Mayor James T. Butts Jr. Transformed Inglewood’s Reputation

James T. Butts Jr., photographed at the Los Angeles Times in El Segundo on September 7.

Listening to James T. Butts Jr. brag Muhammad Ali-style about Inglewood, its people, and all he’s accomplished in more than a decade as mayor, you’d think he’d grew up in this town.

But he did not do it. He could not.

In the 1960s, racial covenants were still used to try to keep Inglewood — once home to a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan — filled with white residents. So his family lived eight blocks away.

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“I would go to Inglewood when you would pay a dime to swim if you were a resident,” Butts, 70, recalled. “A black kid would come and fork out a dime and say, ‘No, that’s a quarter for you.’ .’”

The city has obviously changed a lot since then. White flight has led to a population that is now predominantly black and Latino. But a twisted version of the racial territorialism that defined Inglewood remains. Only this time, it’s Butts who gets the blame.

“What is happening is not gentrification,” he insists. “It’s integration.”

It’s an argument that has overshadowed Butts’ four terms as mayor. First elected in 2011 after an unprecedented career in law enforcement, he transformed the city into a sports and entertainment destination.

Inglewood was on the brink. Once known as the home of the Showtime Lakers, the city was plagued by violence, corruption and financial ruin in the 1990s and 2000s.

Butts took office and began courting billionaires, striking deals to build SoFi Stadium and the Intuit Dome, and recruiting the Rams, Chargers and Clippers. In 2027, Inglewood will host Super Bowl LXI, and in 2028, the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games. The Forum, for its part, attracts large concerts. And Hollywood Park is getting a facelift with upscale housing and shopping.

Butts was the driving force behind it all, a combination of sheer determination and a willingness to engage in cavalier, bare-knuckle, and sometimes legally dubious decision-making. One notable example was the months he spent fighting a lawsuit brought by Madison Square Garden Co., which had alleged dirty dealings of all kinds related to the Intuit Dome development. The mayor’s reputation then took another hit when that lawsuit revealed a relationship with a highly paid aide who later sued for harassment and wrongful termination.

Yet Inglewood has transformed under Butts’ tenure. And while celebrated, it also led to a transformation in once-affordable housing prices in the city. The owners are happy. But not the tenants, many of whom are black and Latino. As wealthy people – many of them white – continue to move into Inglewood, there is an effort to keep them out.

This annoys Butts.

“My intention was to create a city that would provide jobs for its residents and provide them with properties that would bring generational wealth to their children,” he complained. “I knew all I heard about was gentrification.”