West Adams Area
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An excellent article about the West Adams area (Jan. 10)! African Americans called that area Sugar Hill. In 1949 or ’50 a musical comedy by that title was written, starring Marjorie Day not long after she graduated from Jefferson High School. She had been a charter member of the choir of All Peoples Christian Church. How we missed her lovely soprano voice when she went on tour!
Churches were among the first to purchase the mansions. The Pepperdine house, known as “the castle,” was the home of the Council of Churches and the Protestant Church Welfare Bureau when my wife and I came to Los Angeles in October, 1942. The Rev. L.L. White began Holman United Methodist Church soon after, to be followed by the Fellowship Church. The latter building was also the headquarters for the Congregationalists in Southern California.
Churches bought the property, worshiped in the main room, and in time built a sanctuary toward the front of the lot.
Later churches included the West Adams Japanese Christian Church. In the early 1950s the long-established McCarty Memorial Christian Church became integrated.
Sugar Hill bears an amazing sociological witness, a lesson and example for us all.
THE REV. DAN B. GENUNG
Claremont
The writer was the founding pastor of All Peoples Christian Church.
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