Tom Bradley, the longest-serving mayor of Los Angeles, was born in 1917 to sharecropper parents in the small town of Calvert, Texas. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was seven, but his father soon abandoned Tom and his four siblings, leaving his mother to raise five children on a maid’s salary.
Tom became an outstanding athlete, earning an athletic scholarship to UCLA in 1937, but he left without a degree in 1940 to join the Los Angeles Police Department, where he worked for the next 21 years. While rising to the rank of lieutenant in the police force, Tom also earned a law degree from Southwestern University Law School.
Official portrait of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley in 1986.
In 1963, when he was 45, Bradley became the first African American elected to the Los Angeles City Council. He ran for mayor in 1969 but lost narrowly. He ran again in 1973 and won, and then went on to win four more times after that, serving as mayor until 1993.
During his tenure, Los Angeles passed Chicago to become the country’s second-largest city, and Bradley helped transform the city by encouraging development downtown, expanding and modernizing the airport, encouraging business development, and appointing more women and people of color to political positions. Bradley was widely praised for the success of the 1984 Summer Olympics, which showcased the growing city and became the first profitable, privately run Olympics.
We moved to Southern California in August 1993, just a month after Bradley retired from the office of mayor but we heard his name in the news often until his death in 1998. Today, his name gets mentioned most often in connection with his namesake terminal at LAX.
But Bradley’s legacy lives in the crazy, beautiful mayhem of the city he shaped for so many years. In 1985, Bradley paid homage to that city by saying, “Los Angeles is the city of hope and opportunity. I am a living example of that.”
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