Magical History Tour

Felicia Settle grew up in Los Angeles, yet it wasn’t until Sunday that she learned that more than half of the city’s 44 founders were black or of African descent. Or that the Pentecostal movement started in a small Echo Park house where blacks and whites worshiped together. Or that an area now sliced by the Santa Monica Freeway was once an upper-class black neighborhood.

“You don’t learn it in school,” said Settle, a counselor in a Los Angeles middle school. “It’s important to know that we have a place in history.”

Settle was one of about a dozen Angelenos who packed into a van Sunday morning and saw a side of the city often absent from history tomes or guidebooks--historic black Los Angeles.

Their guide was Ken Perkins, co-owner of a Compton travel service who was inspired by watching Compton middle school students enthusiastically soak up information on Memphis’ black heritage on a similar tour three years ago.

“A light went on,” said Perkins, 45.

A Compton native who now lives in Cerritos, Perkins realized that no one was offering similar tours of Los Angeles. He secluded himself in libraries, poring over old books and documents at the Los Angeles Historical Society and USC, and slowly discovered a hidden history of the City of Angels.

“I didn’t even know we had a history here. Frankly, I thought most black people came here after World War II,” Perkins said. “For me it was amazement, pride and awe.”

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In his four-hour tours, which he offers irregularly through KEP Tours, Perkins points out the subtle remains of that history, often hidden in plain view amid strip malls and billboards. Here are some of the stories he told:

Tucked away in a plaza behind a McDonald’s and an office building in downtown Los Angeles stands a monument to Biddie Mason. Born in 1818 as a slave in Mississippi, Mason’s owner brought her to Southern California in the 1850s. She walked behind a wagon most of the way. One of Mason’s three daughters became romantically attached to Robert Owens, a prominent black Los Angeles businessman.

As the Civil War approached, Mason’s owner tried to take the family to Texas, a slave state, but Owens organized a group of prominent Los Angeles leaders and law enforcement officials who took the Mason family from the Southerner.

A judge granted Mason her freedom, and she became a midwife, investing the money she earned in a parcel of swampy land just south of the then-city center.

That parcel on Spring Street between 2nd and 4th streets became the heart of Los Angeles’ financial district, and Mason became wealthy. She founded the city’s first black church, the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, in her living room and bought food for the needy. Prominent black businessmen had their offices in the buildings on her property.

“I’d like for them to make a movie about this,” Settle said as Perkins told Mason’s story in front of the striking stone monument to the freed slave.

Northeast of downtown, hidden in the urban sprawl, is an eight-block area once known as “the Island.” Black families--including some of the original settlers of Los Angeles, some of whom were Mexicans of black ancestry--settled on the land when it was cheap, rural and vacant in the late 19th century. As the city grew around them, they remained, isolated by segregation but tightly knit.

A few blocks away is a simple white house with a faded sign marking it as the birthplace of the Pentecostal movement. The house was owned at the turn of the century by William and Jennie Seymour, who began leading mixed-race services inside. Their boisterous worship became so popular that, once, so many people crowded together for a service that the front porch collapsed.

Eventually the movement was chased out of the neighborhood by whites who objected to racial mixing, Perkins said. The Pentecostalists settled on Azusa Street downtown in a predominantly black neighborhood.

Just north of the Santa Monica Freeway on Hobart Boulevard are faded stone pillars that mark the West Adams Heights neighborhood. During the 1940s and 1950s, the stately Victorian manors housed Los Angeles’ black elite. Today, many are in disrepair, and the neighborhood is bisected by the freeway and studded with vacant lots.

Yet the houses, some of which are being restored, drew sighs of admiration from the sightseers. On one block near the current location of the First AME church, Perkins pointed out the former homes of singer Lena Horne and actresses Butterfly McQueen and Hattie McDaniel.

The tour-goers, mostly Los Angeles natives, reminisced about their childhoods as Perkins drove past the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building on Wilshire Boulevard and Western Avenue, once one of the largest black-owned businesses in the nation. The firm is now housed in a building designed by black architect Paul Revere Williams.

Perkins pointed out several, but still only a fraction, of the 3,000 buildings designed by Williams, who was known as “architect to the stars” for the homes he designed for Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra and Lon Chaney, among others.

“These people have become my heroes,” Perkins said of Williams, Mason and the founders of Golden State Mutual. “They faced terrible discrimination . . . and they became the best.”

“When you don’t have this kind of information, it damages the children,” said Paige Leemhuis, 51, a bilingual education teacher. But learning about positive contributions of blacks can bolster youths’ self-esteem, she said.

Leemhuis took careful notes on the tour. She said she plans to tell her third-grade students about the true history of blacks in Los Angeles. “It’s an uplift,” she said.