1990-1994 · Los Angeles

The Rise and Fall of America's Most Dangerous Neighborhood: Compton, California

Paul McAllister · Jun 13, 2026 · published to YouTube

Compton, California was once a quiet Methodist farming colony, one of the oldest incorporated cities in Los Angeles County. After the devastating 1933 Long Beach earthquake leveled its Main Street business district, the city rebuilt on bonds and grew into a thriving, exclusively white postwar suburb — so respectable that a young George H.W. Bush and his family briefly called it home. Racially restrictive covenants kept it that way until the Supreme Court struck them down in 1948, and what followed was one of the fastest demographic transformations in American urban history: blockbusting real estate agents, white flight, a collapsing tax base, the founding of the Bloods gang on Piru Street in 1972, and the crack cocaine epidemic that made Compton the per-capita murder capital of the United States. In the very years the city's name became too toxic for neighboring towns to keep on their st

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