A Sense of Equality: African American Political Incorporation and the Democratic Party in California

Mervyn Dymally, born in Trinidad to a Muslim Indian father and a Catholic Trinidadian mother, arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1950s as an undocumented immigrant, factory worker, and would-be college student. By 1962 he was representing the predominantly African American 62^nd District of South Los Angeles in the California Assembly. To achieve this remarkable rise to political prominence, Dymally adhered to the pillars of the state’s liberal Democratic establishment. He worked his way up through union organizing, participation in grassroots Democratic Clubs and Citizens for Kennedy, and finally an appointment to the California Disaster Office, which allowed him to arrange civil defense classes (and potential votes) at the city’s black churches. Yet his own cosmopolitan background, along with the class-conscious anticolonialism he absorbed as a youth in Trinidad, influenced his understanding of the political "place" of African Americans and other people of color in ways that did not always align with California Democrats’ liberal orthodoxy. While he found support for his efforts to counter discrimination in areas such as education, for instance, authoring successful legislation requiring the teaching of "minority" history in the state’s schools, he was unable to convince most of his white Democratic colleagues to take on the structural foundations of racism in the form of legislation addressing the unemployment and lack of adequate housing that ravaged his district through the later 1960s and early 1970s. Though Dymally was successful at expanding African American political incorporation in the California statehouse, those legislators were ultimately not enough to enable him to make good on the promise of liberalism for his constituents.