Op-Ed: Hal Miller kept a key piece of L.A.'s black history alive. Now he's gone (via latimesopinion)
More than 20 years ago, I asked my father’s good friend Hal Miller to take me on a driving tour of Central Avenue, a street that when he was young had boasted every black business of note as well as a world-famous jazz scene.
But even as they fought for residential freedom, Eastsiders had a fierce pride of place — and nobody venerated the place more than Hal. He was a natural optimist who considered the era of the Eastside the L.A. black community’s finest hour, segregation notwithstanding. One thing they all recalled fondly and often was the Eastside’s economic diversity — doctors and lawyers lived easily among sanitation workers and housekeepers. The stabilizing diversity that flourished within the larger, destabilizing dynamic of segregation was just one of the many contradictions Eastsiders lived with.
Hal always acknowledged the paradox, but he never knew quite how to respond to it. He unapologetically idealized the Eastside, cherished it, boasted about the advantages of black people hanging together in bad times and good. Yet he had no illusions about why it all ended. Hal, after all, was among the many Eastsiders who eventually left. “We got what we wanted, but lost what we had,” was how he described the decline, sounding more perplexed than grieved or sorry.
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