Grandmamas of Downtown Crenshaw

The Downtown Crenshaw project and movement was launched in the spring of 2020 when a Los Angeles community decided to rise up and take control of their own future. Gentrification is a crisis that has been erasing Black and Brown neighborhoods across America, and the people of Crenshaw decided to take action to stop the continued displacement of themselves, their neighbors, businesses and culture. Integral to this movement from the very beginning have been a group of elder women who have been fearlessly leading their community toward a more equitable and just future. They’ve named themselves the Grandmamas of Downtown Crenshaw.

Veronica Sance, Grandmama of Downtown Crenshaw

The Grandmamas have been instrumental in preventing the sale of the mall to outside developers associated with Donald Trump and Jared Kushner. They have led community actions, and traveled across the country. They are fighting for our community’s right to self-determination. 

In October 2020, when the Councilmember of the area would not speak out against the attempt to buy the Crenshaw Mall by a close development partner of Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law), they went to his home, carrying roses and soil from the mall.

In May of 2021, they flew to Chicago to show up at the residence of Tim Ellsworth in Chicago and protest the discriminatory practices of Deutsche Bank/DWS. (Deutsche Bank is the infamous lender of Donald Trump). They brought the conversation to Ellsworth’s door and demanded to know why, after submitting the highest bid in the last round, Deutsche Bank/DWS still did not award the mall to the people of Crenshaw, if not because of blatant racism.

Grandmamas Robin Cole, Zerita Jones, Veronica Sance & Jessie Smith-Jones in Chicago

In June, they flew into New York City to protest outside the luxury residences of Len Blavatnik, a corrupt and racist multi-billionaire oil oligarch who made his initial fortune through shady business dealing in the Putin regime and has been placed on Putin’s List. They also showed up to protest outside Carnegie Hall which shockingly has Blavatnik on it’s board of Trustees. Blavatnik has been identified as the equity partner of David Schwartzman of Harridge Development Group, a failed developer with a shady history of violating tenant and civil rights, making racist comments, and buying off city council members for approval of his controversial development approvals.

 When asked about why this movement is important to her, Grandmama of DC Kim Yergan, said, “When I came here from Chicago in 1982, the Crenshaw Mall was my go-to place along with Marlton Square and Leimert Park...Retaining the cultural character of Crenshaw is why I support the vision of Downtown Crenshaw Rising.  It is an opportunity for the Crenshaw Community to realize community ownership, self-determination, economic justice, sustainable development, community wealth-building and environmental justice. To stop gentrification and displacement of the ‘Shaw’s community. To preserve the sustainability and livability, the character and culture of the ‘Shaw, now and for generations to come.”

As guardians of the Crenshaw community and our future, the Grandmamas have made it abundantly clear that they are not backing down from this fight for Black Los Angeles’ future – even if we’re up against Soviet-born billionaire industry tycoons connected to Vladimir Putin and close business partners of Trump and his family. They’ve endured decades of discrimination living in racist and patriarchal society overcoming tremendous odds and struggle and remain proudly standing.

They will not be intimidated.

They will not be moved.

They remain staunch defenders of the Crenshaw community and the opportunities that rightfully belong to us.

Los Angeles ━ On Thursday, July 22 at 10:00 am PT representatives from civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference-Greater Southern California, Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, Grandmamas of Downtown Crenshaw, and local business owners will hold a press conference to stop the attempt to sell L.A.’s Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza to predatory developers being financed by a “crony of Vladimir Putin.”

With gentrification now becoming a buzzword for seismic urban change, the battle lines were now tightly drawn in the debate over whether gentrification and development, or at least the types of development it brought, were a good or bad thing for poor Black and Hispanic communities. Developers, a slew of government officials and real estate moguls are solidly on one side repeatedly citing the supposed benefits: more jobs, a spur to businesses, more and better housing, schools and services, and spruced up public space.

Community activists and legions of residents counter with their checklist of bad things it purportedly will bring: homelessness, displacement, unaffordability, racial tensions and erosion of the decades of racial and cultural cohesion that ironically forced confinement to racially segregated neighborhoods.

WOLFF: Tell me something, Nikki, that I know is in the minds of our audience. How do you account for the success that you just described? Why were people as responsive to your efforts as they've turned out to be? Why were so many drawn in? I mean, the complaint on the side of progressive movements like yours is so often that, yes, we have a few people, but it's hard to get folks kind of on board, to get them moving, mobilized. You seem to have tapped into something. Can you help us understand what that might have been?

“At every single step to buy the mall, they’ve thwarted us,” Goodmon said.  “They denied our bid, as a Black collective, pushing forward a Black community focused vision, for this Black and Brown Crenshaw community.  But they didn’t just deny our bid.  They denied the bids of multiple Black development teams; multiple teams that had far more experience, far more community support, far more community understanding (than LIVWRK).”

“I want the sale stopped because it’s about Black ownership,” said the Rev. William D. Smart Jr., CEO and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California. “Personally, our community deserves to have Black ownership. The Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza is one of the most sacred spaces in our community. We should have the opportunity to own that building.

There were three bids put in by Black groups who had the capacity to get this done. I believe in Black determinism to determine our own communities,” he added.

"This is a tremendous Black community victory and testament to the power of the people," said Niki Okuk, the Board President of Downtown Crenshaw Rising. "Downtown Crenshaw stood up and defeated LivWrk-DFH Partners, an unqualified out-of-town Trump-Kushner development partner, who sought to do harm to our beloved Crenshaw. On behalf of all of the leaders of this movement, we extend a heartfelt thank you to the nearly 13,000 people who signed our petition and sent in letters, hundreds of community organizations and civic leaders who stood united, and the many activists who took to the streets, from the powerful Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles crew to Grandmamas of Downtown Crenshaw. We have shown that when we come together to defend our community, not even the powerful business partners and close friends of the president's family can defeat us.

Local residents say the opposition to the CIM redevelopment can be traced to the 2008 financial crisis. After a rash of foreclosures, investment firms bought homes in South Los Angeles that they turned into rentals, spreading worries about pricing out local families.

In the economic recovery, the demographics near the mall began turning more affluent and more white, said Paul Ong, director of UCLA’s Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. “I think the big fear was around Crenshaw Plaza accelerating that,” he said.

When the mall came up for sale last year, community groups analyzed proposed redevelopment plans and argued against them, arguing that the new housing that was planned for the site would end up displacing thousands of people who lived nearby. “That’s typically how organizations engage—we don’t like the project, we say don’t build it. They say build it. And then we come to some consensus where everybody’s not really happy, right?” he says. Goodmon and others started talking about an alternative: Instead of continuing to negotiate for months with a prospective owner, they could try to raise the millions of dollars necessary to buy the building themselves.