Past Due

Los Angeles has long been celebrated—and caricatured—as a “city of the future.” Does it follow that this sensibility invites or even requires minimal attention to the past? Given recent and ongoing upheavals across the United States regarding commemorative monuments, statues, and the like—underpinned by increasingly widespread and resonant cries for social justice—the conclusions of the Civic Memory Working Group and its subcommittees collected in this report may act as a corrective to metropolitan amnesia and a guide for public memorialization efforts moving forward. This report is a mere starting point in what the Mayor’s Office genuinely hopes will be a deeper, wider, and ongoing public conversation.