On my desk, a brick-shaped hunk of glass sits squarely under the glow of a brass lamp. Etched onto its surface are the phrase “In our neighborhood, everybody’s welcome,” a row of bungalows and cottages and a pair of clasped hands — one frosted, one clear.
I remember clasping the hand of the representative from a nonprofit civil rights organization, The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, who gifted me this glass brick at a ceremony on April 23, 1999. The honor was in recognition of a newspaper column I had published about my personal experience with housing discrimination. In that column, I linked the experience of being denied a desired apartment once the owner saw the color of my skin to a rejection my parents had undergone nearly 30 years earlier. When they arrived at the house they had scheduled by phone to tour, the owner, who was standing on the porch, shook her head vehemently, then retreated back into the house and slammed the door.
“We couldn’t believe it,” my mother says, her incredulity still as sharp as broken glass even when she retells the story today. I know exactly how they felt because I felt it, too. Absolutely gutted. And within those guttural sensations: a mixture of fury, pain, humiliation, shame. I turned to writing to transmute my emotions, an act of internal and external reporting.
While my favorite novelist Toni Morrison once said that “the function…of racism is distraction,” I keep the brick on my writing desk as a tactile reminder of the power of words to highlight and chisel away at injustice. A current example of this power of language is poured into the foundation of the newly opened and only Black-owned hotel in Venice, The Redline Venice Hotel. “Yes, that word, redlining, does mean what you think it means,” co-owner and founder Kamau Coleman told a crowd at the hotel’s grand opening ceremony this spring.
What’s in a name
From the early 1930s to the late 1960s, redlining was the orchestrated and federal government-backed practice of denying Black people and other minorities access to mortgage loans and other forms of credit, even when they qualified for it. In fact, the Federal Reserve and local lenders used red-lined maps to indicate what they deemed “risk areas.” Redlining, the Los Angeles Public Library’s “Undesign the Redline” exhibit said, is how “structural racism was designed.”
Without access to substantial credit like other neighborhoods, redlined communities flailed economically. And while the racially motivated practice was outlawed under the 1968 Fair Housing Act, the economic and public health repercussions of such rampant disenfranchisement still resound.
I was intrigued that Black entrepreneurs would intentionally choose to name their hospitality venture after such an inflammatory word, but as my husband and I walked up to the apartment-style hotel that sits right on the Venice boardwalk at the corner 17th and Pacific avenues, I sensed something even more poignant than I imagined was at play.
While I had read on the website that the founders’ reclamation of the term symbolizes a form of “resistance and empowerment,” I hesitated as we stood outside a metal gate painted a deep crimson, but the hosts warmly ushered us to go in. As we stepped into the breezeway, I marveled at this red gate that swings open to welcome people from all over the world.
Confronting redlining, offering luxury
The whimsy of words is that they can become putty in our human hands, changing shape and meaning over time, allowing us to craft new definitions and even to travel deeper into the past to retrieve positive connotations of words gone awry. Indeed, in The Redline’s name lies a double helix of significance: The name also refers to Los Angeles’ “red cars,” the trolleys that ran from Downtown L.A. to Venice in the 1920s until the 1960s, ferrying residents and tourists to and from the beach.
Committed to weaving fraught, rich and lost histories into their project, The Redline team (which also includes co-founder/owner Michael Clinton, creative director Sophea Samreth and director of guest experience Destinee Sales) transformed this four-apartment building into not only a luxury vacation-home-style hotel, but also a museum, art gallery and, dare I say, a classroom.
At the grand opening, we gathered on the hotel’s rooftop just as the sun was setting. We noshed on peach cobbler, shrimp and grits and other Southern-inspired cuisine as The Redline team introduced their mission and paid homage to Black and Brown families whose roots in Venice run deep. When the founders hired Sales, her first mission was to delve into the history of Venice, so she reached out to what the team calls “local legends.” “These families were foundational to the inspiration that came to this hotel,” Sales says.
On the website, you can find the stories of some of Venice’s local legends of color. And the four apartment suites that make up The Redline Venice Hotel are named in honor of some of them:
- Escape, a one-bedroom suite, pays homage to Nick Gabaldón, the first documented surfer of African American and Mexican American descent in California’s Santa Monica Bay. This suite also celebrates the skating and roller-dancing culture that continues to be the bloodline of Venice Beach.
- 12 Miles West, a two-bedroom, one-bath suite, is dedicated to the legacy of designer and inventor Arthur Reese, who helped Venice founder Abbot Kinney build Venice Beach.
- Beat By The Sea, a studio suite, honors jazz artist and activist Horace Tapscott, as well as the many young people who were dissatisfied with social injustice and found a sense of belonging in Venice.
- The Canvas, which features three bedrooms, is inspired by Venice’s overall origin story.
Each suite includes a kitchenette or full kitchen, work space, stylish yet comfortable furnishings, luxurious bed linens, smart TVs, Bose soundbars, air conditioning and striking bathroom designs. A narrative runs through each suite, curated through artwork and books that don the tables and walls. Future plans include installing QR codes to expand ways to tell narratives.
Even with the scent and sound of the ocean just outside the windows, it’s easy to get lost in the waters of history, luxury and art the hoteliers have created here.
The hotel is Samreth’s first interior design project; she’s a fashion designer. But when the owners asked her to join them, she dove into the challenge. To get her creative juices flowing, she started with the kitchens. “I love to cook, and when I travel, I want to cook.”
Getting it right
Initially, Coleman wasn’t so sure that buying the building, which was in possession of another Black owner who had inherited it from family (and had been trying for years to sell it), was a good idea. “It was the beginning of the pandemic, and Venice at that time was a mess,” Coleman says.
“I didn’t want to do it. But then, I said [to Clinton], ‘Bro, look at where we are. Now, we’ve just got to find a way to wrap a business model around it.’ We’re both in real estate, and what we realized is that Venice is very different from other parts of L.A. Built into the family documents was the ability to turn the property into a hospitality business, and that was what we knew we had to do. Then, the question was what’s the theme, and that’s where Sophea [creative designer] really came in, but she said, ‘What’s the glue, what’s the story that I’m designing this around?’
“I said, ‘One thing that I’ve always wondered about Venice is where did all the Black and Brown folks in Venice come from?’ As a kid at John Burroughs [Middle School], and then when I went to Fairfax [High School], we always came here and felt comfortable, but it never crossed my mind why it felt different from Malibu or Marina del Rey. So Sophea did a bit of research and came back quickly and said, ‘[Black people] have always been here and, by the way, there was this redlining going on, and I think the name of the hotel should be Redline.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, what we need to do is draw the line in the sand right here, ourselves. Take that negative and turn it into a positive.’”
Alison Rose Jefferson, an independent historian and author of “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim Crow Era,” was one of the quintessential collaborators during the staff’s research process. Jefferson was a critical advocate for the public commemoration of Bruce’s Beach in Manhattan Beach. Once owned by a Black couple named Charles and Willa Bruce, the beach operated as a successful seaside resort for Black Californians during the Jim Crow era. But white officials drove the Bruces out of town. In 2022, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors officially transferred ownership of the property back to the legal heirs of the Bruces, who sold it back to the city for $20 million in 2023.
“Alison Rose Jefferson…has been our north star, our conscious,” Coleman says. “We thought it [redlining] was all about Black folk, but she said, ‘No…at the end of the day, everybody was redlined.’ We wanted to make sure that we were accurate historically, and we wanted to figure out what are the narratives that we’re going to tell. So, we had to readjust and say, ‘We can tell these stories as long as we can do it authentically.’ What this little team is incredible at doing is sucking the marrow out of the history and creating a narrative around it.
“We knew we needed community support, so we early on started reaching out,” Coleman says. “There’s no way we could have done this on the shoestring budget that we had without the community buy-in.”
“And all of our guests are part of the buy-in,” Sales says. “We’ve had nothing but five-star reviews.”
Brick by brick
My grandfather, Oscar Lane, was a mason, a bricklayer. Born in 1911, he certainly experienced injustice, yet in his hands, bricks became homes — sanctuaries that housed dreams and sheltered generations.
Such stories of empowerment run right alongside devastating ones. And the successful opening of their contribution to telling a full history gives The Redline Venice team hope that they will be able to open other Redline hotels across the country, pushing the harmful legacy of “redlining” further into the past and creating opportunities for deeper economic empowerment, connection and, yes, leisure.
