Bradley, Tom

views updated

Bradley, Tom

December 29, 1917
September 29, 1998

Politician Thomas "Tom" Bradley was born in Calvert, Texas, a town located between Waco and Houston. Both his mother and father were sharecroppers. When Bradley was four, the family moved to Dallas, and when he was six, to Somerton, Arizona, where they lived with relatives and where he first attended school.

In 1924 the family moved to Los Angeles and Bradley attended Polytechnic High School; he was one of 113 blacks out of a student population of 1,300. He excelled as a scholar and athlete and won a scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

In 1941 Bradley left UCLA to enter the police academy. He remained in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) until 1961, rising to the rank of lieutenant, the highest position achieved up to that time by an African American.

During his years on the police force, Bradley attended Loyola University Law School and Southwestern University Law School at night, and he was accepted to the California Bar in 1956. Upon leaving the force in 1961, he joined the law practice of Charles Matthews. In 1963 Bradley ran successfully for the City Council seat for Los Angeles's tenth district, which was predominantly white. He was one of the first blacks outside the East Coast elected to political office by a nonblack majority constituency. He retained his seat until 1973.

In August 1965, when the Watts Riots erupted, Councilman Bradley's criticism of police brutality brought him into conflict with his former comrades in the LAPD, and with Mayor Sam Yorty. Despite a widespread white backlash against civil unrest and black militancy, Bradley's law enforcement background and moderately liberal politics, along with his dignified, unthreatening bearing, gave him interracial popularity in a city that was only 15 percent black. In 1969 Bradley challenged Yorty for the office of mayor. He won the primary with 46 percent of the vote to Yorty's 26 percent, but in the runoff, after a race-baiting campaign by Yorty, Bradley was narrowly defeated.

In 1973 he ran again, this time defeating Yorty 56 percent to 43 percent to become Los Angeles's first black mayor, as well as the first African-American mayor of a predominantly white city. He was reelected four times. A major highlight of Bradley's tenure was the athletically and commercially successful 1984 Summer Olympics. The Bradley administration also spurred downtown development. However, partly as a result of weak municipal government, Bradley was accused of neglecting working-class and inner-city neighborhoods, particularly black areas. Nevertheless, he was sufficiently popular in 1982 to win the Democratic Party nomination for governor of the nation's largest state. He was projected to win the race but narrowly lost to Republican George Deukmejian. In 1985 Bradley won a fourth term as mayor, and the same year he won the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Spingarn Medal. In 1986 he again ran for governor and once again lost.

Bradley was reelected mayor in 1989, but his final term was marred by the savage March 1991 beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, by four LAPD officers, an incident that was secretly videotaped by a bystander. Repeated showings of the tape on national television caused a nationwide furor. When the officers who had been charged were acquitted in 1992, Los Angeles erupted in a riot that dwarfed the Watts uprising of 1965. Bradley drew heavy criticism from blacks over his ineffective control of the police department and from whites for his inability to reestablish order in the city. When King's assailants were tried on federal charges in 1993, Bradley prepared an emergency response in case of another riot, but two officers were convicted and no violence occurred. Bradley completed his last term in 1993 and died of a heart attack in Los Angeles on September 29, 1998.

The International terminal at Los Angeles Airport is named after Bradley, who was mayor when the terminal was funded and built.

See also Mayors; Politics in the United States