Thomas Bradley (December 29, 1917 – September 29, 1998) was an American politician, athlete, police officer, and lawyer who served as the 38th mayor of Los Angeles from 1973 to 1993. A member of the Democratic Party, he was Los Angeles' first black mayor, first liberal mayor, and longest-serving mayor.
Bradley went to college at the University of California, Los Angeles, serving as captain of the track team. Bradley joined the Los Angeles Police Department after graduation. Disenchanted with the racism prevalent in the LAPD, Bradley became a lawyer. Bradley won election to the Los Angeles City Council, becoming its first black member in 1963. Bradley ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 1969, losing to incumbent conservative mayor Sam Yorty before defeating Yorty in 1973 and 1981.
In 1973, Bradley became the first liberal mayor of Los Angeles and its first black mayor. The Bradley coalition transformed Los Angeles from a conservative, white-dominated city to a more liberal multiracial one. Mayor Bradley appointed more women and people of color to political positions than all his predecessors combined. He was widely respected and renowned for his hard work ethic. Bradley was re-elected by landslides in 1977, 1981, and 1985. Bradley's main political opponent as mayor was Chief of the LAPD Daryl Gates, and several Bradley budgets cut funding to the LAPD. Bradley was lauded for running the first profitable Summer Olympics in 1984. The Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport is named after him and opened weeks before the 1984 Olympics. Bradley's promotion of public transit led to the creation of the Los Angeles Metro in 1990.
Bradley ran to be the first black Governor of any state since Reconstruction in 1982 and 1986 but was defeated both times by Republican candidate George Deukmejian. Bradley's narrow and unexpected 1982 loss was at odds with the polls and was attributed to the racist vote, giving rise to the political term "the Bradley effect". Bradley was considered a possible vice-presidential nominee in 1984 by Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale. Bradley was re-elected a final time as Los Angeles mayor in 1989, with a majority of the vote but diminished support. Bradley's approval ratings dropped after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which led to the resignation of Bradley's longtime rival Gates. Bradley announced his retirement in 1993. A panel of 69 scholars that year ranked him the third-best mayor of any city in the United States since 1960 and among the nine best mayors in American history.
Bradley was born on December 29, 1917, to Lee Thomas and Crenner Bradley. Thomas and Bradley were poor sharecroppers who lived in a small log cabin outside Calvert, Texas. He had four siblings — Lawrence, Willa Mae, Ellis (who had cerebral palsy) and Howard. The children's grandfather had been enslaved. The family moved to Arizona to pick cotton and then in 1924 to the Temple-Alvarado area of Los Angeles during the Great Migration, where Lee was a Santa Fe Railroad porter and Crenner was a maid.
Bradley attended Rosemont Elementary School, Lafayette Junior High School and Polytechnic High School, where he was the first black student to be elected president of the Boys League and the first to be inducted into the Ephebians national honor society. He was captain of the track team and all-city tackle for the high school football team. Bradley went to UCLA in 1937 on an athletic scholarship and joined Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. Among the jobs he had while at college was as a photographer for comedian Jimmy Durante. At UCLA, Bradley was a standout athlete in track and field and later credited his collegiate experience with broadening his political and social outlook during a period of entrenched racial segregation in Los Angeles.
Bradley left his studies to join the Los Angeles Police Department in 1940. He became one of 400 black officers in a police department that had 4,000 officers. He recalled "the downtown department store that refused him credit, although he was a police officer, and the restaurants that would not serve blacks." He told a Los Angeles Times reporter:
When I came on the department, there were literally two assignments for black officers. You either worked Newton Street Division, which has a predominantly black community, or you worked traffic downtown. You could not work with a white officer, and that continued until 1964.
Bradley and Ethel Arnold met at the New Hope Baptist Church and were married May 4, 1941. They had three daughters, Lorraine, Phyllis and a baby who died on the day she was born. He and his wife "needed a white intermediary to buy their first house in Leimert Park, then a virtually all-white section of the city's Crenshaw district."
Bradley was attending Southwestern University Law School while a police officer and began his practice as a lawyer when he retired from the police department. Upon his leaving the office of mayor in 1993, he joined the law offices of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, specializing in international trade issues.
Tom Bradley's entry into politics came when he decided to become the president of the United Club. The club was part of the California Democratic Council, a liberal, reformist group organized in the 1950s by young Democrats energized by Adlai E. Stevenson's presidential campaigns. It was predominantly white and had many Jewish members, thus marking the beginnings of the coalition, which along with Latinos, that would carry him to electoral victory so many times. His choice of a Democratic circle also put him at odds with another political force in the African American community, representatives of poor, all-black areas who were associated with the political organization of Jesse M. Unruh, then an up-and-coming state assemblyman. The early stage of Bradley's political career was marked by clashes with African American leaders like onetime California Lieutenant Governor and former U.S. Representative Mervyn Dymally, an Unruh ally.
Bradley was a Prince Hall Freemason.
In June 1961, the post for 10th District was vacated by Charles Navarro when he was elected city controller. Bradley, a police lieutenant living at 3397 Welland Avenue, was one of 12 people to apply for the position. The City Council, which had the power to fill a vacancy, instead appointed Joe E. Hollingsworth. When the position was up for election again, in April 1963, Bradley ran against Hollingsworth.
There were only two candidates, Hollingsworth and Bradley, and also two elections — one for the unexpired term left by Controller Navarro, ending June 30, and one for a full four-year term starting July 1. Bradley won the first, 17,760 to 10,540 votes, and the second election, 17,552 to 10,400 votes. By then he had retired from the police force, and he was sworn in as a councilman at the age of 45 on April 15, 1963, the first African-American elected to City Council.
One of his first votes was in opposition to a proposed study by City Attorney Roger Arnebergh and Police Chief William H. Parker of the Dictionary of American Slang, ordered in an 11–4 vote by the council. Councilman Tom Shepard's motion said the book was "saturated not only with phrases of sexual filth, but wordage defamatory of minority ethnic groups and definitions insulting religions and races."
When asked why he did not participate in public demonstrations, Bradley said that he saw his position on the City Council as a way to bring groups together. He expressed a desire to establish a human relations commission for the city.
Campaign for Mayor of Los Angeles
In 1969, Bradley first challenged incumbent Mayor Sam Yorty, a conservative Democrat for mayor in the nonpartisan election. Armed with key endorsements (including the Los Angeles Times), Bradley held a substantial lead over Yorty in the primary, but was a few percentage points shy of winning the race outright. However, Yorty pulled out a come-from-behind victory to win reelection. Yorty questioned Bradley's credibility in fighting crime and painted a picture of Bradley, a fellow Democrat, as a threat to Los Angeles because he would supposedly open up the city to Black Nationalists. Bradley did not use his record as a police officer in the election. With the race factor, even many liberal white voters became hesitant to support Bradley. It would be another four years, in 1973, before Bradley would unseat Yorty.