The Central Avenue Borderscape

Since the early twentieth century, African Americans in Los Angeles confronted a variety of borders—racial, cultural, economic, and social—in an environment of Jim Crow restrictions. In this article I apply the concept of the borderscape to the multiethnic community of Central Avenue in Los Angeles to consider how musicians encountered borders in the city during the Great Migration. In the fields of jazz (Clora Bryant, Howard McGhee, Dexter Gordon), education (William Wilkins, John Gray, Sam Browne, Alma Hightower), and composition (William Grant Still, Harold Bruce Forsythe), many African Americans used music both to transcend borders and to resist Jim Crow restrictions within the Central Avenue borderscape.