Revisiting “Bound for Freedom”: Recent Histories of Black LA

Bringing in both new and familiar voices to consider what’s new in the field and how our collective understanding may have changed, this series explores the history of the West through a reflective and multifaceted lens.

About the Speakers:

Marne Campbell is an associate professor and the chair of African American studies at Loyola Marymount University.

Doug Flamming is an associate professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A Guggenheim Fellow and award-winning teacher, Flamming specializes in the social and political history of the United States since the Civil War. He is the author of three books, including Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (University of California Press, 2005) and African Americans in the West (ABC-CLIO, 2009). He is currently completing a study of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Kristina Borrman is an assistant professor of built-environment history in the School of Design and Construction at Washington State University. She is currently writing about the role of Black patronage in Paul R. Williams’ design of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building in West Adams, where the company encouraged policyholders to imagine themselves as architecture patrons and to picture the modernist office building as a symbol of racial uplift.

Laura Dominguez is a historian of race, heritage, and placekeeping in the American West. She is currently a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow with the National Park Service and an affiliated scholar with ICW. An expert in historic preservation, Dominguez focuses her research and public practices on exploring equitable storytelling in the built environment and surrounding landscapes.

This webinar is part of the Huntington–USC Institute on California and the West’s 20th anniversary Considering Anew Series.