Biography
Bradley, the grandson of a slave, was born on December 29, 1917, to Lee Thomas and Crenner Bradley, "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 family moved to Arizona to pick cotton and then in 1924 to the Temple-Alvarado area of Los Angeles, where Lee was a Santa Fe Railroad porter and Crenner was a maid.
Young Bradley attended Rosemont Elementary School, Lafayette Junior High School and Polytechnic High School, where he was the first black 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. He went to UCLA in 1937 on an athletic scholarship and joined Kappa Alpha Psi, a black fraternity. Among the jobs he had while at college was as a photographer for comedian Jimmy Durante.
Bradley left his studies to join the Los Angeles Police Department in 1940. He became one of the "just 400 blacks" among the department's 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 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.
He 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.
He was stricken with a heart attack while driving his car in March 1996 and endured a triple bypass operation. Later he suffered a stroke "that left him unable to speak clearly." He died on September 29, 1998, and his body lay at the Los Angeles Convention Center for public viewing. He was buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery. Bradley was a Prince Hall Freemason.
Read more about this topic: Tom Bradley (American Politician)
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)