It looked like another fun weekend event organized by one of the many neighborhood running clubs that have popped up in Los Angeles: meet up at a park, run a few miles with your neighbors and afterward enjoy a smoothie to tracks spun by a D.J.
Barrio Athletics, a predominantly Latino run club based in South Los Angeles, planned to host its 5K event last Sunday at the plaza in Leimert Park, the cultural heart of the city’s Black community. But it did so without following a permit process that includes consulting with neighborhood leaders and business owners.
So after the event was announced late last month, it struck a nerve with Black residents in a part of the city that was for generations maligned as unsafe and is now confronting a wave of gentrification. Some worried that it could overrun a weekly farmer’s market that had been disrupted before; others felt protective of a revered community space.
It wasn’t long before a social media firestorm broke out that amplified racial grievances, initially stirred by a Black activist group that frequently objects to events in the park and holds anti-immigrant views that often center on Latinos.
Online blogs and podcasts picked up the controversy, with some commenters using racial slurs in referring to Black people, while others suggested the event should be reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Ultimately, Black and Latino leaders worked harmoniously to resolve the dispute, and the run was relocated to another part of the city and held on Sunday morning. But the vitriol that spilled out during the weeklong episode represented a rare public airing of tensions between the Black and Latino populations, which have been simmering in recent years amid a demographic upheaval in that section of the city.
It is hard to overstate the cultural resonance of Leimert Park to Black Angelenos. It is home to one of the nation’s largest Juneteenth celebrations, and longtime residents treat the area with the reverence that New Yorkers might treat Harlem.
In recent decades, though, Leimert Park has become more of a symbolic foothold for a community that has been shrinking. As wealthier, mostly white, families buy up pricier homes, Black Angelenos have been leaving for cheaper suburbs. At the same time, Latinos, particularly recent immigrants, have been moving into affordable homes, shifting the culture and demographics of a swath of the city that had, over decades, become a hard-won locus of Black political power.
South Los Angeles went from being 80 percent Black in 1970 to two-thirds Latino by the 2010s, according a report by researchers at the University of Southern California.
“It is one of the few places we have that are worth protecting and defending at a time where Black displacement and push out is at an all-time high,” said Assemblyman Isaac Bryan, the vice chair of the state’s legislative Black caucus, who lives in and represents Leimert Park. “It is more difficult to afford to live in Los Angeles than at any other time, and Black folks feel the brunt of that.”
“So I think all of these factors just culminated on top of one another” and required community leaders to step in, Mr. Bryan said.
One of those leaders was Kaya Dantzler, 34, who co-founded a community group called We Love Leimert. Started in 2019, the group has helped revitalize the commercial corridor of the Leimert Park neighborhood and works with the merchants and the city to help coordinate local events.
As online hostilities escalated, she met with Henry Gallardo, the Barrio Athletics founder, and other community leaders to explain why some people were upset and urged him to postpone the run.
“He was just excited about organizing people around wellness, and he’s not a trained community organizer so I think he was just lacking context,” Ms. Dantzler said.
Mr. Gallardo, 25, said in an interview that he had initially planned to host the run in a different neighborhood, but the space could not accommodate the smoothie vendor he had planned to bring.
So he decided to move the event to Leimert Park Plaza, a public park that adjoins the commercial district. Collectively, the entire space is known as the Leimert Park Village.
In an interview, Mr. Gallardo, 25, said he was not aware there was a permit process, and didn’t think staging it at Leimert Park Plaza would be a problem. He had hosted runs in other parts of South Central Los Angeles, and vendors typically welcomed the influx of potential customers, he said. But after talking with Ms. Dantzler and others, he acknowledged he had made a “misstep in protocol” and moved the race to Elysian Park, about nine miles away.
“Conversations were being had,” Mr. Gallardo said, “but the internet chaos took over and made it brown versus Black. And it’s never that.”
The fracas even drew in Mayor Karen Bass, a Black native of South Los Angeles who got her political start there. She said in a statement that she did not get involved or urge organizers to move the event, as one Black activist had claimed. But she sought to temper the tension surrounding Leimert Park.
“My work as a community organizer began in the heart of South Los Angeles over three decades ago, building an organization rooted in the belief that Black and brown community can create lasting power by working together,” she said.
Ms. Dantzler said she felt the online hostility had come to overshadow the important strides Leimert Park had made in recent years. Every business in the village — coffee shops, bike shops, skate shops, book stores, clothing stores, wellness stores — had become Black-owned, she said, with the exception of the Vision Theater, which is owned by the city.
But while Mr. Gallardo, Ms. Dantzler and merchants in the community were chalking up the original plan to an honest mistake, others were stoking tensions on the internet.
Members of Africa Town Coalition, a Black activist group in Leimert Park, homed in on the language used in the video promoting the run, which featured a woman running through the neighborhood using the phrase “taking over the streets.” The group interpreted those words as disrespectful.
Some members also suggested that the run posed yet another threat to the regular Sunday farmers market, which they said had been overrun multiple times in recent years by motor bikers and cyclists.
Billion Godsun, 55, and other group members blasted the planned run on social media, posting videos and spreading their message to blogs and content creators who share their politics. They cast the event in overt racial terms, contending that it was an example of the growing hostility of the Latino population in South Los Angeles toward Black people.
“One — if you’re going to come, come with respect,” Mr. Godsun said. “Two — know that right now this is a community that is being torn apart. The fact that many Black communities have been erased is being kept quiet.”
The group has previously clashed with others over who should get to use the park and for what. More broadly, it contends that Latino immigrants in the South Los Angeles take jobs from Black residents in fast food restaurants and construction sites.
Sonja Diaz, the founder of the nonprofit Unseen and an expert on Latino policy issues in Los Angeles, said that there was no evidence that suggests Latinos are taking jobs from Black people. And South Los Angeles has long been a place where many ethnic communities have existed alongside one another, albeit sometimes uneasily.
But she said that the economic anxiety Africa Town Coalition has expressed is legitimate.
Working-class Angelenos — Black and Latino alike — are being forced into fewer neighborhoods that have been “willfully neglected” in favor of richer areas, Ms. Diaz said.
As news spread last Friday that the race had been relocated, some Black residents lamented what they felt was a missed opportunity for collaboration and comity — and worried that the uproar would leave the impression that Leimert Park was not a welcoming community.
De’Shunn Powell, 21, said that he understood why people in Leimert Park felt protective of the area, but that ultimately it was a public space and people should be free to run in it.
He showed up at Elysian Park last Sunday, despite the rain and muddy terrain, with a few dozen people, including other Black runners. He said it was important to support the run after a week of racial strife on the internet.
“I argued with people on TikTok about it,” Mr. Powell said, “so I’m just like, ‘I got to come out here.’”
Alain Delaqueriere and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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