History of the Dunbar

It is great to have the limelight once again shining on Central Avenue and the Dunbar Hotel, its incredible history and the days when it was the place and, lamentably, the only place where great black artists like Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington could stay when working in Los Angeles in the 1930s and ‘40s (“Itinerary: Central Avenue,” by Robin Rauzi, July 26).

However, the history of the Dunbar Hotel was not completed in your story. While it was built in 1928 by Dr. Somerville, it was saved from bankruptcy after the stock market crash of 1929 by my grandfather, Lucius Walter Lomax Sr., who bought it for $100,000 in 1930.

He renamed it for the post-Civil War poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, like grandfather the son of former slaves, whose work he greatly admired. He owned it until the mid-’50s, when Brown vs. Board of Education enabled black Americans to eat, sleep, buy and do business west of Central Avenue.

One hundred thousand dollars was an amazing amount of money for any black man to have in the 1930s. But my grandfather was an amazing man who left home at the age of 11 to seek his fortune and take care of his mother and two sisters and died at age 82 “several times a millionaire.”

My childhood was full of stories from my parents, Central Avenue newspaper proprietors during the glamour years, about the famous guests of the Dunbar, and the gifted singers, dancers and musicians frequenting “the Stem.” And Steven Sachs’ new play, “Central Avenue,” has much to say about the socioeconomic and political status of blacks in that era, metaphorically illustrated in the community’s struggle with the Los Angeles Police Department.

MELANIE E. LOMAX

Los Angeles