.

This was rare, demographers say, because whites are historically uncomfortable being a minority group. It is unusual to see a majority-black community with a substantial white population.

“It’s as integrated a community as a black community could get,” said USC sociology professor Angela James.

There is another way of looking at Ladera. However cordial they may be, the two main groups--older whites and younger blacks--are members of two distinct generations. What this produces, says Ladera Realty owner Val Murphy, is “an integrated community that isn’t integrated.”

Whites continue to savor their neighborhood.

“It is our little secret--a paradise,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a white woman who is senior associate at the Center for Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate School.

Jo Marie P. Noble, a black actress, was living in Inglewood when she discovered Ladera. She was charmed by the pride that people had in their homes and by the racial blend. “I feel comfortable in a mixture of people. I need a balance,” she said.

Noble was struggling for work at the time, but after she won the role of the mother in the long-running TV sitcom “Family Matters,” she moved to a spacious two-story house in Ladera and enrolled her daughter in Frank Parent Elementary, the local public school.

Like many middle-class blacks, Noble accepted a traditional consequence of integration: When you live among whites, you must routinely travel to other areas of town if you wish to maintain your cultural identity. It never fazed her to drive to Fox Hills in Culver City to get her hair done or to the Crenshaw district for Jamaican food. Or, for that matter, to go to Beverly Hills for shopping.

It did faze Paula Leonhauser and Chuck Kogon.

‘I Feel Disconnected’

On a clear day, from the second floor of their English-style cottage, Leonhauser and Kogon, a white couple, can see Catalina.

“You feel like you are on top of the world, like you are in a treehouse watching planes come in,” Kogon said.

The couple, who run a joint family therapy program, live with their two small children on a primarily black street just outside Ladera’s boundaries but still call their neighborhood Ladera. Houses seem to be freshly painted before they need another coat, trees are trimmed and curbs are freshly marked.

In the late 1980s, when they moved here from another West Los Angeles community, Kogon and Leonhauser felt like pioneers. Housing prices in Ladera, Windsor Hills and View Park were easily $100,000 or more below comparable homes on the Westside--largely a consequence, real estate agents acknowledged, of racial prejudice. There was much talk of a white yuppie invasion, in which economics would drive integration. Leonhauser, who had discovered the neighborhood while a student teacher at Parent Elementary and yearned to raise a family in a mixed neighborhood, imagined herself as the first of a wave of whites.

It did not work out that way. First the recession struck, slowing the sale of homes. Then came the riots in 1992, imposing their searing racial identity crisis, raising a wall between whites and minorities.

“You had the feeling there were not going to be many white professionals moving into the neighborhood,” Kogon said, groping for the right words. “The riots kind of put a stop to that dream. You didn’t have a sense that people were going to follow in your footsteps.”

For all their good intentions, Leonhauser and Kogon could not adjust. Generations of blacks have routinely adjusted to isolation in white neighborhoods, of being a token minority, but for whites such experiences are relatively new and more burdensome.

“There is no Starbucks,” she said one day. “There is no Barnes and Nobles. I feel disconnected.”

With their oldest son nearing elementary school age, they worried about test scores at the public school, which ranked far below those of Westside schools. Then last fall O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder and another wave of racial introspection swept over Los Angeles. Their feelings of isolation deepened. They decided to move farther west, where their practice is located.

They are ambivalent about this small defeat for integration.

“I could easily be dubbed a ‘white flighter,’ but I don’t view myself that way,” Leonhauser said.

‘Snobs on the Hill’

One of the central values shared by black and white parents here--a refusal to send their children to local public schools--ensures the eventual demise of an integrated community.

Of all the factors that have lowered the white population of Ladera, the biggest is the disappearance of young families with school-age children. With a larger stake in Ladera, black families are more willing to accept the compromise of living here and sending their children to private schools. White parents rarely see that as an option.

The schools are administered by the Inglewood Unified School District. At one of two local elementary schools, Parent Elementary, Principal Marie P. Stricklin’s office wall holds pictures of graduating classes from 1986 to the present. Parent has active family support and test scores that are among the highest in the Inglewood district, yet each graduation picture tells its own story about the diminishing white population.

The resistance fits into the upper-middle-class philosophy that has shaped Ladera.

Gene Eldridge, a black Ladera resident, recalls his anger at moving here with his family in the 1970s, only to find that his daughter was about to be bused back out of the then largely white community as part of a school integration plan.

Jewett L. Walker Jr., co-president of the PTA at Parent Elementary School, who grew up in View Park and went to neighborhood schools through Crenshaw High, says disdain for local schools has hurt the community.

There remains an argument over whether the low opinion of Inglewood schools is a racial slight generated by the original white residents of Ladera or a class-based one.

Ladera homeowner activist Ronnie Cooper, the last white to serve on the Inglewood Board of Education, insists that race was never the issue.

“We were always known as the snobs on the hill,” she said. “This is not about race, it has to do with class.”

God and Man

“Integration,” says the Rev. Mark F. Buchanan, pastor of Ladera’s Knox Presbyterian Church, “is something you have to work at and grow with. We as a nation don’t always integrate ourselves naturally.”

And so Buchanan, whose congregation is 55% black and 45% white, labors to maintain a racial balance that is remarkable within virtually any denomination.

Racial strains from the riots, the Simpson trial and concerns over affirmative action have all taken their toll on church attendance, he acknowledges. “It affected the momentum we had achieved.”

The Sunday before the Simpson verdicts were read, Buchanan urged the 200 members of his congregation to pray for “someone of a different ethnicity.”

His prayers appear answered. On Sundays, blacks and whites still sit together, with none of the self-segregation that plagues many offices or college campuses.

Not far away is Calvary Baptist Church, another symbol of how dominoes are falling. Calvary, an African American church, recently moved here from 60th Street and Compton Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles, leaving an area that had shifted from black to predominantly Latino. It purchased an inactive synagogue whose members had merged with a larger West Los Angeles temple.

“We made the move to position the church for growth into the 21st century,” said the Rev. Clinton Benton.

That was what University Christian Church did in the early 1960s, moving here from its old location near USC when the ethnic character of that once-white neighborhood began to change.

Today, University Christian advertises its integrated congregation. In one postcard, the entire congregation is posed in front of the church.

The caption could be a plea for the future of Ladera itself.

“Put yourself in this picture,” it says.

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Ladera Heights

Located between Culver City and Inglewood, Ladera Heights is an affluent bridge between white and minority Los Angeles.