On the morning of September 6, Barrio Athletics was supposed to lace up in Leimert Park, the historic heart of Black Los Angeles. The group was supposed to run five kilometers down Crenshaw Boulevard. Instead, the South L.A. running club started its race on the other side of the city, at Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium. They did so after a week of backlash from the Black community.

The headlines and social posts focused mainly on whether Black and Latino Los Angeles can get along. But we went deeper.

What Actually Happened in Leimert Park

Barrio Athletics is not an outside group parachuting into a neighborhood. The grassroots fitness organization was founded in South Los Angeles by Henry Gallardo, a South Central native. It’s built around making running and wellness accessible in neighborhood spaces. Its events typically draw anywhere from dozens to several hundred participants.

The trouble started with a promotional video that described the planned 5K as “taking over the streets.” That language rubbed the Leimert Park Black community the wrong way.

For those who don’t know, Leimert Park has been one of Los Angeles’s most recognizable centers of Black culture, commerce, and political life for decades. Founded in 1927 by developer Walter H. Leimert, who purchased 231 acres of land from the Baldwin Hills estate, Leimert Park originally enforced racially restrictive housing covenants that barred non-white residents. Following the landmark 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling (Shelley v. Kraemer) that outlawed legally enforceable restrictive housing covenants, Black residents began moving into the area.

Despite initial resistance and white flight, Leimert Park became one of the largest and most prominent Black middle-class neighborhoods in the United States, with residents including entertainers like Ella Fitzgerald and Ray Charles.

Since the early 1960s, Leimert Park began replacing older districts like Central Avenue as a central focal point for Black society, politics, and culture in Los Angeles.

But going back to the controversy.

Barrio Athletic’s event planned meeting point at Leimert Park, with a run down Crenshaw Boulevard that would have coincided with the park’s longstanding Sunday marketplace. It would’ve also coincided with the African Marketplace and Drum Circle, which traces its roots to the early 2000s, and the Degnan Boulevard craft and food market, which the Leimert Park Crenshaw Corridor Business Improvement District says has operated for 40 years. Vendors spent years navigating city permitting to legally sell there. And one organizer described the market as a matter of economic survival for Black Angelenos.

A video began circulating of a woman warning organizers not to come into what she called “Africa Town,” saying they’d face resistance from the Black community. Other social media users threatened in the comments to call ICE on runners who showed up, prompting Barrio Athletics to publicly say it does not condone racism, violence, or hate. The club tried to defuse things by offering to move its warm-up to a nearby El Pollo Loco and start the run there instead, “to respect the local vendors’ space and not cause any disturbance to the market at the park.” Still, the offer didn’t resolve the deeper disagreement over whether organizers had consulted the community enough before announcing the event.

The Park Mesa Heights Community Council scheduled a special meeting on September 1 to discuss the event.

Public records confirm the meeting happened, though the vote results haven’t been posted. Activist Najee Ali, director of Project Islamic Hope, called on Mayor Karen Bass to intervene, calling Leimert Park “the crown jewel and heart and soul of Black Los Angeles.” Bass’s office later told Fox 11 she wasn’t actually aware of the dispute until after it was resolved and never personally spoke to anyone about it, despite speculation that she’d forced the move. In a statement, she called Leimert Park a place holding “a special place in the historical and cultural life of Los Angeles”. She stressed the importance of bringing Black and Brown communities together to work through disagreements constructively. Barrio Athletics ultimately relocated the entire event, writing that the decision came after “careful conversation with community leaders” and was meant “to respect Leimert Park and the surrounding community.”

An Old-as-Time Social Dynamic

However, in a country where racial and social tensions are at an all-time high, the controversy around the 5k run merits a closer look.

Keeping Black and Latino communities suspicious of each other while they compete over the same scarce jobs, housing, and public space has been a documented, repeated strategy in American politics and business for more than a century, one that benefits neither community.

A 2024 report from the Economic Policy Institute traces the argument to an economic model built to extract cheap labor first from enslaved Black people, then from Black and Latino workers alike, that has always depended on keeping those two workforces from organizing together rather than seeing what they have in common.

Beyond the ‘Racism’ Commonplace

Here’s where the story splits. The New York Post ran with the headline “Historically black LA neighborhood explodes with racism claims,” reducing the dispute to a straightforward case of Black residents rejecting Latino runners based on race.

Columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson pushed back hard on that framing in EurWeb, writing that the objections he heard and raised were never about Latinos being unwelcome in the neighborhood. “The issue was not whether Latino runners should be welcome in Leimert Park,” he wrote. “It was whether the people who work, sell and gather there every week had been adequately consulted about an event that could directly affect them.” He called it a legitimate community concern, not evidence of anti-Hispanic racism, and argued that reducing the dispute to a race story “may make for a provocative headline. It does not tell the whole story.”

Both things can be true at once. The threats to call ICE and the “hostile takeover” language were real, documented, and genuinely racialized, and they deserve to be named as such. So do the legitimate, race-neutral concerns about vendor livelihoods and community consultation that Hutchinson and others raised.

Leimert Park is a public space open to anyone, and it’s also one of the last strongholds of Black political and cultural power in a city where the Black population and its influence have been shrinking for years. Residents told Fox 11 they welcome outside visitors and events. They just want to be asked first. That’s a more honest, and far less clickable, version of the story than “explodes with racism.”

Los Angeles Has Been Here Before

Leimert Park is far from the first time Black and Latino Los Angeles have collided over the same turf, and, once again, the lack of historical conscience is the key flaw. These two communities were never doomed to distrust each other. However, that distrust has been left to grow while the actual sources of scarcity, in housing, in jobs, in political power, went largely unexamined.

Twenty years ago, the tension was, in fact, lethal. Fourteen-year-old Cheryl Green was killed in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood in December 2006, allegedly by members of a Latino gang, according to a 2007 Los Angeles Times op-ed by Tanya K. Hernandez, a professor of law at Rutgers University. Just months earlier, federal prosecutors had convicted four Latino gang members in Highland Park of a six-year conspiracy to assault and murder African American residents who had no gang ties at all, in what Hernandez described as an effort to force Black families out of a neighborhood “now perceived as Latino.” One man was murdered while looking for a parking space near his own home. A woman was knocked off her bicycle, and her husband was threatened with a box cutter by a defendant who told them, using a racial slur, that they’d “been here long enough.”

Hernandez argued that explanations like job competition or turf disputes weren’t enough to account for violence that extreme, and traced part of it back further, to anti-Black racism embedded in Latin America and the Caribbean itself.

More than 90% of the roughly 10 million enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean, she wrote, compared with 4.6% brought to the United States. That legacy still shows up as colorism across the region today.

She cited a 2002 University of Houston survey of 600 Latinos and 600 African Americans in which African Americans reported more positive views of Latinos than Latinos did of them, and a separate study finding that 46% of Latino immigrants living in neighborhoods with Black residents reported almost no interaction with them at all. Hernandez was writing about real, documented violence. But even she noted that job competition and turf disputes, the material conditions two communities are so often left to fight over instead of the systems that created the scarcity in the first place, don’t fully explain what happened. Something else was doing the rest of the work.

What the Research Says About Black and Latino Attitudes

The Highland Park violence was extreme, not representative, and the actual research on how Black and Latino communities feel about each other paints a messier, more useful picture than either “these two groups hate each other” or “this is all overblown.”

A Pew Research Center report published in January 2008 found that Black and Hispanic Americans hold broadly favorable views of one another, even as Hispanics were somewhat less likely than Black respondents to say the two groups get along well. And while that’s the general view, precarity takes its toll.

A 2022 study covered by the American Political Science Association found that Latinos express more anti-Black prejudice specifically when they feel their own status as Americans is being threatened, particularly liberal Latinos, and that this insecurity measurably reduces their support for policies that benefit Black communities. Prejudice, in other words, becomes a reaction to feeling like there isn’t enough room, security, or even belonging to go around, which happens to be exactly the condition that manufactured scarcity is designed to produce.

That prejudice is still real, and it isn’t small.

A 2016 study by political scientists Yanna Krupnikov, of Stony Brook University, and Spencer Piston, of Boston University, found that Latino levels of racial prejudice against Black Americans, measured through stereotype questions about laziness and intelligence, were statistically indistinguishable from those of non-Hispanic white Americans.

Fifty-five percent of U.S.-born Latinos in their sample rated Black Americans as lazier than Latinos, and among foreign-born Latinos that number rose to 72%. Yet Latinos were also more likely than whites to support policies designed to help Black Americans and to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, not because they held less prejudice, the researchers found, but because Latinos are more Democratic,  egalitarian, and less committed to the value of limited government than white Americans are.

That same dynamic shows up inside Latino communities, too. A 2021 Pew survey, covered by New York Times columnist Charles Blow, found that dark-skinned Hispanics report far more discrimination than light-skinned Hispanics, and that nearly half of Hispanic adults said they’d heard a Hispanic friend or family member make racist or racially insensitive comments about other Hispanics or non-Hispanics. Blow’s fear, watching the country’s demographics shift, wasn’t that white supremacy would simply fade away. It was that it could be replaced by what he called “light supremacy,” a hierarchy that survives the browning of America by regrouping around skin tone instead of race.

And don’t get us wrong. None of this is an excuse. It’s more of a map that shows the prejudice is real; it shows where it tends to come from, and it shows that the thing feeding it, scarcity, status anxiety, the sense that there isn’t enough to go around, isn’t naturally occurring.

Who Actually Wins When Black and Brown Communities Fight

Here’s the fuller version of that history. The Economic Policy Institute’s 2024 report traces how the entire Southern economic model- low wages, weak unions, a threadbare safety net- was built to extract cheap labor first from enslaved Black people and then, as the region diversified, from Black and Latino workers alike.

Hispanic workers now make up more than a quarter of the South’s meat processing labor force, working the same grueling, low-wage jobs Black workers have long been funneled into. Keeping those two workforces from organizing together has always been the point.

When the Congress of Industrial Organizations tried to unionize Black and white workers together in the mid-20th century, opponents circulated material highlighting that a Black organizer, George Benjamin, would be in charge of organizing white workers, warning that white workers would be “forced into organizations” with Black people they’d have to call “brother” or lose their jobs. Vance Muse, the architect of the country’s first right-to-work laws, passed in Arkansas and Florida in 1944, was curt about his own strategy when confronted about it, reportedly saying he liked Black people fine, “in their place.”

That strategy didn’t stay in the 1940s, and it didn’t stay Black-versus-white.

In a widely cited interview in the late 1960s, Republican strategist Lee Atwater said you couldn’t use a racial slur outright anymore, so politicians talked about forced busing and states’ rights and cutting taxes instead, abstract enough that “a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.” The Economic Policy Institute explains there is a direct line from that strategy to the way politicians today talk about immigrants “living on public benefits” and voters who supposedly “cheat,” language aimed at Latino and Black communities respectively, but built on the same strategy to convince the people with the least to blame each other instead of the people with the most.

Today, Leimert Park’s vendors are fighting for the same thing Barrio Athletics is: a livelihood and a sense of belonging in a city that has made both harder to hold onto for Black and Latino Angelenos alike, as rent climbs and political power concentrates elsewhere. Neither community set gentrification in motion, nor do they control who gets priced out of Los Angeles next.

Tags: Black and Brown Communities, Leimert Park