Tom Bradley

• Born: December 29, 1917
• Birthplace: Calvert, Texas
• Died: September 29, 1998
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Politician

After holding various positions in the Los Angeles Police Department during the 1940’s and 1950’s, Bradley became the first African American elected to the Los Angeles City Council and served five terms as the city’s first black mayor. He also came close to being elected California’s governor.

Early Life

Thomas J. Bradley was born in 1917 to sharecroppers who lived in a small log cabin in Calvert, Texas. His grandparents had been slaves. The family moved to Dallas in 1921, then to Somerton, Arizona, in 1924, to pick cotton. Later that year, they moved to Los Angeles, where Bradley’s mother worked as a maid. His father left Los Angeles to work as a porter for the Santa Fe Railroad on West Coast routes. After Bradley’s parents divorced, the family went on public assistance. Bradley, the second of five children, brought in some money from a paper route.

Bradley attended Rosemont Elementary School and Lafayette Junior High School. Because of his athletic prowess at the neighborhood Central Recreation Center, a track coach recruited him to Polytechnic High School, a mostly white school, where he became captain of the track team and won honors in three track events. On the football team, he was an All-City tackle and also played back or end. He was Polytechnic’s first black Boys’ League president and the first black member of the Ephebians, a national honor society.

In 1937, Bradley won an athletic scholarship to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where as a member of the track team he was among those who broke the color barrier in competitive college sports. He also worked briefly as a photographer for comedian Jimmy Durante. While a junior, Bradley did well on a qualifying exam for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), enrolled in the police academy, and became a police officer in 1940. On May 4, 1941, he married Ethel Arnold, with whom he had two daughters.

Discrimination occasionally dogged Bradley even after he donned a police uniform. He was denied credit by a clothing store in downtown Los Angeles, some restaurants refused to serve African Americans, and he could not enter some hotels as late as 1956. To buy a house in an all-white neighborhood, he relied on a white intermediary. In the 1940’s, African Americans in the LAPD were given one of two assignments—policing downtown traffic or patrolling a black neighborhood—and were not allowed to have white partners. Nevertheless, Bradley worked his way up to lieutenant, the highest rank held by a black police officer at the time.

In 1949, Bradley was a volunteer in the successful campaign to elect Edward Roybal, a Latino, to the Los Angeles City Council. In 1958, he joined a newly formed California Democratic Club in his Jewish neighborhood, later becoming president. Bradley decided to take night courses in Southwestern University’s law school and passed the bar exam in 1956. After being passed over for a promotion, he retired from the LAPD in 1961 and worked as an attorney.

Life’s Work

When the city council seat representing Bradley’s district fell vacant, he applied for the seat, but the council picked someone else. In 1963, he ran for the seat and won, making him the city council’s first African American member. After winning a second council term, Bradley ran for mayor against incumbent Sam Yorty in 1969. Bradley received more votes than Yorty in the primary but did not achieve the majority necessary to win outright. During the ensuing runoff election, Yorty falsely claimed that Bradley was a radical and sympathetic to black militants. Yorty won, but Bradley defeated him when the two faced off again in 1973.

Eager to cement his majority, Bradley met with downtown business leaders who had opposed his election, appointing them to important advisory committees. Then in 1974, Bradley announced a sweeping pro-growth redevelopment plan for the city, including new skyscrapers downtown and new development clusters in Century City and Warner Center. He saved the Produce Market, revitalized shopping centers in two inner-city neighborhoods, and got support for a shopping center to rebuild Watts. He agreed to improvements in the airport and harbor so that Los Angeles would become the premier trade gateway on the West Coast.

One of Bradley’s most ambitious projects was the development of mass transit for Los Angeles County, consisting of subway and fixed-rail lines from downtown to Long Beach, Hollywood, the edge of Orange County, Pasadena, and the Westside. The costly project was needed in a sprawling metropolitan area where many residents relied on buses running in heavily clogged traffic. Bradley secured an unprecedented amount of federal funding both for transportation and for development in minority communities.

Bradley’s political style was calm, working behind the scenes to build consensus; he was nicknamed “The Sphinx of City Hall.” He was praised by labor and management after mediating an end to a three-day bus strike in 1982. He also made a successful bid for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games; privately financed, the event produced an unprecedented $250 million profit. Bradley considered the Los Angeles Olympics to be the high point of his career.

Bradley was reelected four times, serving twenty years as mayor. He ran for governor in 1982 and 1986 but lost both times. He almost lost reelection as mayor in 1989 over campaign contributions from a bank in which he had a financial interest. He also was an adviser to two banks that had dealings with the city. He paid twenty thousand dollars to settle his failure to report a conflict of interest that he called an “error in judgment.”

Bradley’s principal opponents were members of minority communities who believed that he had become too cozy with special-interest groups. He took no public stance during the late 1970’s, when Los Angeles was in federal court to desegregate its school district. Nevertheless, he refused under pressure to condemn controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

Bradley had a personal interest in reforming the LAPD even before 1991, when Rodney King was beaten by police officers. In 1992, when the police officers were acquitted of wielding excessive force, riots broke out in South Central Los Angeles and spread toward Hollywood. After appointing review bodies, Bradley persuaded the city council to institute major reforms, including firing the police chief.

After deciding not to run for reelection in 1993, Bradley was hired by a downtown law office. He focused his efforts on increasing trade with Asia. In March, 1996, Bradley suffered a heart attack while driving his car. Although triple-bypass surgery saved his life, one day later he suffered a stroke that resulted in impaired speech until his death two years later.

Significance

Bradley’s election to five four-year terms made him Los Angeles’s longest-serving mayor. He built a multiethnic coalition in a city whose population was less than 20 percent African American and became a model for future mayors. Women and minorities were invited to serve on city commissions, hired in the civil service, and given fair treatment in competitions for contracts. The LAPD underwent reforms that stressed professionalism over brute force. Bradley’s legacy is apparent throughout the city—in the downtown skyline, business centers in West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles International Airport, and an expansive mass-transit system.

Bibliography

Bauman, Robert. “The Black Power and Chicano Movements in the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles.” Journal of Urban History 33, no. 2 (2007): 277-295. Provides valuable context for Bradley’s efforts and achievements during a volatile era in Los Angeles.

Payne, J. Gregory, and Scott C. Ratzan. Tom Bradley, the Impossible Dream: A Biography. Santa Monica, Calif.: Roundtable, 1987. A promotional biography that focuses on Bradley’s rise from poverty to political success as mayor of the nation’s second largest city.

Pettigrew, Thomas F., and Denise A. Alston. Tom Bradley’s Campaigns for Governor: The Dilemma of Race and Political Strategies. Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for Political Studies, 1988. Analyzes why Bradley lost two gubernatorial elections and whether race was a handicap.

Sonenshein, Raphael J. Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. An analysis of how Bradley forged a multiethnic voting coalition by appealing beyond his base in the African American community to become the most important political leader in Los Angeles during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The book examines his legacy in transforming Los Angeles into a world-class international city while providing opportunities for both the poorest and the richest people in the city.