The Los Angeles County Skid Row Action Plan process was launched in June 2022 through a Motion introduced by Supervisor Hilda Solis and passed by the County Board of Supervisors.
Throughout 2023, Skid Row Action Plan meetings called Community Design Sessions were attended by forty to fifty people, a cross section of government, nonprofit service providers, residents, and advocates. All of the Community Design Sessions began with a public reading of Land and Labor Acknowledgments.
The Land Acknowledgment was created over 18 months by the County as the official Land Acknowledgment for Los Angeles County. For the Community Design Sessions, it included a visual of a mural in Indian Alley — Decolonize and Chill. Indian Alley, in the western part of Skid Row, is one of the most well known Urban Indian locations in the county among Native Americans.
Here is the Land Acknowledgment:
“The County of Los Angeles recognizes that we occupy land originally and still inhabited and cared for by the Tongva, Tatavium, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash Peoples. We honor and pay respect to their elders and descendants — past, present, and emerging — as they continue their stewardship of these lands and waters. We acknowledge that settler colonization resulted in land seizure, disease, subjugation, slavery, relocation, broken promises, genocide, and multigenerational trauma. This acknowledgment demonstrates our responsibility and commitment to truth, healing, and reconciliation and to elevating the stories, culture, and community of the original inhabitants of Los Angeles County. We are grateful to have the opportunity to live and work on these ancestral lands. We are dedicated to growing and sustaining relationships with Native peoples and local tribal governments.”
The Labor Acknowledgment is from Cal State Long Beach. The visual attached to it for the Community Design Sessions was of Bridget “Biddy” Mason, a former slave who became a major matriarch in the early years of Los Angeles.
With the election of Donald Trump and the phrase “mass deportations” now becoming a common phrase in our cultural language, this reality is not separate from Skid Row. Many undocumented immigrants have come into Skid Row by buses mainly from Texas.
This reality of “mass deportations” as language, regardless of what happens with it as actionable policy, is highly stressful/traumatic. This reality can be engaged in an organic and substantive way by recognizing that undocumented workers are honored in the Labor Acknowledgment read during 2023.
Here is the Labor Acknowledgment:
“We recognize and acknowledge the labor upon which our country, state, and institution are built. We remember that our country was built on the labor of enslaved people who were kidnapped and brought to the U.S. from the African continent and recognize the continued contribution of their survivors. We also acknowledge all immigrant and indigenous labor, including voluntary, involuntary, trafficked, forced, and undocumented peoples who contributed to the building of the country and continue to serve within our labor force. We recognize that our country is continuously defined, supported, and built upon by oppressed communities and peoples. We acknowledge labor inequities and the shared responsibility for combating oppressive systems in our daily work.”
The Poor People’s Campaign: a national call for moral revival began several years ago. It’s rooted in the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 started by Dr. King, what was called a Phase Two in the Civil Rights Movement.
Historian Taylor Branch wrote three books about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr titled Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1953–65; At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68. The titles are a metaphor and analogy of the Exodus journey with Moses leading the Jewish people out of Egypt and through the Desert towards the Promised Land.
At Canaan’s Edge gives details about a weekend strategy summit held in March 1968 in Atlanta to plan for a Poor People’s Campaign March on Washington that coming summer. Dr. King gathered dozens of leaders of poor people from around the country for this weekend summit. Some of the leaders were in conflict with each other.
As the summit progressed and concerns mounted the weekend would end without a unified strategy in place, the breakthrough came when Reis Lopez Tijerina from New Mexico, one of the main Hispanic leaders, stood up and said based on what he has learned, the strategy should be in historical order with the Native American experience of poverty followed by the African American story of poverty followed by the Hispanic experience of poverty. The summit closed on a wave of relief.
Two weeks later, Dr. King was assassinated and the strategy of Native, then African American, then Hispanic collapsed.
It’s incredibly ironic, if ironic is the right word, that Martin Luther King Day for 2025 falls on January 20, the same day as Inauguration Day for President-elect Trump.
Going back to the Skid Row Action Plan….
When will Skid Row Action Plan implementation be officially completed? Does that question even have an answer? If the answer is when all the recommendations have been acted upon, that might take ten years to get done. Or maybe it could happen in five years. I don’t know. Is there a five to ten year focused commitment by the County to implement the Skid Row Action Plan? I don’t know. Should there be one?