Tom Bradley

Thomas Bradley was born on the twenty-ninth of December 1917 on a sharecropper's tenant farm at Calvert, Texas, the second of five children of Lee Thomas Bradley — a labourer and Pullman porter — and Crenner Hawkins Bradley, a domestic worker. The family migrated west to Somerton, Arizona, and then in 1924 to Los Angeles in pursuit of cotton-picking work. He was raised in the South Central district of Los Angeles and attended the Polytechnic High School, graduating in 1937 as a four-year varsity letterman in track and field.

He took a track scholarship to the University of California at Los Angeles in 1937 — among the few Black UCLA students of the late 1930s — and left in his junior year in 1940 to join the Los Angeles Police Department. He served the LAPD for twenty-one years from 1940 to 1961 and rose through the segregated police-department ranks to lieutenant — the highest rank then held by any African American in the LAPD. He completed simultaneously the LL.B. at Loyola Law School at Los Angeles in 1956.

He retired from the LAPD in 1961 and entered private legal practice. He was elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1963 from the Tenth District — the first African American on the Los Angeles City Council since Reconstruction.

He stood for mayor of Los Angeles in 1969 against the incumbent Sam Yorty and lost narrowly under a racially-coded Yorty campaign. He stood again in 1973 and defeated Yorty by eight points — making him on the first of July 1973 the first African American mayor of a major American city with a majority-white electorate. He served five consecutive four-year terms — the longest mayoral tenure in Los Angeles history.

He directed the city through the 1984 Summer Olympic Games — the first profitable summer Olympics in modern history and the principal civic event of the post-war Los Angeles. He directed the city also through the April 1992 Rodney King uprising of the final year of his mayoralty.

He stood for governor of California in 1982 and 1986 and lost both elections — the 1982 contest by under a percentage point.

He died of a heart attack at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on the twenty-ninth of September 1998, at eighty.

He is honored here as the longest-serving mayor of Los Angeles.