A History of the Progressive Movement in Los Angeles: the Eighties

1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s

In October l989, l00 activists were arrested at the Federal Building in West LA protesting government inaction on AIDS treatments. It was one of the largest mass arrests in LA history. This protest was part of a broader effort to respond to the AIDS crisis and to link the gay and lesbian movement to other progressive activities. Two key figures - Mark Kostopolous (a postal worker and union organizer with a New Left background who became the leader of LA's ACT-UP chapter until his death in 1992) and Torie Osborn (a civil rights and anti-war activist who turned the LA Gay and Lesbian Center into the world's largest gay organization and is now executive director of the Liberty Hill Foundation) - reflected the effort to build these political bridges. The Los Angeles ACT-UP group, the second largest and most active chapter in the country, not only served as an effective and militant advocate regarding AIDS issues, but also participated in the defense of abortion clinics and Central American solidarity work. In the late l980s, figures such as Rolando Palencia (the son of a Uraguayan Tupamaro guerrilla leader) helped push the city's gay and lesbian movement to reflect the city's racial and cultural diversity.

Swelled by an influx of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Asia, and other parts of the world, Los Angeles emerged in the 1980s as the nation's most multi-cultural city. In response to the city's changing demographics, with its new immigrant neighborhoods, cultural identities, and social realities, Los Angeles' progressive movements incorporated new issues and organizations. These included issues like Central American solidarity work and the rights of immigrants and triggered the development of new groups like CARECEN and El Rescate. A number of key figures also served as bridges between movements and generations. One was Bert Corona, who was recruited to LA with a USC basketball scholarship, worked as a longshoreman, served as president of Local 26 of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union during World War 2, and then helped organize the Community Service Organization and MAPA in the Mexican-American community. Corona and other activists emerged during the 1980s at the forefront of what became a continuous mobilization against the repeated efforts to threaten the rights of immigrants, who constituted a major new constituency. Demonstrations, such as the massive turnout in March 1982 protesting federal immigration policies, coincided with a wave of organizing, activist leadership, and other ethnic-based organizations (such as the Asian Pacific Legal Center, the Korean Youth and Community Center, and the Korean Immigrant Workers Association). This shift also extended to the labor movement, increasingly defined by emergent leaders such as Maria Elena Durazo, who was elected president of Local 11 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union in 1989, and Kent Wong, who became head of the UCLA Labor Center.

A new progressive alliance of environmentalists and communities of color emerged around the struggles to stop the siting of trash and hazardous waste incinerators in communities like South Central and East LA. One of those battles, the fight to stop the LANCER project, a proposed 1600 ton per day solid waste incinerator at 41st Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard, reflected this new environmental justice coalition. The Bradley administration at first supported the project as a way to alleviate the growing problem of landfill capacity, due in part to the objections of his westside supporters regarding the expansion of the Lopez landfill. The city's Bureau of Sanitation, in conjunction with major industry, legal, and political interests, came up with a plan to construct three of these huge incinerators. The first would be built in South Central on the assumption that low-income blacks or Latinos did not care about environmental questions. Then future sites on the westside and the San Fernando Valley could be built because any future opposition would be characterized as "racist." The political leaders and bureaucrats assumed that activists in different parts of the city would not join forces. Instead, groups in South Central mobilized to stop LANCER, and groups throughout the city formed alliances to stop the project. These alliances helped promote a potent progressive environmental movement and ultimately forced Bradley to pull the plug on LANCER.

The defense of neighborhoods by environmental justice groups like Mothers of East LA and Concerned Citizens of South Central L.A. extended to concern about Los Angeles' landscape and seascape. Hundreds of high school students and other beach users protested government failure to clean up Santa Monica Bay. This effort eventually led to the establishment in 1988 of the Heal the Bay organization and also forced the city of Los Angeles and its water and sanitation bureaucracies to reduce the pollution in the Bay. Similarly, environmental activists in the Coalition for Clean Air sued the federal government and ultimately forced the South Coast Air Quality Management District to develop a more far-reaching and vigorous plan to clean the region's air.

The 1980s were also a time of growing economic inequality and more overt expressions of racism. The decade saw the rise of an anti-plant closing movement in response to the rapid dismantling of the region's manufacturing base. The destruction of hundreds of thousands of decent paying jobs, and the Reaganite war on social spending, led to growing homelessness, malnutrition and hunger, and pressures to lower wages in such areas as janitorial work. By the mid-1980s, for example, the Liberty Hill Foundation was processing dozens of proposals to provide basic survival services that were formerly provided by the government. Groups such as the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank and the Los Angeles Coalition to End Homelessness and Hunger became major de facto service providers.

The 1980s also witnessed a new wave of community-based organizations, such as the Coalition for Women's Economic Development and the Esperanza Community Housing Corporation (founded by Sister Diane Donaghue, who learned her organizing skills with the Industrial Areas Foundation, or IAF). Among other leaders in this area, two long-time activists - Denise Fairchild and Jan Breidenbach - sought to forge the dozens of separate neighborhood organizations into a broader movement for community development through such umbrella organizations as the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and the Southern California Association for Non-Profit Housing. With the collapse of the public sector and government activism, Progressive LA organizations and advocates became the only significant forces, in this era of Reagan and Bush, to address concerns about equity and livability. One such effort was the Jobs with Peace campaign, which sponsored a successful citywide referendum in 1984 calling for the federal government to cut the Pentagon budget and place the savings into job-creating community economic development programs.

Another progressive response to the widening economic divide was the successful statewide campaign for a "moral minimum wage," conducted in 1987 by three Los Angeles area affiliates of the IAF, the national organizing network founded by Saul Alinsky in the l940s and later brought to California by Fred Ross and Ernesto Cortes. Based in 73 churches, mostly in low-income neighborhoods, the leaders of the three IAF groups - the United Neighborhood Organization (based in East Los Angeles), the South Central Organizing Committee, and the East Valley Organization (based in the San Gabriel Valley) - saw the living standards of the constituents of their organizations decline as wages stagnated and housing costs skyrocketed. Their solution was to mobilize a grassroots campaign to increase the state minimum wage from $3.35 to $4.25 an hour, the highest in the nation at the time. By building on the IAF's strong and racially-mixed congregation-based leadership and bringing in allies among labor and church groups and some elected officials (including Congressman Gus Hawkins and State Senator Art Torres), this impressive campaign ended in victory, representing an annual raise of $1800 for each of the state's nearly one million low-wage workers.