Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles. - book reviews

Black Enterprise, Jan, 1994 by Michelle Stein-Evers

Building Political Unity

As the new year begins, many black and Jewish New Yorkers are grappling with the impact that the deaths of Gavin Cato and Yankel Rosenbaum, and the Crown Heights riots had on last November's mayoral election. Emotions between the two groups remain raw. Ironically, in Los Angeles, blacks and Jews contemplate a much different relationship - one that had previously led to the election of another black mayor.

This distinctive alliance has been finely delineated by Raphael J. Sonenshein in Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles. Sonenshein, an associate professor of political science at California State University at Fullerton, has written the first political history of the largely unknown coalition of Los Angeles African-Americans and white liberals, mainly Jews, who in 1973 wrested the mayor's office from the hands of white conservatives.

Using interviews and statistics, it traces not only the rise of Mayor Tom Bradley and the coalition that won City Hall, but subsequent events leading to the coalition's fraying.

Finally, the book reveals that even as Crown Heights has tested whatever remains of a New York City black-Jewish coalition, the biracial coalitions in Los Angeles have been reinvigorated. In the wake of the Rodney King affair and the riots, all groups in the city now grope for ways to meet the concurrent needs of commerce and community.

Anyone interested in understanding the mutual need and value of forging multiracial and multiethnic coalitions in big cities should give this mayor work of American social science serious consideration.