A Lasting Legacy from Bradley’s Five Terms

Tom Bradley’s election as mayor of Los Angeles 26 years ago provided a map of how to deal with the many ethnic and cultural changes that are revolutionizing the Southland.

Today, more than a year after his death, Bradley is a civic icon. But that was not the case on election night 1973.

His race against incumbent Sam Yorty, a rematch after his 1969 loss, was exceptionally bitter. Bradley savaged Yorty in a televised debate and battered him with speeches and television commercials.

The white downtown Los Angeles establishment, still a power in those days, was highly suspicious of a black liberal who could not be admitted to their clubs or hired for a substantive job by their firms.

Although it had been eight years since the Watts riots, the city remained tense, with television and the papers full of stories about demonstrations against the Vietnam War, Black Panther activism and growing feuds among ethnic groups.

Bradley’s great accomplishment was bringing a feeling of peace and reconciliation to the city, uniting fractured groups and restoring a feeling of confidence that peaked in one of his proudest moments, the 1984 Olympic Games.

Part of it was his demeanor.

Bradley was a tall, athletic-looking man, possessed even in later years of his UCLA track star body. He talked little. Interviewing him was a chore. He was reserved and dignified, impeccably dressed. He had command presence. When he called me in to bawl me out about something I had written as The Times’ City Hall reporter, I felt I was being hauled into the principal’s office.

He was very much a product of his era, a segregated, bigoted time when it was all but impossible for minorities to make it to the top.

Bradley was born on Dec. 29, 1917. His parents were Texas sharecroppers. His grandfather had been a slave.

When the family moved to Los Angeles, Bradley attended South Los Angeles public schools. His mother was a maid and his father was a railroad porter.

But he moved up, from the UCLA campus to the Los Angeles Police Department, through law school, into Democratic politics, to the City Council and finally mayor.

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His rise through hard times left him with little patience for those of the downtrodden he felt weren’t helping themselves. Among these were many of the homeless.

Once, I was trying to find out who had ordered an especially rough sweep of the homeless from skid row. I called the assistant police chief who had directed it. The mayor had called him in, he said, and told him to get those homeless off the streets, where they were blocking the entrance to toy companies owned by some of Bradley’s campaign contributors. Bradley figured he had made it, so why couldn’t the homeless do the same?

That innate conservatism, plus a belief in trickle-down economics, helped him wipe out the suspicions of the downtown business establishment. This was especially true after Bradley pushed through a redevelopment plan that resulted in today’s high-rise central city.

The redevelopment plan, plus such projects as rail transit and the Olympics, made him a favorite of organized labor, whose members benefited from the construction. And he became a bridge between labor and business, mediating disputes from behind the scenes.

Bradley was already a bridge between blacks and whites, at least whites of a progressive political nature. As a police officer who was active in community affairs, he was friendly with members of the liberal California Democratic Council. He became active in the group, which had many Jewish members. When Bradley ran for City Council, the CDC members and the black community united behind him. This was the beginning of the African American-Jewish progressive political coalition that came to dominate Los Angeles politics.

Raphael J. Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton political scientist, analyzed the Bradley coalition in his book “Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles.”

“He came from the liberal reform section of the Democratic party. . . . He built bridges to whites and other groups,” said Sonenshein.

Not all African Americans approved of the coalition approach. Some felt Bradley’s alliances with business and his attention to predominantly white areas on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley meant that he was forgetting the African American community’s poor.

Racial peace ended in the 1992 riots. That, plus investigations into his personal business dealings, brought a troubled end to his five-term administration.

But history will remember the earlier years, when Bradley united a divided city by unswervingly forming racial coalitions, persuading Los Angeles to come together.