Tom Bradley

Thomas Jefferson Bradley (December 29, 1917 – September 29, 1998) was an American politician and police officer who served as the 38th Mayor of Los Angeles from 1973 to 1993. He has been the only African American Mayor of Los Angeles, and his 20 years in office mark the longest tenure by any mayor in the city's history; barring any change to the City Charter, no other future mayor of Los Angeles will serve longer than Bradley. His 1973 election made him the second African-American mayor of a major U.S. city. Bradley retired in 1993, after his approval ratings began dropping subsequent to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Bradley unsuccessfully ran for Governor of California in 1982 and 1986 and was defeated each time by the Republican George Deukmejian. The racial dynamics that appeared to underlie his narrow and unexpected loss in 1982 gave rise to the political term "the Bradley effect." In 1985, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.

Bradley, the grandson of a slave, was born on December 29, 1917, to Lee Thomas and Crenner Bradley, poor sharecroppers who lived in a small log cabin outside Calvert, Texas. He had four siblings — Lawrence, Willa Mae, Ellis (who had cerebral palsy) and Howard. The family moved to Arizona to pick cotton and then in 1924 to the Temple-Alvarado area of Los Angeles, where Lee was a Santa Fe Railroad porter and Crenner was a maid.

Bradley attended Rosemont Elementary School, Lafayette Junior High School and Polytechnic High School, where he was the first black student to be elected president of the Boys League and the first to be inducted into the Ephebians national honor society. He was captain of the track team and all-city tackle for the high school football team. He went to UCLA in 1937 on an athletic scholarship and joined Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. Among the jobs he had while at college was as a photographer for comedianJimmy Durante.

Bradley left his studies to join the Los Angeles Police Department in 1940. He became one of the "just 400 blacks" among the department's 4,000 officers. He recalled "the downtown department store that refused him credit, although he was a police officer, and the restaurants that would not serve blacks." He told a Times reporter:

When I came on the department, there were literally two assignments for black officers. You either worked Newton Street Division, which has a predominantly black community, or you worked traffic downtown. You could not work with a white officer, and that continued until 1964.

Bradley and Ethel Arnold met at the New Hope Baptist Church and were married May 4, 1941. They had three daughters, Lorraine,Phyllis and a baby who died on the day she was born. He and his wife "needed a white intermediary to buy their first house in Leimert Park, then a virtually all-white section of the city's Crenshaw district."

Bradley was attending Southwestern University Law School while a police officer and began his practice as a lawyer when he retired from the police department. Upon his leaving the office of mayor in 1993, he joined the law offices of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, specializing in international trade issues.

Entering politics

His entry into politics came when he decided to become the president of the United Club. The club was part of the California Democratic Council, a liberal, reformist group organized in the 1950s by young Democrats energized by Adlai E. Stevenson's presidential campaigns. It was predominantly white and had many Jewish members, thus marking the beginnings of the coalition, which along with Latinos, that would carry him to electoral victory so many times.

His choice of a Democratic circle also put him at odds with another political force in the African American community, representatives of poor, all-black areas who were associated with the political organization of Jesse M. Unruh, then an up-and-coming state assemblyman. The early stage of Bradley's political career was marked by clashes with African American leaders like onetime California Lieutenant Governor and former U.S. Representative Mervyn Dymally, an Unruh ally.

City Council

Bradley applied for the 10th District seat in June 1961, when he was still a police lieutenant living at 3397 Welland Avenue; the post had been vacated by Charles Navarro when he was elected city controller. The City Council, which had the power to fill a vacancy, instead appointed Joe E. Hollingsworth.

He ran against Hollingsworth in April 1963. There were only two candidates, Hollingsworth and Bradley, and also two elections — one for the unexpired term left by Controller Navarro, ending June 30, and one for a full four-year term starting July 1. Bradley won by 17,760 votes to 10,540 in the first election and by 17,552 votes to 10,400 in the second. By then he had retired from the police force, and he was sworn in as a councilman at the age of 45 on April 15, 1963, "the first Negro ever elected to the council."

One of the first votes he made on a controversial subject was his opposition to a proposed study by City Attorney Roger Arnebergh and Police Chief William H. Parker of the Dictionary of American Slang, ordered in an 11-4 vote by the council. Councilman Tom Shepard's motion said the book was "saturated not only with phrases of sexual filth, but wordage defamatory of minority ethnic groups and definitions insulting religions and races."

Bradley told Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Bergholz the next month that he "has been asked why he doesn't participate in public demonstrations. His answer: His power as a councilman can best be used in trying to bring groups together, and that's where his time and energy should be spent." He said he would work to establish a human relations commission in the city.

Campaign for mayor

In 1969, Bradley first challenged incumbent Mayor Sam Yorty, a conservative Democrat (later Republican) though the election was nonpartisan. Armed with key endorsements (including the Los Angeles Times), Bradley held a substantial lead over Yorty in the primary, but was a few percentage points shy of winning the race outright. HoweverYorty pulled an amazing come from behind victory to win reelection. Yorty questioned Bradley's credibility in fighting crime and painted a picture of Bradley, his fellow Democrat, as a threat to Los Angeles because he would supposedly open up the city to feared Black Nationalists. Bradley did not use his record as a police officer in the election. With the racial factor, even many liberal white voters became hesitant to support Bradley. It would be another four years, in 1973, before Bradley would unseat Yorty.

Mayor of Los Angeles

Powerful downtown business interests at first opposed him. But with passage of the 1974 redevelopment plan and the inclusion of business leaders on influential committees, corporate chiefs moved comfortably in behind him. A significant feature of this plan was the development and building of numerous skyscrapers in the Bunker Hill financial district.

During Bradley's tenure as mayor, Los Angeles saw the 1974 shootout with the Symbionese Liberation Army, Kiss' footprints outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre on February 20, 1976, Bradley's own handprints there the following year on May 18, 1977 (the 50th anniversary of the theatre itself), the Hillside Stranglers crime sprees from October, 1977-February, 1978, the end in 1978 of Edward M. Davis's career as one of the Los Angeles Police Department's controversially outspoken police chiefs and, after Assistant Chief Robert F. Rock's brief interim term, the rise of Daryl Gates as their longer-lasting-and also controversial-successor in 1978, Jimmy Carter's first and second presidential visits in respective 1978 and 1979, Bradley's signing of the city's first homosexual rights bill in 1979, the city's bicentennial and Los Angeles as the first U.S. city where the discovery of symptoms of what would later be called AIDS was reported from, both in 1981, President Reagan's and Queen Elizabeth II's 1980's visits, ex. Queen Elizabeth's city debut was in 1983, the hosting of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, Los Angeles surpassing Chicago as the second most populous city in the country after New York (also 1984), Bradley's signing the city's-and maybe the U.S.'s-first anti-AIDS-discrimination bill in 1985, since Los Angeles was/is one of the original top 3 highest reporting cities for its cases along with New York and San Francisco, increased homelessness, crack cocaine and related gangs during the later 1980s and early 1990s, as well as road rage freeway shootings in the late 1980s when the term was first coined, and welcoming Pope John Paul II in 1987. The Rodney King videotaped incident in 1991 and 1992 Los Angeles riots — in which some critics said Bradley might have "actually made the already tense situation that much worse"— and the formation of the Christopher Commission also occurred on his watch as did the city-held federal trials in 1993 of the four LAPD officers charged in Rodney King's beating and federal convictions of two of them-Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell-that April 17.

Bradley helped contribute to the financial success of the city by helping develop the satellite business hubs at Century City and Warner Center. Bradley was a driving force behind the construction of Los Angeles' light rail network. He also pushed for expansion of Los Angeles International Airport and development of the terminals which are in use today.The Tom Bradley International Terminal is named in his honor.

Bradley served for twenty years as mayor of Los Angeles, surpassing Fletcher Bowron with the longest tenure in that office. Bradley was offered a cabinet-level position in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, which he turned down. In 1984, Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale considered Bradley as a finalist for the vice presidential nomination, which eventually went to U.S. Representative Geraldine Ferraro of Queens, New York.

Bradley introduced President Carter at the May 5, 1979 dedication ceremony for the Los Angeles Placita de Dolores.

Although Bradley was a political liberal, he believed that business prosperity was good for the entire city and would generate jobs, an outlook not unlike that of his successor, Riordan. For most of Bradley's long administration, the city appeared to agree with him. But in his fourth term, with traffic congestion, air pollution and the condition of Santa Monica Bay worsening, and with residential neighborhoods threatened by commercial development, the tide began to turn. In 1989, he was elected to a fifth term, but the ability of opponent Nate Holden to attract one-third of the vote, despite being a neophyte to the Los Angeles City Council and a very late entrant to the mayoral race, signaled that Bradley's era was drawing to a close.

Other factors in the waning of his political strength were his decision to reverse himself and support a controversial oil drilling project near the Pacific Palisades and his reluctance to condemn Louis Farrakhan, the Black Muslim minister who made speeches in Los Angeles and elsewhere that many considered anti-Semitic. Further, some key Bradley supporters lost their City Council reelection bids, among them veteran Westside Councilwoman Pat Russell.Bradley chose to leave office, rather than seek election to a sixth term in 1993.

Gubernatorial campaigns

Bradley ran for Governor of California twice, in 1982 and 1986, but lost both times to Republican George Deukmejian. He was the first African American to head a gubernatorial ticket in California.

In 1982, the election was extremely close. Bradley led in the polls going into Election Day, and in the initial hours after the polls closed, some news organizations projected him as the winner. Ultimately, Bradley lost the election by about 100,000 votes, about 1.2% of the 7.5 million votes cast.

These circumstances gave rise to the term the "Bradley effect" which refers to a tendency of voters to tell interviewers or pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, but then actually vote for his white opponent. In 1986, Bradley lost the governorship to Deukmejian by a margin of 61-37 percent.

Bradley was stricken with a heart attack while driving his car in March 1996 and endured a triple bypass operation. Later, he suffered a stroke "that left him unable to speak clearly." He died on September 29, 1998 (three months after his former rival, Sam Yorty died), aged 80, and his body lay at the Los Angeles Convention Center for public viewing. He was buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery. Bradley was a Prince Hall Freemason.

In 1976, Bradley was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws (LL.D.) degree from Whittier College. Bradley's mayoral archives are held at UCLA.Also, the UCLA Film & Television Archive has created an online resource that presents free streaming access to local newsfilm segments from Los Angeles station KTLA that document Bradley's career in the 1970s.The Tom and Ethel Bradley Center, a vast collection of over one million photographs celebrating the diverse nature of Southern California, is housed at California State University, Northridge. The international terminal at Los Angeles International Airport is named Tom Bradley International Terminal in honor of him.