All That Jazz Aside

It’s well documented that, in its heyday from the late 1920s to the ‘50s, Central Avenue was the center of L.A.’s jazz scene. What’s not as well known--”the part that is not told,” as Anthony Scott, executive director of the Dunbar Economic Development Corp., says, is that it was also home to some of the city’s first black-run businesses, social organizations and churches. This unknown side is celebrated in an exhibit opening today at the landmark Dunbar Hotel. Constructed in 1928, the Dunbar played host, when other segregated hotels wouldn’t, to Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and W.E.B. Du Bois. Hard-to-find memorabilia such as archival black-and-white photographs of Central Avenue, 1930s and ‘40s programs from the now-closed Lincoln Theatre and personal scrapbooks will be on display through June 30.

Scott’s favorite find at the exhibit? A poem handwritten in 1935 by Langston Hughes to the children of Vernon’s public library branch: “We Have tomorrow Bright before us Like a flame. . . . And dawn-today, Broad arch above The Road we came. We March!”