Los Angeles Sentinel

Los Angeles Sentinel. . , Blacks on the Record , The largest black newspaper west of the Mississippi, the Los Angeles Sentinel was founded by Leon H. Washington Jr. in 1933. A native of Kansas City, Washington moved to Los Angeles in 1930 at the urging of his cousin Loren Miller, a civil rights attorney who would later become a judge and a local legend in his own right (Miller was chief counsel of the legal team that successfully argued the Supreme Court case against restrictive housing covenants in 1948). Washington first worked as an ad manager for the California Eagle, the oldest black newspaper in the west, published in Los Angeles by legendary activist and journalist Charlotta Bass. After three years of selling ads, Washington started his own paper that he called The Eastside Shopper, a free weekly aimed at goods and services to the black residents of the Eastside. As the publication prospered, he changed the name to the Los Angeles Sentinel, and transitioned to a news-based format that was "Fearless-Independent-Free.", Racial Advocacy , The upstart newspaper wasted no time following in Bass' activist footsteps. In 1934 Washington launched a protest and boycott against Zerg's Furniture Store, a white-owned establishment that, like many establishments that sold to blacks, refused to hire them. After placing a "Don't Spend Where You Can't Work" sign on his parked car outside Zerg's on Central Avenue and 43rd Street, the young publisher was promptly arrested for violating the city picketing ordinance. This did much to increase his stature in the community and establish him as an activist who went well beyond journalism to make a change. , The Sentinel's first offices were on Central Avenue, the historic main thoroughfare that ran through the eastside of Los Angeles. In 1940, Washington married staff photographer Ruth Brumell, and named her assistant publisher and business manager in 1948, after beginning to struggle with his health. The boom years for the Los Angeles Sentinel were the 1960s and early 1970s, when circulation topped 50,000 and the paper employed a staff of fifty. Like her husband, Ruth was committed to community building and active in promoting racial justice. She co-founded the Black Women's Forum along with Mayor Tom Bradley's wife, Ethel, and lawmaker Maxine Waters. She was also an ardent supporter of the Crenshaw/28th Street YMCA. , Moving West , After Leon died in 1974, Ruth ran the Los Angeles Sentinel until her own death in 1990. Washington's attorney, Kenneth L. Thomas, took the reins as publisher. In 1993, citing the increasing Latino demographics of South Central and the migration of blacks in the city from east to west, Thomas relocated the paper to Crenshaw Boulevard after 60 years on Central Avenue. Thomas died in 1997, and in 2004, developer and activist Danny Bakewell - himself a frequent subject of Los Angeles Sentinel news stories - became publisher. In 2010, the paper acquired its cross- town rival, The Watts Times, which it now publishes each weekend out of its Crenshaw Boulevard office.