Bradley, Thomas 'Tom'

Impact on the world

Elected Los Angeles's first Black mayor in 1973 after an earlier failed bid marred by his opponent's race-baiting campaign rhetoric, Bradley went on to serve five terms over 20 years, the longest mayoral tenure in the city's history, during which he successfully brought the 1984 Summer Olympics to Los Angeles in what became the most financially successful Olympic Games to that point.

Life & background

Born to a Texas sharecropping family that moved to Los Angeles when he was seven, Bradley grew up in a segregated neighborhood and ran track at UCLA alongside a young Jackie Robinson before joining the Los Angeles Police Department in 1940, eventually becoming the department's highest-ranking Black officer as a lieutenant despite the force still barring Black and white officers from sharing patrol cars at the time. He left the force after passing the bar exam, served on the City Council starting in 1963, then lost a bitter 1969 mayoral race against incumbent Sam Yorty, whose campaign explicitly accused Bradley of being backed by 'black militants, white radicals and Communists.' Bradley won the rematch in 1973 with a broad multiracial coalition of Black, Latino, Asian American, Jewish, and white liberal voters, becoming the first Black mayor of a major Western U.S. city and ultimately the city's longest-serving mayor, in office until 1993. His tenure included the expansion of Los Angeles International Airport, growth of the city's downtown skyline, and the successful 1984 Olympics, but also the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a crisis for which Bradley shared public blame alongside police leadership.

Sources

1. CAAM (Tom Bradley); PBS SoCal; NEH Humanities Magazine; History Central