Loyola Marymount University is a top-ranked national university by U.S. News and World Report, which places LMU among the top six Jesuit universities in the country and in the top six private universities in California. Founded in 1911, LMU is a Catholic, Jesuit, and Marymount university with more than 7,100 undergraduate students and more than 3,000 graduate and law students. LMU offers 56 undergraduate majors and 56 minor programs, along with 46 master’s degree programs, three doctorate programs and 12 credential/authorization programs. LMU’s intercollegiate athletics teams compete in the West Coast Conference with 14 Division I varsity sports.

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Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH)

Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH)

American Historical Association (AHA)

Organization of American Historians

African American Women, Wealth Accumulation, and Social Welfare Activism in 19th Century Los Angeles

The Newest Religious Sect Has Started In Los Angeles”: Race, Class, Ethnicity, And The Origins Of The Pentecostal Movement, 1906 – 1913

One Ever Feels His Twoness: Understanding The Service and Rhetoric of Barack Obama

The NAACP in Film: Three Documentaries from California Newsreel

Composing Metropolis: New Approaches to African American Urbanization in the Late 20th Century

Book Review: A Celebrity Preacher and his House of Prayer

Black Los Angeles started small. The first census of the newly formed Los Angeles County in 1850 recorded only twelve Americans of African descent alongside a population of more than 3,500 Anglo Americans. Over the following seventy years, however, the African American founding families of Los Angeles forged a vibrant community within the increasingly segregated and stratified city. In this book, historian Marne L. Campbell examines the intersections of race, class, and gender to produce a social history of community formation and cultural expression in Los Angeles. Expanding on the traditional narrative of middle-class uplift, Campbell demonstrates that the black working class, largely through the efforts of women, fought to secure their own economic and social freedom by forging communal bonds with black elites and other communities of color. This women-led, black working-class agency and cross-racial community building, Campbell argues, was markedly more successful in Los Angeles than in any other region in the country.Drawing from an extensive database of all African American households between 1850 and 1910, Campbell vividly tells the story of how middle-class African Americans were able to live, work, and establish a community of their own in the growing city of Los Angeles.

Making Black Los Angeles: Class, Gender, and Community, 1850-1917

Introduction to African American Studies

African American History

Race, Gender, and the Law

Hip-Hop Culture

Major Themes in African American History

Black Women's History

Civil Rights in America

Race and Ethnic Relations

History of Ethnic America

Black Los Angeles

Marne L. Campbell is an Associate Professor at Loyola Marymount University and the Chair of the Department of African American Studies. She received her Ph.D. in History at UCLA in 2006 and holds a Master’s Degree in African American Studies. She is the author of “Making Black Los Angeles,” which explores the intersections of race, class, and gender in early Los Angeles, and was published by the University of North Carolina Press. Her study emphasizes issues of labor, politics, and culture through the intersection of this diverse community with other communities of color. She has completed an extensive database of almost every African American family in Los Angeles (1850 - 1910). 

She has published essays in the Journal of Urban History as well as the Journal of African American History. “African American Women, Wealth Accumulation, and Social Welfare Activism in 19th Century Los Angeles” was published in the Journal of African American History, and considers the integral role of African American women in securing rights for their community such as equal education and public transportation. This article also connects their experiences with those of black women in the North and South during the second half of the 19th century. 

Currently, Marne is working on a book about crime and punishment in early Los Angeles. She created a database of every criminal court record between 1830 and 1900, noting crimes committed, race and gender of the victims and defendants, and sentencing. This book will explore the role of race and gender in the shaping of the local criminal justice system. 

Marne is the recipient of several academic awards including the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, The Los Angeles City Historical Society Miriam Matthews Ethnic History Award, and a Mellon Fellowship from the Huntington Library.

Her research and teaching interests focus on the middle 19th and early 20th century urban U.S. and has taught a range of specialized courses on U.S. Religious History, History of the West, Gender History, and History of Los Angeles, as well as surveys of American and African American History.

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